This Mortal Coil by Emily Suvada

Author:Emily Suvada
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon Pulse

CHAPTER 23

THE AIR STILLS. DAX’S WORDS echo through my mind.

I don’t think you have hypergenesis.

“That’s ridiculous.” I push myself up with my good arm until I’m sitting cross-legged on the blood-splattered concrete. The movement makes my vision blur. I rub my eyes, shaking my head. “I was born with hypergenesis.”

Dax just stares at me. “I don’t know what to tell you. These results are all coming up negative. Here, you can see for yourself.” He turns the genkit’s screen to me. A bright green banner glows at the top, and the words are there, as clear as day.

Hypergenesis not detected.

Every time I’ve plugged my panel in, the same banner has flashed red. I must have seen it a hundred times. This can’t be happening.

“But my back,” I say, my voice shaking. “Dax, you were there that night. I hacked my panel, and half my back bubbled off.”

“I know. Trust me, Princess, this is freaking me out as much as it is you.”

I doubt it. My stomach is clenched like a fist, my heart pounding. I punch a command into the genkit, running the scan again. The green flashing banner reappears. I try another scan, running deeper this time, testing the behavior of every component of my cells.

The result comes back. A jagged line, representing the way the sample Dax took from me responded to an array of test nanites. A hypergenesis-positive reading would look like wild, patternless static, and a negative reading would be almost flat. My line is like a ridge of mountains. Not flat, but not chaos, either. I stare at it, a chill creeping across my skin.

It tells me I don’t have hypergenesis, but it doesn’t say that I’m normal, either.

“Dax, look at this. I don’t know what it means. I’ve never seen a result like this before.”

He leans in, then turns to me. “Didn’t your mother have hypergenesis?”

“Yeah, that’s how she and my father met. He was running tests on her blood.”

Hypergenesis is rare, with only a handful of known cases in the world, but samples from people with the condition are in high demand. Their cells don’t behave like they’re supposed to, and when that happens in science, there’s always something interesting to be learned. When my father was starting out at Cartaxus, my mother was the only living hypergenesis donor in the country. She saw him so often and for so long that she joked that they should get married. When he ran out of code to test on her, he proposed.

She lived another five years, until a well-meaning doctor gave her a syringe of healing tech after a car crash. Most people with hypergenesis die young. The condition is a curse—something that nobody would ever wish upon their child. I haven’t thought about my mother since we left the cabin, but Dax is right to mention her. Hypergenesis is a non-Mendelian trait—it isn’t passed down by a parent’s chromosomes, but it is hereditary. Every child who’s ever been born to a mother with the condition has inherited it too.

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