‘My memories aren’t false!’ I whirl on Cole. Part of me wants to hit him, to stop these accusations that feel like nails being driven into my skull. ‘I remember the food, the clothes I wore, the goddamn soap I had to use.’
I freeze. The soap. The sweet-sharp vanilla scent I’ve smelled so many times in the last few days. In the cleaning wipes Cole gave me back at the cabin. In the Wash-and-Blast at Homestake. In the Skies gymnasium. It’s a disinfectant, a Cartaxus brand. I’ve always hated the smell.
‘You’re starting to see it,’ Cole whispers. ‘Your memories are blurred, aren’t they? There’s nothing you can grab hold of and know for sure it’s real. Try to think of something specific. What were your birthdays like? When did you get your first period?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Just stop it, stop talking!’
His questions feel like arrows in my side. I don’t remember my birthdays, but they’ve never meant much to me anyway, so I probably just spent them in my room. My first period, though – a physical change. I would have been intrigued; I would have jacked myself into my genkit and analysed my hormones. I close my eyes, searching my memory for the day it happened.
But there’s nothing. No memories at all.
My breathing hitches higher, making my throat burn. I open my eyes and find Cole watching me with his hand over his mouth. He reaches for me and I stumble away, scrambling to the jeep to yank out my backpack. I turn it upside down, shaking it until the Zarathustra folders slide out. I drop to my knees and grab Jun Bei’s file. Her eyes glare up at me when I flip to the black-and-white photograph clipped to the back.
Bursts of pain, like firecrackers, pop in the base of my skull.
Jun Bei. The girl I saw on the road. Small, scarred, fierce. The wild, murderous genius who was in love with Cole.
I blink and see her eyes in the mirror. Crying. Afraid. For a moment it feels impossibly real, but I shake the thought away. I’m not her – I’m Catarina. I have my father’s skin, his face, his hands, his genes written into every inch of my bones. I’ve seen my DNA, I’ve sequenced it, and I would have noticed something like this …
Only, that’s not true.
I never had hypergenesis, and I didn’t figure that out. My father made me too afraid to touch my own panel. I flip the pages in Jun Bei’s file, turning away from her photo, reading the notes my father left in her sequencing report.
Rapid uptake. Whole-body regeneration. Cellular anomalies.
I flip the pages frantically, until a comment stops me in my tracks.
Jun Bei is a blank canvas waiting to be painted over. She’s just a child now, but she could be a masterpiece.
‘Oh no,’ I breathe, rocking back on my knees. ‘No, it can’t be. He’s my father …’
‘Then how do you remember the lab?’ Cole drops down beside me, a file clutched in his hands.
No, not a file. A sketchbook. His drawings.
The throbbing in my skull rises into a storm as he opens it, turning the pages, flipping through the sketches. Each one hits me like a bullet. Those eyes. That smile. The tear tracks on her cheeks.
‘No,’ I gasp. ‘Stop it, please …’
Cole’s shoulders heave, tears pooling in his lashes. ‘It’s you, it has to be. The first time I saw you, it took my breath away.’ He chokes back a cry. ‘I’ve loved you all along.’
The wall in my mind parts with a roar.
Bright green eyes, black hair falling in my face. My skin is pale and my knuckles are bruised, and there’s a stranger’s face in the mirror. I feel her tears and her anger, feel her hands turning DNA models in the air, solving puzzles deep inside a white laboratory. I’ve been kept here as long as I can remember. I see bars and concrete cells. I see scalpels and arterial spurts of my own blood.
And I see Cole.
I see him as a child. I see him smiling, laughing, screaming. Bandaged and broken, I see him with every beat of my heart. The memory of Cole’s smile hits me like a bolt of lightning, shattering the pain and confusion, splintering the walls in my mind.
He is my friend and my confidant. My soul mate and guardian. I am a girl called Jun Bei, and I am in love with Cole.
This truth detonates inside me, crackling across my skin. My memories of boarding school fall away, crumbling into dust.
‘Cole,’ I gasp, blinking away tears. ‘Cole, I remember.’
His arms curve around me, folding me into his chest. ‘It’s you,’ he breathes, his voice thick with tears. His lips find my cheek, his hands shaking as they tangle in my hair. ‘It’s you, it’s you.’
I let out a cry, a thousand points of pain aching in a body that is not my own, that has been changed and twisted into something else. Tears stream from eyes that belong to a stranger, hands and limbs and lips and teeth that are wrong and changed and desecrated.
This is not my body.
‘Who am I?’ I cry. My mind curls in on itself, the fragments of who I was and who I am splintering apart. ‘Who was I?’
‘You were wonderful,’ Cole says, pressing his lips to my forehead. ‘You were clever, and brave, and stubborn, just like you are now.’
‘We were … together,’ I choke out.
Cole lets out a strangled sound, something between a sob and a laugh. ‘Yes,’ he breathes. ‘Yes, we were together.’
Pressure rises in my throat. I close my eyes, blinking away tears, and see a dorm room with grey blankets, a patch of gauze taped over Cole’s chest. He was always bandaged, always coming back from surgery and limping to my side. I see his fourteen-year-old form, already too strong to be strictly human. His eyes burn in the darkness as he tells me we’ll run away. We’re alone, his arms are around me, and there’s power in his breathing. He kisses me, tells me he loves me, and I promise we will always be together.
‘I love you,’ I gasp, touching his ribs, his arms, his beating heart. I know them. I love them. I press my face to his neck.
Then his lips find mine, and I pull myself into him, clutching him as he kisses me. Something roars inside me as his lips crush mine. A deep, aching cry that rises from my chest and bursts from me as I throw my head back, screaming into the sky.
He did this. The man who is not my father. He took me apart, cell by cell, and remade my body in his own, twisted image.
Cole presses his head to my chest, his arms circling my waist as I stare up at the gold-streaked sky, tears running down my cheeks. More memories surge up from my past, itching inside my skull, flashing across my vision like a glitching video feed.