One of the digital items catches my eye. It’s an orange-and-white gradient square with a single row of black numbers running across it. On the top it reads
Magnum Ball Lotto
with a date from last week. Unable to make sense of it, I return it to the pile and scroll through a collection of photos.
After the novelty of the countertop screen wears off, I slide onto one of the stools and start to eat the breakfast Cody left out for me. Once again, it’s delicious. Some kind of fluffy egg dish mixed with various vegetables and cheeses. The covered metal dish it’s served on has somehow kept the meal warm. I’ve nearly devoured all of it when a small blue bubble appears on the screen below the plate.
It’s a message from Cody.
Are you awake?
I click on the button labeled “Reply” and a keyboard appears. I drag it to the right, away from my plate, and type out a response.
Yes.
After pressing Send, I watch the word disappear and rematerialize as a green bubble under Cody’s question. A few seconds pass before Cody’s next message pops up in blue.
Can you come to the lab? There’s something I think you should see.
Panic floods through me.
He’s found something.
Something about Zen.
I haven’t even finished chewing by the time I’ve transessed into Cody’s lab, steadying myself against the wall as the small wave of dizziness fades.
Cody jumps upon seeing me. “Wow. I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to that.”
“What is it?” I ask, my voice frantic. “What did you find?”
“Were you able to eat the breakfast I left for you?”
He’s stalling. Putting off bad news. “Cody.” My tone is dripping with desperation. Begging him.
Please don’t make me wait for this.
He seems to understand. “Okay,” he agrees, and takes a deep breath. I swear I can feel every particle of carbon dioxide that he exhales hitting my face like a million tiny drops of acid. “Well, I finished running all the tests.”
Cloudiness starts to curtain my vision. “And…”
It’s the only word I can manage to get out. One syllable. Three little letters. A universe of mass riding on it. I swallow, wetting my parched throat, but it does no good. The moisture evaporates instantaneously.
Cody scratches his chin and beckons me over to his desk. He points to the large ultrathin monitor that sits atop it.
He inputs a numeric password to unlock the screen. His fingers fly rapidly over the keyboard, but my eyes catch the series of seemingly random digits as he enters them.
7123221157778
The screen flashes and then reveals a collection of data that I don’t understand. Lines and lines of letters and values that make no sense to me. Cody points to one column and says, “This is the code of a normal human genome.” Then he points to the column next to it. “This is a breakdown of Zen’s DNA.”
The discrepancy jumps out at me immediately. I point to a line in the data. “That one is different.”
Cody nods. “Yes.” He taps the screen, enlarging that section until only a small subset of letters is visible. “This is the reason Zen is sick.”
My mouth falls open and I gaze up at him. “Because of his DNA?”
“Because of this one gene in his DNA. I’ve never seen a gene like this in my research. It’s very complex. Definitely man-made. And Zen’s body is attacking it.”
I blink. “What?”
“It would seem the gene is too powerful and his immune system is treating it like a virus. It’s trying to get rid of it. Essentially his body is destroying itself.”
“But what
is
it?” I ask, panicked. “Why would Zen have a gene that no one else has? He’s just a normal…”
My voice trails off. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before. Rio warned me. He warned me when he gave it to me. He told me this could happen. And I ignored it. I blocked it from my memory. Until now.
“If something goes wrong and you have no way to disable it, the gene could destroy you. Slowly eat you alive from the inside out. You wouldn’t even know until it was too late.”
It’s why he gave me the locket in the first place. So that I would have the ability to turn the gene on and off. But Zen didn’t have anything. I knew I would never get him to trust Rio enough to allow him to install something similar in his genetic code. Which means his gene has been active this whole time, slowly destroying him.
“It’s his transession gene,” I reply numbly, almost forgetting that Cody is in the room with me. “It’s killing him.”
“That was my conclusion, too,” Cody admits softly, and I realize that he must have seen those memories: the one where I learned about the transession gene and the one where Rio told me about my locket.
But wait,
I think.
What about Kaelen?
He doesn’t have anything that activates or deactivates his gene. At least, not as far as I could tell. Why isn’t the gene making him sick? Was Zen’s gene somehow faulty? Did something go wrong when it was implanted?
Regardless of what the problem is, there’s obviously only one way to fix it.
I grab Cody’s hands, squeezing them urgently. “You have to deactivate the gene. Just take it out. I don’t care if he’s trapped here forever, at least he’ll be alive.”
But Cody shakes his head regretfully. “I can’t. Like I said, it’s complex. Tightly interwoven with the rest of his DNA. There isn’t a scientist alive today who would be able to remove it. We’ve learned a lot more about genetics in the past few decades, but this is something else. Something I’ve never seen before. A human being’s genetic code is like a complicated tapestry. You pull one string the wrong way and the whole thing falls apart.”
“Are you saying there’s nothing you can do?” My voice is rising now, chock-f of growing despair. “That we’re supposed to stand by and watch him die?!”
Cody grimaces and reaches out to touch my hand.
“No!” I screech, brusquely pulling my hand away. “I won’t do that. There has to be a way to stop it from killing him!”
And then suddenly I feel a thin layer of ice coating my skin as I retrace Cody’s words. As they chime restlessly inside my brain like bells gonging.
“There isn’t a scientist alive today who would be able to remove it.”
I don’t think he realizes how right he is.
“I know who can disable the gene,” I say, my voice sounding like it’s coming from far away. Somewhere deep in the future. Eighty-three years to be exact.
Cody’s eyebrows shoot up. “Who?”
I draw in a long breath, feeling it energize me. Renew my hope. There’s only one person in the world who knows enough about the transession gene to save Zen’s life.
“The woman who created it.”
42
DEDUCTION
I pace the length of Cody’s lab, memories and numbers and data streaming through my mind like rain. This discovery has suddenly turned everything on its head.
The gene is what’s been making Zen sick. Not some mysterious disease.
And if Kaelen was telling the truth, and he knew all along that it was the gene, then he must also know how to turn the gene off, essentially leaving me with two options at this point. And the second one—the one that requires me to give Diotech what they want—is completely out of the question.
Which means I have to go with option one. It means there’s only one person who can help me now.
“Her name is Dr. Rylan—”
“Maxxer,” Cody finishes, his voice rigid and remote.
Once again, for some reason, her name sends an unexpected flare of anger blazing through me and I’m forced to stop pacing and grab on to something to steady myself.
What was that
?
It was like a hot rage. As though I’d stepped across some kind of invisible battle line into enemy territory and could feel the resentment lingering in the air like smoke.
But just as soon as it came, the sensation is gone.
I study Cody’s indignant expression. “So you know.”
“That I met her and she erased the entire day from my mind and replaced it with a bogus memory of something that never happened? Yes.” His eyes are locked on a fixed point across the room. His jawline is taut.
I can tell that he’s angry. And suddenly I
know
that this was the memory that finally pushed him over the edge. The reason he ripped off the receptors and stalked out of the room.
“She did it to protect you.”
“She had no right to make that choice for me!” he growls back. “No right to mess with my head like that.”
“I know how you feel,” I relate. “There was a point when I had more fake memories in my head than real ones.”
Cody grunts and crosses his arms over his chest. “And that thing she used to knock me out. What’s it called again?”
I pull the black device from my pocket and plunk it down on the countertop. “A Modifier.”
Cody hisses out a breath as he stares at the contraption sitting in his lab. He bends down and examines it without daring to touch it.
“I don’t know exactly how it works,” I offer. “I just know that it does something to your brain waves and basically puts you to sleep.”
Cody shakes his head. “That’s messed up.”
“Yes,” I agree. “But right now, Dr. Maxx—” I stop myself from saying her name, feeling the strange fury start to bubble up again. “That woman is the only one who can help me. Who can help Zen. I have to find her.”
“Well, do you have any idea where she could be?”
I throw my hands in the air. “No! That’s the problem. I don’t have the first clue. She could be anywhere. You saw how much trouble she went through to keep her whereabouts a secret.” I gesture toward the Modifier still lying on the counter. “That’s the reason she deactivated us both in the first place. So we couldn’t see where she was hiding.”
Cody suddenly goes very still. It almost looks like his body is starting to withdraw into itself.
I narrow my eyes at him. “Cody?”
He doesn’t respond. Just keeps staring at an unidentified point across the room. I take a careful step toward him, almost afraid that if I move too fast, I might startle him.
But in reality,
he’s
the one who ends up startling me.
He suddenly soars into action, darting to the wall behind me, which I now see is a giant, virtual whiteboard. He clears away all the existing scribbles of notes and symbols with a sweep of his hand and plucks a pen-like device from a nearby magnet.
“Cody,” I begin warily. “What are you doing?”
But again, he doesn’t respond. He just starts scrawling.
At the top of the space, he writes
Invents Transession
and draws a circle around it.
Then clockwise down to the right, he writes
Cody’s memories erased.
Circles it.
He continues in an arc with the phrases
Hidden Location
,
Implanted Memory Map
, and
Capable of Disabling Malfunctioning Gene
, until he’s formed a complete circle.
“Don’t you see?” he says, tapping the empty center. “This Maxxer woman is the one common factor in all of this.”
He scribbles
Maxxer
in the middle of the circle and underlines it twice.
I squint at the diagram, trying to figure out what Cody is getting at.
“You said it yourself,” Cody presses on. “She went through so much trouble to keep her whereabouts a secret. Do you know anyone else who has reason to do that?”
“I don’t think so.”
“She’s on the run, like you are. She told you so. She’s hiding from the same people you’ve been hiding from.”
“Diotech,” I say instantly.
“Yes,” Cody confirms. “And if she was willing to expend that much effort to conceal her location from them before, it only makes sense that she would do it again.”
He points the tip of the pen at his own name. “Just think about it. If she was capable of
removing
memories from my mind, wouldn’t she also be capable of putting memories
into
yours?”
Every inch of me goes numb. Except my brain. My thoughts are spinning frantically. I stare at Cody’s diagram in total disbelief. Why didn’t I see it before? It makes so much sense now.
The Modifier.
She used it on him. But she also used it on
me
. When we got into her car, she turned it on both of us. She said it was to protect her. So that the memory of her location couldn’t be stolen later.
I woke up on the cold concrete floor of her storage unit. I have no idea how long I was out.
She had complete and full access to my brain the entire time.
I gasp and bring my hand to my mouth.
“You’re right,” I squeak. “Maxxer is the only other person I know who has reason to hide from Diotech. But she couldn’t simply
tell
me where she was. Or implant a memory of her location. That would be too easy for Diotech to steal. She had to leave clues. Clues that could only be triggered by
me
.”
The pieces are swirling around me as I eagerly pluck each one and put it in the right place.
“Find me
.”
That voice was inserted at the beginning of every memory. Like a label. Like a heading. Tying them all together. Telling me what to do.
“She’s leading me
to
her.”
The excitement of our breakthrough is so overwhelming, I have to sit down. I slide into one of the chairs.
This whole time Maxxer has been waiting for me to come to her.
It’s almost as though she
knew
I wouldn’t stay in 1609. That something would go wrong and I would eventually need to find her.
If she really implanted these memories when I was unconscious in her storage unit, that means she was already planning for us to meet again. She was already three steps ahead of me.
“But wait,” I wonder aloud. “Why would
Diotech
be so interested in finding Maxxer, anyway? Why would they send someone here simply to track her through me?”
Was it because she ran away? That doesn’t feel right. Why risk losing me—the trillion-dollar investment—only to bring back a rogue scientist?