‘Marcus,’ I breathe, confused, my vision growing foggy. I see him standing over me, his two daughters appearing at his side.
‘This is what we’ve been praying for, girls,’ he murmurs, his voice growing distant.
‘Good work, Daddy,’ Chelsea says. ‘I’ll go and get a scalpel.’
CHAPTER 15
I wake drenched in sweat, staring wildly around me. My breath, rushing from my lips, sounds rough and unfamiliar. Everything looks blurry and strange. My eyes flit around the room, my heart rate pitching higher as I realize what’s different.
I’m seeing the world through natural, unfiltered eyes.
My lungs empty in a gasp. My sensory tech is gone. It’s been years since my implants have been switched off like this. I’ve always had their base levels in the background, fine-tuning my reality.
Now everything feels wrong.
My breathing sounds rasping and foreign, and my skin is a vague, blurry tan. I’m used to glancing at my hands and seeing every pore, but now my brain has to scramble to recognize them as hands. It’s like seeing the world upside-down, with all the colours switched round.
What the hell did Marcus do to me?
My eyes drop to my forearm, my vision spinning. All the glowing dots of my panel are gone, with a row of stitches in their place. A three-inch gash throbs along my arm, swabbed with yellow antiseptic.
The bastard knocked me out, then cut open my arm.
The thought makes me want to be sick. I press my fingers around the stitches, searching desperately, making out the soft edges of the silicone beneath my skin. I let out a sigh of relief. I don’t know what Marcus did to me, but at least my panel is still there.
I stand up shakily, but my arm snags and I fall back to the couch, finding a cannula in my wrist with an IV curling out of it.
‘Marcus!’ I yell, yanking at the IV, hissing as it slides from my vein. ‘Marcus, what the hell have you done?’
‘Shh,’ he whispers, running in from the hallway. He makes a gesture with his hands, but the movement just makes my head spin.
My brain isn’t used to following moving objects without my panel. My ocular tech is primitive compared to most people’s, but I never realized how much it streamlined my sense of reality. With my implants running, everything in my peripheral vision was sharpened. Now I feel like I’m looking through a narrow, blurry tunnel.
‘You’re fine,’ Marcus says, dropping down beside me. ‘You’re more than fine, my dear. You’ve saved our family is what you’ve done. I’m sorry about the incision, but I had to take it. The firewalls wouldn’t let me transfer the code.’
‘What do you mean, take it?’
It suddenly hits me, and my blood runs cold. My fingers slide to my wrist, to a divot in the silicone of my panel, right where one of my function cores is supposed to be.
My healing tech. He took it. I stare at my arm, my stomach heaving. He cut out my healing tech’s function core to steal the code. There is no method of transferring gentech that’s more brutal than that.
The grid of silicone that forms a panel’s body has spaces for thousands of apps, each kept separately in its own function core. The cores are designed to be removable, like cards in an old-school computer, but you can’t just cut them out like this. You’re supposed to eject them slowly, retracting the interconnecting wires, balancing the panel’s delicate operating system. Cutting one out like this could damage my tech permanently. My panel might never turn on again.
I grab Marcus’s collar, yanking him closer. ‘What the hell have you done?’
‘Easy, easy,’ he says, backing away. ‘I needed the neural code your father left you. I knew if there was anything that could help us, he would have been the one to write it, and might have left it with you. Turns out he did. It was just what we needed for Amy.’
I drop my hands from his collar, speechless. This can’t be happening. There’s no such thing as neural code – apps that can change the brain – it’s just a myth. Gentech can’t do that, and it can’t turn Lurkers who’ve lost their minds, like Marcus’s wife, back into the people they were before.
‘I didn’t have any goddamn neural code,’ I say. ‘You cut out my healing tech, Marcus. I only had six apps, and now none of them are working.’
‘They’ll be fine. Your panel will regenerate the core in no time.’
‘No it won’t,’ I spit. ‘I don’t even have a backup node.’ I press my hands to my face. A backup node is a compressed version of your panel’s code, backed up every day so you can regrow it if it’s damaged. Most people have one or two lodged somewhere in their bodies, but my father never designed one to work with my hypergenesis-friendly tech.
That means my healing code is gone, forever. Maybe the rest of my apps will recover, but there’s a chance Marcus has damaged them beyond repair. He’s lost his mind. He drugged me, sliced me open …
I look up suddenly. ‘Where’s Cole?’
‘He’s fine. He’s waking up now.’
‘Then we don’t have much time.’ I look down at my arm, the fire of my anger quelled with a rush of fear. I don’t know how Cole’s black-out tech will respond when he finds out that Marcus did this, but I know it won’t be good.
‘Look, Catarina, I know you’re angry –’
‘You’re damn right I’m angry, but I happen to care about your daughters, and I don’t want them to get hurt. We need to cover these stitches.’
‘Why, what’s wrong?’
I grope around the couch for my jacket. ‘Didn’t you see Cole’s implants, Marcus? Did you see his leylines? He’s a Cartaxus black-out agent, and he’s been tasked with protecting me. You need to bandage my arm, and I’ll get him out of here before he realizes what you’ve done.’
The colour drains from Marcus’s face. He turns and hurries into the kitchen, leaving the door swinging behind him. I catch a glimpse of Cole – bandaged and bleary, rubbing his eyes, sitting up on the kitchen table.
‘Catarina,’ he calls, his voice slurred. ‘Where are you?’
Marcus darts back through the door, unrolling a bundle of gauze with fumbling hands. I snatch it from him and wind it around my forearm.
‘I’m OK!’ I shout. ‘Marcus is bandaging my wrist.’
‘What’s wrong with your wrist?’ Cole’s voice is suddenly sharp.
‘Nothing, just a scratch. I got hit by a chip of rock in the mines. Marcus cleaned it for me.’
Marcus takes the end of the gauze to wrap it around my wrist, sweat beading on his forehead.
‘You were hurt?’ Cole’s voice is softer now. He shuffles across the room and pulls the door open, leaning his shoulder against the frame. His torso is smeared with yellow antiseptic, and there’s a patch of gauze taped to his stomach. He looks thinner, somehow, as though his body has chewed itself up to heal his wound.
‘I’m fine,’ I say, my teeth gritted. ‘It’s just a scratch.’
Marcus ties off the gauze and steps back, his hands trembling. ‘Looks like you’re all set. Let me help you to your vehicle.’