Unforgotten(73)

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-full 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.