‘No,’ I breathe. A crack inside my mind grows wide, splintering the last of my hope, the last vestige of my self-control.
Not my mind. My body, I can handle. This is just skin and bone and flesh. Impermanent.
He cannot have my mind.
‘Don’t you think like me sometimes?’ Lachlan asks. ‘Don’t you read my code as if you were the one who wrote it, darling?’
My stomach twists. I lurch to the side, gagging. He built his mind over mine. He took everything I am.
Now he wants to do it to everyone else.
Rage blazes through me like a flame along a fuse. Through tears I see the handgun I dropped, lying just out of my reach. I hurl myself towards it, grasping for its barrel, but my hand slips in the pool of my blood and my knee smacks into the tiles. The pain tears a ragged scream from me. My body curls in on itself instinctively.
‘There it is!’ Lachlan shouts. ‘The Wrath, Catarina! I can see it in you as clear as day.’
I suck in a breath, trying to drag myself to the gun. He’s damn right this is the Wrath – I’m summoning it with all the strength I have. The beast is howling, rising through me, painting my vision red, and I’m calling it to me, begging it to take over again.
He needs to die. He’s murdered me; there is no other word for what he’s done. He’s ripped away every shred of the person I used to be.
My hands lock on the barrel, dragging it across the tiles, and I lift it, flipping it into my palm, my finger curling around the trigger.
‘What would Cole think if he could see you now?’
I stop, the gun aimed at Lachlan’s heart. My eyes slide to the window, and I see my reflection overlaid across the mountains, my face twisted in rage.
My breath catches. I’ve never seen myself this way, never dared to look into a mirror after yielding to the Wrath. The girl in the window is not someone I know, but there is an echo in her eyes of the child I’m only just beginning to remember.
The girl who plunged scissors into a nurse’s throat. Who killed fourteen guards to escape from the laboratory she spent her childhood in. She wouldn’t hesitate; she’d pound bullets into Lachlan’s chest until the magazine ran out.
But I’m not her any more.
I scrunch my eyes shut, letting out a scream of frustration. My finger slides away from the trigger. The Wrath raging inside me wants to shoot Lachlan now, but I can’t let myself yield to it. I can’t kill Lachlan in a fit of rage, and I can’t do it for revenge. I want to be the girl Cole watched with wonder in his eyes. The one smiling from his sketchbook.
In his eyes, I am fierce, but I am not a murderer.
I throw the handgun down, my chest shuddering with adrenaline. ‘I won’t kill you, but I won’t help you with this plan. You have to stop this madness. People have the right to make up their own minds. You can’t decide for them.’
‘You’re defending the Wrath, Catarina! I’m only taking away a part of us we should have bred out long ago. It’s an artefact from when the people who survived were the ones who killed everyone else. We relied on that instinct then, but we don’t need it any more. It’s holding us back, keeping us from our true potential. What did you see in Sunnyvale that was worth saving?’
I close my eyes and see Dax’s hands on my neck. The dark gleam in his eyes after he shot me in the back. Sunnyvale was a mass of bloodthirsty animals. There was nothing there I can defend. Not a single thing worth saving.
But that doesn’t mean I’m willing to lobotomize the entire human race.
‘This choice isn’t up to you. It’s up to all of us.’ I grit my teeth, trying to sit up straighter. ‘I saw Dax drag himself back from the Wrath when he saw what he’d done to me. If he was strong enough to fight your code, then we’re strong enough to fight the instinct. We can overcome it on our own.’
Lachlan shakes his head. A jerking, pained motion. ‘As long as the Wrath remains, humanity will never truly be free of it. It will sit at the back of our minds like a sickness, leaching into every choice, every action. It has always controlled us, and it always will. There is a chasm that lies between the savage idiocy of animals and humanity’s true potential, Catarina. Civilization has built us a bridge that lies stretched across that chasm, but the Wrath is stopping us from crossing over it. We cannot evolve without shedding our past. We are a flawed beast, and we cannot move forward until we cut this weakness from ourselves. You can’t seriously argue for keeping evil inside us, darling. That is madness.’
‘No,’ I say, pushing myself up. My bloody hands slip on the tiles, but I manage to grab the edge of the closest genkit and haul myself up. ‘I’m not arguing for evil – I’m arguing for discussion. People need to see your work, and then maybe they’ll choose to do this on their own.’
He snorts. ‘They’ll never make the right choice. I spent years trying to convince Cartaxus to take this seriously, but they never saw the value in my work. We can’t leave it up to people to decide this for themselves. You don’t ask the patients to tend to the sick. This is the only way to save us.’
‘You’re insane.’ I sway, gripping the genkit to steady myself. My wounded knee is pulsing with pain. ‘You’ve lost track of what’s right and wrong. I’m not going to help you with this.’
‘You think it’s up to you?’ Lachlan’s gaze grows steely. ‘You’ll help me, Catarina, or I’ll switch the suppressor into reverse somewhere else. How about Homestake?’
‘You can’t do that. We blocked your connection.’
‘That’s interesting, because I just did it. It should take another minute before Homestake’s eighty thousand civilians start killing each other.’
My blood freezes. As if on cue, Leoben’s voice echoes through the hallway, shouting that the black-dome chips aren’t working any more.
‘Eighty thousand lives,’ Lachlan says. ‘They’re in your hands, my darling girl. Say you’ll join me, and they can all be spared.’
I stare around wildly. My eyes snap to the gun, but I don’t know if shooting Lachlan will save Homestake’s civilians. I turn to the humming, industrial-grade genkit I’m gripping for balance. Its wireless light glows a clear, solid blue. He must be using it to control the vaccine. If I want to save Homestake, there’s only one option.
I’m going to have to fight his code.
I look down at my arm. My panel hasn’t finished growing, but a handful of cobalt lights are blinking beneath my skin. This probably won’t work, but it’s the only weapon I have left to fight with. I grab one of the needle-tipped cables hanging from the genkit’s cable port and jam it into my wrist.
The moment the cable snakes under my skin, my vision blinks to blue, and I tumble head over heels into the first VR session I can remember. Text and images batter my mind, racing across my vision, though I can still make out the vague outline of Lachlan’s silhouette.