This Mortal Coil By Emily Suvada

This Mortal Coil By Emily Suvada

Prologue: It’s sunset, and the sky is aflame, not with clouds or dust, but with the iridescent feathers of a million genehacked passenger pigeons. They soar across the sky like a live impressionist painting in brilliant swirling arcs of tangerine and gold. Their strange cries sound like pebbles tossed against a window, and they move in perfect unison, blocking out the sun. Amateur coders in Nevada rebuilt the long-extinct pigeon’s DNA, then spliced it into something new and bold. Razor-tipped beaks. Metabolic hijacks. Colour-shifting feathers to signal danger to the flock with a single muscle twitch. Through years of work, they crafted the pigeons to be stronger than their ancestors. They’re leaner, smarter, fiercer. And they made them look like fire. I lean out over the cabin’s porch railing, my hips pressed into the wood, squinting through the scope of my father’s rifle. Without magnification, the flock is just a blur of stippled colour, but through the scope, with my ocular tech sharpening my vision, the colours resolve into the wings and chests of individual birds. ‘Come on, little birdy,’ I breathe, squeezing the trigger. The shot echoes off the mountains, and the scent of gunpowder fills the air. That’s homemade powder. Low sulphur, fine grade, nanoprinted in the basement, rigged to fire a tranquillizer dart and bring me down a bird without killing it.

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