“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?”