CHATINE WAS AWARE OF THE muffled voices around her, but for a full minute, all she could hear was the sound of her own heavy, uneven breaths. And the hazy echoes of her disbelief hanging in the air.
A switch that disables the Skins?
An Ascension banquet for fifty winners?
A weapon that will give the general command of the entire Third Estate?
She glanced down again at the inside of her left arm, at the long, rectangular scar where her Skin used to be. Where this weapon would have been if Brigitte hadn’t removed it. And now she understood why the Défecteurs didn’t trust any of the Ministère technology, especially not the Skins.
“I knew it! I knew it was real!” a screeching voice yanked Chatine out of her reverie and back into the treatment center. She turned to see who had spoken. It was the girl Marcellus had introduced earlier as Cerise.
“I don’t understand.” Marcellus was holding his head in his hands like he was afraid his brain might explode. “There’s a kill switch for the Skins hidden behind a DNA-locked vault?”
“Yes,” said Brigitte, and Chatine swung her gaze back to Etienne’s mother. “It’s called the Forteresse. It was the last project I worked on before I left the Ministère.”
“That was the special assignment you refuse to talk about?” Etienne sounded stunned and almost disgusted. “You built a lock that protects the Skins?”
Brigitte lowered her eyes. “I’m not proud of it. That’s why I left. And I vowed to spend the rest of my life removing as many of those evil devices as I could.”
“So, this Forteresse,” Cerise said, sounding somewhat hopeful. “If you built it, then you must know how to break into it. A backdoor? A loophole? If we can access it, we can shut down the Skins before the general can—”
Brigitte shook her head. “There is no backdoor. There is no loophole.”
Cerise frowned. “But every good hacker puts in a backdoor.”
“Not cyborgs,” Brigitte said solemnly. “It goes against their programming. By the time we realized what we’d done, it was too late. The Forteresse—and the kill switch for the Skins—was locked to anyone who wasn’t a Paresse descendant. Even us.”
“Us?” Cerise repeated. “You were working with someone?”
Brigitte nodded. “There were two of us on the project. We left together. Her name was—”
“Vanessa,” Alouette said quietly, and Chatine could swear she saw the girl shiver.
Brigitte’s eyebrows shot up. “How did you know?”
“She goes by Denise now.” Alouette kneaded her hands in her lap. “She … She was one of the women who raised me.”
“You were raised by the Sisterhood?” Brigitte asked.
“How do you know about the Sisterhood?” Marcellus shot back.
“I told you.” Brigitte flashed him a smile. “We have some of the same friends.”
“Yes. They raised me.” Alouette nodded, but in her eyes, Chatine saw a hint of grief.
“Vanessa—or Denise as you call her—was a dear friend,” Brigitte explained. “We were placed on the Forteresse assignment together because of our mutual expertise in the field of genetics. Patriarche Claude wanted to safeguard the Skins and his family’s sovereignty over the Third Estate. The Rebellion of 488 was still three years away, but unrest was already rumbling. The kill switch was originally located in a bunker inside the Grand Palais, but Claude didn’t think that was safe enough. He worried about the Palais being stormed and the bunker raided. He wanted to make sure that, even in the face of a rebellion, no one could shut down the Skins. Because he knew, as I’m sure you do, that the Skins are the only way to keep the Third Estate controlled.”
Chatine scoffed, feeling a familiar hatred for the First Estate roll through her. Arrogant pomps.
“So,” Brigitte went on, “Vanessa and I built the Forteresse to protect the kill switch. And Patriarche Claude had a special tower erected to house it.”
“The Paresse Tower?” Cerise asked in astonishment.
Brigitte nodded. “It was a clever decision on Claude’s part: to hide the kill switch in plain sight but protect it by the most advanced lock on the planet. Most people think the tower is just decorative. A symbol of the Regime. But there’s a small chamber at the top that only a few people know about.”
“Who?” Cerise insisted. “Who else knows about it?”
Brigitte let out an unsteady breath. Chatine could tell that recounting this story was making her anxious, dredging up old regrets. “The current Patriarche, of course. General Bonnefaçon, who was there when the project was initiated. Vanessa—or Denise. Me. And now the people in this room.”
“The general knows,” Cerise repeated numbly, casting a glance at Marcellus, but he appeared to be lost in thought.
“How does a lock like that even work?” Alouette asked.
Brigitte wrung her hands together. “Well, as a cyborg, Vanessa had been a frontrunner in the field of gene editing—the process of modifying targeted strands of the human genome. It would have been easy to build a lock that opens to anyone with Paresse DNA, but the Patriarche didn’t want that. Most members of the First Estate have at least some Paresse DNA, and he didn’t want a disgruntled cousin or uncle shutting off the Skins. He wanted this lock to only open for his direct descendants. He also wanted to make sure that someone couldn’t just snatch a strand of hair from his head and use it to unlock the Forteresse and gain access to the kill switch. So Vanessa figured out a way to edit the Patriarche’s genetic code and create a modified gene. We called it the Sovereign gene.”
Brigitte seemed to shudder at the name. “This modified gene can only be found in certain cells of the brain, and the modification is only triggered once a Paresse heir has come of age. If she’d lived, little Marie Paresse would have eventually had the ability to open the Forteresse.” Brigitte paused, as though taking a moment of silence to mourn the lost child. “Once the creation of the Sovereign gene was complete, the DNA of Claude’s young son, Lyon, was also edited. And I started work on the lock itself. I was able to develop a technology that can not only read the modified Sovereign gene in the brain and confirm its validity, but also eliminate any chance of sabotage. The lock on the Forteresse, for example, can’t be accessed if more than one person is present, eliminating the chance of the Patriarche being coerced into opening it. The person accessing the lock must also be alive and not under duress.” She sighed and looked to Cerise with apologetic eyes. “In other words, we did our job too well.”
“So it’s hopeless, then.” Cerise collapsed back down onto the cot, a darkness seeming to descend over her. “The kill switch exists, but we can’t get to it. And now we just have to sit idly by and watch the general take control of the planet.”
“We don’t need the kill switch,” Marcellus said quietly. He was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest. It was the first time he’d spoken in several minutes.
Cerise peered at him. “What do you mean?”
Marcellus stood up straighter, as though waking from a dream. “Think about it,” he said, his gaze fierce and determined. “For the very first time in …well, forever, we’re not three moves behind him.”
“What?” Chatine asked.
“Don’t you see?” Marcellus’s face was flushed with adrenaline. “We know exactly what the general is going to do next. We know he plans to use the Ascension banquet to bring two hundred Third Estaters into Ledôme to kill the Patriarche. And now that we know his strategy, we can stop him. We can defeat him.”
Chatine and Cerise exchanged a wary look. But Alouette somehow seemed to be following what Marcellus was saying. She was gazing up at him, her own eyes alight with something that looked like pride.
“How?” Chatine asked, still trying to keep up.
“My grandfather always says that the only way to win is to analyze your opponent and plan your attack accordingly.”
“But couldn’t we just, I don’t know, warn the Patriarche?” Chatine asked. “If he knew what the general was planning, he’d probably cancel the banquet and have the general arrested.”
“It won’t work,” said Marcellus. “We’d never be able to get close enough to the Patriarche in time to warn him, and the general has installed guardian controls on the Patriarche’s TéléCom, making it impossible to send him an AirLink without the general knowing about it. Which means we have to stop him another way.”
Marcellus turned to Chatine, his eyes as grave and unwavering as his voice. And in that moment, she suddenly understood. This tall, determined man standing before her was not the same Marcellus Bonnefaçon she’d met less than a month ago in the Vallonay Med Center morgue. That shiny-haired, goofy-smiled, inept young officer was gone. And in his place, Chatine saw what she knew his grandfather had always hoped to see.
His protégé.
A little sliver of General Bonnefaçon.
Chatine felt a shiver ripple through her. “So,” she began warily, “does that mean you have a plan?”