I grab my bike and run.
Through the trees, back along the creek that feeds the lake, bolting for the fire trail that cuts between the mountains. Leaves and branches whip my skin. More shots ring out behind me, echoing from the slopes until the night air sings with violence. I hit the fire trail, throw my leg over my bike and pedal blindly down the pitch-black, rock-studded slope.
My ocular tech kicks into overdrive, burning calories I can’t afford to lose. Hints of light become lines of fire that guide my way. My audio filters amplify the footsteps in the distance into thunder, punctuated by the crack of gunshots. The soldier must be chasing me, shooting in the dark. Each gunshot rattles my breathing, its acoustic fingerprint multiplied in my ears …
Only those aren’t gunshots.
It hits me like a punch. I skid to a stop, scrambling off my bike, wrenching my sweater over my head. That wasn’t a shot that startled the soldier; it was a piece of the infected man’s body. The man I killed for immunity. The man I took a dose from. His body is detonating, but I could have sworn I checked his flesh for warning markers. I thought he had at least a day, but I must have missed the signs. Now he’s blowing, every single cell bursting into scalding gas, including the blood soaked into my clothes.
Patches hiss on my jeans, erupting into tiny plumes. A hundred points of fire, a hundred lit cigarettes. I fall to my knees, tearing at the fabric, crying out as they sizzle across my skin.
My healing tech kicks in, sucking the energy from my panel, and my ocular tech sputters out, plunging me into darkness. Footsteps pound somewhere nearby, crashing through the trees, but I can’t track them on my own, and I can’t see well enough to run.
I’m trapped.
He’s coming. He’ll be here any minute, and there’s nowhere I can run to, nowhere to hide.
‘Agnes,’ I gasp, scrambling for a comm-link, hearing only static. ‘He’s coming. Yaya, can you hear me?’
If Agnes can hear, she doesn’t reply. The footsteps pound closer, somewhere along the fire trail. I crawl forward in my tattered clothing, grasping blindly for my bike even though there’s no way I’ll be able to ride like this. Another crack echoes from the hills, and the breath rushes from my lungs as something lurches inside me.
I scream, clutching my stomach, and tumble into the dirt. A ribbon of fire coils up into my throat.
The dose I ate, it’s not digested yet. And what’s left of it just blew inside me.
CHAPTER 4
I land hard on my side, curling into a ball, biting my fist to stop myself from crying out. My stomach is aflame, the pain streaking up my back, arcing along the curve of my ribs and swallowing me whole. The footsteps grow closer, pounding up the fire trail until they’re right on top of me, but I can’t get up or run away. All I can do is scrunch my eyes shut, hoping that if the soldier wants to kill me, he’ll have the decency to make it quick.
‘Bobcat, is that you?’
Strong hands roll me to my back. I blink, expecting the soldier, but instead see a woman’s face framed by a halo of grey hair. Agnes gapes down at me, her eyes wide and frantic. ‘Oh, Bobcat. Oh, my poor girl.’
‘Yaya,’ I choke out, shaking with relief. ‘You found me. How did you get here so fast?’
She wipes the dirt from my face. ‘Novak called me, said she was worried.’
‘Th-the soldier,’ I say, coughing. It feels like there’s a knife in my stomach. Every breath, every movement just drives it deeper. ‘Cartaxus is here.’
‘I know.’ She drops her voice, glancing over her shoulder. ‘We’re gonna get out of here, but you have to get up. I can’t carry you.’
I force myself to take her hands, summoning the strength to rise to my feet. Somehow we stagger down the hill to where her car is waiting. There’s a door, then light, then I’m lying in the back, curled on my side. Agnes’s breath comes short and fast as she races round to the front and throws herself into the driver’s seat. Her skin is flushed and damp, wisps of grey hair plastered to her cheeks.
She wrenches the car’s joystick. The engine spins up with a high-pitched whine, and we lurch along the fire trail. ‘What happened to you?’ she asks.
I cough again, the movement sending pain stabbing through me. ‘The dose was too late. Thought I checked it, but it was dark …’
‘Ohhh,’ she cries out, leaning round to look me up and down, letting the autodriver follow the trail on its own. She reaches out to yank up what’s left of my sweater. The fabric is in tatters after the spots of blood on it detonated. Her eyes rise to mine slowly, her voice falling to a whisper. ‘You immune?’
I nod. She lets out a sigh of relief.
‘I took the dose an hour ago.’ That’s not long enough to fully digest it, but it’s enough time for the immunity to spread through my cells. I won’t get infected, but that doesn’t mean I’m coming out of this alive.
‘You must be hurting, Bobcat,’ she says. ‘Heard it’s been happening a lot lately. I swear they’re blowing faster than they used to. The damn plague keeps getting smarter. But don’t worry, this ain’t hard to treat. The doc will have you better in no time.’
‘No he won’t.’ I scrunch my eyes shut, clutching my stomach. ‘Hypergenesis, remember?’
Gentech has been around for thirty years, and people have already forgotten how medicine used to work without it. The local doctor can set a broken bone or dig a bullet out, but he cures most of his patients by optimizing apps for their DNA. Standard healing tech does the rest. Agnes could come back from almost any injury without so much as a scar, but my tech can’t handle major trauma. It can’t stop heavy internal bleeding, or hypovolemic shock. It’ll heal me, but it’ll do it so slowly I might die before it’s finished.
‘So what do you want me to do?’ Agnes’s brow furrows. The autodriver swings us on to the dirt road that circles the edge of the property.
‘We need to get somewhere safe.’ I cough into my hand. The pain is like a living, clawing beast inside me. ‘You need to lower my body temperature, give my tech more time to work. And I need calories. I’m running on empty right now.’
She turns back to the front. ‘OK, I can do that. I’ll call Novak. She’ll know what to do. You’re gonna be just fine, Bobcat.’
I cough again, clutching my stomach. I wish I had her optimism. The only time I’ve been hurt this badly before, I had my father there to save me. To jack into my panel and run a live stream of hypergenesis-friendly nanites, writing the kind of code that made Cartaxus so desperate to take him.