‘Not really.’ I drop my eyes. ‘I just picked up a few things from my father.’
This is dangerous ground. It’s a miracle Cole hasn’t already put it together that I’m one of the Skies hackers he’s talking about. My genkit is downstairs, and it would only take a moment for someone who knows what they’re doing to open it up and log in to Novak’s network.
From what I’ve been able to determine from my time hacking their servers, Cartaxus would very much like to see the hacker known as Bobcat disappear from the face of the planet.
Cole watches me carefully. ‘Our scientists are working on unlocking the code, but they estimate that it’ll take six months to crack it with brute force.’
‘Six months?’ My head spins. That’s an eternity. ‘What insane kind of encryption algorithm did they use on it?’
‘I don’t know, except that it was encrypted by your father.’
I look up sharply. That doesn’t make sense. My father hates gentech encryption – he always said that medical code should be released to anyone who needs it. He’d never lock up the vaccine – he’d shout it from the rooftops. He’d give it away for free.
‘If my father encrypted it,’ I say, ‘it’s because Cartaxus forced him to.’
‘I don’t care who encrypted it,’ Cole snaps. ‘The problem is that it’s locked.’
I flinch at the sudden edge in his voice, reminded of the way he moved when he grabbed the fountain pen from my hands. He’s a Cartaxus weapon, tightly strung. It might not be the best idea to get into an argument with him.
‘If you don’t trust me, that’s fine,’ he says, scowling. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised. You’re a damn Agatta, after all. But I’m not here to fight.’ He wipes his hand on his shirt and slides a slip of plastic from his pocket. ‘I’m here because before he died, your father left me this.’
He hands me the slip. It’s white and scratched, with a burn mark along one side and a faint image of a scythe etched on the front. A ghost memo. An encrypted chip that displays messages when the person who left them behind has died. People use them to confess their sins and store their secrets. Sentimental stuff. The kind of thing my father would never do.
I press the button on the side. Glowing letters appear on the plastic, flickering faintly, lit by a dying battery.
Cole,
If required, my daughter Catarina can unlock the vaccine. You must find her, and protect her with your life. She may be our only chance to save humanity.
A gust of wind sweeps through the hole in the bedroom wall. I shiver in my foam-streaked clothes, staring at the words. The note means nothing to me, but that doesn’t stop a chill from settling in my stomach. It’s probably a fake. Something put together by Cartaxus. I press the button again, but the message doesn’t change.
‘So will you help?’ Cole asks.
I glance up at him, then back down to the memo, turning it over. No ports, no access. It must connect wirelessly. ‘Help with what?’
‘With decrypting the vaccine.’
I press the memo to my forearm on the off chance my panel will register it, but nothing appears in my vision. ‘I don’t know anything about that. I wouldn’t even know where to start.’
It’s true. I don’t know the first thing about decryption; my job is purely hacking. If Cole’s telling the truth about the vaccine, and Cartaxus’s scientists can’t crack the code, I don’t see how I can help.
‘But Lachlan said you could.’
‘Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you.’ I run my fingernail along a crease in the edge of the memo, splitting the plastic apart. It falls open neatly in my hands. Inside is a tiny screen – LCD, old-school, with two stubby buttons wired up to it. I look up, scanning the room, searching for the fountain pen, and settle for a splinter of wood on the floor beside me.
‘What are you doing?’ Cole leans in to watch me jab at the buttons with the splinter. The tiny screen flickers with green text as I make my way into the ghost memo’s operating system. ‘You’ve broken it.’
‘I haven’t broken it. I’m trying to see who it’s registered to.’
To figure out if it’s really linked to my father’s panel, or just part of some elaborate Cartaxus lie.
Cole watches me use the memo’s buttons to navigate through its file system. ‘How do you know how to do that?’
‘You said it yourself. I’m an Agatta. I know how to do a lot of things.’
‘Fair enough.’
Honestly, I’ve never used a ghost memo before, but it’s only taken me a few moments to figure it out. That’s how I’ve always been with software. Learning new programming languages has always felt like relearning words and concepts that I already knew. Like I was born with the knowledge inside me and just had to remember it. That’s how my father always described the way he felt about DNA.
The memo’s display blinks, showing me the registration details, the log of people who’ve had access to the chip. I navigate into the memory. The message Cole showed me was recorded in the last two weeks and activated just three days ago. It was set off by a death notice from the panel it’s paired to. I jab the button one last time, my chest tightening.
The ID flashes on the screen. A hundred hexadecimal digits I know by heart, that I’ve searched for every time I’ve hacked Cartaxus’s servers. A void inside me opens up. A yawning, empty chasm.
It’s there on the screen. Cole wasn’t lying.
My father is dead.
The pieces of the memo tumble through my fingers. My father is dead. The words circle inside me, over and over, the dimensions of my universe shifting to accommodate this truth.
‘Catarina?’
‘It’s true.’
‘Yes.’
‘The vaccine, the encryption …’
He just nods. I double over, clutching my chest. My ribs feel like iron bars, unyielding. I can’t breathe. My heart can barely beat.
My father’s lab was attacked. His work was destroyed, his staff were killed …
‘Wait, what about Dax?’ My head snaps up. ‘Dax Crick? He worked with my father. Is he alive?’
Cole nods, and the breath rushes from my lungs. I reach for the wall, fighting a wave of dizziness.
‘Crick is fine,’ Cole says. ‘He was one of the few who made it out of the lab before the genkits self-destructed. Your father left instructions for both of us. We’re working on this together, and he’s going to try to join us out here.’
‘He’s coming here?’
Cole nods. I shut my eyes, the thought of Dax breaking through something inside me, a door that I’m now struggling to close. The plague has taught me to handle grief, and my father’s death is an ember in my fist – I know to crush it, let it burn into my palm, shrinking it down until it morphs into something hard and cold. A diamond. But this is more than grief. This is too much to take in – the vaccine, the attack on my father’s lab, the thought of seeing Dax again. It’s a rush of oxygen, making the ember of my father’s death burst into flames that threaten to engulf me.