I shrug. ‘I think so. I mean, my father was the one who gave me the backup node that’s growing this. He probably thought I’d find it myself. I should have, really. I was just too scared to do anything with my panel after Cartaxus took him. He probably expected me to jack in as soon as he left, and hunt around in the code. I would have figured it out eventually. It wasn’t very well hidden.’
Cole nods, looking doubtful. ‘Why would he have hidden this from you?’
I drop my eyes. ‘I have a theory about that, too.’
‘Oh?’
I chew my lip. ‘Well, he came up with a treatment for my hypergenesis. I don’t know what it was, but I think that’s what he was hiding. And since hypergenesis is only seen in humans, which means it’s probably part of the anthrozone, I was thinking …’
Cole’s hands tighten on the wheel. ‘You think he developed the treatment based on the research he did in the Zarathustra Initiative.’
I nod, closing my eyes. Silhouettes of the five children flicker through my mind, along with scraps from the experimental notes in their files. Surgical examinations. Toxicity tests. Extended sensory deprivation. Cole said my father developed the Hydra vaccine based on the research he did on Leoben, but what if the treatment for my hypergenesis came from that work too? He couldn’t have explained it to me without telling me the truth.
I would have learned what he did to Cole and the others. I would have hated him.
‘What did you mean earlier?’ I ask quietly. ‘When you said you wanted to become a weapon because of what Cartaxus … what my father did to you.’
He shifts. ‘Let’s talk about that after we get to the lab.’
‘I want to know. It’s important. What happened to you and the other kids?’
He blows out a sigh. ‘It was different for each of us. We all had different mutations. Your father called them gifts.’
‘Like superpowers?’
His lips curl. ‘Not even close.’
I pull my leg up slowly so my foot rests on the seat, keeping my wounded knee straight. ‘What were they?’
‘Well, we weren’t told what they were explicitly. Your father wanted to make sure that the experiments were pure, so we weren’t supposed to understand what they were testing us for. But some of us figured it out. Lee’s was obvious. They took blood and tissue samples from him for years, and after a while they started locking him in a room with Hydra doses and letting them blow.’
I close my eyes, stunned by the brutality. I swallow it down. ‘So Leoben was naturally immune?’
‘Completely. He doesn’t even have the vaccine in his arm like Crick and I do, but your father was probably the only man in the world who could tell you how his immunity works. All we know is that it took almost eighteen years for him to translate whatever he found in Lee’s DNA into a vaccine.’
‘What about the others?’ I lean down to grab my backpack and slide out the mould-spotted manila folders. Cole stiffens, but he doesn’t stop me. I open one folder to a picture of a little girl with shaved blonde hair. Anna Sinclair. Her skin looks unusual – as though it’s covered with tiny bumps – but it’s hard to tell from the photograph. Her eyes are narrowed, staring at the camera as though she’d like to hurt whoever is behind it. ‘What about her?’
Cole glances over and smiles. ‘Ah, Anna. She’d approve of that trick you did with your genkit to blow the airlocks. Anything with explosives, and Anna’s on board. We didn’t know what her mutation was, but she had a thing when she was younger where she’d get growths all over her. Her skin cells wouldn’t stop growing. You can see it in the picture. She couldn’t eat, either. She spent a lot of time in the medical ward, until Lachlan came up with an app that seemed to clear it up overnight. She’s down south now, in another Cartaxus facility. A civilian bunker. They firewalled us, and we’ve barely been able to talk for the last few months.’
‘Why is she there?’
Cole looks surprised. ‘I don’t know. They don’t tell us that kind of thing in the black-out programme.’
‘She’s in it, too?’
He nods. ‘Me, Anna and Leoben. Anna probably has the most training. She was into the military stuff even when we were little. She wants to run Cartaxus one day.’
‘What about …’ I flip through the files, opening the one with the bald girl. Her skin is so pale I can see the veins across her cheeks. She looks like a doll made of glass. ‘What about Ziana?’
‘Ziana …’ Cole sighs. ‘Ziana’s gone. She escaped during the outbreak. She told us that she was going to, and that she didn’t want us to find her. I still check for her every week, but I can’t get through. She was only really close to Jun Bei.’
‘Did you know what her mutation was?’
‘Yeah.’ Cole’s voice goes hard.
A chill creeps across my skin. ‘What was it?’
‘Are you sure you want to talk about this?’
I tighten my grip on the folders. ‘I need to know, Cole.’
He lets out a slow breath. ‘Ziana has … she has another sense.’
‘What, like … magnetoreception?’
He shakes his head. ‘She can feel some of her body’s systems. They’re connected to her brain like our nervous system is. When I got shot, I felt pain, because that’s what my nerve endings were telling me. Ziana would feel that too, but she’d also feel her blood and her hormones, and a hundred other things just as clearly as the pain. She has too many neurons in her body – at least that’s what Jun Bei thought, but it took us a while to figure it out.’
Too many neurons. My head spins with the implications. Every panel has a handful of blunt monitors to read data from its user’s body: blood-sugar levels, histamine releases, hormone balances, the number of cells being shed inside your stomach every hour. The monitors add a feed to most people’s VR dashboard, but seeing the stats in your vision is different from actually sensing them. Someone like Ziana could grow up knowing more about the human body than any scientist ever had, just by listening to her own.
‘That’s amazing.’
‘Lachlan seemed to think so. He worked with Ziana a lot, but she didn’t get along with the rest of us. She was always … strange. She barely spoke, and she spent most of her time in the medical ward.’
‘Why?’
Cole doesn’t answer, and it suddenly hits me why he didn’t want to tell me about Ziana. The easiest way to test someone’s awareness of their body’s functions would be to hurt and disrupt them. To push them to their limits. To bend them until they broke.
The best way to test someone’s ability to survive is to try to kill them.
I close my eyes. I’ve seen the scars on Cole’s chest, but I hadn’t really let myself think about how he got them. My father’s research wasn’t just brutal; it was intentionally brutal. He was trying to push these children as far as he could, to see what he’d learn when they fell apart.
I open my eyes, fighting the rage coiling inside me. ‘What about Jun Bei’s mutation?’
Cole glances over, but I don’t flip open Jun Bei’s file. I don’t want to see the look in his eyes when he sees her photograph. I’m in a storm right now – of anger, of disgust, of fear. I don’t need to add jealousy to that mix.
‘We didn’t figure out what her mutation was. Or, at least, she never told me. It wasn’t obvious, whatever it was.’
‘What about you?’