That fact alone should convince me that Cole is on my side, but for some reason it just makes me more nervous.
He looks me up and down, then turns and walks to the dining table. ‘Come on. We’re both tired, and you need to eat. I’ve cooked you a double serving. It looks like you could use it. Your healing tech must be using a lot of calories.’ He pulls out a chair at the table for me.
I hesitate for a moment, then walk over slowly and sit down. A heaped plate of herbed, creamy spaghetti lies waiting. The sight makes my stomach rumble. I pick up a fork and lean over the plate, drawing in a slow breath.
‘This might be the best meal I’ve seen in a year.’
He looks up. ‘What have you been eating?’
I jerk my thumb at a stack of foil-wrapped nutriBars in the corner. ‘Those, mostly. There isn’t much else around.’
He twirls his fork in the spaghetti. ‘Really? I drove past a farm just north of here that looked like it went for miles. Soybeans, vegetables …’
‘Um-mh,’ I say, through a mouthful of spaghetti. ‘That stuff’s proprietary. You can’t digest it without their app’s synthetic enzymes. It tastes good going down, but it’ll leave you sick for days. There’s a special place in hell for whoever came up with DRM for food.’
‘So you’ve been living on nutriBars?’
I swallow a mouthful. ‘I wouldn’t call it living. I nearly lost my mind eating them every day last winter. It’s better than starving, though.’
He pauses with his fork mid-twirl. ‘So why didn’t you go to a bunker? Homestake isn’t far, and Cartaxus would have come to pick you up. Hell, you’re an Agatta. They would have sent a chopper.’
My shoulders tighten. ‘I know. They sent one for my father. They put two bullets in him too. I wasn’t going to let myself become their prisoner.’
‘Your father wasn’t mistreated, Catarina.’
I dig my fingernails into my palm again, but the pain is becoming meaningless. ‘If he wasn’t mistreated, then why would he make me promise to stay out here?’
Cole raises an eyebrow. ‘I’d like to know that myself.’
I lean forward. ‘I’ll tell you why – it’s because he knew he was walking into a cell he’d never escape from. He wanted me to live on my own terms.’
Cole looks around the room, at the spiderwebs on the ceiling, at the bare walls and dusty kitchen. ‘Yeah, you’re really knocking it out of the park.’
I scowl. ‘At least I can leave anytime I want. Cartaxus threatened my father’s life when he tried to quit. It took him years to get out.’
‘He quit? I thought Lachlan was fired over the influenza crisis.’
‘Fired?’ I freeze with a forkful of spaghetti midway to my mouth. ‘No, that’s ridiculous.’
‘Thirty thousand people died.’
‘I know. That was Cartaxus’s fault.’
Cole chews silently, and the condescending look on his face makes me want to stab him with my fork. Influenza X was the most lethal virus in human history, before Hydra came along and shot straight to the top of the list. My father coded a vaccine that should have won him a Nobel prize, but Cartaxus encrypted it and refused to release the source code. Soon people started guessing at what might be hidden inside it. One rumour caught hold – that the code was impure, that it was based on canine DNA.
My father said there were a lot of rumours like that in the early days of gentech – that innocuous-looking apps were based on the genes of animals that many religions believed to be unclean. Pigs, dogs, insects. Genes that people didn’t want swimming around inside their cells. The concern was well-founded, since many early apps were derived from the previous decades scientists had spent studying rats. It was estimated that almost sixty per cent of early gentech code contained at least one rodent gene. That changed as time went on, and people like my father invented new and superior genes that were entirely synthetic. When he wrote the code for Influenza X, there was no need to lift genes from nature’s encyclopaedia – he could write better code himself.
The rumours about the Influenza X vaccine were false, but that didn’t stop them spreading, and Cartaxus refused to release the code and put them to rest. Hundreds of thousands of religious objectors refused to download the vaccine, and thousands of them died.
‘If Cartaxus had learned from Influenza, we wouldn’t be in this mess,’ I say. ‘The whole idea of encrypting gentech code is unconscionable. People need to know what their code is doing to them, which means they need to read it. But Cartaxus doesn’t care about people. They just care about copyright.’
Cole snorts. ‘Encrypting the Influenza vaccine had nothing to do with copyright. You can’t pander to extremists about code they don’t understand while a virus is killing millions of people.’
‘It’s not pandering! It’s open, honest debate. People have a right to choose what goes into their bodies.’
‘What about their children’s bodies? Who chooses for them when the alternative is death?’
I throw my fork down. ‘I don’t know, but it sure as hell shouldn’t be Cartaxus. All they care about is power. My father knew that, and that’s why he quit.’
‘Is that what he told you?’
‘He wasn’t lying.’
Cole picks up my plate. ‘Then he shouldn’t have based the Influenza vaccine on canine DNA.’
I push back from the table, biting back the urge to yell at him. He just told me my father is dead, and now he’s trashing him in front of me. I’m so worked up I can barely keep my voice level, but I’m not going to let him disrespect my father like that. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, soldier,’ I say. ‘My father wouldn’t do that. He would have found an alternative, or even if he couldn’t, he would never have lied about it. He wasn’t ashamed of his work.’
Cole’s eyes meet mine, flintlike and cold. ‘Believe what you want to believe, Catarina. Let me know when you’re ready for the truth.’
He stands and walks into the kitchen, leaving me in a storm of grief, with a trickle of blood weaving from the palm of my left hand.
CHAPTER 9
By the time Cole is done with the dishes, I’ve tugged a comb through my hair, cleaned my nails, and am pacing back and forth across the living room. Cole’s words are spinning through my mind – but it’s not what he said that’s worrying me. It’s the cold, angry tone in his voice when he talked about my father.
He sounded like a perfect Cartaxus soldier. A true believer, loyal to the conglomerate that has taken over the planet. He didn’t sound like a renegade gone AWOL on the back of a single note from a man whose word he’s ready to risk his life on.
If anything, it sounds like Cole didn’t like my father at all.