Shattered Minds Read online

  To Erica Bretall and Shawn DeMille

  for reading early drafts of every book

  and always being there

  Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained

  Vladimir Nabokov

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE: THE GIRL

  ONE: CARINA

  TWO: MARK

  THREE: CARINA

  FOUR: DAX

  FIVE: CARINA

  SIX: CARINA

  SEVEN: CARINA

  EIGHT: ROZ

  NINE: ROZ

  TEN: DAX

  ELEVEN: CARINA

  TWELVE: ROZ

  THIRTEEN: ROZ

  FOURTEEN: DAX

  FIFTEEN: CARINA

  SIXTEEN: ROZ

  SEVENTEEN: CARINA

  EIGHTEEN: DAX

  NINETEEN: ROZ

  TWENTY: CARINA

  TWENTY ONE: CARINA

  TWENTY TWO: DAX

  TWENTY THREE: ROZ

  TWENTY FOUR: ROZ

  TWENTY FIVE: DAX

  TWENTY SIX: CARINA

  TWENTY SEVEN: CARINA

  TWENTY EIGHT: ROZ

  TWENTY NINE: ROZ

  THIRTY: DAX

  THIRTY ONE: CARINA

  THIRTY TWO: CARINA

  THIRTY THREE: CARINA

  THIRTY FOUR: CARINA

  THIRTY FIVE: DAX

  THIRTY SIX: ROZ

  THIRTY SEVEN: CARINA

  THIRTY EIGHT: CARINA

  THIRTY NINE: CARINA

  FORTY: DAX

  FORTY ONE: CARINA

  FORTY TWO: DAX

  FORTY THREE: CARINA

  FORTY FOUR: KIM

  FORTY FIVE: CARINA

  EPILOGUE: CARINA

  PROLOGUE

  THE GIRL

  SIX MONTHS AGO

  Sudice headquarters, San Francisco, California, Pacifica

  ‘What do you see?’ the doctor asks.

  ‘It’s a bee on a rose, just like before. And the time before that. And the time before that.’ The girl leans back in her Chair, crossing her arms over her chest.

  ‘And how does it make you feel?’ the doctor nudges.

  ‘Bored.’

  The girl glances away from the rose and the bee. Her brain map floats above them, translucent and pink as candyfloss. That’s me, the girl thinks. She sees the brighter spots of the neural dust of her brain implants, sparkling deep in her cortex like stars. Within those pink-grey whorls are her thoughts, her dreams, her memories.

  The doctor looks at the brain map and the waves on various machines dotted about the lab. The woman is trying to solve a puzzle about her mind, but the girl has no idea what the woman is searching for or how she’ll find it.

  The girl has done this exact appointment five times before, though she usually sees the male doctor. She likes him, and wishes he were here instead. The girl has only met this doctor once before, at the first session. She can’t remember the woman’s name and is too embarrassed to ask. Being able to visit Sudice has been excellent extra credit for her senior project on neuroscience. Yet each time, she wonders about the point of this experiment. Perhaps she should simply stand up, shake the woman’s hand, thank her for her time and inform her she’s changed her mind.

  ‘I’m going to try something a little different today,’ the doctor says, her lips curling up at the corners. The girl does not like her smile.

  ‘Where’s Dr Teague?’ she asks.

  ‘He’s unavailable.’

  ‘I think I might just go,’ the girl says, making to stand. ‘I’m not feeling well. Maybe I can meet with Dr Teague when he’s back.’

  ‘I know these appointments are tedious, but the work you’re doing is going to change the world,’ the doctor says. ‘Don’t you want to be right at the forefront of that?’

  The girl hesitates. The doctor stands, moves closer. ‘I’m going to dose you with our new compound, and then we’ll look at the images again, see if your emotional responses differ at all.’

  Before the girl can respond, the doctor takes her arm and presses a syringe into her skin, just below her elbow. The girl startles and cries out at the pain.

  ‘All done,’ the doctor says, her eyes bright and unblinking.

  The girl’s arm burns. The world goes soft and fuzzy around the edges. The doctor settles the girl back in the Chair, lays the back down flat. She fits restraints around the girl’s arms and legs.

  ‘Wh-what?’ the girl asks, words slurred.

  ‘Don’t worry. It’s just a partial sedative mixed with Verve.’ Another sharp smile. ‘With a little paralytic thrown in for good measure.’

  ‘V-Verve?’ the girl asks, a thrum of fear going through her. Verve is a drug the San Francisco mob, the Ratel, created; it was all over the news feeds for weeks last year. It was meant to be like Zeal, but so much worse. Not a dream you wake up from, your frustrations spent cathartically. Instead you emerge hungry for violence. Pacifica promised they’d destroyed it. What will it do to her? Her limbs are heavy. She tries to move a finger. Nothing.

  Time fractures and grows strange. The girl feels a faint tickling along her skull, a strange release of pressure.

  ‘Look at the images again,’ the doctor instructs.

  The girl’s eyes move to the wallscreen, as if she can’t help it. There is the bee, its segmented eyes staring at her, its pollen dusting the blood-red petals of the rose. Its stinger is as sharp as the thorns on the stem. Something new appears – a drop of blood drips from one thorn. Above the rose, two eyes open. One is blue, one is green. Heterochromic, just like hers. There’s something odd about the images. As if they’re more than they appear. As if she could fall into them.

  ‘How do the images make you feel?’ The pictures segment and flash before her. A bee. A rose. A thorn. A drop of blood. Mismatched eyes. Over and over, until they blur together.

  ‘I don’t feel anything,’ the girl says. And it’s true. All her emotions are just . . . gone. As if they’ve never existed.

  ‘I see.’ The doctor is excited, but trying to hide it. The top of the girl’s head tickles again. She looks away from the images, back to her brain scan.

  It looks different. There are darker specks scattered throughout her brain, moving around like busy ants. It takes her a moment to figure out what they are.

  ‘Nanobots,’ the doctor answers for her. ‘They’ll help the code settle in quickly.’

  ‘How . . . ?’ the girl asks. Then she realizes why her skull itches. All her pain sensors are turned off, and the doctor has opened up her skull. A piece rests on the tray next to the Chair. The girl can just see it out of the corner of her eye.

  The doctor holds up the blood-slicked bone.

  ‘It’s a barbaric approach these days, to actually open up a subject like this, but there’s no risk of infection. And there’s something about seeing the brain right there before you as the nanites do their work. It’s more . . . visceral.’ The doctor sets the bone aside. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll put it back where it belongs when we’re done.’

  The girl should feel fear, but there is nothing. Nothing.

  Until there is.

  The nanobots converge in her brain, digging deeper, down into the very core of her. The girl’s emotions switch on. She feels everything – the pain in her skull, in her brain, the full horror of what’s happening to her.

  She opens her mouth and screams. Alarms blare and beep in the room. She can smell blood, thick and coppery, and the taste hits the back of her throat.

  ‘You will change the world, my girl,’ the doctor says, leaning over her.

  The world blinks out.

  ONE

  CARINA

  Green Star Lounge, Los Angeles, Califo
rnia, Pacifica

  Carina awakens with a gasp and bites down a curse.

  An alarm bleeps in the Zeal lounge. The clock on the flickering wallscreen tells her she’s woken two hours earlier than she should have. The room is small and close, a little grimy. All it contains is a Chair, the Zeal machine, and its body monitors. Carina paid extra for a private room with money she doesn’t have to spare.

  An orderly buzzes the door and steps in, his white lab coat stained about the cuffs. ‘700628,’ he says, confused. ‘Why are you awake?’

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ Carina replies. ‘Put me back in.’

  The orderly shakes his head. His hair is short and buzzed, and he’s thin enough that she can see the shape of his skull beneath his skin. ‘If you’ve been booted out early, there’s a reason. Something’s off. It’ll need to reset, and you should stay out of the Zealscape for at least twelve hours.’

  Carina knows something is wrong – that last dream of the girl on the table wasn’t hers, and couldn’t have been. It felt . . . unfinished, somehow. Like there should be more. Between that and not getting her proper fix, she wants – needs – to go right back in.

  She gives the orderly a look that makes him pause. ‘Reach in my left pocket,’ she says. Her wrists are still restrained to stop her from lashing out in the dreams and hurting herself.

  The orderly reaches into her pocket, his hand grazing her hip bone. He takes out a handful of credit chips. Enough to buy himself a very nice vat-grown steak dinner at a restaurant downtown.

  ‘Put me back in,’ she says, her voice low. The white-clad orderly only knows Carina as 700628. He doesn’t know her name, who she used to be, what she used to do before she lost it all to Zeal. He knows enough about what she does in her dreams that his eyes skitter away from hers.

  He knows Carina wouldn’t mind killing him. Slowly.

  The orderly shrugs. ‘Your call, I guess.’ He preps another syringe.

  Carina has to be reminded of her body while she waits. She lies back on the Chair, its plastic covering crinkling. She smells and hasn’t showered in almost a week, hasn’t eaten in two days, and lost her third tooth yesterday (was it yesterday?), spitting it out into the sink. She can’t remember if she washed it away or if it’s still there.

  Zeal addiction is not for the faint-hearted.

  She stares at the top of the orderly’s head. Quicker, quicker.

  He restarts the machine, the air filling with the comforting whirs and clicks she knows so well. He plunges the needle into the crook of her arm, one more mark out of many. She’ll have to get a vein port put in soon. As the Zeal takes hold, her eyes roll up into her head.

  ‘Sweet dreams,’ the orderly says, voice flat, already turning away.

  Though she yearns for her own personal heaven and hell in the Zealscape, as she does every time, a little part of her hopes she’ll never wake up.

  It’d be so much easier that way.

  TWO

  MARK

  Off-grid, San Francisco, California, Pacifica

  The man coughs, blood splattering into his hand. He doesn’t pause to wipe it away. His hands dance in midair, manipulating the code his ocular implants project into the room around him. The room is empty, the white walls stark. There are no windows. His body is exhausted, his lungs struggling to work. Medical advancement miracles can’t cure every disease, especially engineered ones.

  Sweat trickles down his temples as he works. His hands shake, and he can’t afford to make a mistake. There’s only one person he can trust. Or at least, trust her to want to take Sudice down as much as he does.

  There. His hands fall to his sides. The code floats around him, beautiful and perfect, like a nebula of the universe made of letters, numbers and symbols. Now all he has to do is find her. Minimizing the code, he opens the government map he cracked into earlier, typing in the numbers of her new VeriChip.

  There she is. Right in Los Angeles, as he suspected. And she’s plugged in.

  ‘Finally, fate gives me a break,’ he mutters, beginning to prep the transfer when he hears the door open.

  ‘Fuck.’ His pulse spikes. He has seconds, if that. He locks onto the signal in LA. ‘Please, please let this work.’ He can’t stop a sob. ‘Don’t let this be for nothing.’

  The footsteps come closer. The information streams into her brain. As soon as it finishes, he manages to still his shaking hands enough to obscure the breadcrumbs of the trail. He can only hope it’s enough. He turns to face his killer.

  Someone shoots the lock and kicks the door open. The woman steps in and shakes her head at him. ‘I’m disappointed in you, Mark.’

  ‘I’m more disappointed in you, you fucking psychopath.’ He’s still shaking, but he hasn’t pissed himself. Maybe he’ll die with a modicum of dignity.

  She tuts. ‘Language, Dr Teague. And I’ve never been officially diagnosed.’ She flashes him a mirthless smile before hefting the gun. ‘Now, what have you done here?’

  He says nothing. She moves forward, and with a wave of her hands latches onto his ocular implants. As she rifles through his recent history, he stifles a satisfied smirk when she can’t find where he’s sent it.

  ‘You’ve made a mistake.’ She points the gun at him.

  ‘I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life. I only wish I could be around to see you and Sudice fall.’ He’s proud that, in the end, he stood up to them, at least put a wrench in their plans after all they’ve done.

  No company is entirely invincible. Sudice has been trying for decades, buying politicians and using its deep entanglement in every aspect of Pacifica’s economy and government to strangle its competition. Mark knows there’s always a crack, a flaw that can be used to bring the whole thing down. He’s found the fissure, but he’s not strong enough to give it enough pressure to break.

  ‘Any regrets?’ the woman asks with a sardonic tilt of her head. ‘Any last-minute confessions before you meet your maker, if you believe in that sort of thing?’

  Mark regrets ever working for Sudice. Greed was why he started, and he opened his eyes to the truth far too late. ‘I only had a few weeks left anyway, with whatever you gave me.’ He shrugs. ‘At least I might have done some good in the end. So no regrets.’

  ‘Pity, that.’

  She pulls the trigger. Mark falls. He stares at nothing, the dark bullet hole on his forehead like a third eye. Roz steps over him and takes up his code, transferring it from his dying implants into her own. Face impassive, she begins her search.

  THREE

  CARINA

  The Zealscape, Green Star Lounge, Los Angeles, California, Pacifica

  Carina’s drug dreams always begin the same way.

  She’s back in Greenview House. Her father bought it even though it was far too big for three people, outside Woodside, California, less than an hour by hovercar out of San Francisco. Nothing but trees surrounded that house that would become a crypt. She couldn’t wait to leave, and now, eight years later, she still can’t escape it.

  Carina walks through the empty hallways, her footsteps echoing. Nothing exists outside of the house in the Zealscape, not really, and the windows only look out into a grey fog. All her dreams and nightmares take place in its various rooms. Even if the rooms can expand into streets or forests, no matter how vast, she can turn a corner and step back into those familiar corridors. She tried to change the Zealscape program to another setting, but in the end, her subconscious is too tied to Greenview House and everything that happened here.

  She opens the door to the room where she last saw the young girl and the doctor she knows from earlier nightmares. They are nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Anyone here?’ she calls. ‘Come out, come out, wherever you are!’

  Silence.

  Carina turns away. Needing her fix, she creates her first victim, bringing him to life on a table before her, prepped just as she wishes. Half the fun is the hunt, but when she first plugs in, there’s never the pa
tience for it. It’s an appetizer of violence before the more leisurely meal.

  Carina has a very specific type, here in the Zealscape. She kills criminals, perpetrators of terrible, fictional crimes. They are usually men, middle-aged, cocky in their assurance that they are getting away with their wrongdoings. She has killed women, for a bit of variety, often ‘angel of death’ types. Never children or teenagers – which is why the vision of the girl was so damn jarring.

  Where had that come from?

  The Zealscape is where Carina lets it all out so that those people out in the real world, those strangers who seem as insubstantial as her dream creations, are safe from her. She has killed hundreds of figments within these walls over the last six months. Used almost every weapon. Killed quickly. And slowly. The one constant is that she never tires of it.

  The man pushes against his bonds, the whites of his eyes showing. Carina has created him a serial killer, like her, but he preys on the innocent. He buries young boys beneath his house, like John Wayne Gacy. He’s not real, but he deserves death.

  Her fingers itch and she moves closer. His chains rattle as his struggles grow more frantic. A desperate, delicious gurgling bubbles from his throat. Her fingers tingle in anticipation, and her heartbeat quickens.

  Carina doesn’t speak to her victims. She did in the beginning, trying to make these fabrications of her imagination understand what she was about to do to them. It grew dull, unlike the act of killing.

  Carina sometimes finds her situation amusing, when she’s coherent enough for amusement. The government doles out unlimited Zeal to keep criminals off the streets, yet offers them an unlimited playground to hone their criminal skills. With chronic Zealot mortality rates as high as eighty per cent, however, the government doesn’t have much to fear.

  Closing her eyes to concentrate, she opens them to a long, thin knife resting in her hands. There are some weapons she prefers – the knife is particularly instinctual, personal, whereas the gun is too distant, even if the kickback and the crack are satisfying.

  Carina hefts the knife.

  The man below her is in his physical prime, muscled as a wrestler. He’s strong, the chains binding him straining with each pull. Her usual type is older, paunchier. Though she still buzzes with the need to kill, she forces herself to slow down, at least a little. She runs the knife tip along his skin next to the bonds. A tear slides down his cheek. She wipes it away with her thumb, then brings her fingertip to her mouth, tasting the salt. It feels real. Real enough.