Lachlan shrugs, then winces at the movement. To my horror, part of me still aches to see him in pain.
‘Another hacker had already weakened our systems,’ he says, ‘and the genkit’s self-destruct sequence ran faster than I planned.’
I blink, confused. Could he really not know the hacker was me? I consider telling him for a moment but change tack instead.
‘You faked my hypergenesis.’
‘Ah, yes. That was unfortunate. I had to stop you digging too deeply into your panel. You would have found too much too soon.’
‘What about my mother? Was she … was she even real?’
A flicker passes across his face. A shadow of something deep and true. ‘She was very real, Catarina. I loved her very much, just as I love you. But she isn’t your mother, as I’m sure you’ve come to realize.’
I just stare at him. I don’t need to answer. The anger in my eyes should be all the evidence he needs.
‘I assume you’d like to know how I changed your DNA.’
I nod, gritting my teeth. The skin around the wound on my leg is starting to blister – but not like it’s falling apart. Like it’s melting back together.
‘How much do you remember about the Zarathustra programme?’ he asks.
I gasp, arching my back as my leg shakes, my nerves aflame. Strings of wet, torn flesh are coalescing, stretching across the wound, slowly pulling the two edges back together.
‘N-not much,’ I stutter, my vision blurring. ‘Except that you used knockout kids, and you were making a vaccine.’
‘Close, but not quite. You weren’t knockout kids. The genetic recoding that happened in the Zarathustra project was performed by nature herself. She transferred her gifts to you.’
My head snaps up. He’s talking about gene transfer. When two species interact, sometimes they share their DNA. Humans carry genes from plants, bacteria, and even viruses that have made their way into our genome over the course of our evolution.
My breath stills. ‘You used the virus.’
Lachlan smiles. ‘Indeed. You and the others were grown in tanks in this lab and infected with Hydra when you were just a clump of cells. Most of the samples died instantly, but a handful of you survived. Your cells replicated so quickly that the virus couldn’t keep up. Its triggers were destroyed as your cells split and replicated, and parts of Hydra’s DNA intermingled with your own. It changed your cellular structure. It built and shaped your bodies. It’s true, you’re not my daughter. You’re the daughter of the plague.’
The air stills. The sounds of my breathing and my beating heart shift up into some harsher frequency. The fog-covered mountains beyond the window shudder in my vision. It seems to shake the very foundations of the building, rattling my breath. But the ground is not shaking; I am.
My identity is splintering like a ship thrust against stone cliffs. I feel the mast of myself snapping, my sails ripped to shreds. I knew I wasn’t normal. I knew my cells were changed and twisted – there is no other way I could have survived the vaccine’s decryption. I knew Lachlan changed me, broke me, forged me into something else, but I didn’t know just how unnatural I was.
I’m not just abnormal. This is more than a genetic tweak. I was created, built and rearranged by the virus.
I’m not even quite human.
‘But I’ve seen my DNA,’ I whisper. ‘It’s like yours. There’s nothing from Hydra in it.’
‘Oh, there is, you just can’t see it. Genkits run their scans on humanity’s forty-six chromosomes, with cursory checks for duplicates. They discard anything that looks like a contaminant, which means that your additional two chromosomes don’t show up on the average scan.’
‘I have forty-eight chromosomes?’ My stomach lurches. I press my lips together, fighting the urge to be sick.
‘Don’t get too excited about it. Cole has fifty-four, and Ziana had sixty, but she was barely human at the best of times. Your additional chromosomes can’t be changed, but the forty-six I’ve worked on are incredibly flexible. You’re a chameleon, darling. The rest of us can mask small parts of ourselves, but you can literally become anything you want, recoding yourself from your very foundations.’
Every word from Lachlan’s lips is another wave in the storm in my mind. I press my hands to the cold, tiled floor as though the contact will anchor me somehow.
‘That’s my gift, isn’t it? That’s what you were studying when you cut me open.’
He nods – a short, jerking movement. ‘That research helped me develop the procedure you used to unlock the vaccine. It would have killed anyone else before it was done. That was why I needed your help, Catarina. I never wanted you to get hurt. I never wanted anyone to get hurt – that’s why I set this plan in motion. The vaccine is our last chance, and humanity’s survival depends on it. Everything I’ve done has been to ensure its release.’
‘But you don’t care about the vaccine! I talked to Cartaxus. They were going to pretend to withhold the code and let the Skies give it to everyone on the surface. That would have worked, and you know it. But all you cared about was putting whatever abomination you wrote into it. You know I was there at Sunnyvale. I saw the orange panels and what it did to those people. You murdered them. That had nothing to do with humanity’s survival.’
‘Oh, but it did,’ Lachlan says, his voice rising. ‘You’re so focused on the virus, but Hydra isn’t our greatest threat. Why can’t you see that, darling? I’ve gone through so much to make you understand. Ever since the beginning, I’ve done this all for you. Sunnyvale was for you, Catarina.’
His eyes are locked on mine, and my hands are pressed to the floor, but I am crashing against rocks, tossed high on furious waves. I close my eyes, seeing drones in the sky. Blood and broken bones. Orange panels glowing from the arms of snarling beasts.
He did it all for me. The monster who is not my father. I’m the one who let him, who paved the way.
It was all my fault.
‘But I don’t understand,’ I say. ‘Sunnyvale was a nightmare. Dax almost killed me.’
He just smiles. ‘There wasn’t a person in that town capable of killing you, darling. You might not remember your training, but I assure you it’s still there.’
‘Why?’ I cry, my voice breaking. ‘Why did you make everyone go crazy?’
‘You can’t make people go crazy with gentech,’ Lachlan says. ‘You know this, Catarina. Tell me how I could have controlled those people with a piece of code. Tell me how I could have made them kill each other. The human brain is too complex to be controlled like that. All you can do is encourage or suppress parts of us that are already there. That’s what Sunnyvale was for, darling. I needed you to see it for yourself.’