‘I kicked off a lockdown.’ I flip open my backpack. ‘I had to make my genkit self-destruct.’
We reach a checkpoint on the perimeter, littered with more flailing gun-bots. The steel barricades are bent and smoking, blackened with scorch marks. Leoben and Dax must have blasted their way through before us. Cole floors the accelerator, and we screech through and on to a highway, leaving Homestake and the billowing Hydra cloud behind us. I rifle through my bag for the medkit, pulling out a vial of healing tech.
Cole’s jet-black eyes grow wide. ‘What have you done, Cat?’
‘I did what I had to. I told you – I needed a bomb.’ I hold the vial in my teeth and pull my trouser leg up to expose my knee. The fabric catches on the wound, and I gasp at the sudden rush of pain. A trickle of blood runs down my calf. The flesh is swollen, the fabric tight. I grit my teeth, closing my eyes, and yank the fabric back.
The pain is an avalanche. It roars in my ears, drenching my senses. Silver crystals spin in my vision. I blink them away, staring down at what’s left of my swollen, ruined knee.
It’s worse than I thought. The skin is purple and cracked, revealing deep pink fissures that run like claw marks across my leg. The swelling forms a dark, violet bruise along my calf, snaking through my veins, reaching all the way to my ankle.
The only sign of hope are blisters that have risen like drops of silver in a ring around the spot where I jacked myself in. My body is trying to eject the nanites wreaking havoc in my cells. That’ll help, but it won’t stop the damage from spreading. There’s no way to stop this without a genkit and some seriously brilliant code. These nanites will keep rampaging through me until they die – maybe in minutes, maybe hours. All I can do is bear the pain and pump myself full of healing tech, trying to keep the wounds under control.
I uncap the healing tech vial with shaking hands. Cole looks over and stiffens.
‘Oh, no, no,’ he whispers. The jeep’s tyres screech. We plough off the side of the highway and into the trees. Leaves smack against the windshield, branches scraping against the doors, and then we burst into a clearing and shudder to a stop.
‘No, no.’ Cole’s seat belt flies off him. His voice is frantic, his eyes inky pools of blackness. ‘Why, Cat? What did you do to yourself?’
‘I did what I had to,’ I say, bracing myself through a rush of pain. ‘I told you we needed to close the airlocks. Eighty thousand people, Cole.’ I jam the healing tech into the ruined flesh of my knee, ignoring the stab of pain, the way my flesh gives way like rotting fruit.
‘Dammit, Catarina!’ Cole flinches, turning away, the tendons in his neck taut. ‘I didn’t want you to hurt yourself.’
‘I didn’t have time to do anything else.’ I glare at him. ‘I made a decision, and you disagreed. This is what happens when you don’t listen to me.’
Cole scowls, then kicks open his door and marches round the front of the jeep, making his way to my door. The veins on my leg grow darker, rippling as the healing tech races into me. Some of the deeper cracks in my skin tighten, weeping tracks of pink, dilute blood down my calf. The flesh is starting to repair itself, and with enough healing tech, I should recover completely.
Not that it matters. Come nightfall, we’ll be at the lab, running the decryption. No amount of healing tech will save me then.
Cole swings my door open and stares at me, his shoulders tight, his eyes slowly retreating to blue. He scrapes a hand over his face. ‘I’m going to carry you to the back and dress the wound. I don’t know if I can stop the damage, but I want to try.’ He reaches out to pick me up, but I push him away.
‘Don’t touch me. I can walk.’ I slide down to the ground and land on my good leg, but the movement sends a jolt through me.
‘No you can’t.’
I close my eyes, breathing through the pain. He’s right, but I’m angry, and the last thing I want is for him to carry me.
‘Cat, let me help you.’
‘No.’
‘Please.’
I open my eyes. Cole’s face is strained, his hands stretched out, hanging in midair. He looks frustrated, like he’s ready to snap and pick me up over my protests, and it just makes me angrier – that he wants to help me now, but he wouldn’t lift a finger to help Homestake’s civilians.
‘I can walk,’ I growl, taking three painful steps to the back of the jeep, holding its dust-caked side to keep myself upright. Every movement brings a burst of pain, but I grit my teeth and shuffle forward, ignoring the way Cole stares at me.
When I reach the back doors, they swing open automatically, and I manage to haul myself up so I’m sitting in the back, leaning against the side. The effort leaves me shaking. Lines of silver-tinted blood trickle down from the cracked skin of my knee. Cole follows me like a shadow, silent and tense, and stares at the wound on my knee for a long time.
Without a word, he reaches past me and grabs his backpack, sliding out a medkit full of bandages and syringes. Some look like healing tech, but others are red and black, marked with glyphs I don’t recognize. Probably some ungodly Cartaxus tech. He pulls out a thick, wet-looking bandage and sprays it with something before wrapping it around my knee.
It’s like ice.
I gasp, arching my back, stunned by the sudden mix of cold and pain. Goosebumps shoot across my arms. After a second the chill fades, and the pain in my knee starts to soften, slowly dropping into numbness.
‘You did this to make your genkit self-destruct?’ he asks.
I nod, chewing my lip. My little trusty, beat-up genkit. It did me proud for three long years, and now it’s gone. The thought brings a flash of grief.
‘You should rest for a couple of days before the decryption,’ he says. ‘Your body needs to heal before you put it through something like that.’
My head snaps up. How does he know what the decryption will be like? Surely he can’t know that it’s going to kill me.
He raises an eyebrow. ‘I’m not an idiot, Catarina. I know you’re scared, and I’ve been on the end of enough genkit cables to know that Lachlan doesn’t write painless code. It’s going to hurt you, isn’t it? You’re not telling me because you’re worried I won’t let you go through with it.’
I can’t answer. I don’t know what to say, and I don’t trust my voice to remain steady.
He sighs. ‘Look, you can do whatever you want, OK? But Lachlan was the one who gave me the protective protocol, and I like to think he did it for a reason. I’m trained for this, I can assess the risks –’
‘Is that why you left Homestake’s airlocks open? Because you were assessing the risks?’