Chapter 13: The Geneticist
A dead man's theory was sitting open on Zach's Dell, loading one paragraph at a time over a connection that made dial-up look ambitious.
Chandra Suresh, Ph.D. — Activating Evolution: A Theoretical Framework for Spontaneous Genetic Mutation in Homo Sapiens. Published by Hyderabad University Press, 2001. Forty-seven citations in five years, thirty-nine of which were dismissive rebuttals from other geneticists, six of which were neutral, and two of which had been pulled from their journals under circumstances the internet hadn't bothered to explain. The academic community had treated Suresh the way it treated anyone who said something true before the world was ready to hear it: politely, thoroughly, and with enough condescension to ensure nobody else tried.
I'd read the book before. Not this version — the words on this screen were the same words I'd read in a different life, summarized on fan wikis and analyzed in forum threads by people who'd treated it as fictional worldbuilding rather than published science. But reading it now, with Evo-Sense humming in my chest like a second heartbeat every time I passed Claire Bennet in a hallway, the theoretical framework felt less like theory and more like a user manual for the thing I was becoming.
My phone rang. Claire's name on the flip screen.
"Did you read it?" No greeting. She'd been doing that more lately — skipping the social architecture and going straight to content.
"I'm reading it now. Chapt er four."
"Skip to seven. He maps the gene sequence against population distribution. There's a formula — a way to predict where abilities would manifest based on genetic markers. If you overlay his prediction map with actual population data, the correlation is—"
"Claire."
"—statistically significant at the ninety-five percent confidence level, which for a field study with that sample size—"
"Claire. Slow down."
A breath on the other end. Not annoyed — recalibrating. The sound of someone who'd been running at full speed and was being asked to downshift for a listener who couldn't keep up. Except I could keep up. I'd known Suresh's work before she'd ever opened a browser. The problem wasn't comprehension. The problem was managing the conversation toward the conclusion I needed and away from the one she was building toward.
"His son is at Columbia," she said. "Mohinder Suresh. He's continuing the research. His email is on the university website. I want to write to him."
"Don't."
The silence that followed was the kind that had weight. Three seconds of it, which in Claire Bennet conversational economics was the equivalent of a paragraph.
"Why not?" she asked.
"Chandra Suresh is dead. Murdered. In his own apartment in New York. The police report says it was a home invasion but the case is unsolved and his research files were taken. His son picks up the same work, starts making noise at the same university, and now a sixteen-year-old girl from Texas emails him saying she can heal from anything?" I let that sit. "Think about who else might be watching that inbox."
More silence. Longer this time.
"You think someone killed him because of the research."
"I think the research identifies people with abilities, and I think someone who wanted to find those people would have a very strong interest in who contacts the Suresh family."
"That's paranoid."
"Paranoid keeps you alive."
Claire didn't respond for a beat. I could hear her breathing — the careful, measured breathing she did when she was processing information that challenged her framework but didn't break it. She wanted to contact Mohinder the way she'd wanted to jump from forty feet — directly, decisively, without intermediaries.
"I'll save his contact info," she said finally. "I won't write to him yet."
"Thank you."
"But I'm going to keep reading. And I have questions you're going to answer."
"I'll answer what I can."
"That's not the same thing, Zach."
She hung up. The line went dead and I sat in the glow of Zach's monitor staring at Chandra Suresh's author photo — a middle-aged man with kind eyes and a research grant that had gotten him killed — and calculated the distance between what Claire wanted to know and what I could safely tell her. The gap was shrinking every day.
[Quarry — October 19, 2006, 4:30 PM]
The quarry was empty when I arrived. No Claire — this was a solo trip, unscheduled, driven by a question I needed to answer without an audience.
The pull had been there for weeks. A sensation in my chest, below the Evo-Sense frequencies, deeper and less defined — like hunger, except located in a part of the body that didn't correspond to any organ I could name. Three empty slots reaching toward something they couldn't find. I'd first become aware of it standing next to Claire during testing sessions, a subtle intensification of the Evo-Sense hum that didn't match the detection signature. Something else. Something underneath.
Absorption. Dormant, waiting, wanting.
I stood in the middle of the quarry floor — the same patch of gravel where Claire had landed from forty feet and walked away grinning — and tried to make it work.
Focus. I closed my eyes and reached for the pull, tried to grab it the way you'd grab a muscle to flex. Nothing. The pull was there but passive, a compass needle pointing at nothing because there was nothing nearby to point at. No EVO signatures within range. No living source for the system to lock onto.
I tried harder. Pushed against the sensation, bore down on it with the same concentration I used for Evo-Sense range tests. The pull didn't intensify — it resisted, the way a joint resists being bent past its natural limit. Pain bloomed behind my left eye, sharp and sudden, and a warmth trickled from my right nostril. I wiped my nose. Blood on the back of my hand, bright red against pale skin.
More pushing. The headache spread from behind my eye to the base of my skull, a deep ache that felt structural rather than muscular. My vision blurred at the edges. The pull remained exactly as it was — present, passive, unmoved by the effort I was throwing at it. Like trying to start a car with no key. The ignition was there. The engine was there. But the mechanism that connected intent to action required something I didn't have.
A source. A living Evolved Human within range, radiating the signature that the absorption system was designed to lock onto.
I sat down on the gravel and pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes until the headache receded to a dull throb. Blood had dripped onto my shirt — a small spot on the collar that would need washing. My mouth tasted like copper.
In the show, Peter Petrelli had absorbed powers by standing near people with abilities. Empathic mimicry — intuitive, automatic, effortless. He'd walked past people on the street and picked up their abilities like pocket change. I'd gotten a nosebleed and a headache from concentrating at a rock formation.
The difference between fiction and reality, even in a reality that used to be fiction, was that fiction didn't give you nosebleeds.
I wiped the blood off my hands on my jeans and pulled out the working notebook. New entry, separate page, coded in the shorthand nobody but me could read: Absorption test #1. Solo quarry. No EVO source present. Result: FAILURE. System responsive but non-functional without proximate source. Physical cost: nosebleed, headache, visual disturbance. Duration: ~15 min active effort. Recovery: ~30 min. Conclusion: Absorption is reactive, not proactive. Requires sustained proximity to active EVO signature. Source must be present.
Below that, in smaller writing: Claire is the obvious source. Constant access. Known signature. Cooperative if asked. Asking means revealing the power exists. Calculate risk before proceeding.
I closed the notebook and sat in the quarry until the headache faded. The October light was turning gold on the limestone walls. A hawk circled overhead, riding thermals, patient and purposeful. Somewhere in Odessa, Claire Bennet was reading Chandra Suresh's theory of evolved humans and building a picture of herself that was more accurate than she knew. And here I was, sitting on the quarry floor with blood drying on my shirt, trying to learn how to copy her power without her permission.
The ethical distance between that and what the Company did to Andy Delgado was smaller than I wanted to think about.
My phone buzzed. Claire: chapt er 7 is insane. suresh predicted healing factors SPECIFICALLY. he calls it "accelerated cellular regeneration." he literally described me.
I typed back: be careful what you search. we'll talk thursday.
Then I drove home and scrubbed the blood out of my shirt collar in the bathroom sink, watching the water run pink, and tried not to think about the fact that the girl I needed to get close to for thirty seconds was the same girl whose trust I'd already cracked once by disappearing to New York.
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