Something in his tone rings true. His emerald eyes are as unreadable as ever, but I catch a hint of sadness in them. I look away, across the room at Cole. A doctor is working on his arm, and Novak is making one of her speeches to the cloud of cameras.
‘Tell me Novak knows what’s going to happen,’ I whisper.
‘Disturbingly, she does. She wanted cameras in here from the start, but when I explained …’ He drops his voice. ‘When I explained the procedure’s effects, she ordered a whole swarm. I think she’s making a film. Don’t worry, though. Nothing will be live. The broadcast is delayed, and it’s mostly footage of her and her team. People won’t be watching you when the decryption is happening.’
‘Well, that’s a relief.’ I kick in the liquid, leaning back against the vat’s curved side. The painkillers and beta-blockers are already working. I’m still terrified about the decryption, but the ache in my knee is gone, and the edges of my terror are bleeding into calm.
‘I have some bad news,’ Dax says. ‘Since you don’t have a panel, we’ll need to do a spinal jack to hook you up to the clonebox.’
I wince. Spinal jacks are a last-resort procedure using a socket buried in the back of your neck. It grows there in case people lose their arms and need emergency treatment, but it means cutting through muscle and screwing a cable into your spine. I should have realized that we’d need to do one, but I guess I’ve been trying not to think about it. I pull the fishtail braid over my shoulder. ‘Are you going to do it?’
He waves his hand across the steel trolley he brought over, where a row of scalpels glitter in the liquid’s blue light. ‘I think that’s best. Are you ready?’
I glance around the room, trying to prepare myself for what’s about to happen. Cole’s already jacked in, with his eyes shut, his head tilted back. A thick cable juts from an incision in his forearm, coiling into the clonebox that stands humming in the middle of the room. It’s waist high and cube shaped, built of glass that shows a jungle of internal tubing, where ninety litres of grey liquid is pumping constantly. That’s approximately the same volume of liquid you’d get if Cole were to melt into a puddle on the floor, and that’s precisely the scenario the clonebox is designed to replicate. Every cell in Cole’s body needs to be duplicated, so the soupy liquid inside the clonebox is recoding itself to match Cole’s DNA. If that were to happen inside a living person’s body, their cells would break apart in the same way mine are about to do. But inside the frothing liquid of the box, they’ll be recoded from scratch without affecting Cole at all.
His panel will see the clonebox as an extension of his body, and it will send his apps, including the vaccine, in to protect it. That’s when we’ll jack me in. Another thick black cable is jutting from the clonebox, curling across the gym’s floor to the side of the vat. Dax will hook it into my spinal socket, and if the procedure’s code works like it should, the gold-flecked cables in my body will pump the vaccine’s code into every limb. Every muscle, every nerve. My own DNA will decrypt it piece by piece, and my body will send the decrypted code back, ready for release.
I stare at the humming clonebox, at the cable in Cole’s panel, at the whining clouds of drones spiralling through the air. I’m still frightened, but I made up my mind about this the moment I found the procedure’s code in my panel. The only thing I can do now is choose how I want to face it.
I look up at Dax, steeling myself. ‘Yeah, I’m ready. Let’s do this.’
I let Dax pull my head forward so the back of my neck is exposed, my chin resting on the curved rim of the vat. His fingers prod along my spine, and I feel a flash of pain as he slides a syringe of anaesthetic into the muscle.
‘OK, here we go,’ he says. A scalpel clinks beside me, followed by a quick slash, a hint of pain and a sharp tug on my neck. The cable vibrates as it connects with the socket, locking itself into my spine with a wet, metallic crunch.
My vision flashes. The power running through the cable is bleeding through my wiring, glitching out my ocular tech. ‘It worked.’
‘Good.’ Dax’s fingers slide from my neck. ‘I’ll kick off a biometric scan.’
I nod, slowly straightening my head, blinking through the sudden blast of noise in my vision. It’s not just my ocular tech that’s glitching. All my implants are starting up in a rush, flooding my senses, turning the whine of the drones into a roar.
‘This scan looks clear,’ Dax mutters, his eyes glazing over. ‘Your levels are within acceptable limits, and … Ah.’
‘What?’
His forehead creases. ‘That backup in your spine we found, I can see more information now. It’s not masking its access any more, and it’s growing a panel in your arm again, like we thought. It has a hard drive, and it looks like there’s data on it. Maybe it was backing up everything from your genkit.’
‘Maybe …’ I say, confused. ‘Can you see anything else about the hypergenesis treatment?’
‘I’m taking a look now. I can’t see anything obvious except a lingering dose of ERO-86 in your blood. It looks like it was being synthesized by your old healing tech code. I’ll send a command to bring the levels down to trace, then we should be good to go.’
The cable in the back of my neck vibrates, and a jolt races down my spine.
‘What …’ I breathe, suddenly dizzy. ‘What’s ERO-86?’
‘It’s a post-traumatic-stress treatment,’ Dax says. ‘It suppresses memories. They use it in black-out training, but it’s probably a false reading. With your panel growing back, there’ll be all sorts of chemicals in your blood. I wouldn’t worry about it.’
‘M-memory supp-ess-nt?’ I slur, my lips going numb. Whatever command Dax used on me, it’s left me barely able to speak. But he has to listen to me. He can’t just ignore a memory suppressant reading, not after everything we’ve found. If the backup node in my spine has a hard drive with data on it, maybe there’s something in there about the decryption. Something important that my father expected me to find.
What if it’s a way to unlock the vaccine without killing me?
‘OK,’ Novak says. Her stilettos click across the floor, and the drones swarm back around me. She stands beside the vat, resting her mirror-fingernailed hands on the rim. I force my eyes open, struggling to stay upright. My voice is barely a breath when I try to speak, and my arm doesn’t move at all when I try to grab Novak’s sleeve.
She raises an eyebrow at Dax, oblivious to me. ‘It’s time to make history, Dr Crick. The clonebox is running. Is she ready to go?’
‘All clear,’ Dax says, his eyes still glazed. ‘We can start decryption on your command.’
I shake my head. ‘St …’ I murmur, my lips shaking. I try to shout, but nothing comes out except a sigh.
‘Cloning now,’ Novak says, staring intently at me. The drones whizz around us, a cloud of thousands of eyes trained on me, but not a single one of them can see that I want this to stop. Novak raises a scarlet eyebrow, giving me a sharp-toothed smile. ‘Hold tight now, Catarina. Transferral on my word.’
‘St …’ I breathe, closing my eyes.
The cable in my neck vibrates.