‘Cole, no!’ I shout, but I have no plan, no options, just a dying man and a stranger’s gunfire from the trees. It could be Marcus, or it could be Lurkers. Either way, if I wait much longer, Cole is going to bleed out.
‘Marcus!’ I scream, running into the driveway, my hands held high. ‘Marcus, please! We’re not with Cartaxus. Please, we need your help!’
A moment of silence stretches out. Cole’s eyes are wide and frantic. He grits his teeth, scanning the trees.
A figure steps into the driveway, staring down the barrel of a rifle. ‘Catarina? Is that really you?’
‘Yes!’ I shout, laughing with relief. ‘I’m so glad you’re here, Marcus. I thought you were gone.’
Marcus lowers the rifle, looking warily at Cole. His two daughters emerge from the trees behind him. The younger, Eloise, has pink ribbons in her hair, and her face lights up as soon as she sees me. Her older sister, Chelsea, watches Cole suspiciously. Deep shadows hang beneath her darting, cautious eyes.
‘I know how this looks, Marcus,’ I call out. ‘The jeep, the gear, I know. But I need you to trust me. This man is a friend of my father.’
Marcus looks down at Cole’s wound and gives me a tight smile. ‘Then he’s a friend of mine, whoever he works for. Let’s get him inside.’
Marcus sends his daughters in to get his surgical bag, and he slips under one of Cole’s arms to help him into the house. Cole’s face goes ghostly white, his feet dragging as we haul him into Marcus’s kitchen. The wooden table is crosshatched with scratches, the windows splattered with blood that Marcus and his wife, Amy, must have given up cleaning long ago.
‘The bullet was nanite rigged,’ I say, helping Cole up to the table. ‘It’s interfering with his healing tech. I jumped his panel a few minutes ago. I was losing him on the way here. I didn’t have a choice.’
Marcus rips Cole’s shirt open to pull the fabric from the wound. ‘That’s probably the only thing keeping him alive, but you’ve taken a hell of a risk. His healing tech has completely stalled. We’re going to have to fight to keep him stable until we can get the bullet out and get his tech running again.’ He turns from the table and pours a bottle of disinfectant into the sink, then scrubs his hands up to his elbows.
Chelsea runs into the kitchen with Marcus’s briefcase, a battered portmanteau filled with scalpels and a gleaming saw. She swaps out Cole’s IV, hooking a bag of anaesthetic into his arm. ‘I’ll scrub up, Daddy,’ she says, rolling up her sleeves.
I raise my eyebrows. Chelsea’s just a kid. ‘Doesn’t your mom normally help with surgeries?’
‘She’s not feeling well,’ Chelsea says, dunking her hands in the sink. She lifts them out slowly, scrubbing with the careful motions of a professional. ‘Don’t worry. I know what I’m doing.’
‘Yeah, I guess you do.’
‘I think we might get lucky.’ Marcus pulls out a scalpel. ‘His tech is coming back online, and he looks like a strong lad.’
‘Good,’ I say, swallowing. This kind of scene doesn’t usually bother me, but for some reason the sight of Cole on Marcus’s table is hitting me hard. His skin is pale, dotted with sweat, his blood trickling to the floor. He looks so weak, and so vulnerable. I can’t stop staring at his chest, watching it rise and fall, my stomach tightening every time there’s a pause in his breathing. Chelsea drives a long, gleaming syringe into his stomach, and the sight makes me sway, grabbing the wall for support.
I dig my fingernails into my palm, trying to tell myself that my response is rational, that I’m just worried about Cole because I need him to unlock the vaccine. But I know it’s more than that. I’ve known him less than two days, but there’s already a bond between us, forged in blood and urgency. Part of me feels like we know each other now on some fundamental level.
I guess seeing someone take a bullet to save your life will do that.
Chelsea looks up at me, her hands still gripped on the syringe. ‘You don’t look so good, Cattie. You want to wait in the living room?’
I pause. My instinct is to stay, but my stomach is turning over, and I don’t know if I can stand here and watch much longer. ‘I …’ I start, but Marcus slides a pair of tweezers into Cole’s wound, and that’s it. That’s all I can take.
‘I’ll wait out there,’ I murmur, backing into the living room. Cole is in Marcus’s hands now. There’s nothing I can do for him.
Two hours later, I’m sitting cross-legged on the couch with Eloise asleep, her head in my lap. A headache is pounding at the base of my skull. It’s the migraine that I’ve known was coming ever since I woke up in the cabin yesterday. They always build up slowly, and then bring days of pain that I have no escape from, not since I ran out of painkillers. I sit as still as is humanly possible to minimize the spikes of pain that flood my senses with every beat of Cole’s heart.
It’s all I can hear. My audio implants are maxed out, tracking every clink of steel in the kitchen, every word, every breath. Cole is still alive, and the bleeding has stopped. It sounds like he’s stabilizing. Marcus thinks his tech is taking over the healing process.
It’s hard for me to admit to myself just how relieved that makes me.
Eloise murmurs in her sleep. I run one hand absently through her hair, watching her eyelashes flutter on her cheeks. She gets the occasional tremor, but they’re not nearly as bad as they used to be when I first met her, years ago. She’s the reason Marcus’s family joined the Skies, and she’s why they’re still out here, instead of in a bunker. She was born with nucleatoxis disease, a genetic disorder that has no cure, no treatment, and is essentially a death sentence. It’s so rare that Cartaxus and the other pharmacoders never bothered to develop a cure, even though the disease is easy to treat with gentech. Faced with no other option, desperate families like Marcus’s started writing cures of their own, pooling their knowledge. They built a database of open-source gentech code for thousands of rare diseases that eventually grew into the Skies.
Novak was their leader, even before the plague. She had Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease and hacked a Cartaxus concussion app into a cure to save her own life. It was a brilliant piece of code, but Cartaxus sued her for copyright infringement. She fought them for the right to keep using it, and the community rallied around her. A group of ordinary people who refused to watch helplessly as their loved ones died. Self-taught, self-tested, self-financed. Some of them started writing impressive code and giving it away for free.
They scared the hell out of Cartaxus.