‘You’d better go,’ I say.
His eyes blink wide. ‘Catarina, what are you doing?’
I raise an eyebrow. ‘Improvising.’
The window starts to rattle. The freezepak is swelling now, the meat shuddering and frothing as it prepares to blow. I lurch away, hoping to take cover behind the bed, but the soldier’s weight crashes into me, and the slice blows with the force of a thunderclap.
CHAPTER 6
The bedroom’s outer wall explodes, blasting into splinters and shards of glass that slash my skin as they hurtle through the air. The bookshelves fly across the room, sending out a flurry of paper, and a jet of mist slams against the plaster ceiling. The air is hot and choking, stinking of blood and plague. I cough, scrunching my eyes shut, my hands bunched in the soldier’s shirt. We land hard on the mattress, with his body above me, curled around me.
Protecting me from the blast.
I scramble back, coughing. The soldier falls to his knees, doubled over, the skin on his shoulders sliced to ribbons. His eyes are midnight black, but they quickly change to blue, an ocular upgrade that I’ve never seen before. I stare at his eyes for a full, stunned beat before I realize he’s staring back at me.
‘Are you OK, Catarina?’
I blink. I should be jumping through the hole in the wall and bolting through the woods, but I can’t move. Everything about this is wrong. He’s not supposed to ask if I’m OK, not after I just murdered him. Not after I infected him with a Hydra cloud.
‘Your leg,’ he says, reaching for my ankle, where I took the blast straight on. Fat droplets of blood are welling on my skin, mixing with the pink, foamy sheen of the cloud. Jagged splinters jut from my ankle, and scratches arc across my calf, but it’s nothing compared to the shredded skin on the soldier’s arms.
‘You got hit,’ he says. ‘I need to clean this.’
‘Soldier, you … You’re not immune.’ I wait for his eyes to widen, for the realization to set in, but he only seems interested in the wounds on my leg.
‘You can call me Cole.’ He tilts his body to look down the length of my leg, his eyes pausing on a few deep scratches. His own skin is bloody and raw, with splinters and glass embedded in his shoulders, but he doesn’t seem to notice, or maybe his implants have dulled the pain. He pulls a yellow plastic packet from his cargo pants and tears it open with his teeth. The scent of disinfectant cuts through the haze as he swipes my ankle with a stinging towelette.
‘Don’t touch me,’ I whisper, scrambling back on the bed. A trickle of foam runs down my cheek. I wipe it with the back of my hand. ‘You’re infected. Are you even listening to me?’
‘Please, I’m not going to hurt you. I’ve been programmed to protect you.’
That makes me pause. You can’t program someone’s mind, not even with gentech, but that’s not what’s bothering me about what Cole just said. ‘Why would you be programmed to protect me?’
‘Because your life is important. Please, Catarina. I need to clean this wound.’
At this point I’m too confused to resist. I let him clean my ankle and barely wince at the sting of the disinfectant. Cole seems utterly calm despite the scarlet mist swirling in the air, the countless Hydra particles sweeping into his lungs. He’s completely unconcerned, but I know he’s not immune. I would have smelled it on his skin, I would have …
‘Oh shit,’ I breathe. ‘You’re not infected, are you?’
He shakes his head, his eyes meeting mine through the wafting clouds of mist. It clicks inside me like the tumblers in a lock.
‘There’s a vaccine.’
‘Yes, Catarina,’ he says. ‘There’s a Hydra vaccine.’
The words are like a jolt. I stand up, pushing the foam-slicked hair back from my face. My hands are shaking with the thought that this could all be over. No more blood on my hands. No more nights spent alone. With a vaccine, people could leave the bunkers. We could finally start to rebuild. The nightmare of the last two years could fade to a distant memory.
I could have a life again; the world could go back to normal …
But that still doesn’t explain why there’s a Cartaxus soldier sitting in my father’s bedroom.
‘I haven’t heard anything about a vaccine.’ I gesture to the ruined wall. ‘You could have planted that meat, or it could have been faked somehow. This could all be a setup.’
Cole sighs, folding the bloodied towelette into a square on his knee. ‘Now why would I want to do that?’
I don’t have an answer to that, just a growing sense of unease. I cross my arms over my chest, limping to the toppled bookshelves. The floor is slick with greasy foam, littered with splinters, glass and paper. If Cole is telling the truth about the vaccine, does that mean he’s telling the truth about my father?
‘If there’s a vaccine,’ I ask, ‘then why hasn’t Cartaxus released it?’
‘Because they don’t have it any more.’
I spin round. ‘Then who does?’
‘Nobody. The hack that destroyed your father’s lab corrupted most of his work. I’m one of a handful of trial subjects who received the code in a test a few days before the attack. We have fragments backed up, but the attack was complex. Most of your father’s work is unrecoverable.’
I just stare at him. ‘That’s ridiculous. The Skies are amateurs – they couldn’t pull off a hack like that. And besides, how could the code be lost? Didn’t you just say you had it in your arm?’
Cole’s face darkens, and he turns his forearm so his panel shines up at me. It’s a bar of solid blue, even bigger than Dax’s. The silicone that forms his panel’s body is a grid with spaces for thousands of separate function cores – individual processors that run each of his apps. The bigger the panel, the more function cores, the more cobalt dots on his skin representing the apps running inside him, altering his body. But I’ve never seen a panel as big as Cole’s before. What the hell does he have in that thing?
‘The vaccine works as a special implant,’ he says. ‘Once it’s installed, it becomes locked to each user’s DNA, so even if I ejected the function core out of my arm and put it into yours, it wouldn’t work. The only way to share it is to get the original code, but that’s heavily encrypted.’
I nod. A lot of the code I stole from Cartaxus to release on the Skies network was encrypted like that. We had to crack it before we could release it, something I’ve never been good at. I have natural talents for hacking networks and stealing files, but cracking and decrypting takes a whole different set of skills. The Skies have a team dedicated to it. Most of Cartaxus’s code is easy to unlock, but some files are so well encrypted that we’ve never come close to cracking them.
‘But Cartaxus would have the key,’ I say, speaking to Cole like I would a child. ‘Or they’d be able to guess it. They have standard encryptions. They have backup procedures for data breaches.’
Cole frowns. ‘You know a lot about this.’