I see trees and highways, a forest and a lake. I’m not in the lab any more. I’m fifteen, I’m in the cabin, and Lachlan is telling me that this is where we’ll live. He shows me the property, he’s trying to be kind, but he’s weak. He can’t rip Cole from my mind no matter what he does to my DNA. I see myself running into the mine shafts, hiding a box of stolen files behind an orange kayak, promising that I will return to look at the photograph of Cole and never let myself forget, even though my memory is already in broken, blurry pieces that fall through my hands like water when I try to grasp at them.
I see Lachlan finding me, shouting, dragging me back into the cabin. I see his eyes grow wide as I smash the windows and cut my hands on the glass, trying to scramble through and run. I see him fighting me, wrestling me away as I suck my hand to spit blood at him, screaming for Cole.
Then he locks me away, and there are no gentle arms to keep me from the darkness. I am alone with the monster who changed my face, and he tells me that I will not remember.
But I do.
CHAPTER 44
‘Almost there,’ Cole says. ‘How are you doing?’
‘OK,’ I say. ‘As long as I’m with you.’
He smiles, glancing over at me. We’re in the jeep with the windows rolled down, following a dirt road into the valley at the base of the three-peaked mountains. It’s mid-morning, and the sky is a deep, stormy grey, the air ringing with the percussive cries of a flock of passenger pigeons.
I’m sitting twisted in the passenger seat to protect my wounded shoulder, one hand stretched out to rest on Cole’s leg. I haven’t left his side all morning. I’m afraid I’ll fall apart without his touch. My mind is still a storm, but Cole is my anchor to reality.
Now that we’ve found each other, I won’t let anything break us apart again.
‘Any more memories coming back?’ Cole asks, nodding at my lap, where I have the photographs from each of the Zarathustra files arranged in a rough line.
Every time I look at them, I remember something new. Ziana singing tunelessly. Leoben chasing me down the halls. Anna climbing into the lab’s ductwork and making it all the way to the roof before the guards dragged her down. Little fragments of memories keep coming back to me, but they’re scattered and incoherent, rushing away before I can take hold of them. I don’t know if that’s a side effect of the ERO-86 wearing off, or if it’s how my memories are going to stay.
‘I still can’t remember anything properly,’ I say. ‘It’s all bits and pieces, like I just don’t have a past any more.’
‘What about your memories of boarding school?’
‘They’re even worse. They’re like … black-and-white photographs. I don’t know how I ever thought they were real.’
‘That’s how the brain works.’ Cole looks out the window, scanning the trees. ‘If you suppress memories, it’ll build a story to take their place. I’ve had it done to me. I spent two weeks away from the lab, just after the outbreak, but I don’t know where. My black-out tech kicked in and stopped me from remembering. When I got back, Lachlan showed me photographs of me in Los Angeles. He said I’d been extracting a scientist from the city, getting them away from the riots. He told me what the weather was like, and what I’d eaten, and I started remembering it all.’
‘So were you really there?’
‘That’s the thing. I took one of the photographs and ran it through an image checker. It was faked. That didn’t stop me from remembering being there, though. Memories are weak. They’re fallible. That’s why I kept my scars.’
My hand rises instinctively to my chest. The skin there is smooth and unscarred, and I have no memory of it looking like Cole’s. But in Jun Bei’s photograph, there is a network of stitches and puckered lines stretching all the way to her neck.
Scars can be healed easily enough. Skin colour can be altered. Hair, facial structure, eye colour can all be changed with enough time. But there shouldn’t be a way to edit what’s inside my cells.
I pick my file up from the pile on the floor and flip it open, scanning the contents, itching for a genkit cable to jack into my arm. I could figure this out so much faster if I could do my own analysis. The sequencing reports in the mouldy file are in a format I’m not familiar with, and some of the experimental results are so bizarre that I can barely understand what Lachlan was testing for, but there’s something here that just might explain what he did to me.
‘What do you see?’ Cole asks.
I flip back through the pages, chewing my thumbnail. ‘I think I might know why I survived the decryption. It looks like my cells are flexible, but I don’t know how. Most people’s cells can’t handle changes to the natural DNA inside them. They reject it, which tends to destroy the cells, too. But it seems like my cells just … adapt. They change to suit whatever DNA is inside them, but I don’t know how.’
‘Does that mean you could change your body back?’
Cole’s words hang in the air. I’ve been asking myself the same thing for the last few hours, but it feels strange to hear it asked aloud. I wear Lachlan’s face and skin, I have his eyes and hairline. His genes are written in the shape of my nose and the taper of my chin. But it’s not just his face any more – it’s mine. It’s the face I’ve seen in the mirror for the last three years. Through the outbreak, through the desperate winters alone in the cabin. My eyes are so like Lachlan’s, but they also belong to me. The fire in them, the strength of my jaw, the tangles of my hair.
When I look at Jun Bei’s photograph, I still feel like I’m looking at her instead of me.
The thought of wearing Lachlan’s face is sickening, but the thought of having to change myself again is traumatizing too. I don’t know how I want to look. I don’t even know who I am.
‘I … I don’t know,’ I say quietly.
‘I’m sorry,’ Cole says. ‘I shouldn’t have asked that. It doesn’t matter what you look like.’
But it does. He’s right – it’s part of who I am. The way a person looks is based on their DNA, and Lachlan changed mine. My chest tightens. ‘I’m not Jun Bei, Cole, not according to what’s inside me. I’m someone else, but I don’t know who. I don’t know anything any more.’
His hand slides up my back to rest on my good shoulder. ‘We’ll figure it out together.’
I nod silently. I feel like I’m drowning, like I’m slipping into a cold, dark sea. Cole’s hand on my skin is a life-raft, keeping me above the surface, but it’s not enough. I need to find something inside myself. A flame of bravery.
I turn my gaze inward, but all I see is shadow.
The jeep slows. Cole’s eyes glaze, and he pulls off the road and on to a heavily overgrown trail. ‘We’re close to the lab,’ he says. ‘It’s just another few miles. Lee went to check it out on foot overnight, but he’s got stealth tech running, so I can’t hear him.’
We bounce over rocks and fallen branches until we pull up beside Leoben’s jeep, parked in a thicket of trees.
Cole climbs out, his eyes still glazed. He motions for me to stay, but I’m already halfway out of the jeep. I slide heavily to my feet, wincing as pain flickers in my still-wounded knee.