‘Yeah, that’s how she and my father met. He was running tests on her blood.’
Hypergenesis is rare, with only a handful of known cases in the world, but samples from people with the condition are in high demand. Their cells don’t behave like they’re supposed to, and when that happens in science, there’s always something interesting to be learned. When my father was starting out at Cartaxus, my mother was the only living hypergenesis donor in the country. She saw him so often and for so long that she joked that they should get married. When he ran out of code to test on her, he proposed.
She lived another five years, until a well-meaning doctor gave her a syringe of healing tech after a car crash. Most people with hypergenesis die young. The condition is a curse – something that nobody would ever wish upon their child. I haven’t thought about my mother since we left the cabin, but Dax is right to mention her. Hypergenesis is a non-Mendelian trait – it isn’t passed down by a parent’s chromosomes, but it is hereditary. Every child who’s ever been born to a mother with the condition has inherited it, too.
But none of them had Lachlan Agatta as a father.
‘Jesus, Dax. He did something to me, didn’t he?’
Dax nods, staring at the jagged line on the genkit’s screen. ‘It appears so. He must have found a way to suppress the condition, but it isn’t gone completely. I don’t know what these readings mean, but they’re weak. I wouldn’t expect foreign code to even give you a rash, so I’m not sure what happened to your back. There must have been something else going on that hurt you when you hacked your panel that night.’
Dax and I both turn to the mess of my panel at the same time. He jams the genkit’s wire into its side. It connects with a wet click. His eyes glaze over, flitting back and forth. ‘Here,’ he says. ‘There’s something in one of your old modules.’
He tilts his head, pulling it up on the genkit’s screen for me. It’s my healing tech’s code – four hundred pages of my father’s unique notation. From the installation log beside it, it looks like this was the app Marcus cut out of me. He thought it was neural code and that it could help his wife, but that’s ridiculous – this slow, clunky code took days to heal anything worse than a scratch.
I flick my finger across the genkit’s touchpad, reading the commands. I’ve never sat down and actually read through most of this code. Back in the cabin, my father didn’t want me messing around with it, and ever since I hurt my back, I’ve been too scared to even jack into my panel. The code is complicated, but I find myself reading it easily, the way I’ve always done with my father’s work. But a few pages in, I hit a section that isn’t like the rest. I frown, scanning the comments.
Unregistered code … Analyse … Epidermis … Corrode …
My heartbeat slows. ‘This code was written to attack my skin.’
Dax nods. ‘It would have run if you used any apps that weren’t registered to your panel. It’s vicious, but it wouldn’t have killed you. I think your father wrote this to make it look like you have hypergenesis, but you don’t.’
The crinkled scar tissue along my spine prickles. I stare at the code. ‘But my father wouldn’t have –’
I stop myself, digging my fingernails into my palm. He wouldn’t have hurt me – that’s what I was going to say, but now it sounds impossibly naive.
Of course my father would hurt me. I’ve seen what he did to Cole. He cut open five children and ran experiments on them. What made me think he wouldn’t hurt me, too? How could I have missed this? I scrunch my eyes shut, blocking out the evidence on the genkit’s screen.
‘Princess,’ Dax says.
He touches my shoulder, but I flinch away. I don’t want to be comforted. I don’t want his sympathy. I want to break out of here, drive back to the cabin and burn the whole place down.
I open my eyes and stare at the genkit’s screen. The pain gripping me is shifting into anger, making my breath come fast, blurring my vision. My blood pressure is still low, and I should get an IV. I should lie down or bandage my arm, but I can’t focus on anything else right now.
‘But don’t you see?’ Dax asks. ‘Whatever your father did to cure your hypergenesis, he’s gone to great lengths to cover it up. It must have been something illegal. This has to be why he left you behind. He needed to hide it from Cartaxus.’
‘I don’t care about Cartaxus,’ I spit, stunned by the anger in my voice. ‘He hid it from me, too, Dax. He lied to me. He made me think I had hypergenesis, and hid code inside my arm …’
My head snaps up, my blood freezing. I grab the genkit and yank it to me.
‘What is it?’ Dax asks.
The colours seem to fade from the room. My concentration shrinks my world down to the blinking cursor on the genkit’s screen. I jump through the folders of my panel’s operating system, kicking off a handful of scans.
‘Cole told me how Cartaxus started,’ I say, still typing. ‘My father was trying to make a vaccine before the outbreak, wasn’t he?’
‘He’d been trying to make a Hydra vaccine for over twenty years.’
‘That means he had decades to think about how to release it, and make sure Cartaxus wouldn’t control it. He saw them encrypt the Influenza code, and he knew they’d do it with Hydra. He wasn’t going to let it happen again.’ I punch a string of commands into the genkit with my good hand, setting off another batch of scans. ‘This plan we’re all following, I can see it now. It just goes back further than I thought.’
Dax’s brow furrows. ‘What are you checking?’
I look up at him. The movement makes my head spin. I pull in a slow breath, forcing myself to stay upright. ‘I’ve been thinking about this all wrong. I thought my father cared about me –’
‘He did, Princess. He loved you more than anything.’
‘Let me finish,’ I hiss.
Dax looks stunned for a second, then nods swiftly. I set off a scan on the genkit and meet his eyes. ‘I thought he loved me like most people love their children. But he didn’t, Dax, because he wasn’t like most people. When Cole showed up at the cabin, he didn’t want to follow my father’s plan, but I used his feelings for Jun Bei as leverage. I thought that was what my father wanted me to do, and I’m pretty sure it was, but it made me feel sick to manipulate Cole like that.’
Dax nods slowly. My vision blurs in and out. I shift on the floor, trying to keep myself steady.
‘But that’s what my father did all the time. I see it now, Dax. He manipulated people, and used them as tools. This whole plan to release the vaccine is like a game of chess, and he’s still moving the pieces around, even though he’s gone. My only mistake is that I thought I was playing the game with him.’ I swallow hard. ‘But I’m not. I’m just one of the pieces.’