This Vicious Cure by Emily Suvada

Author:Emily Suvada
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon Pulse
Published: 2020-01-20T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 24 CATARINA

“WE HAVE TO GET HER out,” Anna says, her voice frantic. “Cole, help me move this thing.” She yanks at the handles on the side of Ziana’s tank, dragging it away from the wall. Cole takes the other side, grunting as the two of them move it in a shuddering arc, swinging it into the center of the cabin’s basement. The steel frame screeches against the floor, and the glittering blue liquid sloshes wildly inside the tank.

Ziana rocks with the movement, her eyes closed, her features blank and expressionless. Anna drops to her knees and presses at the control panel inlaid in the glass. “How do you unlock this thing?”

“Wait,” I say. “We can’t just open it—”

“He trapped her in here,” Anna says, snapping her head back to glare at me. Her gaze is sharp, but there’s a tremor in her voice. I haven’t seen her this afraid since she picked up Cole’s emergency beacon. “Open it now. We don’t know how long she’s been like this. It could be killing her.”

“Or it might be keeping her alive. This is a stabilizing tank. They’re used to help people heal from injuries. There’s a chance she’s sick or hurt.”

Anna’s hands draw back from the control panel warily. “Can you check?”

“I can try.” I send out a pulse to find the tank’s controls and check the nanite settings. If Ziana’s sick or wounded, it should show up in the type of tech supporting her. The results ping back into my vision. The tank has been set to send a steady stream of healing tech and anesthetic into the liquid, but that could be a standard setting. I can’t see anything that looks like treatment—no warnings, no medication being pumped into the nanosolution. It’s hard to tell for sure if there’s anything wrong with Ziana, though, since she doesn’t have a panel.

“I think she’s okay,” I say. “You can open it.”

Anna wrenches the glass lid up, and a wall of vapor rolls down the sides of the tank, dripping streams of blue liquid onto the floor.

“Oh, Zan,” Cole says, reaching in and lifting Ziana up carefully. “Let’s get you out.”

Anna scans the room, then bolts upstairs and comes back down with a towel. Cole hooks his arms under Ziana to lift her from the liquid. He lays her down on the floor, wiping her face. Her skin seems even paler somehow, the color of paper, her bare scalp traced with a web of purple veins. She can’t be more than five feet tall, with a small-boned, painfully thin frame. She’s not awake, but she seems to be breathing on her own. Blue liquid streams from her mouth as Cole rolls her to her side, rubbing her back.

Anna drapes the towel over Ziana, then cradles her head in her lap to check her eyes. “She looks doped, but I think she’s okay. She might take a while to wake up. Lachlan must have done this—this is his cabin. He did this to her.

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