The choice was simple: her or them. Save the people suffering from the false cure Janus had submitted to Continuity—or save herself. But it wasn’t that simple at all. If she chose herself, she would never be the same. But if she chose them, she might lose the last bit of herself, the last piece that held on to the person she was, had become.
In that moment, she finally understood Martin. All the hard choices he had made, the sacrifices, the sort of burden he had borne for all those years. And why he had tried so desperately to keep her far away from this world.
She felt herself take the backpack and pull the computer out. She brought up the Continuity program and typed quickly. She saw it—what Janus had done. He was very clever. He had been looking for the pure form of the Atlantis Gene the entire time. The section of the ship with their research database had been completely destroyed and their space vessel had been locked down, making the database there inaccessible. Finding the body of the alpha had been his only choice.
It was amazing: in the genome maps, she could see all the endogenous retroviruses now—those she and Janus had administered as well as the remnants of the changes she had helped Ares/Dorian with. It was as though she was working on a puzzle she couldn’t solve as a child but had returned to as an adult, with the knowledge and mental ability to finally complete it. Martin had been correct. The interventions in the Middle Ages had caused changes to the genome with radical repercussions. And those changes had compromised the rollback therapy Janus had tried to unleash with the Bell.
In her mind, for the first time, she could grasp all the changes, see them like little glowing lights in a pile of rubble. She could pick them out now, line them up and form different patterns with different outcomes. She worked the computer, running scenarios.
The Symphony database—the collection of billions of sequenced genomes that had been collected in Orchid Districts around the world—was the last piece. It was a shame that the world had to come to the brink of annihilation for such an incredible feat to occur.
The true challenge was that Kate had to stabilize all the genetic changes—both those she and Janus had made as well as Ares’ interventions. In essence, she was creating a therapy that would synchronize everyone: the dying, the devolving, and the rapidly evolving, creating a unified, stable genome. An Atlantean-human hybrid genome.
After almost half an hour of work, the screen flashed a message.
One Target Therapy Identified.
Kate examined it. Yes, it would work.
She should have felt euphoria, pride, or even relief. This was the moment she had worked for her entire life: both Atlantean and human. She had finally created a therapy that would complete her life’s work, a genetic therapy that would save the human race and fix all the past mistakes. Yet it felt as though she had simply completed a science experiment, arrived at a conclusion she had suspected, hypothesized, anticipated her entire life. Where joy should have been there was a cold, clinical interest in the outcome. Perhaps the Atlanteans didn’t feel joy in the same way. Maybe joy was so four million years ago for them.
That would be her next task: fixing herself, getting back to who she was before. She wondered what sort of chance that experiment had.
She grabbed the sat phone. “We need to get aboveground.”
She followed David out of the ship. On the hillside, she briefly looked down at Ceuta. Dead horses and people lay across the black, charred expanse that led to the massive wall. Beyond the wall, the ground was stained red from the carnage David had unleashed. The last remnants of the plague barge floated in the water outside the harbor, slowly drifting toward the shore.
The scene… Yes, she had made the right decision, even if it meant that she was giving up the last piece of herself. She was sure of it now.
Kate plugged the sat phone into the computer and sent the results to Continuity.
When the data had uploaded, she disconnected the phone and dialed Paul Brenner.
He answered quickly, but sounded distracted, unfocused. Kate had to repeat things several times. She realized what had happened: Paul had administered Janus’s false cure there—on his own cohort. Continuity was now ground zero for the radiation from Janus’s regression therapy, and it had infected Paul. But Kate couldn’t do anything to help him. She could only hope he found her results and could remember what to do.
She ended the call. Only time would tell now.
Dorian walked into the dark cavern. “Now what?”
“Now we fight.”
“We have no ship,” Dorian said.
“True. We can’t take the fight to them, but we can bring them to us. There’s a very good reason I buried this vessel here in Antarctica, Dorian.”