He holds my gaze for a long time, then lets out a sigh. ‘Well, the first thing you need to know is that we were all born at Cartaxus. I never met my parents. We were raised in a lab and had nurses when we were young, so that was all we ever knew, and I think that made it easier. We didn’t join the rest of Cartaxus until the outbreak, but we were soldiers from the start. That was the point of the Zarathustra Initiative.’
The Zarathustra Initiative. The words send a chill down my spine. I glance at the files, but it’s not printed anywhere on them. I almost feel like my father mentioned it once, but I can’t dredge up the memory. Maybe something he was talking about with Dax that I overheard.
‘So were they making you into supersoldiers? Why would they need children for that?’
Something in Cole’s expression makes me pause, and I remember the irregularities I saw in his DNA when I hacked into his panel. I thought my father had changed his genes somehow, splicing new DNA into his, but I should have known better than that.
Splicing doesn’t work. Your cells reject the altered DNA, and it kills you. You have to be born with those genes.
I flick through Jun Bei’s file. Her sequencing report and gene diagrams tell me she’s allergic to dairy and that her eyes are green, but they also tell me that several of her chromosomes differ significantly from the average human’s.
‘What the hell is this?’ I flip open the other files. ‘You can’t change this sort of thing with gentech. You can’t rewrite this much of someone’s DNA without killing them.’ I point to a circled area in one report. ‘This is the anthrozone – we don’t even have that part of the human genome mapped. This isn’t splicing, it wouldn’t be possible, it would …’
I drift off, staring at the files. ‘They weren’t making soldiers, were they? They were making knockout kids.’
The thing with genetics is, there’s no map to explain how it all works – you just have to figure it out through trial and error, learning along the way. Back when we first sequenced the genome, it was an unintelligible mass of data that scientists broke into smaller chunks – genes – like the words in a sentence. But nobody knew what the words meant, or what the genes did, so they’d knock out one gene at a time in mouse DNA and grow a mouse without it – a knockout mouse. If the mouse was blind, the gene they knocked out must control vision. Maybe it wouldn’t grow cartilage properly, or its fur would be curly. They made thousands of them, slowly mapping out the mouse genome, and since humans and mice have similar DNA, we learned a lot about ourselves.
But it got messy, like language – if you move the words around in a sentence, you get a different meaning, and that’s how genes work too. Eventually we reached a limit of what we could learn from mice, and we were left with parts of the human genome we still didn’t understand. They moved on to rabbits, chimps, bonobos, zeroing in on the anthrozone – a set of gene combinations which are unique to humans. It’s against the law to knock genes out in babies, and for good reason. They might be born with horrific mutations or be unable to survive at all. It’s the worst kind of ethical violation. The anthrozone is off-limits for experimentation, and it holds thousands of combinations of genes that we still don’t understand.
But someone at Cartaxus must have done it anyway.
The Zarathustra Initiative is a line of knockout kids.
‘What was my father’s role?’ I whisper. But I already know. I can see it in the notes – the passion, the possessiveness about the research.
‘Lachlan was in charge of the project,’ Cole says, confirming my fears. ‘He started it. He was there from before we were born, up until he quit Cartaxus.’
I stand up and sit down again. I want to respond, but I don’t trust my voice, and I don’t know what to say. I thought I could handle the truth, but I didn’t think it would be anything like this. This isn’t the work of a scientist – this is the work of a monster.
‘You haven’t asked why he did this,’ Cole says. ‘Lachlan always had a good reason for his work.’
‘A good reason to torture children?’ I stand and pace to the sink, bracing my hands on the counter. ‘To experiment on them? To cut them open and see what they looked like inside?’
‘That was part of it,’ Cole says, stepping up behind me. ‘But he was looking for something specific, something he could only figure out by mapping the parts of us that make us human. Think about it, Catarina. What separates humans from animals?’
I let out a bitter laugh. ‘We’re the only species who would do this to children, for one thing.’
‘No,’ Cole says, his voice gentle. He reaches for my shoulder. ‘Right now, what’s the biggest difference? You’ve been out in the wild. What have you seen?’
I close my eyes, thinking of the flocks of passenger pigeons, the way they blacken the skies for days when they fly overhead. I think about deer growing fat on abandoned crops, of the blast craters littering the empty, trash-strewn cities.
I open my eyes. ‘The biggest difference is, we’re dying.’
‘That’s right. Hydra only affects humans.’ Cole takes my shoulder, turning me to him. ‘Your father had a reason for his work, Catarina. He was trying to make a vaccine.’
My heartbeat slows. ‘No, Hydra wasn’t discovered yet …’
But that’s more naivety. More wilful ignorance. I’m standing in a bunker that holds eighty thousand people, perfectly designed to keep them safe from an airborne pandemic. It opened just a few weeks after the outbreak.
‘You’re telling me …’ I breathe. ‘You’re telling me they knew.’
‘For thirty years. Cartaxus has been studying Hydra since before you were born.’
‘Thirty years?’ I press one hand to my forehead, my head spinning with the weight of everything I’m hearing.
‘Just come and sit down.’ Cole gestures to the bunks.
‘I don’t want to sit down.’
‘Please,’ he urges. ‘I can’t relax with you hurting yourself like that.’
I drop my eyes. One hand is in a fist, my fingernails digging half-moons into the skin of my palm. I unfurl it slowly, and a thin line of blood runs down my little finger.
Cole sits down on the lower bunk, and I perch myself on the edge beside him, my head dropped, my elbows on my knees.
‘It started thirty years ago,’ he says. ‘Researchers found a body frozen in the Arctic permafrost. It was prehistoric, and when it thawed, it gave off a cloud of gas. The researchers got sick, the CDC moved in, and then the sick people started blowing. That was the first outbreak. The world’s governments controlled it, but they recognized the threat Hydra posed. A research group was formed to study it, and that was how Cartaxus started. Your father joined when most of the work was genetic research, but Cartaxus eventually split into two groups: those who were trying to make a vaccine, and those who were preparing for the inevitable outbreak. They started building airtight camps and decided that all ethical considerations needed to be put aside.’
I rub my forearm where the bandage over my panel is starting to itch. ‘So the Zarathustra Initiative, the knockout kids …’
He nods. ‘They were an attempt to find a vaccine. It had been ten years, and they still weren’t any closer, so they were ready to try anything.’