Darwin's Children

1

WASHINGTON, D.C.

The clouds over the capital were swollen and green with rain. The air felt close and sticky. Kaye took a government car from Dulles. She wore a trim gray suit with a pale yellow blouse, ruffled collar and sleeves, sensible walking shoes, dress pumps in her bag. She had carefully made up her face late in the morning and touched up in a restroom at Dulles. She knew how she looked: pale, thin, face a deeper shade of powdery beige than her wrists. Middle-aged and frail. Too much time spent in laboratories, not enough looking at the sun or seeing the sky.

She could have been any one of ten thousand professional workers leaving the long blocky tan-and-gray buildings around Washington, waiting for traffic to clear, stopping off for a drink or a coffee, meeting coworkers for dinner. She preferred the anonymity.

Last night, Kaye had carefully studied the briefing folio from Senator Gianelli’s office. What she had read in that folio she could clearly see on the drive from Dulles. The capital was losing the last of its self-respect. On some streets, garbage pickups had been delayed for weeks without explanation. National guard and regular army troops walked around the streets in trios, firearms slung and clips loaded. Military and security vehicles—Humvees, bomb-squad trucks, armored personnel carriers—sat on key streets, humped up on sidewalks or blocking intersections. Concrete barriers that shifted every day and multiple checkpoints with armored ID kiosks made travel to government buildings tortuous.

The capital even smelled sick. Washington had become a city of long, sad lines, drawn faces, rumpled clothing. Everyone feared people in long coats, delivery trucks, boxes left on streets, and posters taped to walls demanding obscure justice and hiding thin, nasty bombs beneath to blow up those who would try to take them down.

Only the clowns and the monsters looked healthy and happy. Only clowns and monsters found their careers advancing in Washington, D.C., in the fifteenth year of SHEVA.

The driver told her the hearing had been delayed and they had some time to kill. Kaye asked him to stop in front of a Stefano’s bookstore on K Street. She thought about eating but she could not rouse an appetite. She just wanted to be alone for a few minutes to think.

Kaye pulled up the strap on her shoulder bag and entered the retail-grade checkpoint outside the bookstore. A large, heavy guard in an ill-fitting uniform with all the buttons straining looked her over with a blank expression and motioned for her to apply thumb to scanner, then waved her through the metal detector. Sniffers whuffed, checking for traces of explosives or suspicious volatiles.

Perfume had become a no-no in the city.

“Clear,” the guard said, his voice like soft thunder. “Y’all have a good evening.”

Outside, the rain began to fall. Kaye looked back through a display window and saw trash floating down the gutters, paper bags and cups bobbing along. The gutters were clogging and water would soon back up.

She knew she needed some food. She should not attend the hearing on an empty stomach, and she had not eaten since ten that morning. It was five now. Soup and sandwiches were available at a small café inside the store. But Kaye walked past the menu board without stopping, on some sort of autopilot. Her walking shoes made damp sucking sounds on the linoleum as she passed several deep aisles of bookshelves. Fluorescent lights flickered and buzzed overhead. A young man with long felted hair sat on a patched chair, half-empty knapsack crumpled in his lap, asleep. A paperback Bible lay open facedown on the arm of the chair.

God sleeping.

Without thinking, Kaye turned right and found herself in the religion section. Most of the shelves were filled with brightly colored apocalypse novels. E-paper holograms leaped from lurid covers as she passed: end time, rapture, revelation, demons and dark angels. Most of the books had speaker chips that could read out the entire story. The same chips replaced jacket copy with vocal come-ons. The shelves murmured softly in a wave, like ghosts triggered by Kaye’s brief passage.

Serious theology texts had been crowded out. She found a single shelf concealed high in the back, near the brick wall. It was cold in that corner and the books were worn and dusty.

Eyes wide, ill at ease, Kaye touched the spines and read one title, then another. None seemed right. Most were contemporary Christian commentaries, not what she was looking for. Some lashed out angrily at Darwinism and modern science.

She turned slowly and looked down the aisle, listening to the books, their competing voices sibilant like falling leaves. Then she frowned and returned to the lone shelf. She was determined to find something useful. She tugged out a book called Talking With the Only God. Skimming through five pages, she found big print, wide margins, self-righteous but simple instructions on how to live a Christian life in troubled times. Not good. Not what I need.

She replaced the book with a grimace and turned to leave. An older man and woman blocked the aisle, smiling at her. Kaye held her breath, eyes shifting. She was sure her driver had come into the store but could not remember seeing him.

“Are you seeking?” the man asked. He was tall and skeletally thin with a short cap of braided white hair. He wore a black suit. The way his coat sleeves rode up his wrists reminded Kaye of Mitch, but the man himself did not. He looked determined and a little fake, like a mannequin or a bad actor. The woman was equally tall, thin through the waist but with fleshy arms. She wore a long dress that clung to her thighs.

“I beg your pardon?” Kaye asked.

“There are better places to seek, and better texts to find,” the man said.

“Thanks, I’m fine,” Kaye said. She looked away and reached for another book, hoping they would leave her alone.

“What are you seeking?” the woman asked.

“I was just browsing. Nothing specific,” Kaye said, avoiding their eyes.

“You won’t find answers here,” the man said.

The driver was not in sight. Kaye was on her own, and this probably wasn’t serious anyway. She tried to appear friendly and unconcerned.

“There’s only one valid translation of the Lord’s words,” the man said. “We find them in the King James Bible. God watched over King James like a holy flame.”

“I’ve heard that,” Kaye said.

“Which church do you attend?”

“No church,” she said. She had come to the end of the aisle and the pair had not moved. “Excuse me. I have an appointment.” Kaye clutched her purse to her side.

“Have you made peace with God?” the woman asked.

The man lifted his hand as if in benediction. “We lose our families, the families of God. In our sin, in homosexuality and promiscuity and following the ways of the Arab and the Jew, the pagan gods of the Web and TV, we stray from the path of God and God’s punishment is swift.” He swept his hand with a scowl at the whispering books on the shelves. “It is useless to seek His truth in the voices of the devil’s machines.”

Kaye’s eyes crinkled. She suddenly felt angry and perversely in control, even predatory, as if she were the hawk and they were the pigeons. The woman noticed the change. The man did not. “Terence,” the woman said and touched the man’s elbow. He looked down from the ceiling, meeting Kaye’s steady glare and reeling in his spiel with a surprised galumph and a bobble of his Adam’s apple.

“I’m alone,” Kaye said. She offered this like bait, hoping they would bite and she would have them. “My husband just got out of prison. My daughter is in a school.”

“I’m so sorry. Are you all right?” the woman asked Kaye with an equal mix of suspicion and solicitude.

“What kind of daughter?” the man asked. “A daughter of sin and disease?” The woman tugged hard on his sleeve. His Adam’s apple bobbled again, and their eyes darted over her clothes as if looking for suspicious bulges.

Kaye squared her shoulders and shoved out her hand to get through.

“I know you,” the man continued, despite his wife’s tugging. “I recognize you now. You’re the scientist. You discovered the sick children.”

Confined by the aisle, Kaye’s throat closed in. She coughed. “I have to go.”

The man made one last attempt, brave enough, to get through to her. “Even a scientist in self-centered love with her own mind, suffocating in the fame of television exposure, can learn to know God.”

“You’ve spoken to Him?” Kaye demanded. “You’ve talked to God?” She grabbed his arm and dug into the fabric and the flesh beneath with her fingernails.

“I pray all the time,” the man said, drawing back. “God is my Father in Heaven. He is always listening.”

Kaye tightened her grip. “Has God ever answered you?” she asked.

“His answers are many.”

“Do you ever feel God in your head?”

“Please,” the man said, wincing.

“Let him go,” the woman insisted, trying to push her arm between them.

“God doesn’t talk to you? How weird.” Kaye advanced, pushing both back. “Why wouldn’t God talk to you?”

“We fear God, we pray, and He answers in many ways.”

“God doesn’t stick around when things get ugly. What kind of God is that? He’s like a recorded message, some sort of God service that puts you on hold when you’re screaming. Explain it to me. God says he loves me but dumps me into a world of pain. You, so full of hate, so ignorant, he leaves alone. Self-righteous bigots he doesn’t even touch. Explain that to me!”

She let go of the man’s arm.

The couple turned with stricken looks and fled.

Kaye stood with the murmuring books lapsing into silence behind her. Her chest heaved and her cheeks were flushed and moist.

“All right,” she said to the empty aisle.

After a decent interval, to avoid meeting the couple outside, she left the store. She ignored the guard’s irritated glower.

She stood under the eaves breathing in the heat and the humidity and listening to real thunder, far off over Virginia. The government car came around the corner and stopped at the black-striped yellow curb in front of the store. “Sorry,” the driver said. Kaye looked through the limo’s window and saw for the first time how young the driver was, and how worried. “Store security ignored my license. No place to park. Goddamned guard fingered his holster at me. Jesus Christ, Mrs. Rafelson, I’m sorry. Is everything okay?”

2

Hart Senate Office Building

Plenary Session of the Senate Emergency Action Oversight Committee,

Closed Hearing

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Mark Augustine waited patiently in the antechambers until called to take his seat. It was duly noted that he was the former director of Emergency Action. The nine senators assembled for this unusual evening session—five Republicans and four Democrats—exchanged edgy pleasantries for a few minutes. Two of the Democrats observed, for the record, that the current director was late. As well, Senator Gianelli was not present.

The chair, Senator Julia Thomasen of Maryland, expressed her aggravation and wondered who had called the meeting. No one was clear on that.

The meeting began without the director and Gianelli, and lacking any obvious point or focus, soon devolved into a testy debate about the events that had led to Mark Augustine’s dismissal three years earlier.

Augustine sat back in his chair, folded his hands in his lap, and let the senators argue. He had come to the Hill to testify fifty-three times in his career. Power did not impress him. Lack of power impressed him. Everyone in this room, as far as he was concerned, was almost completely powerless.

And—if the rumors were true—what they did not know was about to bite them right on the ass.

The minority Democrats held sway for a few minutes, deftly entering their comments into the record. Senator Charles Chase of Arizona began the questioning of Augustine as a matter of senatorial courtesy. His questions soon led to the role of the state of Ohio in the death of SHEVA children.

“Madam Chair,” bellowed Senator Percy from Ohio, “I resent the implication that the state of Ohio was in any way responsible for this debacle.”

“Senator Percy, Senator Chase has the floor,” Senator Thomasen reminded him.

“I resent the entire subject area,” Percy bellowed.

“Noted. Please continue, Senator Chase.”

“Madam Chair, I am only following the line of questioning begun last week by Senator Gianelli, who is not, I hope, indisposed today, not with a virus, at least.”

No laughter in the Senate chamber. Chase continued without missing a beat. “I mean no disrespect to the honorable senator from Ohio.”

Senator Percy flipped his hand out over the chamber as if he would have gladly tossed them all through a window. “Personal corruption should not reflect ill on such a fine state.”

“Nor am I impugning the reputation of Ohio, which is where I was born, Madam Chair. May I continue my questions?”

“What in hell made you move, Charlie?” Percy asked. “We could use your eagle eye.” He grinned to the nearly empty room. Only a grandstanding senator—or an aging vaudevillian—could imagine an audience where there was none, Augustine mused. He unfolded his hands to tap his finger lightly on the table.

“Chair asks for a minimum of unchecked camaraderie.”

“I’m done, Madam Chair,” Percy announced, sitting back and wrapping his hands behind his neck.

Augustine sipped slowly from a glass of water.

“Perhaps our questions should be more pointed, dealing more with responsibility and less with geography,” Thomasen suggested.

“Hear, hear,” Percy said.

“When you were in charge of the school system for Emergency Action, did you supply all schools—even state-controlled schools—with the federally mandated allotments for medical supplies?” Chase continued.

“We did, Senator,” Augustine said.

“These supplies included the very antivirals that might have saved these unfortunate children?”

“They did.”

“In how many states was there sufficient supply of these antivirals to treat sick children?”

“Five; six, if we include the territory of Puerto Rico.”

“My state, doctor, was one of those five?”

“It was, Senator,” Augustine said.

The senator paused to let that sink in. “The supply of antivirals was sufficient to take care of the children in our custody—our care. Arizona did not lose nearly as many children as most. And that supply was insured because Arizona did not seek to control and divert the federal allotments and allocations for Emergency Action schools, a hijacking sponsored by the Republican majority, if I remember correctly?”

“Yes, Senator.” Augustine tapped his finger again on the table. Now was not the time to bring up Arizona’s current record. There were rumors that the children of dissidents were being warehoused in schools there. He no longer had access to the lists, of course.

“Is it fair to say that you lost your job because of this fiasco?” Chase asked.

“It was part of the larger picture,” Augustine said.

“A large part, I presume.”

Augustine gave the merest nod.

“Do you continue to consult for the Emergency Action Authority?”

“I serve as adviser on viral affairs to the director of the National Institutes of Health. I still have an office in Bethesda.”

Chase searched his papers for more material, then added, “Your star is not completely out of the firmament in this matter?”

“I suppose not, Senator.”

“And what is the authority’s budget this year?” Chase looked up innocently.

“You of all people should know that, Charlie,” Senator Percy grumbled.

“Emergency Action’s budget is not subject to yearly congressional review, nor is it available for direct public scrutiny,” Augustine said. “I don’t have exact figures myself, but I would estimate the present budget at over eighty billion dollars—double what it was when I served as director. That includes research and development in the private and public sector.”

Thomasen looked around the room with a frown. “The director is tardy.”

“She is not here to defend herself,” Percy observed with amusement. Thomasen nodded for Chase to continue, and then conferred with an intern.

Chase closed in on his favorite topic. “Emergency Action has become one of the biggest government programs in this nation, successfully fighting off all attempts to limit its scope and investigate its constitutionality in a time of drastic fiscal cutbacks, has it not?”

“All true,” Augustine said.

“And with this budget, approved by both Republican and Democratic administrations year after year, EMAC has spent tens of millions of dollars on lawyers to defend its questionable legality, has it not?”

“The very best, Senator.”

“And does it pay any attention to the wishes of Congress, or of this oversight committee? Even to the extent that the director arrives on time when summoned?”

Senator Percy from Ohio exhaled over his microphone, creating the sensation of a great wind in the chamber. “Where are we going, Madam Chair? Haven’t we enough black eyes to go around?”

“We lost seventy-five thousand children, Senator Percy!” Chase roared.

Percy riposted immediately. “They were killed by a disease, Senator Chase, not by my constituents, nor indeed by any of the normal citizens—the true citizens—of my great state, or this fine country.” Percy avoided the hawklike gaze of the senator from Arizona.

“Dr. Augustine, is it not the scientific conclusion that this new variety of virus—hand, foot, and mouth disease—arose within the so-called normal adult population, in part through recombination of ancient viral genes not found within SHEVA children?” Chase asked.

“It is,” Augustine said.

“Many prominent scientists disagree,” Percy said, and lifted his hand as if to fend off the sudden rap of the gavel.

“And did you predict that just the reverse would happen, fourteen years ago, a statement that practically led to the creation of Emergency Action?”

“The reverse being…” Augustine said, lifting his brows.

“That the children would create new viruses that would kill us, Doctor.”

Augustine nodded. “I did.”

“And is that not still a scientific possibility, Dr. Augustine?” Percy demanded.

“It hasn’t happened, Senator,” Augustine said mildly.

Percy moved in. “Come on, Dr. Augustine. It’s your theory. Is it not likely that this deadly viral outbreak will happen soon, given the possibility that these children might perceive that they are under threat, and that many of these old viruses respond to the chemicals, steroids, or whatever, that we make when we are unhappy or stressed?”

Augustine subdued a twitch of his lips. The senator was showing some education. “I suggest that perhaps the children have already turned the other cheek, and it is time now for us to show some charity. We could relieve some of their stress. And we should recognize them for what they are, not what we fear they might become.”

“They are the mutated products of a deadly viral disease,” Percy said, straightening his microphone with a scraping noise.

“They are our children,” Augustine said.

“Never!” Percy shouted.

3

Sable Mountain Emergency Action School

ARIZONA

Without explanation, Stella’s evening study hour had been canceled and she had been told to go to the gym. The building was empty and the basketball made a clapping echo with each resonant bounce.

Stella ran toward the end of the court, worn sneakers squeaking on the rubbery paint that covered the hard concrete. She spun around for a layup and watched the ball circle the hoop, hiccup, then drop through. There was no net to slow its fall. She deftly grabbed the ball as it fell and ran around the court to do it again. Mitch had taught her how to shoot hoops when she was eight. She remembered a little about the rules, though not much.

Stella’s bunkmate, black-haired Celia Northcott, wandered into the gym fifteen minutes later. Celia was a year younger but seemed more mature. She had been born as a twin but her sister had died while only a few months old. This was common among SHEVA twins; usually, only one survived. Celia made up for a tendency toward sadness with a brittle cheer that sometimes irritated Stella. Celia was full of schemes, and was probably the most avid constructor of demes—social groupings of SHEVA children—and plans about how to live when they grew up.

She was nursing her arm—a bandage covered her wrist—and grimaced as Stella held the ball and queried her with a freckle flash and stare.

“Blood,” Celia said, and sat cross-legged on the side of the court. “About a gallon.”

“Why?” Stella asked.

“How should I know? KUK/ I had a nightmare last night.” Celia’s tongue caught and she made her signature glottal click, which almost obscured her underspeech. Celia was not very good at double speaking. Someone, she never said who, had tried to mutilate her tongue when she was eight years old. This she had revealed to Stella late at night, when Stella had found her huddled in a corner of the barracks, crying and smelling of electric onions. The facile ridge found in most of the children was a white scar on Celia’s tongue, and she sometimes slurred her words, or inserted a hard clucking sound.

Stella squatted beside Celia and lightly bounced her palm off the ball, held in the nest of her legs. Nobody knew why the counselors took so much blood, but visits to the hospital usually followed upsets or unusual behavior; that much Stella had deduced. “How long did they keep you?”

“Until morning.”

“Anything new in the hospital?” That was what they called the administration building, adjacent to the counselor and teacher dormitories, all beyond a razor-wire topped fence that surrounded the boys’ and girls’ compounds.

Celia shook her head. “They gave me oatmeal and eggs for breakfast,” she said. “And a big glass of orange juice.”

“Did they do a biopsy?”

Celia bit her lip and let her eyes grow large. “No. Who’s had-KUK a biopsy?”

“Beth Fremont says one of the boys told her. Right out of his… you know.” She pointed down and tapped the basketball.

“Kweeee,” Celia whistle-tongued.

“What did you dream?” Stella asked.

“I don’t remember. I just woke up with a screech.”

Stella licked her palms, tasting the paint on the court and the old rubber of the ball and a little of the dust and dirt of other shoes, other players. Then she held out her palms for Celia to clasp. Celia’s palms were damp. Celia squeezed and rubbed their hands together, sighed, and let go after a moment. “Thanks,” she said, eyes downcast. Her cheeks turned a steady mottled copper and stayed that way for a while.

Stella had learned the spit trick from another girl a few weeks after her arrival.

The door to the gym opened and Miss Kinney came in with ten other girls. Stella knew LaShawna Hamilton and Torry Butler from her dorm; she knew most of the others by name, but had never shared a deme with any of them. And she knew Miss Kinney, the girl’s school coach. Miss Kinney led the other girls onto the court. Slung over her shoulder was a duffel bag filled with more balls.

“How about a little practice?” she asked Celia and Stella.

“Her arm hurts,” Stella said.

“Can you bounce and throw?” Miss Kinney asked Celia. Miss Kinney stood about five feet nine inches tall, a little shorter than Stella. The gym teacher was thin and strong, with a long, well-shaped nose and large green eyes, like a cat’s.

Celia got to her feet. She never turned down a challenge from a counselor or a teacher. She thought she was tough.

“Good,” Miss Kinney said. “I brought some jerseys and shorts. They’re ragged, but they’ll pass. Let’s go put them on. Time to see what you can do.”

Stella adjusted the baggy shorts with a grimace and tried to focus on the ball. Miss Kinney shouted encouragement from the sidelines to Celia. “Don’t just sniff the breeze. Take a shot!”

All the girls on the court had come to a halt in the middle of hoop practice. Stella looked to Celia, the best at sinking baskets in her group of five.

Miss Kinney strode forward, exasperated, and put on her best I’m being patient face. Stella would not meet her steady gaze.

“What is so hard about this?” Miss Kinney asked. “Tell me. I want to know.”

Stella lowered her eyes farther. “We don’t understand the point.”

“We’re going to try something different. You’ll compete,” Miss Kinney said. “You’ll play against each other and get exercise and learn physical coordination. It’s fun.”

“We could all make more baskets if we formed our own teams,” Stella said. “One team could have three slowing others down, if they were coming in too fast. Seven could play opposite and make baskets.” Stella wondered if she sounded obtuse, but she truly wasn’t understanding what Miss Kinney expected of them.

“That isn’t the way it’s done,” Miss Kinney said, growing dangerously patient. Miss Kinney never got really angry, but it bothered Stella that she could hold in so much irritation and not express it. It made the teacher smell unpleasant.

“So, tell us how it’s-KUK done,” Celia said. She and LaShawna approached. Celia stood an inch taller than Stella, almost five eleven, and LaShawna was shorter than Miss Kinney, about five seven. Celia had the usual olive-to-brown skin and flyaway reddish hair that never seemed to know what to do or how to hold together on her head. LaShawna was darker, but not much, with finely kinked black hair that formed a slumped nimbus around her ears and down to her shoulders.

“It’s called a game. Come on, girls, you know what a game is.”

“We play,” Stella said defensively.

“Of course you play. All of us monkeys play,” the teacher said.

Stella and LaShawna smiled. Sometimes Miss Kinney was more open and direct than the other teachers. They liked her, which made frustrating her even more distressing.

“This is organized play. You guys are good at organizing, aren’t you? What’s not to understand?”

“Teams,” LaShawna said. “Teams are like demes. But demes choose themselves.” She lifted her hands and spread them beside her temples, making little elephant ears. It was a sign; many of the new children did such things without really understanding why. Sometimes the teachers thought they were acting smart; but not Miss Kinney.

She glanced at LaShawna’s “ears,” blinked, and said for the tenth time, “Teams are not demes. Work with me here. A team is temporary and fun. I choose sides for you.”

Stella wrinkled her nose.

“I pick players with complementary abilities. I can help sculpt a team. You understand how that works, I’m sure.”

“Sure,” Stella said.

“Then you play against another team, and that makes all of you better players. Plus, you get exercise.”

“Right,” Stella said. So far, so good. She bounced the ball experimentally.

“Let’s try it again. Just the practice part. Celia, cover Stella. Stella, go for the basket.”

Celia stood back and dropped into a crouch and spread her arms, as Miss Kinney had told her to do. Stella bounced the ball, made a step forward, remembered the rules, then dribbled toward the basket. The floor of the court was marked with lines and half circles. Stella could smell Celia and knew what she was going to do. Stella moved toward her, and Celia stepped aside with a graceful sweep of her arms, but without any signs or suggestions for adjustment, and Stella, in some confusion, threw the ball. It bounced off the backboard without touching the basket.

Stella made a face at Celia.

“You are supposed to try to stop her,” Miss Kinney told Celia.

“I didn’t help her.” Celia glanced apologetically at Stella.

“No, I mean, actively try to stop her.”

“But that would be a foul,” Celia said.

“Only if you chop her arms or push her or run into her.”

Celia said, “We all want to make baskets and be happy, right? If I stop her from getting a basket, won’t that reduce the number of baskets?”

Miss Kinney raised her eyes to the roof. Her face pinked. “You want to get the most baskets for your team, and keep the other team from getting any baskets.”

Celia was getting tired of thinking this through. Tears started in her eyes. “I thought we were trying to get the most baskets.”

“For your team,” Miss Kinney said. “Why isn’t that clear?”

“It hurts to make others fail,” Stella said, looking around the court as if to find a door and escape.

“Oh, puh-leeze, Stella, it’s only a game! You play against one another. It’s called sport. Everyone can be friendly afterward. There’s no harm.”

“I saw soccer riots on TV once,” LaShawna said. Miss Kinney lifted her eyes to the ceiling. “People got hurt,” LaShawna added doubtfully.

“There’s a lot of passion in sport,” Miss Kinney admitted. “People care, but usually the players don’t hurt each other.”

“They run into each other and lay down for a long time. Someone should have warned them they were about to collide,” said Crystal Newman, who had silver-white hair and smelled like some new kind of citrus tree.

Miss Kinney motioned the twelve girls to go over to the metal chairs lined up outside the lines. They pulled the chairs into a circle and sat.

Miss Kinney took a deep breath. “I think maybe I’m missing something,” she said. “Stella, how would you like to play?”

Stella thought about this. “For exercise, we could push-pull and swing, mosey, you know, like a dance. If we wanted to learn how to run better, or make baskets better, we could set up running academies. Girls could form wavy channels and ovals and others could run the channels. The girls in the wavy channels could tell them how they aren’t doing it right.” She pointedly did not tell Miss Kinney about spit-calming, all the players slapping palms, which she had seen athletes do in human games. “Then the runners could shoot baskets from inside the channels and at different distances, until they could sink them from all the way across the court. That’s more points, right?”

Miss Kinney nodded, going along for the moment.

“We’d switch out a runner and a channel each time. In a couple of hours, I bet most of us could sink baskets really well, and if we added up the points, the teams would have more points than if they, you know, fought with each other.” Stella thought this over very earnestly for an instant and her face lit up. “Maybe a thousand points in a game.”

“Nobody would want to watch,” Miss Kinney said. She was showing her exhaustion now, but also making a funny little grin that Stella could not interpret. Stella looked at the blinking red light on the nosey on Miss Kinney’s belt. Miss Kinney had turned off the nosey before practice, perhaps because the girls often triggered its tiny little wheeping alarm when they exercised, no matter how much self-control they displayed.

“I would watch!” Celia said, leaning into the words. “I could learn how to train people in motion with, you know, signs.” Celia glanced at Stella conspiratorially, and undered, /Signs and smells and spit, eyes that twirl and brows that knit. It was a little song they sometimes sang in the dorm before sleep; softly. “That would really be fun.”

The other girls agreed that they understood that sort of game.

Miss Kinney lifted her hand and twisted it back and forth like a little flag. “What is it? You don’t like competition?”

“We like push-pull,” Stella said. “We do it all the time. On the playground, in the walking square.”

“Is that when you do those little dances?” Miss Kinney asked.

“That’s mosey or maybe push-pull,” said Harriet Pincher, the stockiest girl in the group. “Palms get sweaty with mosey. They stay dry with push-pull.”

Stella did not know how to begin to explain the difference. Sweaty palms in a group touch could make all sorts of changes. Individuals could become stronger, more willing to lead, or less aggressive in their push to lead, or simply sit out a deme debate, if one happened. Dry palms indicated a push-pull, and that was less serious, more like play. A deme needed to adjust all the time, and there were many ways to do that, some fun, some more like hard work.

Rarely, a deme adjustment involved stronger measures. The few attempts she had seen had resulted in some pretty nasty reactions. She didn’t want to bring that up now, though Miss Kinney seemed genuinely interested.

Adjusting to humans was a puzzle. The new children were supposed to do all the adjusting, and that made it hard.

“Come on,” said Miss Kinney, getting up. “Try again. Humor me.”

4

Pathogenics Centers

Viral Threat Assessment Division

Sandia Labs

NEW MEXICO

“We trade a lot of aptronyms to let off steam,” Jonathan Turner said as he spun the golf cart up to the concrete guard box.

“Aptronyms?” Christopher Dicken asked.

The sun had set in typical New Mexico fashion—suddenly and with some drama. Halogen lamps were switching on all over the facility, casting the plain and often downright ugly architecture into stark artificial day.

“Names that suit the job. I’ll give you an example,” Turner said. “We have a doctor here at Sandia named Polk. Asa Polk.”

“Ah,” Dicken said. The guard box stood empty. Something small and white moved back and forth behind smoked glass windows. A long steel tube jutted from the side. He used a handkerchief to wipe sweat from his cheeks and forehead. The sweat was not just from the heat. He did not like this new role. He did not like secrets.

In particular, he did not like stepping into the belly of the beast.

Turner followed his gaze. “Nobody home,” he said. “We still use people at the main gates, but here it’s an automated sentry.” Dicken caught a glimpse of a grid of purple beams scooting over Turner’s face, then his own.

A green light glowed beside the gate.

“You are who we say you are, Dr. Dicken,” Turner said. He reached into a small box under the dash and took out a plastic bag marked BIOHAZARD. “The rag, please, Kleenex in your pockets, anything used to sop. Nothing like that is allowed in or out. Clothing is bad enough.”

Dicken dropped the handkerchief into the bag, and Turner sealed it and slipped it into a small metal drop box. The concrete and iron barriers sank and drew back.

“In accounting, we have Mr. Ledger,” Turner said as he drove through. “And in statistics, Dr. Damlye.”

“I once worked with a pathologist named Boddy,” Dicken said.

Turner nodded provisional approval. “One of our arbovirus geniuses is named Bugg.”

The cart hummed past a dark gray water tower and five pressurized gas cylinders painted lime green, then crossed a median to a fenced enclosure containing a large white satellite dish. With a flourish, Turner did a 360 around the dish, then drove up to a row of squat bungalows. Behind the bungalows, and beyond several electrified fences topped with razor wire, lay five concrete warehouses, all of them together code-named Madhouse. The fences were patrolled by squat gray robots and soldiers toting automatic weapons.

“I once knew a plastic surgeon named Scarry,” Dicken said.

Turner smiled approval. “An auto mechanic named Torker.”

“A nuclear chemist named Mason.”

Turner grimaced. “You can do better. It may be essential to your sanity, working here.”

“I’m fresh out,” Dicken admitted.

“I could go on for days. Hundreds and hundreds, all on file and verified. None of this urban legend crap.”

“I thought you said just personal acquaintances.”

“I may have been handicapping you,” Turner admitted, and pulled the cart into a parking space marked in cargo letters on a white placard: #3 madhouse honcho. “A gynecologist named Box.”

“An anthropologist named Mann,” Dicken said, peering right at the sunning cages for the more hirsute residents of the Madhouse, now empty. “Mustn’t let down the team.”

“A dog trainer named Doggett.”

“A traffic cop named Rush.” Dicken felt himself warming to the game.

“A cabby named Parker,” Turner countered.

“A compulsive gambler named Chip.”

“A proctologist named Poker,” Turner said.

“You used that one.”

“Scout’s honor, it’s another,” Turner said. “And I was a scout, believe it or not.”

“Merit badge in hemorrhagic fevers?”

“Lucky guess.”

They walked toward the plain double doors and the white-lit corridor beyond. Dicken’s brow furrowed. “A pathologist named Thomas Shew,” he said, and smiled sheepishly.

“So?”

“T. Shew.”

Turner groaned and opened the door for Dicken. “Welcome to the Madhouse, Dr. Dicken. Initiation begins in half an hour. Need to make a pit stop first? Restrooms to your right. The cleanest loos in Christendom.”

“Not necessary,” Dicken said.

“You should, really. Initiation begins with drinking three bottles of Bud Light, and ends with drinking three bottles of Becks or Heinekens. This symbolizes the transition from the halls of typical piss-poor science to the exalted ranks of Sandia Pathogenics.”

“I’m fine.” Dicken tapped his forehead. “A libertarian named State,” he offered.

“Ah, that’s a different game entirely,” Turner said.

He rapped on the closed door to an office and stood back, folding his hands. Dicken looked along the cinder block hallway, then down to the concrete gutters on each side, then up at sprinkler heads mounted every six feet. Long red or green tags hung from the sprinkler heads, twisting in a slow current of air flowing north to south. The red tags read: caution: acid solution and detergent. A second pipe and sprinkler system on the left side of the corridor carried green tags that read: Extreme caution: chlorine dioxide.

At the southern end of the corridor, a large fan mounted in the wall slowly turned. During an emergency, the fan would switch off to allow the corridor to fill with sterilizing gas. Once the area had been decontaminated, the fan would evacuate the toxic atmosphere into big scrubbing chambers.

The office door opened a crack. A plump man with thick black hair and beard and critical dark green eyes watched them suspiciously through the crack, then smiled and stepped into the hall. He quietly closed the door behind him.

“Christopher Dicken, this is Madhouse Honcho number five, or maybe number four, Vassili Presky,” Turner said.

“Proud to meet you,” Presky said, but did not offer his hand.

“Likewise,” Dicken said.

“He happens not to be a computer geek,” Turner added.

Dicken and Presky stared at him with quizzical half-smiles. “Pardon?” Presky said.

“Press-key,” Turner explained, astounded by their density.

“We will pardon Dr. Turner,” Presky said with a pained expression.

“We’re at step two of the initiation,” Turner said. “On our way to the party. Vassili is Speaker to Animals. He runs the zoo and does research, as well.”

Presky smiled. “You want it, we have it. Mammals, marsupials, monotremes, birds, reptiles, worms, insects, arachnids, crustaceans, planaria, nematodes, protists, fungi, even a horticultural center.” He snapped his fingers and opened his door again. “I forgot, this is formal. Let me get my coat.”

He emerged wearing a gray tweed jacket with worn cuffs.

The labs spun out like spokes from a hub. Turner and Presky led Dicken through broad double glass doors, then navigated in quicktime a maze of corridors, guiding him toward the center of Sandia Pathogenics. Dicken’s ears throbbed with the surge in air pressure as the doors hissed shut behind them.

All the buildings and connecting corridors were equipped with sprinklers and evacuation fans, emergency personnel showers—stainless steel–lined alcoves with multiple showerheads, decontamination rooms with remote manipulators, color-coded red-and-blue containment and isolation suits hanging behind plastic doors, and extensive collections of emergency medical supplies.

“Pathogenics is bug motel,” Presky said. Dicken was trying to place his accent: Russian, he thought, but modified by many years in the U.S. “Bugs come in, they do not go out.”

“Dr. Presky never gets our jingles right,” Turner said.

“I have no mind for trivia,” Presky agreed. Then, proudly, “Also, not watching TV all my life.”

A group of five men and three women awaited them in the lounge. As Dicken and his two escorts entered, the group lifted bottles of Bud Light in salute and gave him a rousing, “Hip, hip, hurrah!”

Dicken stopped in the doorway and rewarded them with a slow, awkward grin. “Don’t scare me,” he admonished. “I’m a shy guy.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” said a very young man with long blond hair and thick, almost white eyebrows. He wore a well-tailored gray suit that took a stylish drape on his substantial frame, and Dicken pegged him as the dandy. The others dressed as if they wanted covering and nothing more.

The dandy whistled a short tune, held out a strong, square-fingered hand, crossed two fingers, shook the hand in the air before Dicken could grip it, then backed away, bowing obsequiously.

“The secret handshake, unfortunately,” Turner said, lips pressed together in disapproval.

“It symbolizes lies and deceit and no contact with the outside world,” the dandy explained.

“That’s not funny,” said a tall, black-haired woman with a distinct stoop and a pleasant, homely face with beautiful blue eyes. “He’s Tommy Powers, and I’m Maggie Flynn. We’re Irish, and that’s the extent of what we share. Let me introduce you to the rest.”

They passed him a bottle of beer. Dicken made his greetings all around. Nobody shook hands. This close to the center, it was apparent people avoided direct contact as much as possible. Dicken wondered how much their love lives had suffered.

Thirty minutes into the party, Turner took Dicken aside, using the pretext of swapping the half-consumed Bud for a bottle of Heineken. “Now, Dr. Dicken,” he said. “It’s official. How do you like our players?”

“They know their stuff,” Dicken said.

Presky approached, bottle of Becks lifted in salute. “Time to meet the master, gentlemen?”

Dicken felt his back stiffen. “All right,” he said.

The group fell silent as Turner opened a side door leading off the lounge and marked by a large red square at eye level. Dicken and Presky followed him down another corridor of offices, innocuous in itself but apparently rich in symbolism.

“The rest back there don’t usually get this far,” Turner said. He walked slowly beside Dicken, allowing for his pace. “It’s tough recruiting for the inner circle,” he admitted. “Takes a certain mindset. Curiosity and brilliance, mixed with an absolute lack of scruples.”

“I still have scruples,” Dicken said.

“I had heard as much,” Turner said, dead serious and a little critical. “Frankly, I don’t know why in hell you’re here.” He grinned wolfishly. “But then, you have connections and a certain reputation. Maybe they balance out.”

Presky tried for an ironic smile. They came to a broad steel door. Turner ceremoniously removed a plastic tag from his pocket and let it dangle from the end of a red lanyard imprinted with Sandia in white letters. “Never tell the townies you work here,” he advised.

He lifted his arms. Dicken lowered his head, and Turner slung the lanyard around his neck, then backed off. “Looks good on you.”

“Thanks,” Dicken said.

“Let’s make sure you’re in the system before we enter.”

“And if I’m not?”

“If lucky,” Presky said, “you are hit by Tazer before they use bullets.”

Turner showed him how to press his palm against a glass pad and stare into a retinal scanner. “It knows you,” Turner said. “Better still, it likes you.”

“Thank god,” Dicken said.

“Security is god here,” Turner said. “The atomic age was a firecracker compared with what’s on the other side of that door.” The door opened. “Welcome to ground zero. Dr. Jurie is looking forward to meeting you.”

5

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Gianelli swept through the waiting room of his office, accompanied by Laura Bloch, his chief of staff. His face was red and he looked just as Mitch had once described him: on the edge of a heart attack, with a big, friendly expression topped by shrewd eyes.

Kaye stood up beside the long wrought iron-and-marble coffee table that held center position in the lobby. Even though she was alone, she felt like a card being forced from a deck.

“They’re wrangling,” Laura Bloch told Gianelli in an undertone. “The director is late.”

“Perfect,” Gianelli said. He looked at a clock on the wall. It was eleven. “Where’s my star witness?” He gave Kaye a lopsided smile, his expression combining both sympathy and doubt. She knew she did not look prepared. She did not feel prepared. Gianelli sneezed and walked into his office. A young male Secret Service agent closed the door and stood guard beside it, hands folded in front of him, eyes unreadable behind smoked glasses.

Kaye let out her breath.

The maple-and-glass door opened almost immediately and the senator poked his head out.

“Dr. Rafelson,” he called, and crooked his finger.

The office beyond was stacked with newspapers, magazines, and two antiquated desktop computers perched on three desks. The huge desk nearest the window was covered with law books and leftover boxes of Chinese food.

The agent closed the door behind Kaye. The air was close and mustily cool. Laura Bloch, in her forties, small and plump, with intense, bulging black eyes and a halo of frizzy black hair, stood and handed papers from a briefcase to Gianelli.

“Pardon our mess,” he said.

“He says that to everyone,” Bloch said. Her smile was at once friendly and alarming; her expression reminded Kaye of a pug or a Boston terrier, and she could not seem to look directly at anyone.

“This has been my home away from home the last few days. I eat, drink, and sleep here.” Gianelli offered his hand. “Thank you for coming.”

Kaye shook the hand lightly. He let her determine the strength and duration of the grip.

“This is Laura Bloch. She’s my right hand… and my left hand.”

“We’ve met,” Bloch said, and smiled. Kaye shook Laura’s hand; it was soft and dry. Laura seemed to stare at Kaye’s forehead and her nose. Suddenly, irrationally, Kaye liked and trusted her.

Gianelli she was not so sure about. He had moved up awfully fast in the last few years. Kaye had become suspicious of politicians who prospered in bad times.

“How’s Mitch?” he asked.

“We haven’t spoken for a few weeks,” Kaye said.

“I like Mitch,” Gianelli said with an undulating shrug of his shoulders, apropos of nothing. He sat behind his desk, stared over the crusted boxes, and frowned. “I hated to hear about what happened. Awful times. How’s Marge?”

Kaye could tell he did not really give a damn about Marge Cross, not at the moment. He was mentally preparing for the committee meeting.

“She sends her regards,” Kaye said.

“Good of her,” Gianelli said.

Kaye looked up at a framed portrait to the right of the big desk. “We were sorry to hear of Representative Wickham’s death,” she said.

“Shook up everything,” Gianelli murmured, appraising her. “Gave me the boost I needed, however, and here I am. I am a whelp, and many kind folks in this building are bound and determined to teach me humility.”

He leaned forward, earnest now and fully focused. “Is it true?”

Kaye knew what he meant. She nodded.

“Based on what data sets?”

“Americol pharmacy tracking reports. Drop-in data collection systems in two thousand area hospitals servicing epidemiology contracts with Americol.” Kaye swallowed nervously.

Gianelli nodded, his eyes shifting somewhat spookily over her shoulder as he thought this through. “Any government sources?” he asked.

“RSVP Plus, Air Force LEADER 21, CDC Virocol, NIH Population Health Monitor.”

“But no sources exclusive to Emergency Action.”

“No, though we suspect they listen in on some of our proprietary tracking systems.”

“How many will there be?” Gianelli asked.

“Tens of thousands,” Kaye said. “Maybe more.”

“Jesus, Homer, and Jethro Christ,” Gianelli said, and leaned back, his tall chair creaking on old steel springs. As if to calm himself, he raised his arms and folded his hands behind his head. “How’s your daughter?”

“She’s in a camp in Arizona,” Kaye said.

“Good old Charlie Chase and his wonderful state of Arizona. But how is she, Dr. Rafelson?”

“Healthy. She’s found friends.”

Gianelli shook his head. Kaye could not tell what he was thinking or feeling. “It could be a rough meeting,” he said. “Laura, let’s give Dr. Rafelson a quick tour of the subcommittee’s players.”

“I was briefed in Baltimore,” Kaye said.

“Nobody knows ‘em better than we do, right, Laura?”

“Nobody,” Laura Bloch said.

“Laura’s daughter, Annie, died at Joseph Goldberger,” the senator said.

“I’m sorry,” Kaye said, and suddenly her eyes filled with tears.

Bloch patted Kaye’s arm and set her face in grim reserve. “She was a sweet kid,” she said. “A little dreamy.” She drew herself up. “You are about to testify before a baboon, two cobras, a goose, a certified bull ape, and a spotted leopard.”

“Senator Percy is the baboon,” Gianelli said. “Jakes and Corcoran are the cobras, lying low in the grass. They hate being on this committee, however, and I doubt they’ll ask you anything.”

“Senator Thomasen is chairperson. She’s the goose,” Bloch said. “She likes to think she’s keeping the other animals in order, but she has no fixed opinions herself. Senator Chase claims to be on our side—”

“He’s the bull ape,” Gianelli said.

“But we don’t know how he’ll vote, push comes to shove,” Bloch finished.

Gianelli glanced at his watch. “I’m going to bring you in first. Laura tells me the director is still stuck in traffic.”

“Twenty minutes away,” Bloch said.

“She’s working hard to get the directorship of EMAC legislated into a Cabinet-level position, giving her sole budgetary control. The director is our leopard.” Gianelli scratched his upper lip with a forefinger. “We expect you to help us counter her suggestions, which are bound to be nasty beyond belief.”

“All right,” Kaye said.

“Mark Augustine will be there,” Bloch said. “Any problem with that?” she asked Kaye.

“No,” Kaye said.

“You two get along?”

“We disagreed,” said Kaye, “but we worked together.”

Bloch made a fleeting face of dubiety.

“We’ll take our chances,” Gianelli said with a snuffle.

“You should never take chances,” Bloch advised, producing another handkerchief from her purse.

“I always take chances,” Gianelli said. “That’s why I’m here.” He blew his nose. “Goddamned allergies,” he added, and watched Kaye’s reaction. “Washington is full of snotty noses.”

“No problem,” Kaye said. “I’m a mommy.”

“Good,” Bloch said. “We need a pro.”

6

NEW MEXICO

Dr. Jurie’s office was small and crammed with boxes, as if he had arrived only a few days before. Jurie pushed back his old Aeron chair as Dicken and Turner entered.

The shelves around the office were lightly populated with a few battered college texts, favorites for quick reference, and binders filled with what Dicken assumed were scientific papers. He counted seven metal lab stools in the small room, arranged in a cramped half-circle around the desk. The desk supported a flat top computer with two panels popped up, displaying results from two experiments.

“Acclimatizing, Dr. Dicken?” Jurie asked. “Altitude treating you well?”

“Doing fine, thank you,” Dicken said. Turner and Presky assumed relaxed hunched positions on their stools.

Jurie motioned for Dicken to sit in a second old Aeron, on the other side of the desk. He had to push past a stack of boxes to fit into the chair, which bent his leg painfully. Once he sat, he wondered if he would be able to get up again.

Jurie wore brown oxfords, wool slacks, a dark blue shirt with a broad collar, and a sleeveless, cream-colored knit sweater, all clean but rumpled. At fifty-five, his features were still youthfully handsome, his body lean. He had the kind of face that would have fit well right above the collar of an Arrow shirt in a magazine ad. Had he smoked a pipe, Dicken would have thought him a cliché scientist. His body was too small, however, to complete the Oppenheimer effect. Dicken guessed his height at barely five feet three inches.

“I’ve invited more of our research group heads to join us. I apologize for showing you off, Dr. Dicken.” Jurie reached over to send the flat top into sleep mode, then rotated in his chair, back and forth.

A woman’s head poked through the door and pushed a fist in to rap on the inside wall.

“Ah,” Jurie said. “Dee Dee. Dr. Blakemore. Always prompt.”

“To a fault,” the woman said. In her late thirties, comfortably rotund, with long mousy hair and a self-assured expression, she pushed through the door and sat with some difficulty on a stool. In the next few minutes, four others joined them in the room, but remained standing.

“Thank you all for coming,” Jurie started the meeting. “We are all here to greet Dr. Dicken.”

Two of the men had entered holding cans of beer, apparently cadged from the party. Dicken noted that one—Dr. Orlin Miller, formerly of Western Washington University—still favored Bud Light over Heineken.

“We’re a relaxed group,” Jurie said. “Somewhat informal.” He never smiled, and as he spoke, he made small, unexpected hesitations between words. “What we’re essentially interested in, here at Pathogenics, is how diseases use us as genetic libraries and reservoirs. Also, how we’ve adapted to these inroads and learned to use the diseases. It doesn’t really matter whether viruses are rogue genes from inside us, or outside invaders—the result is the same, a constant battle for advantage and control. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose, right?”

Dicken could not disagree.

“I’ve listened to all the media babble about virus children, and frankly I don’t give a damn whether they’re the products of disease or evolution. Evolution is a disease, for all I know. What I want to learn is how viruses can recombine and kill us.

“Not coincidentally, if we learn how that works, we have a pretty important weapon for both national defense and offense. This is the age of gene and germ, and whatever subtle little perversions we can think of, our enemies can also think of. Which is a pretty good reason to keep Sandia Pathogenics funded and running at fool steam, which we all will benefit from.”

“Amen,” said Turner.

I heard “fool steam,” Dicken thought, and looked around the room. Did anybody else? Fool steam ahead.

“Dr. Presky, shall we show Dr. Dicken our zoo?” Jurie asked.

7

NEAR LUBBOCK, TEXAS

Mitch had lost everything important, but once again he had dirt and bone chips and pottery. He was back in the field, carrying a small spade and a kit full of brushes. Starting from scratch was an archaeologist’s definition of workaday life, and he was definitely starting from scratch, all over again.

Around him, a neat square hole in the earth had been sculpted into many terraces on which sat fragments of flint, the crushed remains of what might have once been a wicker basket, a rough oval of shards from a small pot, and the thing that had absorbed his attention all day: an engraved shell.

The sun had set several hours ago and he was working by the light of a Coleman lantern. Down in the hole, all colors had long since turned to gray and brown. Brown was the color he knew best. Beige, gray, black, brown. The brown dust in his nose made everything smell like dry earth. A brown, neutral smell.

The shell lay in three pieces and was crudely engraved with what looked like a crosshatched bird’s wing. Mitch had a hunch it might be similar to the shells found at the Craig mound in Spiro, Oklahoma. If it was, that might generate enough publicity that they could persuade the contractors to pause for a few weeks.

The generator in the back of the truck had broken down the night before. Now, the lantern’s gas was running out.

With a sigh, he turned the lantern off, laid his spade and kit on the side of the hole and climbed out carefully, feeling his way in the dark, putting a strain on his good arm.

As with most university-sponsored digs, the budget was minimal and equipment was precious, usually secondhand, and seldom reliable. Time was important, of course. In two more weeks bulldozers would move in and cover hundreds of acres with fill and concrete slabs for a housing tract.

The twelve students working the site had gathered under a tent and were sipping beer in the cooling twilight. Some things never changed. He accepted a freshly popped can from a twenty-year-old brunette named Kylan, then sat with a groan in a camp chair reserved for him in part because he was the most experienced and in part because he was the oldest and the kids thought he might require the bare minimum of comfort to keep functioning.

The gimpy arm drew sympathy, too. Mitch could only dig effectively with one hand, propping the handle of the shovel under his armpit.

The others squatted on the dirt or on the two rugged wooden benches pulled from the back of the single battered pickup, the same one that held the useless generator.

“Any luck?” Kylan asked. They were not very talkative this evening, perhaps because they saw the imminent dashing of their hopes and dreams. This dig had become their lives in the past few weeks. Two couples were already lovers.

Mitch held up his hand, made a grasping motion. “Flashlight,” he said.

Tom Pritchard, twenty-four, skinny, with a head of dusty and tousled blond hair, tossed him a black aluminum flashlight.

The students looked at each other, blank-faced in the way kids have of hiding what might be an inappropriate emotion: hope.

“What is it?” asked tall, stout Caitlin Bishop, far from her native New York.

Mitch lifted his head and sighed. “Probably nothing,” he said.

They crowded around, all pretense and weariness gone. They needed hope as much as they needed rehydrating fluids. “What?” “What is it?” “What did you find?”

Mitch said it was probably nothing; probably not what he thought it was. And even if it was, how did that figure into his plans? There were hundreds of shells from Spiro scattered in private and university collections. So what if he had just found one more?

What sort of prize was that to replace his family?

He waved them off with the flashlight, then aimed the beam up at the first star to appear in the sky. The air was dry and the beam was only visible because the dust they had been raising all day lingered in the still air.

“Anyone know about Spiro, Oklahoma? The Craig mound?” he asked.

“Mississippian civilization,” said Kylan, the best student in the group but hardly the best digger. “Opened during the nineteen thirties by the Pocola Mining Company. A disaster. Burials, pottery, artifacts, all gone, all sold to tourists.”

“A famous source for engraved conch shells,” Mitch added. “Decorated with birds and snakes and such, vaguely Mesoamerican designs. Probably part of an extensive bartering community spread through a number of cultures in the East and South and Midwest. Anybody know about these shells?”

They all shook their heads.

“Show us,” said Bernard Rowland and stepped forward, as tall as Mitch and broader across the shoulders. He was a Mormon and did not drink beer; Iced Sweat, a wickedly green drink in a large plastic bottle, was his liquid of choice.

Mitch led them back through the ranks of holes in the ground. Flies were starting to zizz and hum after hiding out during the heat of the day. The cattle feed lots near Lubbock were less than ten miles away. When the wind was right, the smell was impressive. Mitch wondered why anyone would want to build homes here, so close to that smell and the flies.

They came to his hole and the students stood a foot back from the dry edges. He climbed into the hole and pointed the flashlight at the terrace that held the shell, painstakingly revealed by his brush and dental pick work of the last six hours.

“Wow,” Bernard said. “How did it get out here?”

“Good question,” Mitch said. “Anybody have a camera?”

Kylan handed him her digital, Dyno-labeled “Potshooter.” Mitch drew out the marker strings with length measurements in small squares of tape, handed them to the students, who set them at right angles and weighted them with rocks, and then snapped a series of flash pictures.

Bernard helped Mitch out of the hole. They stood solemnly for a moment.

“Our treasure,” Mitch said. Even to himself, he sounded cynical. “Our only hope.”

Fallon Dupres, a twenty-three-year-old from Canada, who looked like a fashion model and kept severely aloof from most of the men, handed him another can of Coors. “Actually, the Craig mound shells weren’t conchs,” she told Mitch in an undertone. “They were whelks.”

“Thanks,” Mitch said. Fallon tilted her head, blasé. She had made a pass at Mitch three days before. Mitch had suspected her of being the type of attractive woman that instantly gravitated to age and authority, however weak that authority might be. In the near vacuum of the little dig, he was the most authoritative male, and he was certainly the oldest. He had politely declined and told her she was very pretty, and under other circumstances he might oblige. He had hinted, in as roundabout a way as possible, that that part of his life was over. She had ignored the evasions and told him bluntly that his attitude was not natural.

In fact, Mitch had not had a woman since he and Kaye had parted last year in Phoenix, shortly after his release from prison. They had agreed to go their strategic ways. Kaye had gone to work for Americol in Maryland, and Mitch had gone on the road, looking for holes in the Earth to hide in.

“I thought Spiro was, like, a corrupt vice president,” said Larry Kelly, the dimmest and funniest of the crew. “How’s a shell going to save our dig?”

Fallon, surprisingly, set herself to gently explain.

Mitch wandered off to check his cell phone. He had turned it off for the morning work hours, and forgotten to switch it on during the nap he had taken at the burning center of the day. There was one message. He vaguely recognized the number. With an awkward pass, he punched in the retrieval code.

The voice was instantly recognizable. It was Eileen Ripper, a fellow archaeologist and friend. Eileen specialized in Northwestern digs. They had not spoken in more than ten years. “Mitch, something dishy. Are you busy? Better not be. This is, as I said, dishy. I am stuck here with a bunch of women, can you believe it? Want to upset some more apple carts? Call me.”

Mitch looked across the darkening plateau and the black ditches to where Fallon was explaining the Spiro shells to a group of bone-weary students, about to have their dig closed and covered over by lawns and concrete slabs. He stood with the phone in his weak hand, clenching his strong hand. He could not stand the thought of having this dig closed, however trivial it was, of having another part of his life be judged useless.

He had been put away for two years for assault with a deadly weapon—a large wood chip. He had not seen Kaye for more than a year. She was working on viruses for Marge Cross, and in Mitch’s judgment, that was a kind of defeat as well.

And there was Stella, stashed away by the government in a school in Arizona.

Fallon Dupres walked up behind him. He turned just as she folded her arms, watching him carefully. “It isn’t a whelk, Mitch,” she said. “It’s a broken clamshell.”

“I could have sworn,” he said. He had seen the Mesoamerican design so plainly.

“It’s scratched up like a doodle pad,” the young woman said. “But it’s not a whelk. Sorry.” She turned away, glanced at him one more time, smiled perhaps more in regret than pity, and walked off.

Mitch stood under the blue-black sky for a few minutes, wondering how many wish-thinks he had left in him before he lost it completely. Another door closing.

He could head north. Drop off and visit Stella along the way—if they let him. You could never find out in advance.

He called Eileen’s number.

8

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Gianelli entered at the back of the chamber, carrying a stack of papers. Thomasen looked up. Augustine glanced over his shoulder. The last senator on the committee was followed by a Secret Service agent, who took a position with another agent by the door, and then by a small, intense-looking woman. Augustine recognized Laura Bloch. She was the main reason Gianelli was a senator, and she was a formidable political mind.

Augustine had also heard that Bloch was a bit of a spymaster.

“Glad you could make it, Dick,” Chase called out across the chamber. “We were worried.”

Gianelli smiled foxily. “Allergies,” he said.

Kaye Lang Rafelson entered after Bloch. Her presence surprised Augustine. He recognized a setup and suspected that the current director of EMAC would regret not arriving on time.

Kaye moved up to the witness table. A chair and microphone awaited her. She was introduced to the committee, all of whom knew her by name and reputation.

Senator Percy looked disconcerted. He, too, could smell a setup. “Dr. Rafelson is not on our list, Dick,” he said as Bloch helped Gianelli settle himself at the dais.

“She brings important news,” Gianelli said brusquely.

Kaye was sworn in. Not once did she look at Augustine, though he sat fewer than five feet away.

Senator Thomasen stifled a yawn. She seemed perfectly happy to take her cues from Gianelli. There was some procedural wrangling, more interruptions by Percy and counterarguments by Chase, and finally Percy held up his hands and let her testimony proceed. He was clearly unhappy that the director was still not present.

“You work at Americol, correct, Dr. Rafelson?” Thomasen said, reading from the witness sheet handed to her by Gianelli.

“Yes, Senator.”

“And what is your group doing?”

“We’re studying ERV knockout techniques in mice and chimpanzees, Senator,” Kaye said.

“Bravo,” Senator Percy said. “A worthy effort, to rid the world of viruses.”

“We’re working to understand the roles viruses play in our genome and in our everyday lives,” Kaye corrected. The distinction seemed lost on Percy.

“You also work with the Centers for Disease Control,” Thomasen continued. “Serving as a go-between for Marge Cross and Fern Ridpath, the director of SHEVA affairs at the CDC?”

“Occasionally, but Dr. Ridpath spends more time with our PI.”

“PI?”

“Principal Investigator.”

“And that is?”

“Dr. Robert Jackson,” Kaye said.

Thomasen looked up, as did the others, at the sound of the door at the back of the chamber opening once more. Rachel Browning marched down the aisle, wearing a black dress with a wide red belt. She glanced at Augustine, then looked over the senators on the dais with what she meant to be a puzzled smile. To Kaye, the smile appeared predatory. Two steps behind walked her counsel, a small, gray-haired woman in a beige cotton summer suit.

“You’re late, Ms. Browning,” Senator Thomasen said.

“It was my understanding Dr. Browning was to be testifying alone to the committee, in closed session,” the counsel said, her voice commanding.

“The hearing is closed,” Gianelli said with another sniff. “Senator Percy invited Dr. Augustine, and I invited Dr. Rafelson.”

Browning sat at the end of the table and smiled calmly as her counsel leaned over to set up a small laptop on the desk. The counsel then unfolded blinders, to prevent the computer display from being visible to either side, and took her seat on Browning’s left.

“Dr. Rafelson was interrupted,” Senator Gianelli reminded the chair.

Thomasen smirked. “I’m not sure which tune we’re supposed to be dancing to. Who’s the fiddler?”

“You are, as always, Madam Chair,” Gianelli said.

“I sincerely doubt that,” Thomasen said. “All right, go ahead, Dr. Rafelson.”

Kaye did not like going up against the director of Emergency Action in this way, but she clearly had no choice. She was being squeezed between lines of scrimmage in a game far rougher than football.

“Yesterday evening, a meeting was held in Baltimore to discuss the results of a proprietary Americol health survey. You were present,” Gianelli said. “Tell us what’s happening, Kaye.”

Browning’s look was a warning.

Kaye ignored her. “We have conclusive evidence there have been new first-stage SHEVA deliveries, Senator,” she said. “Expulsion or abortion of interim daughters.”

A hush fell over the chamber. All the senators looked up and around, as if a strange bird had flown into the room.

“I beg your pardon?” Chase said.

“There will be new SHEVA births. We are now in our third wave.”

“Is there not a security protocol?” Percy asked, regarding his fellow senators on the committee with a look of astonishment. “This committee is not known for its discretion. I ask you to consider the political and social fallout—”

“Madam Chair,” the senator from Arizona demanded, exasperated.

“Dr. Rafelson, please explain,” Gianelli said, ignoring the ruckus.

“Blood samples from more than fifty thousand males in committed relationships are again producing SHEVA retroviruses. Current CDC estimates are that more than twenty thousand women will give birth to second-stage SHEVA infants over the next eight to twelve months in the United States. In the next three years, we may have as many as a hundred thousand SHEVA births.”

“My God,” Percy called out, “Will it never end?” His voice made the sound system ring.

“The big ball rolls again,” Gianelli said.

“Is this true, Ms. Browning?” Senator Percy demanded.

Browning drew herself up. “Thank you, Senator. Emergency Action is well aware of these cases, and we have prepared a special plan to counteract their effect. True, there have been miscarriages. Subsequent pregnancies have been reported. There is no proof that these children will have the same kind of virally induced mutations. In fact, the retrovirus being shed by males is not homologous to the SHEVA viruses we are familiar with. We may be witnessing a novel resurgence of the disease, with new complications.”

Senator Percy moved in. “This is awesome and awful news. Ms. Browning, don’t you think it is high time that we free ourselves of these invaders?”

Browning arranged her papers. “I do, Senator Percy. A vaccine has been developed that confers substantial resistance to transmission of SHEVA and many other retroviruses.”

Kaye held onto the edge of the table to keep her hands from shaking. There was no new vaccine; she knew that for a fact. This was the purest scientific bullshit. But now was certainly not the time to call Browning to account. Let her spin her web.

“We expect to be able to stop this new viral phase in its tracks,” Browning continued. She slipped on granny reading glasses and read from notes on her data phone. “We are also recommending quarantine and GPS-chipping and tracking of all infected mothers, to prevent further outbreaks of Shiver. We hope to eventually get court permission to chip all SHEVA children.”

Kaye looked along the row of faces behind the dais, seeing only fear, and then turned to Browning again.

Browning held Kaye’s gaze for a long moment, eyes square and forthright over the granny glasses. “Emergency Action has the authority, under Presidential Decision Directives 298 and 341, and the authority conferred by Congress in our original charter, to announce a full quarantine of all affected mothers. We are ordering separate house arrest for males shedding the new retrovirus, removing them from households where they may infect their partners. The bottom line is we do not want any more SHEVA-affected children to be born.”

Chase had gone pale. “How do we prevent that, Ms. Browning?” he asked.

“If chipping cannot be implemented immediately, we’ll resort to older methods. Ankle bracelets will be attached to monitor the activities of affected males. Other plans are being drawn up even now. We will prevent this new surge of disease, Senator.”

“How long until we can cleanse our bodies of these viruses completely?” Senator Percy asked.

“That’s Ms. Lang’s area of expertise,” Browning said, and turned to her with an ingenuous expression, one professional to another. “Kaye? Any progress?”

“Our division is trying new procedures,” Kaye said. “So far, we have been unable to remove legacy retroviruses—ERVs—from mouse or chimpanzee embryos and proceed to live birth. Removing most or all of the ancient viral genes, including SHEVA genes, produces gross chromosomal abnormalities following mitosis, failure of fertilized eggs to implant, early absorptions, and miscarriages. As well, we have not made progress at Americol with any effective vaccine. There’s a lot to be learned. Viruses—”

“There it is,” Browning interrupted, turning back to the senators. “Utter failure. We have to move now with practical remedies.”

“One wonders, Dr. Rafelson, whether or not you are to be trusted with this work, given your sympathies?” Senator Percy said, and mopped his forehead.

“That’s uncalled for, Senator Percy,” Gianelli said sharply.

Browning swept on. “We hope to share all scientific data with Americol and with this committee,” she said. “We sincerely believe that Ms. Lang and her fellow scientists should be as forthcoming with us, and perhaps a tad more diligent.”

Kaye folded her hands on top of the table.

After the session was gaveled to a close, Augustine sipped a glass of water in the waiting room. Browning walked briskly by.

“Did you have anything to do with this, Mark?” she asked in an undertone, pouring herself a glass from the frosted pitcher. Three years ago, he had underestimated the fear and hatred of which Americans were capable. Rachel Browning had not. If the new director of Emergency Action trailed any rope, Augustine could not see it.

Many more years might pass before she hanged herself.

“No,” Augustine said. “Why would I?”

“Well, the news will get out soon enough.”

Browning turned away from the door to the waiting room as Kaye was ushered in by Laura Bloch, and slipped away with her counsel. Bloch quickly secured Kaye a cup of coffee. Augustine and Kaye stood less than a pace apart. Kaye lifted her cup. “Hello, Mark.”

“Good evening, Kaye. You did well.”

“I doubt that, but thank you,” Kaye said.

“I wanted to tell you I’m sorry,” Augustine said.

“For what?” Kaye asked. She did not know, of course, all that had happened on that day when Browning had called and told him about the possible acquisition of her family.

“Sorry you had to be their decoy,” he said.

“I’m used to it,” Kaye said. “It’s the price I’m paying for being out of the loop for so long.”

Augustine tried for a sympathetic grin, but his stiff face produced only a mild grimace. “I hear you,” he said.

“Finally,” Kaye said primly, and turned to join Laura Bloch.

Augustine felt the rebuff, but he knew how to be patient. He knew how to work in the background, silently and with little credit.

He had long since learned how to emulate the lowly viruses.

9

NEW MEXICO

To enter the Pathogenics zoo, they had to pass through a room with bare concrete walls painted black and dip their shoes in shallow trays of sweet, cloying yellow fluid—a variation on Lysol, Turner explained.

Dicken awkwardly swirled his shoes in the fluid.

“We do it on the way out, too,” Presky said. “Rubber soles last longer.”

They scraped and dried their shoes on black nylon mats and slipped on combination cotton booties and leggings, cinched around the calf. Presky gave each a snood and fine mesh filter masks to cover their mouths, and instructed them to touch as little as possible.

The zoo would have made a small town proud. It filled four warehouses covering several acres, steel and concrete walls lined with enclosures containing loose facsimiles of natural environments. “Comfortable, low stress,” Turner pointed out. “We want all our ancient viruses calm and collected.”

“Dr. Blakemore is working with vervets and howler monkeys,” Jurie said. “Old World and New World. Their ERV profiles are vastly different, as I’m sure you know. We hope soon to have chimps, but perhaps we can just piggyback on Americol’s chimp project.” He glanced at Dicken with speculative brown eyes. “Kaye Lang’s work, no?”

Dicken nodded absently.

The five large primate cages had most of the amenities: tree limbs, swings and rings, floors covered with rubber matting, multiple levels for pacing and climbing, a wide selection of plastic toys. Dicken counted six howler monkeys segregated male and female in two cages, with perforated plastic sheeting between: They could see and smell each other, but not touch.

They walked on and paused before a long, narrow aquarium containing a happily swimming platypus and several small fish. Dicken loved platypuses. He smiled like a little boy at the foot-long juvenile as it breached and dove several times through the clear green water, silvery lines of bubbles streaming from its slick fur.

“Her name is Torrie,” Presky said. “She’s pretty, no?”

“She’s wonderful,” Dicken said.

“Anything with fur, scales, or feathers, has viral genes of interest,” Jurie said. “Torrie’s rather a dud, at the moment, but we like her anyway. We’ve just finished sequencing and comparing the allogenomes of echidnas and, of course, platypuses.”

“We’re taking a census of monotreme ERVs,” Turner explained. “ERVs are useful during viviparous development. They help us subdue our mothers’ immune systems. Otherwise, her lymphocytes would kill the embryos, because in part they type for the father’s tissue. However, like birds, monotremes lay eggs. They should not use ERVs so extensively during early development.”

“The Temin-Larsson-Villarreal hypothesis,” Dicken said.

“You’re familiar with TLV?” Turner asked, pleased. TLV stood for a theory of virus-host interactions concocted from work done over decades, at different institutions, by Howard R. Temin, Eric Larsson, and Luis P. Villarreal. TLV had gained a lot of favor since SHEVA.

Dicken nodded. “So, do they?”

“Do who, what?” Presky asked.

“Do echidnas and birds express ERV particles to protect their embryos?”

“Ah,” Presky said, and smiled mysteriously, then wagged his finger. “Job security.” He faced Turner. Wherever his head moved, his body moved as well, like a clocktower figure. “Torrie will have a mate soon. That effects many changes intriguing to us.”

“Intriguing to Torrie, as well, presumably,” Jurie added, deadpan.

They moved on to a concrete enclosure with a convincing, though small grove of conifers. “No lions or tigers, but we have bears,” Presky said. “Two young males. Sometimes they’re out sparring with each other. They are brothers, they like to play fight.”

“Bears, raccoons, badgers,” Turner added. “Peaceful enough critters, virally, at least. Apes, including us, seem to have the most active and numerous ERV.”

“Most plants and animals have their own capabilities in biological propaganda and warfare. War happens only if the populations are pressed hard,” Jurie said. “Shall we hear Dr. Turner’s favorite example?”

Turner took them across to a large enclosure containing three rather mangy-looking European bison. Four large, shaggy animals, fur hanging in patches, regarded the human onlookers with ageless placidity. One shook its head, sending dust and straw flying. “Fresh in modern memory, for hamburger eaters anyway: Toxin gene transfer to E. coli bacteria in cattle,” Turner began. “Modern factory farming and slaughterhouse technique puts severe stress on the cattle, who send hormonal signals to their multiple tummies, their rumen. E. coli react to these signals by taking up phages—viruses for bacteria—that carry genes from another common gut bacteria, Shigella. Those genes just happen to code for Shiga toxin. The exchange does not hurt the cow, fascinating, no? But when a predator kills a cow-like critter in nature, and bites into the gut—which most do, eating half-digested grass and such, wild salad it’s called—it swallows a load of E. coli packed with Shiga toxin. That can make the predators—and us—very sick. Sick or dead predators reduce the stress on cows. It’s a clever relief valve. Now we sterilize our beef with radiation. All the beef.”

“Personally, I never eat rare meat,” Jurie said with a contemplative arch of his brows. “Too many loose genes floating around. Dr. Miller, our chief botanist, tells me I should be concerned about my greens, as well.”

Orlin Miller raised his hands in collegial defense. “Equal time for veggies.”

They entered Building Two, the combination aviary and herpetarium. Mounted on benches beside the large sliding warehouse door, glass boxes housed king snakes coiled beneath red heat lamps.

“We have evidence of a slow but constant lateral flow of genes between species,” Jurie said. “Dr. Foresmith is studying transfer of genes between exogenous and endogenous viruses in chickens and ducks, as well as in the Psittaciformes, parrots.”

Foresmith, an imposing, gray-haired fellow in his early fifties, formerly of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—Dicken knew him for his work on minimum genome bacteria—took up the topic. “Flu and other exogenous viruses can exchange genes and recombine within host or reservoir populations,” he said, his voice a bass rumble. “New strains of flu used to come rumbling out of Asia every year. Now, we know that exogenous and endogenous viruses—herpes, poxviruses, HIV, SHEVA—can recombine in us. What if these viruses make a mistake? Slip a gene into the wrong location in a cell’s DNA… A cell starts to ignore its duties and grows out of control. Voilà, a malignant tumor. Or, a relatively mild virus acquires one crucial gene and flips from a persistent to an acute infection. One really big mistake, and pow,” he slapped his fist into his palm, “we suffer one hundred percent mortality.” His smile was at once admiring and nervous. “One of our paleo guys figures we can explain a lot of mass extinctions that way, in theory. If we could resurrect and reassemble the older, extremely degraded ERVs, maybe we would learn what actually happened to the dinosaurs.”

“Not so fast,” Dicken said, raising his hands in surrender. “I don’t know anything about dinosaurs or stressed cows.”

“Let’s hold off on the wilder theories for now,” Jurie admonished Foresmith, but his eyes gleamed. “Tom, you’re next.”

Tom Wrigley was the youngest in the group, in his mid-twenties, tall, dark-haired, and homely, with a red nose and a perpetually pleasant expression. He smiled shyly and handed Dicken a coin, a quarter. “That’s roughly what a birth control pill costs. My group is studying the effect of birth control on endogenous retrovirus expression in women between the ages of twenty and fifty.”

Dicken rolled the quarter in his hand. Tom held out his palm, lifting his eyebrows, and Dicken returned the coin.

“Tell them why, Tom,” Jurie prodded.

“Twenty years ago, some researchers found that HIV infected pregnant women at a higher rate. Some human endogenous retroviruses are closely related to HIV, which goes after our immune systems with a vengeance. The fetus within the mother expresses lots of HERV from its placenta, which some think helps subdue the mom’s immune system in a beneficial way—just enough so that it won’t attack the developing fetus. TLV, as you know, Dr. Dicken.”

“Howard Temin is a god in this place,” Dee Dee Blakemore said. “We’ve set up a little shrine in C wing. Prayers every Wednesday.”

“Birth control pills produce conditions in women similar to pregnancy,” Wrigley said. “We decided that women on birth control would make an excellent study group. We have twenty volunteers, five of them our own researchers.”

Blakemore raised her hand. “I’m one,” she said. “I’m feeling testy already.” She growled at Wrigley and bared her canines. Wrigley held up his hands in mock fright.

“Eventually, SHEVA females will be getting pregnant,” Wrigley said, “and some may even use birth control pills. We want to know how that will effect production of potential pathogens.”

“Sexual maturity and pregnancy in the new children is likely to be a time of great danger,” Jurie said. “Retroviruses released in the natural course of a second generation SHEVA pregnancy could transfer to humans. The result could be another HIV-like disease. In fact, Dr. Presky here, among others, believes something similar explains how HIV got into the human population.”

Presky weighed in. “A hunter in search of bush meat could have slaughtered a pregnant chimp.” He shrugged; the hypothesis was still speculation, as Dicken knew well. As a postdoc in the late 1980s, Dicken had spent two years in the Congo and Zaire tracking possible sources for HIV.

“And last but not least, our gardens. Dr. Miller?”

Orlin Miller pointed to flats of greenery and flower gardens spread out under skylights and artificial sun bulbs hanging in imposing phalanxes, like great glassy fruit, on the north side of the warehouse. “My group studies transfer of viral genes between plants and insects, funguses and bacteria. As Dr. Jurie hinted earlier, we’re also studying human genes that may have originated in plants,” Miller added. “I can just see the Nobel hanging from that one.”

“Not that you’ll ever go up on stage to collect,” Jurie warned.

“No, of course not,” Miller said, somewhat deflated.

“Enough. Just a taste,” Jurie said, stopping in front of a basin containing a thick growth of young corn. “Seven other division heads who could not be here tonight extend their congratulations—to me, for landing Dr. Dicken. Not necessarily do they congratulate Dr. Dicken.”

The others smiled.

“Thanks, gentlemen,” Jurie said, and waved bye-bye, as if to a group of school children. The directors said their farewells and filed out of the warehouse. Only Turner remained.

Jurie fixed Dicken with a gaze. “NIH tells me I can find a use for you at Pathogenics,” Jurie said. “NIH funds a substantial portion of my work here, through Emergency Action. Still, I’m curious. Why did you accept this appointment? Not because you love and respect me, Dr. Dicken.” Jurie loosely crossed his arms and his bony fingers engaged in a fit of searching, marching along toward the elbows, drawing the arms into a tighter hug.

“I go where the science is,” Dicken said. “I think you’re primed to discover some interesting things. And I think I can help. Besides…” He paused. “They gave you a list. You picked me.”

Jurie lifted one hand dismissively. “Everything we do here is political. I’d be a fool not to recognize it,” he said. “But, frankly, I think we’re winning. Our work is too important to stop, for whatever reason. And we might as well have the best people working with us, whatever their connections. You’re a fine scientist, and that’s the bottom line.” Jurie strolled before a plastic-wrapped greenhouse filled with banana trees, obscured by the translucent plastic. “If you think you’re ready, I have a theoretical problem for you.”

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Dicken said.

“I’d like for you to start with something a little off the beaten path. Up for it?”

“I’m listening,” Dicken said.

“You can work with Dr. Wrigley’s volunteers. Assemble a staff from our resident postdocs under Dee Dee’s supervision, no more than two to begin with. They’re analyzing ancient promoter regions associated with sexual characteristics, physiological changes in humans possibly induced by retroviral genes.” Jurie swallowed conspicuously. “Viruses have induced changes quite evident in our SHEVA children. Now, I’d like to study more mundane instances in humans. Can you think of the fold of tissue of which I’m suspicious?” Jurie asked.

“Not really,” Dicken said.

“It’s like an alarm mounted on a gate kept closed until maturity. When the gate is breached, that announces a major accomplishment, a crucial change; announces it with a burst of pain and a whole cascade of hormonal events. The hormones generated by this experience appear to activate HERV and other mobile elements, preparing our bodies for a new phase of life. Reproduction is imminent, this breach tells the body. Time to prepare.”

“The female hymen,” Dicken guessed.

“The female hymen,” Jurie said. “Is there any other kind?” He was not being sarcastic. It was a straight question. “Are there other gates to be opened, other signals?… I don’t know. I’d like to know.” Jurie studied Dicken, eyes glittering with enthusiasm once again. “I’m supposing that viruses have altered our phenotype to produce the hymen. Rupturing the hymen gives them warning that sex is taking place, so they can prepare to do all that they do. By altering expression of key genes, promoting or blocking them, the viruses may change our behavior as well. Let’s find out how.” He reached into his jacket pocket, removed a small plastic case, and handed the case to Dicken. “My notes. If you find them useful, I’ll be content.”

“Good,” Dicken said. He knew very little about hymens; he wondered what his other resources would be.

“SHEVA females don’t have hymens, you know,” Jurie said. “No such membranes. Comparison should bring up fascinating divergences in hormonal pathways and viral activations. And viral activations are what concern me.”

Dicken found himself nodding. He was almost hypnotized by the audacity of the hypothesis. It was perverse; it was perversely brilliant. “You think menarche in SHEVA females will switch on viral mutations?” he asked.

“Possibly,” Jurie said evenly, as if discussing the weather. “Interested?”

“I am,” Dicken said after a thoughtful pause.

“Good.” Jurie reached up and pulled his head to one side, making the bones in his neck pop. His eyes turned elsewhere, and he nodded once and walked away, leaving Turner and Dicken alone in the warehouse between the trailers and the gardens.

The interview was over.

Turner escorted Dicken back through the zoo, the foot baths, and the corridors to the steel door. They stopped off at the maintenance office to get the key to Dicken’s dorm room.

“You’ve survived meeting the Old Man,” Turner said, then showed Dicken the way to the dorm wing for new residents. He held up a key, pinched the key’s tag, turning it from blue to red, and dropped it into Dicken’s palm. He stared at Dicken for a long, uncomfortable moment, then said, “Good luck.”

Turner walked back down the hall, shaking his head. Over his shoulder, he called out, “Jesus! Hymens. What next?”

Dicken closed the door to the room and switched on the overhead light. He sat on the narrow, tightly made-up bed, and rubbed his temples and jaw muscles with trembling fingers, dizzy from repressed emotion.

For the first time in his life, the prey Dicken was after was not microbial.

It was a disease, but it was entirely human.

10

ARIZONA

Stella awoke to the sound of an over-under songfest between barracks. The wake-up bell had not yet rung. She rolled between the crisp white sheets of the top bunk and stared up at the ceiling tiles. She was familiar with the routine: A few dozen boys and girls were hanging out of the windows of their barracks, singing to each other across the razor-wire fence. The over was loud and almost tuneless; the under was subtle and not very clear from where she lay. She had no doubt it carried a lot of early-morning gossip, however.

She closed her eyes for a moment and listened. The singers in the barracks tended to slip into harshly sweet and sky-shaking laments, pushing sounds around both sides of their ridged tongues, circulating breath through nose and throat simultaneously. The two streams of song began to play counterpoint, weaving in and out in a way designed to prevent any eavesdropping by the counselors.

Not that the counselors had yet figured out how to interpret underspeech.

Stella heard loud clanging. She closed her eyes and grinned. She could see it all so clearly: Counselors were going through the barracks, banging metal trash-can lids and shouting for the children to shut up. Slowly, the songs scattered like gusts of scented air. Stella imagined the heads withdrawing from the windows, children rushing to their bunks, climbing under their covers.

Tomorrow, other barracks would take their turns. There was a kind of lottery; they tried to predict how long it would take the counselors to get from their compound to the guilty barracks, and how long they could be fooled as to which were the offending barracks. Her barracks might join in and undergo the same trash-can-lid response. Stella would be part of the songfest. She did not look forward to the challenge. She had a high, clear overvoice, but needed work on her underspeech. She was not quite as facile as the others.

Silence returned to the morning. She sank under the covers, waiting for the alarm bell. New uniforms had been deposited at the end of each bunk. The bunks were stacked three high, and the kids began each morning with a shower and a change of clothes, to keep the scent from building on their bodies or what they wore.

Stella knew that her natural smell was not offensive to humans. What concerned the camp counselors and captains was persuasion.

The girls below her, Celia and Mandy, were stirring. Stella preferred to be among the first in the showers. The wake-up bell at the south end of the hall went off as she ran toward the gate to the showers. Her thin white robe flapped at mid-thigh level.

Fresh towels and brushes were provided every day. She took a towel and a toothbrush but avoided using toothpaste. It had a lingering smell that she suspected was meant to confuse. Stella stood at the long basin with the polished steel mirror and ran the moist brush over her teeth, then massaged her gums with one finger, as Mitch had showed her how to do almost ten years ago.

Twenty other girls were already in the shower room, most from other barracks. Stella’s building—barracks number three—tended to be slow. It contained the older girls. They were not as chipper or enthusiastic as the younger girls. They knew all too well what the day had in store—boredom, ritual, frustration. Stagnation.

The youngest girl in the camp was ten. The oldest was fifteen.

Stella Nova was fourteen.

After she finished, Stella returned to her bunk to dress. She looked down the lines of bunks. Most of the girls were still in the showers. It was her day to act as monitor for the barracks. She had to be inconspicuous—simply walking from bunk to bunk, bending over, and taking a big whiff would probably land her in detention, with Miss Kantor asking pointed questions. But it had to be done.

Stella carried a stack of school newspapers printed the day before. She walked from bunk to bunk, placing a paper on each bunk and gently sniffing the unmade sheets without bending over.

Within ten minutes, as the girls returned from the showers and began to dress, Stella had a good picture of the health and well-being of the barracks. Later, she would report to her deme mentor. The mentors changed from day to day or week to week. Underspeech or cheek-flashes would tell her who was responsible today. She would make a quick report with underspeech and scenting, before the heavily supervised, once-a-week, coed outdoor activity began.

The girls had thought this procedure up all by themselves. It seemed to work. The bed check was not just useful in knowing how each member was faring, it was also an act of defiance.

Defiance was essential to keeping their sanity.

Perhaps they would have early warning if the humans passed along any more diseases. Perhaps it was just a way of feeling they had some control over their lives. Stella didn’t care.

Catching the scent of her barracks mates was reward enough. It made her feel as if she were a part of something worthwhile, something not human.

11

Americol Research Headquarters

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

“Elcob hobe!”

Liz Cantrera rushed past Kaye, a rack of clear plastic trays clattering in her arms beneath the flopping edge of a folder clamped between her teeth. She deposited the rack near the safety sink and pulled the black-bound folder from her mouth. “This just in from La Robert.”

Kaye hung her coat on the knobs behind the lab door. “Another salvo?”

“Mm hmm. I think Jackson is jealous you were asked to testify and not he.”

“Nobody should envy me that.” Kaye waggled her fingers. “Give it to me.”

Cantrera smirked and handed her the folder. “He’ll be pushing a disease model long after the Karolinska hangs gold on you.”

Kaye leafed through the fifty-page brief and response to their work of the last two years. This was the big one. Robert Jackson, PI for the larger group and in some respects her boss, was working very hard to get Kaye out of his labs, out of the building, out of the way.

The expected publication date for Jackson’s paper in the Journal of Biologics and Epigenetics was sticky-tabbed to the last page: December. “How nice he’s passed peer review,” Kaye said.

Liz put her hands on her hips and stood in an attitude of defiant expectation. She pushed back a strand of curly strawberry blonde hair and loudly chewed a wad of gum. Her eyes were bright as drops of fresh blue ink. “He says we’re removing necessary transcription factors surrounding our ERV targets, throwing out the baby with the contaminated bathwater.”

“A lot of those factors are transactivated by ERV. You can’t have it both ways, Dr. Jackson. Well, at least we can shoot that one down.” Kaye slumped on a stool. “We’re not getting anywhere,” she muttered. “We’re taking out the viruses and not getting any baby chimps. What does it take for him to come around?” She glanced up at Liz, who was still waggling her hips and snapping her chewing gum in mock defiance of La Robert.

Liz cracked a big sappy smile. “Feel better?”

Kay shook her head and laughed despite herself. “You look like a Broadway gamine. Who are you supposed to be, Bernadette Peters?”

Liz cocked her hips and fluffed her hair with one hand. “She’s a corker. Which play?” she demanded. “Revival of Mame?”

“Sweeney Todd,” Kaye said.

“That would be Winona Ryder,” Liz countered.

Kaye groaned. “Where do you get so much energy?”

“Bitterness. Seriously, how did it go?”

“I’m being used as a prop by one side and a patsy by the other. I feel like Dorothy in the tornado.”

“Sorry,” Liz said.

Kaye stretched and felt her back pop. Mitch used to do that for her. She riffled through Jackson’s folder again and found the page that through instinct, and a touch of luck, had caught her eye a moment before: suspect lab protocols.

As ever, Jackson was trapped in a maze of in vitro studies—test-tube and petri dish blind alleys using Tera2 tumor cell lines—proven traps for making mistakes with ERV. Hell, he’s even using chicken embryos, she thought. Egglayers don’t use ERVs the same way we do.

“Jackson’s vaccines kill monkeys,” Kaye said softly, tapping the page. “Marge doesn’t like projects that never get past animal studies.”

“Shall we play another game of Gotcha with Dr. Jackson?” Liz asked innocently.

“Sure,” Kaye said. “I am almost cheered by this.” She dropped the folder on her small, crowded desk.

“I’m off to check our arrays, and then I’m going home,” Liz called out as she pushed through the door with the tray. “I’ve been working all night. You in for the week?”

“Until they fire me,” Kaye said. She rubbed her nose reflexively. “I need to look over the fragile site studies from last week.”

“Prepped and digitized. They’re on the photobase,” Liz said. “There’s some leftover spaghetti in the fridge.”

“Heavenly,” Kaye said.

“Bye,” Liz called as the door swung closed behind her.

Kaye got up and rubbed her nose again. It felt slightly stuffy, not unpleasantly so. The lab smelled unusually sweet and fresh, not that it ever smelled dirty. Liz was a stickler for cleanliness.

The scent was hard to place, not at all like perfume or flowers.

There was a long day’s work ahead, preparing for tomorrow’s morning meeting. Kaye closed her eyes, hoping to find her calm spot; she needed to focus on the chromosome results from last week. Get the sour clamp of Washington off her gut.

She pulled the stool over to the workstation and entered her password, then called up the tables and photos of chimpanzee chromosome mutations.

Early-stage embryos modified for lab work had had all of their single-copy ERVs deleted, but all multicopy ERVs, LINEs, and “defective” ERVs left intact. They had then been allowed to develop for forty-eight hours. The chromosomes, bunched up by mitosis, were removed, photographed, and crudely sequenced. What Kaye was looking for were anomalies around fragile sites and hot spots in the chromosomes—regions of genes that responded quickly to environmental change, suggesting rapid adaptive response.

The modified chimp chromosomes were severely distorted—she could tell that just by looking at the photos. The fragile sites were all screwed up, broken and rearranged incorrectly. The embryos would never have implanted in the womb, much less gone to term. Even single-copy ERVs were important to fetal development and chromosome adaptation in mammals, perhaps especially so in primates.

She looked over the analysis and saw random and destructive methylation of genes that should be actively transcribing, necessary lengths of DNA mothballed like a fleet of old ships, curling the chromatin into an agony of alternating misplaced activity and dark, inactive lassitude.

They looked ugly, those chromosomes, ugly and unnatural. The early-stage embryos, growing under the tutelage of such chromosomes, would die. That was the story of everything they had done in the lab. If, by rare chance, the ERV-knockout embryos managed to implant and begin development, they were invariably resorbed within the first few weeks. And getting that far had required giving the chimp mothers massive drug regimens developed for human mothers at fertilization clinics to prevent miscarriages.

The ERVs served so many functions in the developing embryos, including mediating tissue differentiation. And it was already obvious that TLV—the Temin-Larsson-Villarreal conjecture—was correct. Highly conserved endogenous retroviruses expressed by the trophectoderm of the developing embryo—the portion that would develop into the surrounding amnion and placenta—protected against attacks by the mother’s immune system. The viral envelope proteins selectively subdued the mother’s immune response to her fetus without weakening the mother’s defenses against external pathogens, an exquisite dance of selectivity.

Because of the protective function of legacy retroviruses, ERV knockout—the removal or stifling of most or all of the genome’s “original sins”—was invariably fatal.

Kaye vividly remembered the chill she had felt when Mitch’s mother had described SHEVA as “original sin.” How long ago had that been—fifteen years? Just after they had conceived Stella.

If SHEVA and other ERV constituted original sin, then it was starting to look as if all placental mammals, perhaps all multicelled life forms, were filled with original sin, required it, died without it.

And wasn’t that what the Garden of Eden was all about? The beginning of sex and self-knowledge and life as we know it.

All because of viruses.

“The hell with that,” Kaye muttered. “We need a new name for these things.”

12

ARIZONA

Roll call was Stella’s least favorite time of day, when the girls were all gathered together and Miss Kantor walked between the rows under the big tent.

Stella sat cross-legged and drew little figures of flowers and birds in the dust with her finger. The canvas flapped with the soft morning breeze. Miss Kantor walked between the lines of seated, cross-legged adolescents and leafed through her daybook. She relied entirely on paper, simply because losing an e-pad or laptop in the reserve was a severe offense, punishable by dismissal.

The dormitories held no phones, no satellite feeds, no radios. Television was limited to educational videos. Stella and most of the other children here had come to abhor television.

“Ellie Ann Garcia.”

“Here.”

“Stella Nova Rafelson.”

“Here,” Stella called out, her voice silvery in the cool desert air.

“How’s your cold, Stella?” Miss Kantor asked as she walked down the row.

“Done,” Stella answered.

“Eight days, wasn’t it?” Miss Kantor tapped her pen on the daybook page.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“That’s the fifth wave of colds we’ve had this year.”

Stella nodded. The counselors kept careful and tedious track of all infections. Stella had spent several hours being examined, five days ago; so had two dozen other children with similar colds.

“Kathy Chu.”

“Here!”

Miss Kantor walked by Stella again after she had finished. “Stella, are you scenting?”

Stella looked up. “No, Miss Kantor.”

“My little sensor tells me you are.” She tapped the nosey on her belt. Stella was not scenting, and neither was anybody around her. Miss Kantor’s electronic snitch was wrong, and Stella knew why; Miss Kantor was having her period and that could confuse the nosey. But Stella would never tell her that.

Humans hated to be clued when they produced revealing odors.

“You’ll never learn to live in the outside world if you can’t control yourself,” Miss Kantor said to Stella, and knelt in front of her. “You know the rules.”

Stella got to her feet without being prompted. She did not know why she was being singled out. She had done nothing unusual.

“Wait over by the truck,” Miss Kantor said.

Stella walked to the truck, brilliant white under the morning sun. The air over the mountains was intense and blue. It was going to be hot in a few hours, but it might rain heavily later; that would make the late-afternoon air perfect for catching up. She did not want to miss that.

Miss Kantor finished her count and the kids filed off to the morning classes in the trailers and bungalows scattered over the dusty grounds. The counselor and her assistant, a quiet, plump young woman named Joanie, walked across the gravel to the truck. Miss Kantor would not look straight at Stella.

“I know it wasn’t just you,” Miss Kantor said. “But you’re the only one I could catch. It has to stop, Stella. But I’m not going to punish you this time.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Stella knew better than to argue. When things went her way, Miss Kantor was reasonable and fairly easygoing, but any show of defiance or contradiction and she could get harsh. “Can I go to classes now?”

“Not yet,” Miss Kantor said, placing her notepad in the truck. She opened the rear door of the truck. “Your father is visiting,” she said. “We’re going back to the infirmary.”

Stella sat in the back of the truck, behind the plastic barrier, feeling confused. Miss Kantor climbed into the front seat. Joanie closed the door for her and went back to the tent. “Is he there, now?” Stella asked.

“He’ll arrive in an hour or so,” Miss Kantor said. “You two just got approval. That’s pretty good, isn’t it?”

“What do they want?” Stella asked suddenly, before she could control her tongue.

“Nothing. It’s a family visit.”

Miss Kantor switched on the truck motor. Stella could feel her disapproval. Parental visits were futile at the best of times, Miss Kantor believed. The children would never be fully integrated into human society, no matter what the school policy said. She knew the children too well. They just could not behave appropriately.

Worse still, Miss Kantor knew that Stella’s father had served time in prison for assaulting Emergency Action enforcement officers. Having him as a visitor would be something of an affront to her. She was a holdover from the times when Sable Mountain School had been a prison.

Stella had not seen Mitch in three years. She hardly remembered what he smelled like, much less what he looked like.

Miss Kantor drove over the gravel to the paved road, and then between the brush half a mile to the brick building they called the hospital. It wasn’t really a hospital. As far as Stella knew, for sure, the hospital was just the administration and detention center for the school. It had been a hospital once, for the prison. Some kids claimed the hospital was where they injected salt into your cheeks, or resected your tongue, or Botoxed the new facial muscles that made your expressions so compelling.

It was the place they tried to turn SHEVA kids into humans. Stella had never met a kid who had undergone such torments, but that was explained, some said, by the fact that they sent those kids away to Suburbia, a town made up of nothing but SHEVA kids trying to act just like humans.

That was not true, as far as Stella knew, but the hospital was where they sent you when they wanted to draw blood. She had been there many times for that purpose.

There were lots of stories in the camps. Few of them were true, but most were scary, and the kids could get ominously bored.

As they drove through a razor-wire fence and over a moat, Stella felt something sad and cold grow in her.

Memory.

She did not want to lose her focus. She stared through the window, resenting Mitch for coming. Why now? Why not when she had her act together and could tell him she had accomplished something worthwhile? Life was still too confused. The last visit with her mother had been painful. Stella had not known what to say. Her mother had been so sad and full of needs neither could satisfy.

She hoped Mitch would not just sit and stare at her over the table in the family conference room. Or ask pointed questions. Or try to tell Stella there was hope they would get together again. Stella did not think she could stand that.

Stella dipped her head and rubbed her nose. She touched the tip of her finger to the corner of her eye and then to her tongue, out of sight of the rearview mirror. Her eyes were moist and the tears tasted of bitter salt. She would not cry openly, however. Not in front of a human.

Miss Kantor stopped the truck in the parking lot of the flat brick building, got out, and opened Stella’s door. Stella followed her into the hospital. As they turned a corner, through a gap in the brick breezeway she saw a long yellow bus drawn up beside the processing office. A load of new kids had arrived. Stella hung back a few steps from Miss Kantor as they passed through the glass doors and walked to the detention center.

The door to the secretary’s office was always open, and through the wide window beyond, Stella thought she would catch a glimpse of the new kids from the shipment center. That would be something to take back to the deme; possible recruits or news from outside.

Suddenly, irrationally, she hated Mitch. She did not want him to visit. She did not want any distractions. She wanted to focus and never have to worry about humans again. She wanted to lash out at Miss Kantor, strike her down to the linoleum floor, and run away to anywhere but here.

Through Stella’s brief, fierce scowl—a more intense scowl than most humans could manage—she caught a glimpse of the lineup of children beyond the secretary’s window. Her scowl vanished.

She thought she recognized a face.

Stella dropped to remove her shoe and turned it upside down, shaking it. Miss Kantor looked back and stopped with hands on hips.

The nosey on her belt wheeped.

“Are you scenting again?” she asked.

“No, ma’am,” Stella said. “Rock in my shoe.” This pause gave her time enough to chase down the memory of the face in the lineup. She stood, shuffled awkwardly for a moment until Miss Kantor glanced away, then shot a second look through the window.

She did know the face. He was taller now and skinnier, almost a walking skeleton, his hair unruly and his eyes flat and lifeless in the bright sun. The line began to move and Stella flicked her gaze back to the corridor and Miss Kantor.

She no longer worried about Mitch.

The skinny kid outside was the boy she had met in Fred Trinket’s shed in Virginia, when she had run away from Kaye’s and Mitch’s house.

It was Will. Strong Will.

13

BALTIMORE

Kaye shut down the displays and removed the specimens, then carefully returned them to a preservation drawer in the freezer. She knew for the first time that she was close to the end of her work at Americol. Three or four more experiments, six months at most of lab work, and she could go back to Congress and face down Rachel Browning and tell the oversight subcommittee that all apes, all monkeys, all mammals, probably all vertebrates, even all animals—and possibly all forms of life above the bacteria—were genetic chimeras. In a real sense, we were all virus children.

Not just Stella. Not just my daughter and her kind.

All babies use viruses to get born. All senators and all representatives and the president and all of their wives and children and grandchildren, all the citizens of the United States, and all the people of the world, are all guilty of original sin.

Kaye looked up as if at a sound. She touched the bridge of her nose and peered around the lab, the ranks of white and beige and gray equipment, black-topped tables, lamp fixtures hanging from the ceiling like upside-down egg cartons. She felt a gentle pressure behind her eyes, the cool, liquid silver trickle down the back of her head, a growing awareness that she was not alone in the room, in her body.

The caller was back. Twice in the past three years, she had spent as much as three days in its presence. Always before, she had been traveling or working on deadline and had tried to ignore what she had come to regard as a pointless distraction.

“This isn’t a good time,” she said out loud and shook her head. She stood up and stretched her arms and bent to touch her toes, hoping exercise might push the caller into the background. “Go away.” It did not go away. Its signal came in with even greater conviction. Kaye started to laugh helplessly and wiped away the tears. “Please,” she whispered, leaning against a lab bench. She tipped a stack of petri dishes with her elbow. As she was rearranging them, the caller struck full force, flooding her with delicious approval. Kaye shut her eyes and leaned forward, her entire body filled with that extraordinary sensation of oneness with something very close and intimate, yet infinitely creative and powerful.

“It feels like you love me,” she said, shaking with frustration. “So why do you torment me? Why don’t you just tell me what you want me to do?” Kaye slid down the bench to a chair near a desk in the corner of the lab. She put her head between her knees. She did not feel weak or even woozy; she could have walked around and even gone about her daily work. She had before. But this time it was just too much.

Her anger swelled even over the insistent waves of validation and approval. The first time the caller had touched her, Mitch and Stella had been taken away. That had been so bad, so unfair; she did not want to remember that time now. And yet this affirmation forced her to remember.

“Go away. Please. I don’t know why you’re here. This world is cruel, even if you aren’t, and I have to keep working.”

She looked around, biting her lip, seeing the lab, the equipment, so neatly arranged, the dark beyond the window. The wall of night outside, the bright rationality within.

“Please.”

She felt the voice become smaller, but no less intense. How polite, she thought. Abruptly, panicked at this new loss, this possible withdrawal, she jumped to her feet.

“Are you trying to clue me in to something?” she asked, desperate. “Reward me for my work, my discoveries?”

Kaye received the distinct impression that this was not the case. She got up and made sure the door was locked. No sense having people wander in and find her talking to herself. She paced up and down the aisles. “So you’re willing to communicate, just not with words,” she said, eyes half-closed. “All right. I’ll talk. You let me know whether I’m right or wrong, okay? This could take a while.”

She had long since learned that an irreverent attitude had no effect on the caller. Even when Kaye had loathed herself for what she had done by abandoning Mitch in prison and her daughter in the schools, ruining all their lives in a desperate gamble to use all the tools of science and rationality, the caller had still radiated love and approval.

She could punish herself, but the caller would not.

Even more embarrassing, Kaye had come to think of the caller as definitely not female, and probably not neuter—but male. The caller was nothing like her father or Mitch or any other man she had ever met or known, but it seemed strangely masculine nonetheless. What that meant psychologically, she was most unwilling to discover. It was a little too de rigueur, a little too churchy, for comfort.

But the caller cared little about her qualms. He was the most consistent thing in her life—outside of her need to help Stella.

“Am I doing the right thing?” she asked, looking around the lab. Her tremors stopped. She let the extraordinary calm wash over her. “That means yes, I suppose,” she said tentatively. “Are you the Big Guy? Are you Jesus? Or just Gabriel?”

She had asked these questions before, and received no response. This time, however, she felt an almost insignificant alteration in the sensations flooding through her. She closed her eyes and whispered, “No. None of the above. Are you my guardian angel?”

Again, a few seconds later, she closed her eyes and whispered, “No.

“Then what are you?”

No response at all, no change, no clues.

“God?”

Nothing.

“You’re inside me or up there or someplace where you can just pump out love and approval all day long, and then you go away and leave me in misery. I don’t understand that. I need to know whether you’re just something in my head. A crossed nerve. A burst blood vessel. I need solid reassurance. I hope you don’t mind.”

The caller expressed no objection, not even to the extent of withdrawing under the assault of such questioning, such blasphemies.

“You’re really something else, you know that?” Kaye sat before the workstation and logged on to the Americol intranet. “There’s nothing Sunday school about you.”

She glanced at her watch—6 p.m.—and looked up the roster that recorded who was in the building at this hour.

On the first floor, chief radiologist Herbert Roth was still at his post, working late. Just the man she needed. Roth was in charge of the Noninvasive Imaging Lab. She had worked with him two weeks ago taking scans of Wishtoes, their oldest female chimp.

Roth was young, quiet, dedicated to his craft.

Kaye opened the lab door and stepped out into the hall. “Do you think Mr. Roth will want to scan me?” she asked no one in particular.

14

ARIZONA

They did not let Stella see Mitch for hours. First Stella was visited by a nurse who examined her, took a cheek swab, and drew a few cc’s of blood.

Stella looked away as the nurse lightly jabbed her with the needle. She could smell the nurse’s anxiety; she was only a few years older than Stella and did not like this.

Afterward, Miss Kantor took Stella to the visitor’s area. The first thing Stella noticed was that they had removed the plastic barrier. Tables and chairs, nothing more. Something had changed, and that concerned her for a moment. She patted the cotton patch taped to the inside of her elbow. After an hour, Miss Kantor returned with a pile of comic books.

“X-Men,” she said. “You’ll like these. Your father’s still being examined. Give me the cotton.”

Stella pulled off the tape and handed it to Miss Kantor, who opened a plastic bag to store it.

“He’ll be done soon,” Miss Kantor said with a practiced smile.

Stella ignored the comics and stood in the bare room with its flowered wallpaper and the single table and two plastic chairs. There was a water cooler in the corner and a couple of lounge chairs, patched and dirty. She filled a paper cup with water. A window opened from the main office, and another window looked out over the parking lot. No hot coffee or tea, no hot plate for warming food—no utensils. Family visits were not meant to last long or to be particularly comfortable.

She curled the paper cup in her hand and thought alternately about her father and about Will. Thinking about Will pushed her father into the background, if only for a moment, and Stella did not like that. She did not want to be chaotic. She did not want to be unpredictable; she wanted to be faithful to the goal of putting together a stable deme, away from the school, away from human interference, and that would require focus and an emotional constancy.

She knew nothing about Will. She did not even know his last name. He might not remember her. Perhaps he was passing through, getting a checkup or going through some sort of quarantine on his way to another school.

But if he was staying…

Joanie opened the door. “Your father’s here,” she said. Joanie always tried to hide her smell behind baby powder. Her expression was friendly but empty. She did what Miss Kantor wanted and seldom expressed her own opinions.

“Okay,” Stella said, and took a seat in one plastic chair. The table would be between them, she hoped. She squirmed nervously. She had to get used to the thought of seeing Mitch again.

Joanie pointed the way through the door and Mitch came in. His left arm hung by his side. Stella looked at the arm, eyes wide, and then at Mitch’s denim jacket and jeans, worn and a little dusty. And then she looked at his face.

Mitch was forcing a nervous smile. He did not know what to do, either.

“Hello, sweetie,” he said.

“You can sit in the chair,” Joanie said. “Take your time.”

“How long do we have?” Mitch asked Joanie. Stella hated that. She remembered him as being strong and in charge, and his having to ask about such a thing was wrong.

“We don’t have many visits scheduled today. There are four rooms. So… take your time. A couple of hours. Let me know if you need anything. I’ll be in the office right outside.”

Joanie shut the door and Mitch looked at the chair, the table. Then, at his daughter.

“Don’t you want a hug?” he asked Stella.

Stella stood, her cheeks tawny with emotion. She kept her hands by her sides. Mitch walked across the room slowly, and she tracked him like a wild animal. Then the currents of air in the room brought his scent, and the cry came up out of her before she could stop it. Mitch took the last step and grabbed her and squeezed and Stella shook in his arms. Her eyes filled with tears that dripped on Mitch’s jacket.

“You’re so tall,” Mitch murmured, swinging her gently back and forth, brushing the tips of her shoes against the linoleum.

She planted her feet and pushed him back and tried to pack in her emotions, but they did not fit. They had exploded like popcorn.

“I’ve never given up,” Mitch said.

Stella’s long fingers clutched at his jacket. The smell of him was overwhelming, comfortable and familiar; it made her feel like a little girl again. He was basic and simple, no elaborations, predictable and memorable; he was the smell of their home in Virginia, of everything she had tried to forget, everything she had thought was lost.

“I couldn’t come to see you,” he said. “They wouldn’t let me. Part of probation.”

She nodded, bumping her chin gently against his shoulder.

“I sent your mother messages.”

“She gave them to me.”

“There was no gun, Stella. They lied,” Mitch said, and for a moment he looked no older than her, just another disappointed child.

“I know. Kaye told me.”

Mitch held his daughter at arm’s length. “You’re gorgeous,” he said, his thick brows drawing together. His face was sunburned. Stella could smell the damage to his skin, the toughening. He smelled like leather and dust above the fundamental of just being Mitch. In his smell—and in Kaye’s—she could detect a little of her own fundamental, like a shared license number in the genes, a common passkey to the emotions.

“They want us to sit… here?” Mitch asked, swinging one arm at the table.

Stella wrapped her arms around herself, still jammed up inside. She did not know what to do.

Mitch smiled. “Let’s just stand for a while,” he said.

“All right,” Stella said.

“Try to get used to each other again.”

“All right.”

“Are they treating you well?” Mitch asked.

“They probably think so.”

“What do you think?”

Shrug, long fingers wrapping around her wrists, making a little cage of her hands and arms. “They’re afraid of us.”

Mitch clenched his jaw and nodded. “Nothing new.”

Stella’s eyes were hypnotic as she tried to express herself. Her pupils shifted size and gold flecks passed like fizz in champagne. “They don’t want us to be who we are.”

“How do you mean?”

“They move us from one dorm to another. They use sniffers. If we scent, we’re punished. If we cloud-scent or fever scent, they break us up and keep us in detention.”

“I’ve read about that,” Mitch said.

“They think we’ll try to persuade them. Maybe they’re afraid we’ll try to escape. They wear nose plugs, and sometimes they fill the dorms with fake strawberry or peach smell when they do a health inspection. I used to like strawberry, but now it’s awful. Worst of all is the Pine-Sol.” She shoved her palm against her nose and made a gagging sound.

“I hear the classes are boring, too.”

“They’re afraid we’ll learn something,” Stella said, and giggled. Mitch felt a tingle. That sound had changed, and the change was not subtle. She sounded wary, more mature… but something else was at work.

Laughter was a key gauge of psychology and culture. His daughter was very different from the little girl he had known.

“I’ve learned a lot from the others,” Stella said, straightening her face. Mitch traced the faint marks of lines under and beside her eyes, at the corners of her lips, fascinated by the dance of clues to her emotions. Finer muscle control than she had had as a youngster… capable of expressions he could not begin to interpret.

“Are you doing okay?” Mitch asked, very seriously.

“I’m doing better than they want,” she said. “It isn’t so bad, because we manage.” She glanced up at the ceiling, touched her earlobe, winked. Of course, they were being monitored; she did not want to give away any secrets.

“Glad to hear it,” Mitch said.

“But of course there’s stuff they already know,” she added in a low voice. “I’ll tell you about that if you want.”

“Of course, sweetie,” Mitch said. “Anything.”

Stella kept her eyes on the top of the table as she told Mitch about the groups of twenty to thirty that called themselves demes. “It means ‘the people,’” she said. “We’re like sisters in the demes. But they don’t let the boys sleep in the same dorms, the same barracks. So we have to sing across the wire at night and try to recruit boys into our demes that way.”

“That’s probably for the best,” Mitch said. He lifted one eyebrow and pinched his lips together.

Stella shook her head. “But they don’t understand. The deme is like a big family. We help each other. We talk and solve problems and stop arguments. We’re so smart when we’re in a deme. We feel so right together. Maybe that’s why…”

Mitch leaned back as his daughter suddenly spoke in two bursts at once:

“We need to be together/We’re healthier together

“Everyone cares for the others/Everyone is happy with the others

“The sadness comes from not knowing/The sadness comes from being apart.”

The absolute clarity of the two streams astonished him. If he caught them immediately and analyzed, he could string them together into a serial statement, but over more than a few seconds of conversation, it was obvious he would get confused. And he had no doubt that Stella could now go on that way indefinitely.

She looked at him directly, the skin over the outside of her eye orbits drawing in with a pucker he could neither duplicate nor interpret. Freckles formed around the outside and lower orbits like little tan-and-gold stars; she was sparking in ways he had never seen before.

He shivered in both admiration and concern. “I don’t know what that means, when… you do that,” he said. “I mean, it’s beautiful, but…”

“Do what?” Stella asked, and her eyes were normal again.

Mitch swallowed. “When you’re in a deme, how many of you talk that way… at once?”

“We make circles,” Stella said. “We talk to each other in the circle and across the circle.”

“How many in the circle?”

“Five or ten,” Stella said. “Separately, of course. Boys have rules. Girls have rules. We can make new rules, but some rules already seem to be there. We follow the rules most of the time, unless we feel there’s an emergency—someone is feeling steepy.”

“Steepy.”

“Not part of cloud. When we cloud, we’re even more like brothers and sisters. Some of us become mama and papa, too, and we can lead cloud, but mama and papa never make us do what we don’t want to do. We decide together.”

She looked up at the ceiling, her chin dimpling. “You know about this. Kaye told you.”

“Some, and I’ve read about some of it. I remember when you were trying out some of these… techniques on us. I remember trying to keep up with you. I wasn’t very good. Your mother was better.”

“Her face…” Stella began. “I see her face when I become mama in cloud. Her face becomes my face.” Her brows formed elegant and compelling double arches, grotesque and beautiful at once. “It’s tough to explain.”

“I think I understand,” Mitch said. His skin was warming. Being around his own daughter made him feel left out, even inferior; how did it make the counselors feel, their keepers?

In this zoo, who were the animals, really?

“What happens when someone disagrees? Do you compel her? Him?”

Stella thought about this for a few seconds. “Everyone is free in cloud, but they cooperate. If they don’t agree, they hold that thought until the time is right, and then cloud listens. Sometimes, if it’s an emergency, the thought is brought up immediately, but that slows us down. It has to be good.”

“And you enjoy being in the cloud?”

“Being in cloud,” Stella corrected. “All clouds are part of each other, just smeared out. We sort the differences and stuff later, when the demes catch up. But we don’t get to do that often, so most of us don’t know what it’s really like. We just imagine. Sometimes they let it happen, though.”

She did not tell Mitch that those were the times when nearly everybody got taken to the hospital to be sampled, after.

“Sounds very friendly,” Mitch said.

“Sometimes there’s hate,” Stella said soberly. “We have to deal with it. A cloud feels pain just like an individual.”

“Do you know what I’m feeling, right now?”

“No,” Stella said. “Your face is kind of a blank.” She smiled. “The counselors smell like cabbages when we do something unexpected./ They smelled like broccoli when we caught colds a few days ago./

“I’m over my cold now and it wasn’t serious but we acted sicker to worry them.”

Mitch laughed. The crossed intonations of resentment and wry superiority tickled him. “That’s pretty good,” he said. “But don’t push it.”

“We know,” Stella said primly, and suddenly Mitch saw Kaye in her expression, and felt a rush of real pride, that this young woman still came of them, from them. I hope that doesn’t limit her.

He also felt a sudden burst of longing for Kaye.

“Is prison like this?” Stella asked.

“Well, prison is a bit harder than here, even.”

“Why aren’t you with Kaye, now?”

Mitch wondered how he could possibly explain. “When I was in prison—she was going through rough times, making hard decisions. I couldn’t be a part of those decisions. We decided we’d be more effective if we worked separately. We… couldn’t cloud, I guess you’d say.”

Stella shook her head. “That’s fit, like drops of rain hitting each other. Slipskin is when the drops fall apart. Cloud is a bigger thing.”

“Oh,” Mitch said. “How many words for snow?”

Stella’s expression became one of a simple lack of comprehension, and for a moment Mitch saw his daughter as she had been even ten years ago, and loved her fiercely. “Your mother and I talk every few weeks. She’s busy now, working in Baltimore. Doing science.”

“Trying to turn us back into humans?”

“You are human,” Mitch said, his face going red.

“No,” Stella said. “We aren’t.”

Mitch decided this wasn’t the time or the place. “She’s trying to learn how we make new children,” he said. “It’s not as simple as we thought.”

“Virus children,” Stella said.

“Yes, well, if I understand it correctly, viruses play all sorts of roles. We just discovered that fact when we looked at SHEVA. Now… it’s pretty confused.”

Stella seemed, if anything, offended by this. “We’re not new?”

“Of course you’re new,” Mitch said. “I really don’t understand it very well. When we all get together again, your mother will know enough to explain it to us. She’s learning as fast as she can.”

“We’re not taught biology here,” Stella said.

Mitch clamped his teeth together. Keep them down. Keep them under lock and key. Otherwise, you might prime their fuse.

“That makes you angry?” Stella asked.

He could not answer for a moment. His fists knotted on the top of the table. “Of course,” he said.

“Make them let us go. Get us all out of here,” Stella said. “Not just me.”

“We’re trying,” Mitch said, but knew he wasn’t being entirely truthful. As a convicted felon, he had a limited range of options. And his own sense of resentment and damage reduced his effectiveness in groups. In his darkest moods, he thought that was why he and Kaye were no longer living together.

He had become a political liability. A lone wolf.

“I have lots of families here, and they’re growing,” Stella said.

“We’re your family,” Mitch said.

Stella watched him for a moment, puzzled.

Joanie opened the door. “Time’s up,” she said.

Mitch spun around in his chair and tapped his watch. “It’s been less than an hour,” he said.

“There’ll be more time tomorrow if you can come back,” Joanie said.

Mitch turned to Stella, crestfallen. “I can’t stay until tomorrow. There’s something…”

“Go,” Stella said, and stood. She came around the table as Mitch got to his feet and hugged her father again, brisk and strong. “There’s lots of work for all of us.”

“You are so adult now,” Mitch said.

“Not yet,” Stella said. “None of us knows what that will be like. They probably won’t let us find out.”

Joanie tsked, then escorted Mitch and Stella from the room. They parted in the brick corridor. Mitch gave her a small wave with his good arm.

Mitch sat in the hot interior of his truck, under the low Arizona sun, sweating and near despair, lonelier than he had ever been in his life.

Through the fence and across the brush and sand, he saw more children—hundreds of them—walking between the bungalows. His hand drummed on the steering wheel.

Stella was still his daughter. He could still see Kaye in her. But the differences were startling. Mitch did not know what he had expected; he had expected differences. But she was not just growing up. The way Stella behaved was sleek and shiny, like a new penny. She was unfamiliar, not distant in the least, not unfriendly, just focused elsewhere.

The only conclusion he could come to, as he turned over the big engine in the old Ford truck, was a self-observation.

His own daughter scared him.

After the nurse filled another tube with her blood, Stella walked back to the bungalow where they would watch videos after dinner of human children playing, talking, sitting in class. It was called civics. It was intended to change the way the new children behaved when they were together. Stella hated civics. Watching people without knowing how they smelled, and watching the young human faces with their limited range of emotions, disturbed her. If they did not face the televisions, however, Miss Kantor could get really ugly.

Stella deliberately kept her mind clear, but a tear came out of her left eye and traveled down her cheek. Not her right eye. Just her left eye.

She wondered what that meant.

Mitch had changed so much. And he smelled like he had just been kicked.

15

BALTIMORE

The imaging lab office was separated from the Magnetic Resonance Imager—the Machine—by two empty rooms. The forces induced by the toroidal magnets of the Machine were awesome. Visitors were warned not to go down the hall without first emptying their pockets of mechanical and electronic devices, pocket PCs, wallets, cell phones, security name tags, eyeglasses, watches. Getting closer to the Machine required exchanging day clothes for metal-free robes—no zippers, metal buttons, or belt buckles; no rings, pins, tie clasps, or cuff links.

Everything loose within a few meters of the Machine was made of wood or plastic. Workers here wore elastic belts and specially selected slippers or athletic shoes.

Five years ago, right in this facility, a scientist had forgotten the warnings and had her nipple and clitoris rings ripped out. Or so the story went. People with pacemakers, optic nerve rewiring, or any sort of neural implants could not go anywhere near the Machine.

Kaye was free of such appliances, and that was the first thing she told Herbert Roth as she stood in the door to the office.

Slight, balding, in his early forties, Roth gave her a puzzled smile as he put down his pencil and pushed a batch of papers aside. “Glad to hear it, Ms. Rafelson,” he said. “But the Machine is turned off. Besides, we spent several days imaging Wishtoes and I already know that about you.”

Roth pulled up a plastic chair for Kaye and she sat on the other side of the wooden desk. Kaye touched the smooth surface. Roth had told her that his father had crafted it from solid maple, without nails, using only glue. It was beautiful.

He still has a father.

She felt the cool river in her spine, the sense of utter delight and approval, and closed her eyes for a moment. Roth watched her with some concern.

“Long day?”

She shook her head, wondering how to begin.

“Is Wishtoes pregnant?”

“No,” Kaye said. She took the plunge. “Are you feeling very scientific?”

Roth looked around nervously, as if the room was not completely familiar. “Depends.” His eyes squinched down and he could not avoid giving Kaye the once-over.

“Scientific and discreet?”

Roth’s eyes widened with something like panic.

“Pardon me, Ms. Rafelson—”

“Kaye, please.”

“Kaye. I think you’re very attractive, but… If it’s about the Machine, I’ve already got a list of Web sites that show… I mean, it’s already been done.” He laughed what he hoped was a gallant laugh. “Hell, I’ve done it. Not alone, I mean.”

“Done what?” Kaye asked.

Roth flushed crimson and pushed his chair back with a hollow scrape of the plastic legs. “I have no idea what in hell you’re talking about.”

Kaye smiled. She meant nothing specific by the smile, but she saw Roth relax. His expression changed to puzzled concern and the excess color faded from his face. There is something about me, about this, she thought. It’s a charmed moment.

“Why are you down here?” Roth asked.

“I’m offering you a unique opportunity.” Kaye felt impossibly nervous, but she was not going to let that stop her. As far as she knew, there had never been an opportunity like this in the history of science—nothing confirmed, at least, or even rumored. “I’m having an epiphany.”

Roth raised one eyebrow, bewildered.

“You don’t know what an epiphany is?” Kaye asked.

“I’m Catholic. It’s a feast celebrating Jesus’ divinity. Or something like that.”

“It’s a manifestation,” Kaye said. “God is inside me.”

“Whoa,” Roth said. The word hung between them for several seconds, during which time Kaye did not look away from Roth’s eyes. He blinked first. “I suppose that’s great,” he said. “What does it have to do with me?”

“God comes to most of us. I’ve read William James and other books about this kind of experience. At least half of the human race goes through it at one time or another. It’s like nothing else I’ve ever felt. It’s life changing, even if it is very… very inconvenient. And inexplicable. I didn’t ask for it, but I can’t, I won’t deny that it is real.”

Roth listened to Kaye with a fixed expression, brow wrinkled, eyes wide, mouth open. He sat up in the chair and folded his arms on the desk. “No joke?”

“No joke.”

He considered further. “Everyone is under pressure here.”

“I don’t think that has anything to do with it,” Kaye said. Then, slowly, she added, “I’ve considered that possibility, I really have. I just don’t think that’s what it is.”

Roth licked his lips and avoided her stare. “So what does it have to do with me?”

She reached out to touch his arm, and he quickly withdrew it. “Herbert, has anyone ever imaged a person who’s being touched by God? Who’s having an epiphany?”

“Lots of times,” Roth said defensively. “Persinger’s research. Meditation states, that sort of thing. It’s in the literature.”

“I’ve read them all. Persinger, Damasio, Posner, and Ramachandran.” She ticked the list off on her fingers. “You think I haven’t researched this?”

Roth smiled in embarrassment.

“Meditation states, oneness, bliss, all that can be induced with training. They are under some personal control… But not this. I’ve looked it up. It can’t be induced, no matter how hard you pray. It comes and it goes as if it has a will of its own.”

“God doesn’t just talk to us,” Roth said. “I mean, even if I believed in God, such a thing would be incredibly rare, and maybe it hasn’t happened for a couple of thousand years. The prophets. Jesus. That sort of thing.”

“It isn’t rare. It’s called many things, and people react differently. It does something to you. It turns your life around, gives it direction and meaning. Sometimes it breaks people.” She shook her head. “Mother Teresa wept because she didn’t have God making regular visits. She wanted continuing confirmation of the value of her work, her pain, her sacrifices. Yet no one actually knows if Mother Teresa experienced what I’m experiencing…” She took a deep breath. “I want to learn what is happening to me. To us. We need a baseline to understand.”

Roth tried to fit this into some catalog of social quid pro quos, and could not. “Kaye, is this really the place? Aren’t you supposed to be doing research on viruses? Or do you think God is a virus?”

Kaye stared at Roth in disbelief. “No,” she said. “This is not a virus. This is not something genetic and it’s probably not even biological. Except to the extent that it touches me.”

“How can you be so sure?”

Kaye closed her eyes again. She did not need to search. The sensation rolled on, coming in waves of amazement, of childlike glee and adult consternation, all of her emotions and reactions met not with tolerance, nor even with amusement, but with an equally childlike yet infinitely mature and wise acceptance.

Something was sipping from Kaye Lang’s soul, and found her delicious.

“Because it’s bigger than anything I know,” she said finally. “I have no idea how long it’s going to last, but whatever it is, it’s happened before to people, many times, and it’s shaped human history. Don’t you want to see what it looks like?”

Roth sighed as he examined the images on the large monitor.

Two and a half hours had passed; it was almost ten o’clock. Kaye had been through seven varieties of NMR, PET, and computerized tomography scans. She had been injected, shielded, injected again, rotated like a chicken on a spit, turned upside down. For a while, she wondered if Roth was bent on taking revenge for her imposition.

Finally, Roth had wrapped her head in a white plastic helmet and put her through a final and, he claimed, rather expensive CT-motion scan, capable, he muttered vaguely, of extraordinary detail, focusing on the hippocampus, and then, in another sweep, the brain stem.

Now she sat upright, her wrist wrapped in a bandage, her head and neck bruised from clamps, feeling a vague urge to throw up. Somewhere near the end of the procedures, the caller had simply faded, like a shortwave radio signal from across the seas. Kaye felt calm and relaxed, despite her soreness.

She also felt sad, as if a good friend had just departed, and she was not sure they would ever meet again.

“Well, whatever he is,” Roth said, “he isn’t talking. None of the scans show extensive speech processing, above the level of normal internal dialog and my own datum of questions. You seem, no surprise, a little nervous—but less so than other patients. Stoic might be the word. You show a fair amount of deep brain activity, signifying a pretty strong emotional response. Do you embarrass easily?”

Kaye shook her head.

“There’s a little indication of something like arousal, but I wouldn’t call it sexual arousal, not precisely. Nothing like orgasm or garden-variety ecstasy such as, for example, you might find in someone using consciousness-altering drugs. We have recordings—movies—of people meditating, engaging in sex, on drugs, including LSD and cocaine. Your scans don’t match any of those.”

“I can’t imagine having sex in that tube.”

Roth smiled. “Mostly enthusiastic young people,” he explained. “Here we go—CT motion scans coming up.” He became deeply absorbed in the false-color images of her brain on the display: dark fields of gray overlaid with symmetric, blossoming Rorschach birds, touched here and there with little coals of metabolic activity, maps of thought and personality and deep subconscious processes. “All right,” he said to himself, pausing the scroll. “What’s this?” He touched three pulsing yellow splotches, a little bigger than a thumbnail, points on a scan taken midway through their session. He made small humming sounds, then flipped through an on-line library of images from other explorations, some of them years and even decades old, until he seemed satisfied he had what he wanted.

Roth pushed his chair back with an echoing scrape and pointed to a blue-and-green sagittal section of a head, small and oddly shaped. He filled in and rotated the image in 3-D, and Kaye made out the outlines of an infant’s skull and the fog of the brain within. Radiating fields of mental activity spun within ghostly curves of bone and tissue.

An indefinite grayish mass seemed to issue from the infant’s mouth.

“Not so much detail, but it’s a pretty close match,” Roth said. “Famous experiment in Japan, about eight years ago. They scanned a normal birthing session. Woman had had four kids previously. She was an old pro. The machines didn’t bother her.”

Roth studied the image. He hummed for a moment, then clicked his fingernails like castanets. “This is a scan of the infant’s brain while he or she was getting acquainted with mom. Taking the teat, I’d say.” He used his finger to point out the gray mass, magnified the activity centers in the infant’s brain, rotated them to the proper azimuth, then superimposed the baby’s scan on Kaye’s.

The activity centers lined up neatly.

Roth smiled. “What do you think? A match?”

Kaye was lost for a moment, remembering the first time Stella had suckled, the wonderful sensation of the baby at her nipple, of her milk letting down.

“They look the same,” she said. “Is that a mistake?”

“Don’t think so,” Roth said. “I could make some animal brain comparisons. There’s been some work in the last few years on bonding in kittens and puppies, even some in baboons, but not very good. They don’t hold still.”

“What does it mean?” Kaye asked. She shook her head, still lost. “Whatever He is, He’s not using speech—that much has been clear from the start. Irritating, actually.”

“Mumbles from the burning bush?” Roth said. “And no stone tablets.”

“No speeches, no proclamations, nothing,” Kaye confirmed.

“Look, this is the closest I can come to a match,” Roth said.

With her finger, Kaye traced the Rorschach birds inside the infant’s brain. “I still don’t understand.”

Roth tilted his head. “Looks to me like you’ve made a big connection. You’re imprinting on someone or something big-time. You’ve become a baby again, Ms. Rafelson.”

16

Kaye unlocked her apartment, entered, and used her briefcase to block the front door from closing. She punched in her six-number code to deactivate the alarm, then took off her sweater, hung it in the closet, and stood in the hallway, breathing deeply to keep from sobbing. She wasn’t sure how much longer she could endure this. The voids in her life were like deserts she could not cross.

“What about you?” she asked the empty air. She walked into the darkened living room. “The way I see it, if you’re some kind of big daddy, you protect those you love, you keep them from harm. What’s the God… what’s the damned,” she finally shouted it, “the God damned excuse?”

The phone beeped. Kaye jumped, pulled her eyes away from the corner of the ceiling she had been addressing, stepped to the kitchen counter, and reached across to pick up the handset.

“Kaye? It’s Mitch.”

Kaye drew in another breath, almost of dread, certainly of guilt, before speaking. “I’m here.” She sat stiffly upright in the easy chair and covered the mouthpiece as she told the lights to switch on. The living room was small and neat, except for stacks of journals and offprints arrayed at angles to each other on the coffee table. Other piles spilled across the floor beside the couch.

“Are you all right?”

“No-o-o,” she said slowly. “I’m not. Are you?”

Mitch did not answer this. Good for him, Kaye thought.

“I’m on the road again,” he said.

A pause.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“Oregon. My horse broke down and I thought I’d give you a call, ask if you had some extra… I don’t know. Horseshoes.” He sounded even more exhausted than she was. Kaye intercepted something else in his tone and zeroed in with sudden hope.

“You saw Stella?”

“They let me see Stella. Lucky guy, right?”

“Is she well?”

“She gave me a big hug. She’s looking pretty good. She cried, Kaye.”

Kaye felt her throat catch. She held the phone aside and coughed into her fist. “She misses you. Sorry. Dry throat. I need some water.” She walked into the kitchen to take a bottle from the refrigerator.

“She misses both of us,” Mitch said.

“I can’t be there. I can’t protect her. What’s to miss?”

“I just wanted to call and tell you about her. She’s growing up. It makes me feel lost, thinking that she’s almost grown and I wasn’t around.”

“Not your fault,” she said.

“How’s the work?”

“Finished soon,” Kaye said. “I don’t know if they’ll believe it. So many are still stuck in old ruts.”

“Robert Jackson?”

“Yeah, him, too.”

“You’re lucky to be working at what you do best,” Mitch said. “Listen, I’m—”

“You don’t deserve what happened, Mitch.”

Another pause. You didn’t deserve being dumped, she added to herself. Kaye looked back to that empty corner of wall and ceiling and continued, “I miss you.” She tightened her lips to keep them from trembling. “What’s in Oregon?”

“Eileen’s got something going, very mysterious, so I left the dig in Texas. I mistook a clamshell for a whelk. I’m getting old, Kaye.”

“Bullshit,” Kaye said.

“You give me the word, I’ll drive straight to Maryland.” Mitch’s voice steeled. “I swear. Let’s go get Stella.”

“Stop it,” Kaye said, though with sudden gentleness. “I want to, you know that. We have to keep to our plan.”

“Right,” Mitch said, and Kaye was acutely aware he had had no part in making the plan. Perhaps until now Mitch had not really been informed there was a plan. And that was Kaye’s fault. She had not been able to protect her husband or her daughter, the most important people on Earth. So who am I to accuse?

“What are the kids up to? How has she changed?” Kaye asked.

“They’re forming groups. Demes, they call them. The schools are trying to keep them broken up and disorganized. I’d guess they’re finding ways around that. There’s a lot of scenting involved, of course, and Stella talks about new kinds of language, but we didn’t have time for details. She looks healthy, she’s bright, and she doesn’t seem too stressed out.”

Kaye fixed on this so intensely her eyes crossed. “I tried to call her last week. They wouldn’t put me through.”

“The bastards,” Mitch said, his voice grating.

“Go help Eileen. But keep in touch. I really need to hear from you.”

“That’s good news.”

Kaye let her chin drop to her chest, and stretched out her legs. “I’m relaxing,” she said. “Listening to you relaxes me. Tell me what she looks like.”

“Sometimes she moves or acts or talks like you. Sometimes she reminds me of my father.”

“I noticed that years ago,” Kaye said.

“But she’s very much her own person, her own type,” Mitch said. “I wish we could run our own school, bring lots of kids together. I think that’s the only way Stella would be happy.”

“We were wrong to isolate her.”

“We didn’t have any choice.”

“Anyway, that’s not an issue now. Is she happy?”

“Maybe happier, but not exactly happy,” Mitch said. “I’m calling on a landline now, but let me give you a new phone code.”

Kaye took up a pad and wrote down a string of numbers keyed to a book she still kept in her suitcase. “You think they’re still listening?”

“Of course. Hello, Ms. Browning, you there?”

“Not funny,” Kaye said. “I ran into Mark Augustine on Capitol Hill. That was…” It took her a few seconds to remember. “Yesterday. Sorry, I’m just tired.”

“What about him?”

“He seemed apologetic. Does that make sense?”

“He was busted to the ranks,” Mitch said. “He deserves to be apologetic.”

“Yeah. But something else…”

“You think the atmosphere is changing?”

“Browning was there, and she treated me like a Roman general standing over a dying Gaul.”

Mitch laughed.

“God, that is so good to hear,” Kaye said, tapping her pen on the message pad and drawing loops around the numbers, across the pad.

“Give me the word, Kaye. Just one word.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Kaye said, and sucked in a breath against the lump in her throat. “I hate it so much, being alone.”

“I know you’re on the right course,” Mitch said, and Kaye heard the reserve in his voice, filling in, even if it means leaving me outside.

“Maybe,” Kaye said. “But it is so hard.” She wanted to tell him about the other things, the imaging lab, chasing down her visitor, the caller, and finding nothing conclusive. But she remembered that Mitch had not reacted well to her attempts to talk about it on their last night together in the cabin.

She remembered as well the love-making, familiar and sweet and more than a little desperate. Her body warmed. “You know I want to be with you,” Kaye said.

“That’s my line.” Mitch’s voice was hopeful, fragile.

“You’ll be at Eileen’s site. It is a site, I assume?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“What do you think she’s found?”

“She’s not telling,” Mitch said.

“Where is it?”

“Can’t say. I get my final directions tomorrow.”

“She’s being more cagey than usual, isn’t she?”

“Yeah.” She heard Mitch moving, breathing into the handset. She could hear as well the wind blowing behind and around him, almost picture her man, rugged, tall, his head lit up by the dome light in the booth. If it was a booth. The phone might be next to a gas station or a restaurant.

“I can’t tell you how good this is,” Kaye said.

“Sure you can.”

“It is so good.”

“I should have called earlier. I just felt out of place or something.”

“I know.”

“Something’s changed, hasn’t it?”

“There’s not much more I can do at Americol. Showdown is tomorrow. Jackson actually dropped off his game plan today, he’s that cocky. They either listen to the truth or they ignore it. I want to… I’ll just fly out to see you. Save me a shovel.”

“You’ll get rough hands.”

“I love rough hands.”

“I believe in you, Kaye,” Mitch said. “You’ll do it. You’ll win.”

She did not know how to answer but her body quivered. Mitch murmured his love and Kaye returned his words, and then they cut off the connection.

Kaye sat for a moment in the warm yellow glow of the small living room, surveying the empty walls, the plain rented furniture, the stacks of white paper. “I’m imprinting,” she whispered. “Something says it loves me and believes in me but how can anything fill an empty shell?” She rephrased the question. “How can anyone or anything believe in an empty shell?”

Leaning her head back, she felt a tingling warmth. With some awe she realized she had not asked for help, yet help had arrived. Her needs—some of them, at least—had been answered.

At that, Kaye finally let down her emotions and began to weep. Still crying, she made up her bed, fixed herself a cup of hot chocolate, fluffed a pillow and set it against the headboard, disrobed and put on satin pajamas, then fetched a stack of reprints from the living room to read. The words blurred through her tears, and she could hardly keep her eyes open, but she needed to prepare for the next day. She needed to have all her armor on, all her facts straight.

For Stella. For Mitch.

When she could stand it no more and sleep was stealing the last of her thoughts, she ordered the light to turn off, rolled over in bed, and moved her lips, Thank you. I hope.

You are hope.

But she could not help asking one more question. Why are you doing this? Why talk to us at all?

She stared at the wall opposite the bed, then dropped her focus to the cover rising with her knees above the bed. Her eyes widened and her breath slowed. Through the shadowy grayness of the cover, Kaye seemed to look into an infinite and invisible fount. The fount poured forth something she could only describe as love, no other word was right, however inadequate it was; love never-ending and unconditional. Her heart thudded in her chest. For a moment, she was frightened—she could never deserve that love, never find its like again on this Earth.

Love without condition—without desire, direction, or any quality other than its purity.

“I don’t know what that means,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

Kaye felt the vision, if that was what it was, withdraw and fade—not out of resentment or anger or disappointment, but just because it was time to end. It left a mellow, peaceful glow behind, like candles thick as stars behind her eyes.

The wonder of that, the awesome wonder, was too much for her. She laid her head back and stared into the darkness until she drifted off to sleep.

Almost immediately, it seemed, she dreamed of walking over a field of snow high in the mountains. It did not matter that she was lost and alone. She was going to meet someone wonderful.

17

OREGON

The high desert morning was warm and it was barely seven o’clock. Mitch walked across the motel parking lot, swung his bag into the battered old truck’s side seat and shielded his eyes against the sun over the low, gray eastern hills. An hour to the Spent River. Half an hour to the outlying camp. He had his instructions from Eileen, and one more warning: Don’t breathe a word to anyone. No students, no wives, no girlfriends, no dogs, no cats, no guinea pigs: Got it?

He got it.

He pulled out of the Motel 50 parking lot, scraping his bumper on the way. The old truck was on its last few thousand miles; it smelled of singed oil and was starting to cough blue smoke on the grades. Mitch loved big old trucks and cars. He would be sad to see the truck die.

The motel’s red sign grew tiny in his mirror. The road was straight and on either side lay rolling brown terrain daubed with greasewood and sage and low, stubby pines and an occasional sketchy line of fence posts, leaning and forlorn, the wire broken and coiled like old hair.

The air got cooler as the truck climbed the gentle grade into the high country. The Spent River was not on the itinerary of most tourists. Surrounded by forest, in the long shadow of Mount Hood, it consisted of a winding, flat sandy bed cutting through black lava cliffs, leaving tufty islands and curving oxbows. The river itself hadn’t flowed for many thousands of years. It was not well known to archaeologists, and with good reason; the geological history of alternating floods—gravel beds filled with pebbly lava and rounded bits of granite and basalt—and periodic eruptions of lava made it hellacious to dig and disappointing to those who did. Indians had not built or stayed much in these areas over the last few thousand years.

Out of time, out of human interest, but now Eileen Ripper had found something.

Or she had looked into the sun too long.

The road mesmerized him after a while, but he was jounced to full alertness when it started to get rough from washouts. The land had taken on a five o’clock stubble of trees and grass. The asphalt switched to gravel.

A small state sign came and went: spent river recreation area: three miles. The sign looked as if it had been out in the sun for at least fifty years.

The road curved west abruptly, and as he turned, Mitch caught a gleam about a mile ahead. It looked like a car windshield.

The old truck barked out blue smoke as he took a short grade, then he spotted a white Tahoe and saw a stocky figure standing up and waving from the open driver’s door. He pulled over to the side of the road and draped his arm out the window. Enough grip remained in his hand to clutch the door frame and make the gesture look casual.

Eileen had gone completely gray. Her clothes and skin and hair had weathered to the color of the land out here.

“I recognized your taste in trucks,” Eileen said as she walked across the gravel shoulder. “God, Mitch, you’re as obvious as a sailor with a stack of two-dollar bills.”

Mitch smiled. “You’re a regular Earth mother,” he said. “You should at least wear a red scarf.”

Eileen pulled a rag from her pocket and draped it from her belt. “Better?”

“Just fine.”

“How’s your arm?” she asked, patting it.

“Limp,” Mitch said.

“We’ll put you on toothbrush detail,” she said.

“Sounds good. What have you got?”

“It’s dishy,” Eileen said. “It’s grand.” She did a little jig on the gravel. “It’s deadly dangerous. Want to come see?”

Mitch squint-eyed her for a moment. “Why not?” he said.

“It’s just over there,” she said and pointed north, “about ten more miles.”

Mitch scowled. “I’m not sure my truck will make it.”

“I’ll follow and scoop up parts.”

“How can you tell me when to turn?” Mitch asked.

“It’s a game, old friend,” Eileen said. “You’ll have to sniff it out, same as I did.” She smiled wickedly.

Mitch squinted harder and shook his head. “For Christ’s sake, Eileen.”

“Older than Christ by at least eighteen thousand years,” she said.

“You should wear thicker hats,” he said.

Eileen looked tired beneath the bravado. “This is the big one, Mitch. In a couple of hours, I swear to God you won’t even know who you are.”

18

ARIZONA

At eleven in the morning, Stella walked with all the girls from their barracks through a gate in the razor wire fence to the open field, attended by Miss Kantor and Joanie and five other adults.

Once a week, the counselors and teachers let the SHEVA children mingle coed on the playground and under the lunch table awnings.

The girls were uncharacteristically quiet. Stella felt the tension. A year ago, going through the fence to socialize with the boys had been no big deal. Now, every girl who imagined herself a deme maker was plotting with her partners as to which boys would be best in their group. Stella did not know what to think about this. She watched the demes form and disintegrate and reform in the girl’s dorms, and her own plans changed in her head from day to day; it was all so confusing.

The sky was sprinkled with broken clouds. She shaded her eyes and looked up and saw the moon hanging in the pure summer blueness, a wan face blankly amused by their silliness. Stella wondered what the moon smelled like. It looked kindly enough. It looked a little simple, actually.

“Single file. We’re going to South Section Five,” Miss Kantor told them all, and waved her hand to give them direction. The girls shuffled where she pointed, cheeks blank.

Stella saw the boys come through their own fence line from the opposite rows of barracks. They were more touching heads and weaving and pointing out the girls they noticed. They smiled like goofs, cheeks brown at this distance with indistinguishable color.

“Oh, joy,” Celia said listlessly. “Same old.”

The sexes would be allowed to mingle with heavy supervision for an hour.

“Is he here?” Celia asked. Stella had told her last night about Will.

Stella did not know. She hadn’t seen him yet. She didn’t think it likely. She indicated all this with a low whistle, a few desultory freckles, and a twitch of her shoulders. “My, you’re-KUK touchy,” Celia said. She bumped shoulders with Stella as they walked. Stella did not mind.

“I don’t know what they expect us to do in an hour,” Stella said.

Celia giggled. “We could try to-KUK kiss one of them.”

Stella’s brows formed an uneven pair of curves and her neck darkened. Celia ignored this. “I could kiss James Callahan. I almost let him hold my hand last year.”

“We were kids last year,” Stella said.

“What-KUK are we now?” Celia asked.

Stella was looking down a line of boys drawn up in the sun beside the lunch table awnings. The tallest she recognized immediately.

“There he is,” she said, and pointed him out to Celia. Three other girls moved in and followed her point, all smelling of aroused curiosity—smoke and earth.

Will stood, looking at the ground with shoulders slumped and hands stuck firmly in his pockets. The other boys seemed to be ignoring him, which was to be expected; boys didn’t cloud as quickly with newcomers as girls did. It would take Will a few days to form tight bonds with his barracks partners.

Or maybe not, Stella thought, watching him. Maybe he never would.

“He’s not very pretty,” said Felice Miller, a small, brown-haired girl with thin, strong arms and thicker legs.

“How do you know?” asked Ellie Gow. “You can’t smell him from here.”

“He wouldn’t smell pretty, either,” Felice said disdainfully. “He’s too tall.”

Ellie winced. She was known for her sensitivity to sounds and a preference for talking while lying under a blanket. “What’s that got to do with a cat’s fart?”

Felice smiled tolerantly. “Whiskers,” she said.

Stella paid no attention to them.

“Someone you met when you were young can exert a profound influence,” Felice continued.

“I didn’t see him for very long,” Stella admitted.

Celia quickly told them the story of Stella and Will, speaking in her halting double, while the counselors and teachers huddled and arranged the rules of the confab. The rules changed week to week. Today, on the outskirts of the field, three men stood watching them with binoculars.

Nine months ago, Stella had been taken aside and driven to the hospital with five other girls after such a meeting. They had all given blood and one, Nor Upjohn, had suffered other indignities she would not describe, and afterward she had smelled like a mildewed orange, a warning scent.

The girls made their formation, four long columns of fifty each. The counselors did not try to stop them from talking, and Stella saw that some of them—possibly all—had turned off their nosies.

Will looked across the brown grass and gravel at the lines of girls. His brows drew into a narrow straight line and he seemed to be sucking on something sour. His matted hair was cut jagged and his cheeks were hollow pits, as if he had lost some teeth. He looked older than the others, and tired. He looked defeated.

“He’s not pretty, he’s ugly,” Felice said, and with a shrug turned her attention to the other boys they had not seen before. Stella had counted the new arrivals on the bus: fifty-three. She had to agree with Felice. Whatever her memory of Strong Will, this fellow was no one’s idea of a good deme partner.

“You want to cloud with him?” Celia asked in disbelief.

“No,” Stella said, and looked away with a sharp pang of disappointment.

The woods were far away now for both of them.

“What’s anything got to do with toad skin?” Ellie asked nervously as the teachers started to shoo the rows and columns toward each other.

“Crow on the road,” Felice replied.

“What’s that have to do with apple feathers?” Ellie riposted by reflex.

“Oh, just-KUK grow,” Celia said. Her face wrinkled like a dried peach in a sudden despair of shyness. “Grow big and hide me.”

The lines drew up before the concrete lunch tables and the boys were pushed to go and sit, three to one side, leaving the opposite side of each table empty.

“What’ll we say?” Ellie asked, hiding her eyes as their turn approached.

“Same thing we always say,” Stella said. “Hello and how are you. And ask how their demes are growing and what they’re doing on the other side of the wire.”

“Harry, Harry, quite contrary,” Felice sang in an undertone, “how does your garden grow? Pubic hairs and wanton stares, making the hormones flow.”

Ellie told her to shush. Miss Kantor walked in front of the rows from their barracks. “All right, girls,” she said. “You may talk, you may look. You may not touch.”

But the nosies are turned off, Stella thought. The girls fanned out from the lines. Stella looked up at the cameras mounted on the long steel poles, swinging slowly right and left.

Ellie’s turn came and she ran off to join a table of boys whom, as far as Stella knew, she had never visited before. So much for shyness. Stella’s turn came, and of course whatever she had thought earlier, she moved toward the table where Will sat with two smaller boys.

Will hunched over the table, looking at the old food stains. The two smaller and younger males watched her approach with some interest and freckled each other. She thought she heard some under, difficult to be sure at this distance, and Will looked up. He did not seem to recognize her.

Stella was the only girl to sit at their table. She said hello to the two boys, and then focused on Will. Will rested his cheeks in the palms of his hands. She could not see his patterns, though she saw his neck darken.

“He’s in our barracks,” said the boy on the right, strong but short, Jason or James; the boy to the left of Will was named Philip. Stella had sat with Philip three weeks ago. He was pleasant enough, though she had learned quickly she did not want to cloud with him. Neither Jason/James nor Philip smelled right. She freckled Philip a butterfly greeting, friendly but not open, meaning no offense, etc.

“Why did you sit here?” Philip asked with a frown. “Doesn’t somebody else want to sit here?”

“I want to talk to him,” Stella said. She was not very good at dealing with the boys, but then few of the girls were. There were unspoken, unwritten rules, rules yet to be discovered, but this way of doing things was never going to make the rules any plainer.

“He doesn’t talk much,” Jason/James said.

“Girls play games,” Philip said resentfully.

“Nothing like human girls,” Will murmured, and looked up at her. The glance was brief, but Stella knew he remembered their last meeting. “They cut you like knives and you never know why.”

“Right,” Philip said. “Will lived among the savages.” Jason/James giggled at this, and made a gesture of tangled fingers Stella could not interpret.

“I passed,” Will said.

“Was it the woods?” Stella asked, hope flickering like a small ember.

“What?” he asked.

“They scrubbed him before he came to our barracks,” Philip said, just being informative. “His skin was red from soap.”

“Did you stay with your parents?” Will asked. He looked up and let her see his cheeks. They were blank, dark and raw. Most of Will’s neck and face were red and rough. Stella inhaled, only what was polite under the circumstances, and could still smell the Lysol and soap on his skin and clothes.

“Only for a few days,” Stella said. “I got sick.”

“I missed out on getting scabs,” Will said, touching between his fingers. The SHEVA kids referred to the disease that had killed so many of them as “scabs” or “the ache.”

“We’re going to another table,” Jason/James and Philip said, almost in unison.

“You two should be alone,” Philip added brusquely. “We can tell.”

Stella wanted to ask them to stay, but Will shrugged, so she shrugged as well. “They’re breaking the rules,” she said after they were gone.

“They can find a table with not enough boys,” Will suggested. “They’re making up rules in the barracks. Something about demes. What are demes?”

“Demes are families,” Stella said. “New families. We’re trying to figure out what they’ll look like when we’re grown up.”

Will looked directly at her once more, and Stella looked away, then covered her own cheeks. “It doesn’t matter,” Will said. “I don’t care.”

“I came over to say hello,” Stella said. He could not know what his words had meant to her. “You must have got away.” She watched him eagerly, hoping for his story.

“We’re talking human talk. Do you know the under and the over?”

“Yes,” Stella said. “Do you speak it the same way?”

“Not the way they do in the barracks,” Will admitted with a twitch of one arm. “Out on the road… It’s different. Stronger, faster.”

“And in the woods?” Stella asked.

“There are no woods,” Will said, face crinkling as if she had spoken some obscenity.

“When you got away, where did you go?”

Will looked up at the sky. “I can eat lots here,” he said. “I’ll get better, stronger, learn the smell, talk the two tongues.” He balled up his hands and bounced them lightly on the table, then against each other, thumb to thumb, as if playing a game. “Why are they letting us get together, boy-girl?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes they draw blood and ask questions.”

Will nodded.

“Do you know what they’re doing?” Stella asked.

“Not a clue,” Will said. “They teach nothing, like all the schools. Right?”

“We read some books and learn some skills. We can’t cloud or scent or we’re punished.”

Will smiled. “Stupid blanks,” he said.

Stella winced. “We try not to call them names.”

Will looked away.

“How long were you free?” Stella asked.

“They caught me a week ago,” Will said. “I’ve lived on my own and with runaways and street kids. Covered my cheeks with henna tattoos. Neck, too. Some human kids mark their faces to look like us, but everyone knows. They also claim to read thoughts and have better brains. Like they think we do. They say it’s cool, but their freckles don’t move.”

Stella could see some brown still staining the raw patches on Will’s face. “How many of us are outside?”

“Not many,” Will said. “I got turned in by a human for a pack of cigarettes, even after I saved him from getting beat up.” He shook his head slowly. “It’s awful out there.”

Stella smelled Joanie nearby, under her signature mask of baby powder. Will straightened as the stout young counselor approached.

“No one-on-one,” Stella heard Joanie say. “You know the rules.”

“The others left,” Stella said, turning to explain, stopping only when Joanie gripped Stella’s shoulder. Touched and held, she refused to meet the counselor’s eyes.

Will stood. “I’ll go,” he said.

Then, speaking two streams at once, the over a flow of young gibberish, he said, “See you, say hi to Cory in Six” (there was no Cory and no Six) and “keep it low, keep it topped, shop with pop, nay?”

The under:

“What do you know about a place called Sandia?”

He mixed the streams so expertly that it took Stella a moment to know he had delivered the question. To Joanie, it probably sounded like a slur in the gibberish.

Then, with a toss of his hand, as Joanie led Stella away, Will said, in one stream, “Find out, hey?”

Stella watched Ellie be led away to give blood. Ellie pretended it was no big deal, but it was. Stella wondered if it was because Ellie had attracted a lot of boys today, five at the table where she and Felice had sat. The rest of the girls went to their late morning classrooms, where they were shown films about the history of the United States, guys in wigs and women in big dresses, wagon trains, maps, a little bit about Indians.

Mitch had taught Stella about Indians. The film told them nothing important.

Felice was sitting in the aisle next to her. “What’s a green bug got to do with anything?” she whispered, making up for Ellie’s absence.

Nobody answered. The game had gone sour. This time, being with the boys had hurt, and somehow Stella and the others knew it would only get worse. The time was coming when they would all need to be left alone, boys and girls together, to work things out for themselves.

Stella did not think the humans would ever let that happen. They would be kept apart like animals in a zoo, forever.

“You’re scenting,” Celia warned in a whisper behind her. “Miss Kantor turned her nosey on.”

Stella did not know how to stop. She could feel the changes coming.

“You’re doing it, too,” Felice whispered to Celia.

“Damn,” Celia said, and rubbed behind her ears, eyes wide.

“Girls,” Miss Kantor called from the front of the classroom. “Be quiet and watch the film.”

19

BALTIMORE

Promptly at eleven, Kaye entered the Americol twentieth-floor conference room, Liz close behind. Robert Jackson was already in the room. His hair had turned salt and pepper over the years but otherwise he had not matured much either in behavior or appearance. He was still handsome, skin pale to the point of blueness, with a sharply defined nose and chin and a glossy five o’clock shadow. His quartzlike eyes, dark gray, bored into Kaye whenever they met, occasions she tried to keep to a minimum.

Angled on either side of Jackson at the corner position he favored were two of his postdocs—research interns from Cornell and Harvard, in their late twenties, compact fellows with dark brown hair and the nervous aloofness of youth.

“Marge will be here in a few minutes,” Jackson told Kaye, briefly half-standing.

He had never forgiven her an awkward moment in the early days of SHEVA, sixteen years ago, when it seemed that Marge and Kaye had ganged up on him. Jackson had won that round in the long run, but grudges came naturally to him. He was as passionate about office politics and the social side of research as he was about science as an ideal and an abstraction.

With so keen a sense of the social, Kaye wondered why Jackson had been other than brilliant in genetics. To Kaye, the processes behind both were much the same; to Jackson, that idea was heresy of a disgusting magnitude.

The representatives from three other research divisions had also arrived before Kaye and Liz. Two men and one woman, all in their late forties, bowed their heads as they pored over touch tablets, getting through the perpetual network-enabled tasks of their day. They did not look up as Kaye entered, though most of them had met her and conversed with her at Americol mixers and Christmas parties.

Kaye and Liz sat with their backs to a long window that looked out over downtown Baltimore. Kaye felt a breeze go up her back from a floor vent. Jackson had taken pole position, leaving Liz and Kaye with the air conditioning.

Marge Cross entered, alone for once. She seemed subdued. Cross was in her middle sixties, portly, her short-cut, scraggly hair brilliantly hennaed, her face jowly, her neck a landscape of hanging wrinkles. She possessed a voice that could carry across a crowded conference hall, yet carried herself with the poise of a ballet dancer, dressed in carefully tailored pant suits, and somehow could charm the butterflies out of the skies. It was difficult to know when she did not like what she was hearing. Like a rhino, Cross was said to be at her most dangerous when she was still and quiet.

The CEO of Americol and Eurocol had grown stouter and more beefy-faced over the years, but still walked with graceful confidence. “Let the games begin,” she said, her voice mellow as she made her way to the window. Liz moved her chair as Cross passed.

“You didn’t bring your lance, Kaye,” Jackson said.

“Behave, Robert,” Cross warned. She sat beside Liz and folded her hands on the table. Jackson managed to look both properly chastened and amused by the jabbing familiarity.

“We’re here to judge the success so far of our attempts to restrict legacy viruses,” Cross began. “We refer to them generically as ERV—endogenous retroviruses. We’ve also been concerned with their close relations, transgenes, transposons, retrotransposons, LINE elements, and what have you—all mobile elements, all jumping genes. Let’s not confuse our ERV with someone else’s ERV—equine rhinovirus, for example, or ecotropic recombinant retrovirus, or, something we’ve all experienced in these sessions, a sudden loss of expiratory reserve volume.”

Polite smiles around the room. A little shuffling of feet.

Cross cleared her throat. “We certainly wouldn’t want to confuse anybody,” she said, her voice dropping an octave. Most of the time, it hovered between a quavering soprano and a mellow alto. Many had compared her to Julia Child, but the comparison was surface only, and with age and hennaed hair, Cross had gone well beyond Julia and into her own stratospheric realm of uniqueness. “I’ve looked over the team reports from our vaccine project, and of course the chimpanzee and mouse ERV knockout projects. Dr. Jackson’s report was very long. Also, I’ve looked over the research reviews and audits from the fertility and general immunology groups.” Cross’s arthritis was bothering her; Kaye could tell from the way she massaged the swollen knuckles on her hands. “The consensus is, we seem to have failed at everything we set out to do. But we’re not here for a postmortem. We need to decide how to proceed from where we are at this moment. So. Where are we?”

Glum silence. Kaye stared straight ahead, trying to keep from biting her lip.

“Usually, we toss a coin and let the winner start. But we’re all familiar with this debate, up to a point, and I think it’s time we begin with some probing questions. I’ll choose who goes first. All right?”

“Fine,” Jackson said nonchalantly, lifting his hands from the tabletop.

“Fine,” Kaye echoed.

“Good. We all agree it sucks,” Cross said. “Dr. Nilson, please begin.”

Lars Nilson, a middle-aged man with round glasses, had won a Nobel twenty years ago for his research in cytokines. He had once been heavily involved in Americol’s attempts to resolve retroviral issues in xenotransplants—the transplanting of animal tissues into human recipients—a prospect that had come to a drastic halt with the appearance of SHEVA and the case of Mrs. Rhine. He had since been reassigned to general immunology.

Nilson peered around the room with a wry expression, looking to Kaye like a gray and disconsolate pixie. “I presume I’m expected to speak first out of some notion of Nobel oblige or something more awful still, like seniority.”

A small, very slim elderly man in a gray suit and yarmulke entered the room and looked around through friendly, crinkled brown eyes, his face wreathed in a perpetual smile. “Don’t mind me,” he said, and took a chair in the far corner, crossing his legs. “Lars is no longer senior,” he added quietly.

“Thank you, Maurie,” Nilson said. “Glad you could make it.” Maurie Herskovitz was another of Cross’s Nobel laureates, and perhaps the most honored biologist working at Americol. His specialty was loosely labeled “genomic complexity”; he now functioned as a roving researcher. Kaye was startled and a little unnerved by his presence. Despite his smile—built-in, she suspected, like a dolphin’s—Herskovitz was known to be a demanding tyrant in the lab. She had never seen him in person.

Cross folded her arms and breathed loudly through her nose. “Let’s move on,” she suggested.

Nilson looked to his right. “Dr. Jackson, your SHEVA vaccines have unexpected side effects. When you work to block transmission of ERV particles between cells in tissue, you kill the experimental animals—apparently in part because of a massive overreaction of their innate immune system—whether they be mice, pigs, or monkeys. That seems counterintuitive. Can you explain?”

“We believe our efforts interfere with or mimic some essential processes involving the breakdown of pathogenic messenger RNA in somatic cells. The cells seem to interpret our vaccines as a byproduct of the appearance of viral RNA, and stop all transcription and translation. They die, apparently to protect other cells from infection.”

“I understand there may also be a problem with shutting down function of transposases in T cells,” Nilson continued. “RAG1 and RAG2 are apparently affected by nearly all the candidate vaccines.”

“As I said, we’re still tracking that connection,” Jackson said smoothly.

“Most expression of ERVs doesn’t trigger cell suicide,” Nilson said.

Jackson nodded. “It’s a complicated process,” he said. “Like many pathogens, some retroviruses have developed a cloaking ability and can avoid cell defenses.”

“So the model that all viruses are interlopers or invaders may not apply in these cases?”

Jackson vehemently disagreed. His argument was rigidly traditional: DNA in the genome was a tightly constrained and efficient blueprint. Viruses were simply parasites and hangers-on, causing disorder and disease but, in rare instances, also creating useful novelty. He explained that putting viral promoters in front of a necessary cellular gene could cause more of that gene’s products to be manufactured at a key moment in the cell’s history. More rarely, within germ cells—egg or sperm progenitors—they might land, randomly, in such a way as to cause phenotypic or developmental variation in the offspring. “But to call any such activity orderly, part of some cellular reaction to the environment, is ridiculous. Viruses have no awareness of their actions, nor are the cells specifically activating viruses for some wonderful purpose. That has been obvious for more than a century.”

“Kaye? Do viruses know what they’re doing?” Cross asked, turning in her chair.

“No,” Kaye said. “They’re nodes in a distributed network. Greater purpose as such lies with the network, not the node; and not even the network can be described as self-aware or deliberately purposeful, in the sense that Dr. Jackson has purpose.”

Jackson smiled.

Kaye went on. “All viruses appear to be descendants, directly or indirectly, of mobile elements. They did not pop up from outside; they broke free from inside, or evolved to carry genes and other information between cells and between organisms. Retroviruses like HIV in particular seem closely related to retrotransposons and ERV in the cells of many organisms. They all use similar genetic tools.”

“So a flu virus, with eight genes, is derived from a retrotransposon or retrovirus with two or three genes?” Nilson asked with some disdain. His brows dropped into a puzzled and stormy expression at this patent absurdity.

“Ultimately, yes,” Kaye said. “Gaining or mutating genes, or losing them, is mediated by necessity. A virus entering a new and unfamiliar host might take up and incorporate useful genes found within the host cell, but it’s not easy. Most of the viruses simply fail to replicate.”

“They go in, hoping for a handout at the gene table?” Jackson asked. “That’s what Dr. Howard Urnovitz believed, isn’t it? Vaccinations led to HIV, Gulf War Syndrome, and every other illness known to modern man?”

“Dr. Urnovitz’s views seem closer to yours than to mine,” Kaye replied evenly.

“That was more than twenty years ago,” Cross said, yawning. “Ancient history. Move on.”

“We know many viruses can incorporate genes from ERVs,” Kaye said. “Herpes, for example.”

“The implications of that process are not at all clear,” Jackson said, a rather weak-kneed response, Kaye thought.

“I’m sorry, but it simply is not controversial,” she persisted. “We know that is how Shiver arose in all its variety, and that is how the virus mutated that gave our children lethal HFMD. It picked up endogenous viral genes found only in non-SHEVA individuals.”

Jackson conceded these points. “Some of our children,” he amended quietly. “But I’m willing to concede that viruses may be enemies from within. All the more reason to eradicate them.”

“Just enemies?” Cross asked. She propped her chin in one palm, and looked up at Jackson from beneath her bushy eyebrows.

“I did say ‘enemies,’ not handmaids or subcontractors,” Jackson said. “Jumping genes cause problems. They are rogues, not handmaids. We know that. When they’re active, they produce genetic defects. They activate oncogenes. They’re implicated in multiple sclerosis and in schizophrenia, in leukemia and all manner of cancers. They cause or exacerbate autoimmune diseases. However long they can lie dormant in our genes, they’re part of a panoply of ancient plagues. Viruses are a curse. That some are now tame enough to get by without causing their hosts major damage is just the way disease evolution works. We know that HIV retroviruses mutated and jumped from one primate species to another, to us. In chimps, the HIV precursor evolved to be neutral, a genetic burden and little more. In us, the mutation proved to be highly immunosuppressive and lethal. SHEVA is little different. The ERV we are fighting are simply not useful to the organism in any fundamental way.”

Kaye felt as if she had traveled back in time, as if thirty years of research had never happened. Jackson had refused to change despite massive strides; he simply ignored what he could not believe in. And he was not alone. The number of papers produced each year in virology alone could fill the entire meeting room. To this day, most such papers stuck to a disease model for both viruses and mobile elements.

Jackson felt safely enclosed by thick walls of tradition, away from Kaye’s mad, howling winds.

Cross turned to the sole woman on the review committee, Sharon Morgenstern. Morgenstern specialized in fertility research and developmental biology. A nervous-looking, thin woman, reputedly a spinster, with a withdrawn chin, prominent teeth, wispy blonde hair, and a soft North Carolina accent, she also chaired the Americol jury that approved papers before they were submitted to the journals—in-house peer review set up in part to quash publications that might reveal corporate secrets. “Sharon? Any questions while we’re jumping up and down on Robert?”

“Your test animals, when given candidate vaccines, have also been known to suffer the loss or reduction of key sexual characteristics,” Morgenstern began. “That seems exceptionally odd. How do you plan to get around those problems?”

“We have noticed reduction of certain minor sexual characters in baboons,” Jackson said. “That may have no relevance to human subjects.”

Nilson moved in once more, ignoring Morgenstern’s irritated expression. Let the woman finish, Kaye thought, but said nothing.

“Dr. Jackson’s vaccine could be of immense importance in our attempts to neutralize viruses in xenotransplant tissues,” Nilson said. “Dr. Rafelson’s endeavors also hold tremendous promise—to knock out all ERV genes in these tissues has been one of our holy grails for at least fifteen years. To say we’re disappointed by these failures is an understatement.” Nilson shifted in his seat and referred to his notes by leaning over sideways and looking through the edge of his glasses, like a bird examining a seed. “I’d like to ask some questions about why Dr. Jackson’s vaccines fail.”

“The vaccines do not fail. The organisms fail,” Jackson said. “The vaccines succeed. They block intercellular transmission of all ERV particles.”

Nilson smiled broadly. “All right. Why do the organisms fail, time after time? And, in particular, why do they become sterile if you’re blocking or otherwise frustrating a viral load—all the disease-causing elements within their genomes? Shouldn’t they experience a burst of energy and productivity?”

Jackson asked that the overhead projector be lowered. Liz sighed. Kaye kicked her gently under the table.

Jackson’s presentation was classic. Within three minutes, he had used nine acronyms and six made-up scientific terms with which Kaye was unfamiliar, without defining any of them; he had entangled them all in an ingenious map of pathways and byproducts and some deep evolutionary suppositions that had never been demonstrated outside a test tube. When he was on the defensive, Jackson invariably reverted to tightly controlled in vitro demonstrations using the tumor cell cultures favored for lab research. All the experiments he cited had been tightly designed and controlled and had, all too often, led to predicted results.

Marge Cross gave him five minutes. Jackson noticed her impatience and drew his sidebar to a close. “It’s obvious that ERVs have devised ways to worm themselves into the machinery of their host’s genome. We know of many instances in nature where trying to remove a parasite can kill a host. It’s even likely they’ve created safeguards against removal—pseudogenes, multiple copies, disguised or compressed copies that can be reassembled later, methylation to prevent restriction enzyme activity, all sorts of clever tricks. But the prime proof of the malevolent nature of all retroviruses, even the so-called benevolent or benign, is what HIV and SHEVA have done to our society.”

Kaye looked up from her notes.

“We have a generation of children who can’t fit in,” Jackson continued, “who arouse hatred and suspicion, and whose so-called adaptive characteristics—randomly invoked from a panoply of possible distortions—only cause them distress. Viruses cause us grievous harm. Given time, our group will overcome these unfortunate delays and eliminate all viruses from our lives. Genomic viruses will be nightmares from a rough and nasty past.”

“Is that a conclusion?” Cross asked without letting Jackson’s dramatic effect sink in.

“No,” Jackson said, leaning back in his chair. “Something of an outburst. I apologize.”

Cross looked at the questioners. “Satisfied?” she asked.

“No,” Nilson said, once again with that special Olympian frown Kaye had only seen in older male scientists, winners of Nobel prizes. “But I have a question for Dr. Rafelson.”

“Lars can always be relied upon to keep these sessions lively,” Cross said.

“I’m hoping Dr. Nilson will ask equally probing questions of Kaye,” Jackson said.

“Count on it,” Nilson said dryly. “We realize how difficult it is to work with early-stage embryos in mammals, mice for example, and how much more difficult it is to work with primates and simians. As far as I have been able to review, your lab techniques have been creative and skilled.”

“Thank you,” Kaye said.

Nilson waved this off with another frown. “We also know that there are many ways in which embryos and their hosts, their mothers, work together to prevent rejection of the paternal components of embryonic tissues. Isn’t it possible that by removing known ERVs in chimpanzee embryos, you have also shut down genes crucial to these other protective functions? I am thinking in particular of FasL, triggered by CRH, corticotropin releasing hormone, in the pregnant female. FasL causes cell death in maternal lymphocytes as they move in to attack the embryo. It is essential to getting born.”

“FasL is unaffected by our work,” Kaye said. “Dr. Elizabeth Cantrera, my colleague, spent a year proving that FasL and all other known protective genes remain intact and active after we knock out ERVs. In fact, we’re tracking the possibility now that a LINE element transactivated by the pregnancy hormone in fact regulates FasL.”

“I do not see that in your references,” Nilson said.

“We published three papers in PNAS.” Kaye gave him the citations, and Nilson patiently wrote them down. “The immunosuppressive function of particles derived from endogenous retroviruses is indisputably part of an embryo’s protective armament. We’ve proven that over and over.”

“I’m concerned in particular about evidence that a drop in corticotropin releasing hormone after pregnancy induces rapid expression of ERV responsible for triggering arthritis and multiple sclerosis,” Nilson said. “The ERV in this case are reacting to a sharp drop in hormones, not a rise, and they appear to cause disease.”

“Interesting,” Cross said. “Dr. Rafelson?”

“It’s a reasonable hypothesis. The triggering of autoimmune disorders by ERV is a rich area for research. Such expression could be regulated by stress-related hormones, and that would explain the role such hormones—and stress in general—play in such disorders.”

“Then which is it, Dr. Rafelson?” Nilson asked, his eyes sharp upon her. “Good virus, or bad virus?”

“Like everything else in nature, one or the other or even both, depending on the circumstances,” Kaye said. “Pregnancy is a tough time for both the infant and the mother.”

Cross turned to Sharon Morgenstern. “Dr. Morgenstern showed me some of her questions earlier,” she said. “They are cogent. They are in fact excellent.”

Morgenstern leaned forward and looked at Kaye and Liz. “I will state up front that although I often agree with Dr. Nilson, I do not find Dr. Rafelson’s laboratory procedures free from bias or error. I suspect that Dr. Rafelson came here to prove that something could not be done, not that it could be done. And now we are supposed to believe that she has proven that embryos cannot proceed to live birth, or even grow to pubescence, without a full complement of old viruses in their genes. In short, working backwards, she is trying to prove a controversial theory of virus-based evolution that could conceivably elevate the social status of her own daughter. I am suspicious when such strong emotional motivations are involved in a scientist’s work.”

“Do you have a specific criticism?” Cross asked mildly.

“A number of them, actually,” Morgenstern said. Liz handed Kaye a note. Kaye looked over the quickly scrawled message. Morgenstern published twenty papers with Jackson over the last five years. She’s his contact on the Americol jury.

Kaye looked up and stuffed the note in her coat’s side pocket.

“My first doubt—,” Morgenstern continued.

This was the true beginning of the frontal assault. All that had come before was just the softening up. Kaye swallowed and tried to relax her neck muscles. She thought of Stella, far across the continent, wasting her time in a school run by bigots. And Mitch, driving to rejoin an old lover and colleague on a dig in the middle of nowhere.

For one very bad moment, Kaye felt she was about to lose everything, all at once. But she drew herself up, caught Cross’s gaze, and focused on Morgenstern’s stream of precisely phrased, mind-numbing technicalities.

20

OREGON

They had left the dirt road twenty minutes ago and Mitch still had not seen anything compelling. The game was beginning to wear. He slammed on the brakes and the old truck creaked on its shocks, swayed for a moment, then stalled out. He opened the door and mopped his forehead with a paper towel from the roll he kept under his front seat, along with a squeegee to remove mud.

Dust billowed around them until a stray draft between narrow rills spirited it away.

“I give up,” Mitch said, walking back to stare into Eileen’s window. “What am I supposed to be looking for?”

“Let’s say there’s a river here.”

“Hasn’t been one for a few centuries, by the looks of things.”

“Three thousand years, actually. Let’s go back even further—say, more than ten thousand years.”

“How much more?”

Eileen shrugged and made an “I’m not telling” face.

Mitch groaned, remembering all the troubles that came with ancient graves.

Eileen watched his reaction with a weary sadness that he could not riddle. “Where would you set up some sort of long-term fishing camp, say, during the fall salmon run? A camp you could come back to, year after year?”

“On hard ground above the river, not too far.”

“And what do you see around here?” Eileen asked.

Mitch scanned the territory again. “Mostly mudstone and weak terraces. Some lava.”

“Ash fall?”

“Yeah. Looks solid. I wouldn’t want to dig it out.”

“Exactly,” Eileen said. “Imagine an ash fall big enough to cover everything for hundreds of miles.”

“Broken flats of ash. That would have to be above this bed, of course. The river would have worn through.”

“Now, how would an archaeologist find something interesting in all that confusion?”

He frowned at her. “Something trapped by ash?”

Eileen nodded encouragement.

“Animals? People?”

“What do you think?” Eileen peered through the dusty windshield of the Tahoe. She looked sadder and sadder, as if reliving an ancient tragedy.

“People, of course,” Mitch said. “A camp. A fishing camp. Covered by ash.” He shook his head, then mockingly smacked his forehead, Such a dummy.

“I’m practically giving it away,” Eileen said.

Mitch turned east. He could see the dark gray-and-white layers of the old ash fall, buried under ten feet of sediments and now topped by a broken wall of pines. The ash layer looked at least four feet thick, mottled and striated. He imagined walking over to the cut and fingering the ash. Compacted by many seasons of rain, held in place by a cap of dirt and silt, it would be rock hard at first, but ultimately frangible, turning to powder if he hit it vigorously with a pick.

Big fall, a long time ago. Ten thousand and more years.

He looked north again, up a wash and away from the broad mud and gravel bed of the long-dead river, spotted with hardy brush and trees, a course now cut off even from snow melt and flash floods. Undisturbed by heavy erosion for a couple of thousand years.

“This used to be a pretty good oxbow, I’d say. Even in the Spent River heyday, there’d have been shallows where you could walk across and spear fish. You could have set up a weir in that hollow, under that boulder.” He pointed to a big boulder mostly buried in old silt and ash.

Eileen smiled and nodded. “Keep going.”

Mitch tapped his lips with his finger. He circled the Tahoe, waving his arms, making swooshing sounds, kicking the dirt, sniffing the air.

Eileen laughed and slapped her knees. “I needed that,” she said.

“Well, shucks,” Mitch said humbly. “If I’m tapping into mystic spirits, I got to act the part.” He fixed his gaze on a gap that led to higher ground, above the ash. His head leaned to one side and he shook out his bad arm, which was starting to ache. He got the look of a hound on the scent. Eyes sweeping the rough ground, he walked up the wash and climbed around the boulder.

Eileen yelled, “Wait up!”

“No way,” Mitch called back. “I’m on it.”

And he was.

He spotted the camp ten minutes later. Eileen came up beside him, breathless. On a level plateau only thinly forested, marked by patches of gray where the deep ash layer had been exposed by erosion, he saw twelve low-slung, light-weather tents covered with netting, dead branches, and bushes uprooted from around the site. A pair of old Land Rovers had been parked together and disguised as a large boulder.

Mitch had taken a seat on a rock, staring glumly at the tents and vehicles. “Why the camouflage?” he asked.

“Satellites or remoters doing searches for the BLM and Army Corps, protecting Indian rights under NAGPRA,” Eileen said. Federal interpretation of the complaints of certain Indian groups, citing NAGPRA—the Native American Graves Protection Act—had been the nemesis of American archaeologists for almost twenty years.

“Oh,” Mitch said. “Why take the chance? Do we need that now? Having the feds cover your dig with concrete?” That was how the Army Corps of Engineers had protected Mitch’s dig against further intrusion, more than a lifetime ago, it seemed now. He waved his hand at the site and made a face. “Not very smart, staying hidden like this, hoping to avoid the Big Boys.”

“Isn’t that what you did?” Eileen asked.

Mitch snorted with little humor. “It’s a fair cop,” he admitted.

“These are not rational times,” Eileen said. “You’ll understand soon enough. Don’t we all need to know what it means to be human? Now more than ever? How we got to where we are, and what’s going to come later?”

“What are a few old Indian bones going to tell us that we don’t already know?” Mitch asked, feeling his sense of discovery start to sputter and stall.

“Would I have called you out here if that was all we had at stake?” Eileen said. “You know me better than that, Mitch Rafelson. I hope you do.”

Mitch wiped his hand on his pants leg and looked over his shoulder at the long fan of the wash. They had climbed about twenty feet, but he could still see evidence of ancient bank erosion. “Big river, way back when,” he said.

“It was smaller at the time of our site,” Eileen said. “Just a broad, shallow stream filled with salmon. Bears used to come down and fish. One of my students found an old male on the other side. Killed by an early phase of the ash fall, stage one of the eruption.”

“How long ago?” Mitch asked.

“Twenty thousand years, we’re estimating. Ash gives a good potassium-argon result. We’re still refining with carbon dating.”

“Something more than just a dead grizzly?”

Eileen nodded like a little girl confirming that there were, indeed, more dolls in her room. “The bear was female. She was missing her skull. It had been cut off, the bones hacked through with stone axes.”

“Twenty thousand years ago?”

“Yeah. So my student crossed the Spent River and started looking at other reveals. Just killing time until the Land Rover came to pick her up. She found an eroded layer of high-silica ash, right down there, about fifty meters from where the camp is now.” Eileen pointed. “She almost stepped on a human toe bone mixed with some gravel. Nothing spectacular, really. But she tracked down where it had weathered out, and she found more.”

“Twenty thousand years,” Mitch said, still incredulous.

“That isn’t the half of it,” Eileen said.

Mitch took a huge leap of supposition and bent backwards, then did a little dip of disbelief. “You are not suggesting…”

Eileen stared at him keenly.

“You found Neandertals?”

Eileen shook her head, a strong no, then rewarded him with a teary-eyed smile that gave some hint of the distress she had gone through, at night, lying awake and thinking things over.

Mitch let out his breath. “What, then?”

“I don’t want to be coy,” she said primly, and took his hand. “But you’re not nearly crazy enough. Come on, Mitch. Let’s go meet the girls.”

21

BALTIMORE

Morgenstern’s questions were spot on and difficult to answer. Kaye had done her best, but she felt she had goofed a few of her responses rather badly. She felt like a mouse in a room full of cats. Jackson appeared more and more confident.

“The fertility group concludes that Kaye Rafelson is not the proper individual to continue research in ERV knock outs,” Morgenstern concluded. “She has obvious bias. Her work is suspect.”

A moment of silence. The accusation was not rebutted; everyone was considering their options and the map of the political minefield around them.

“All right,” Cross said, her face as serene as a baby’s. “I still don’t know where we stand. Should we continue to fund vaccines? Should we continue to look for ways to create organisms without any viral load?” Nobody answered. “Lars?” Cross inquired.

Nilson shook his head. “I am perplexed by Dr. Morgenstern’s statements. Dr. Rafelson’s work looks impressive to me.” He shrugged. “I know for a fact that human embryos implant in their mothers’ wombs with the aid of old viral genes. Dr. Morgenstern is undoubtedly familiar with this, probably more than I.”

“Very familiar,” Morgenstern said confidently. “Utilization of endogenous viral syncytin genes in simian development is interesting, but I can quote dozens of papers proving there is no rhyme or reason to this random occurrence. There are even more remarkable coincidences in the long history of evolution.”

“And the Temin model of viral contributions to the genome?”

“Brilliant, old, long since disproved.”

Nilson pushed his scattered notes and papers into a stack, squared them, and thumped them lightly on the table top. “All my life,” he said, “I have come to regard the basic principles of biology as tantamount to an act of faith. Credo, this I believe: that the chain of instruction arising from DNA to RNA to proteins never reverses. The Central Dogma. McClintock and Temin and Baltimore, among many others, proved the Central Dogma to be wrong, demonstrating that genes can produce products that insert copies of themselves, that retroviruses can write themselves to DNA as proviruses and stay there for many millions of years.”

Kaye saw Jackson regarding her with his sharp gray eyes. He tapped his pencil silently. They both knew Nilson was grandstanding and that this would not impress Cross.

“Forty years ago, we missed the boat,” Nilson continued. “I was one of those who opposed Temin’s ideas. It took us years to recognize the potential of retroviruses to wreak havoc, and when HIV arrived, we were unprepared. We did not have a crazy, creative bouquet of theories to choose from; we had killed them all, or ignored them, much the same. Tens of millions of our patients suffered for our own stubborn pride. Howard Temin was right; I was wrong.”

“I would not call it faith, I’d call it process and reason,” Jackson interrupted, tapping his pencil harder. “It’s kept us from making even more horrible blunders, like Lysenko.”

Nilson was having none of this. “Ah, get thee behind me, Lysenko! Faith, reason, dogma, all add up to stubborn ignorance. Thirty years before that, we had missed the boat with Barbara McClintock and her jumping genes. And how many others? How many discouraged postdocs and interns and researchers? It was prideful, I see now, to hide our weaknesses and spite our fundamentalist enemies. We asserted our infallibility before school boards, politicians, corporations, investors, patients, whomever we thought might challenge us. We were arrogant. We were men, Ms. Cross. Biology was an incredible and archaic patriarchy with many of the aspects of an old boy network: secret signs, passwords, rituals of indoctrination. We held down, for a time at least, some of our best and brightest. No excuses. And once again we failed to see the coming juggernaut. HIV rolled over us, and then SHEVA rolled over us. It turned out we knew nothing whatsoever about sex and evolutionary variation, nothing. Yet some of us still act as if we know it all. We attempt to assess blame and escape our failures. Well, we have failed. We have failed to see the truth. These reports sum up our failure.”

Cross seemed bemused. “Thank you, Lars. Heartfelt, I’m sure. But I still want to know, where do we go from here?” She hammered her fist on the table with each emphatic word.

Still stuck in his chair in the far corner, pushed back from the table, wearing his trademark gray jacket and yarmulke, Maurie Herskovitz raised his hand. “I think we have a clear-cut problem in epistemology,” he said.

Cross squeezed her eyes shut and pressed the bridge of her nose. “Oh, please, Maurie, anything but that.”

“Hear me out, Marge. Dr. Jackson tried to create a positive, a vaccine against SHEVA and other ERV. He failed. If, as Dr. Morgenstern accuses, Dr. Rafelson came to Americol to demonstrate that no babies would be born if we suppressed their genomic viruses, she has made her point. None have been born. Regardless of her motivations, her work is thorough. It is scientific. Dr. Jackson continues to put forth an hypothesis that the results of his labors seem to have disproved.”

“Maurie, where do we go from here?” Cross repeated, her cheeks pinking.

Herskovitz lifted his hands. “If I could, I would put Dr. Rafelson in charge of viral research at Americol. But that would only be to curse her with more managerial duties and less time in the laboratory. So, I would give her what she needs to conduct her research on her own terms, and let Dr. Jackson focus on what he is best suited for.” He peered happily at Jackson. “Administration. Marge, you and I can make sure he does it right.” Herskovitz then looked at everyone around the room, trying hard to appear serious.

The faces at the table were stony.

Jackson’s skin had turned a bluish shade of ivory. Kaye worried for a second that he might be on the verge of a heart attack. He ticked his pen in a brisk shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits. “I welcome, as always, Dr. Nilson’s and Dr. Herskovitz’s opinions. But I don’t think Americol wants a woman who may be losing her mind in charge of this particular area of research.”

Cross leaned back as if caught in a cold wind. Morgenstern’s watery gaze finally settled on Jackson with an attitude of dread expectancy.

“Dr. Rafelson, last night you spent some hours with our chief radiologist in the imaging lab. I noticed the billing request when I was picking up results from radiology this morning. I asked what the billing was for, and I was told that you were looking for God.”

Kaye managed to hold on to her pencil and not let it drop to the floor. Slowly, she brought her hands up to the tabletop. “I was having an unusual experience,” she said. “I wanted to find out what the cause might be.”

“You told the radiologist you felt God was inside your head. You had been having these experiences for some time, ever since the removal of your daughter by Emergency Action.”

“Yes,” Kaye said.

“Seeing God?”

“I’ve been experiencing certain psychological states,” Kaye said.

“Oh, come on, we’ve just been lectured by Dr. Nilson about truth and honesty. Will you deny your God three times, Dr. Rafelson?”

“What happened was private and has no influence on my work. I am appalled that it should be brought up at this meeting.”

“None of this is relevant? Other than the expense, some seven thousand dollars of unauthorized tests?”

Liz seemed thunderstruck.

“I’m willing to pay for that,” Kaye said.

Jackson lifted a paper-clipped set of invoices and rippled it in the air. “I see no evidence of your picking up the bill.”

Cross’s calm look was replaced by indignant irritation—but at whom, Kaye could not tell. “Is this true?”

Kaye stammered, “It is a personal state of mind, of scientific interest. Almost half—”

“Where will you find God next, Kaye?” Jackson asked. “In your cunning viruses, shuffling around like holy ratchets, obeying rules only you can understand, explaining everything you can’t? If God was my mentor, I’d be thrilled, it would all be so easy, but I am less fortunate. I have to rely on reason. Still, it is an honor to work with someone who can simply ask a higher authority where truth waits to be discovered.”

“Astonishing,” Nilson said. In the corner, Herskovitz sat up. His smile appeared cut in plaster.

“It is not like that,” Kaye said.

“That’s enough, Robert,” Cross said.

Jackson had not moved since beginning his accusation. He sat half-slumped in his chair. “None of us can afford to give up our scientific principles,” he said. “Especially not now.”

Cross stood abruptly. Nilson and Morgenstern looked at Jackson, then at Cross, and got to their feet, pushing back their chairs.

“I have what I need,” Cross said.

“Dr. Rafelson, is God behind evolution?” Jackson called out. “Does he hold all the answers, does he jerk us around like puppets on a string?”

“No,” Kaye said, eyes unfocused.

“Are you really sure, now, in a way none of the rest of us can be, with your special knowledge?”

“Robert, that is enough!” Cross roared. Seldom had any of them heard Cross when she was angry, and her voice was painful in its crackling intensity. She let the stack of papers in her hands slip back to the table and spill onto the floor. She glared at Jackson, then shook her fists at the ceiling. “Absolutely unbelievable!”

“Astonishing,” Nilson repeated, much quieter.

“I apologize,” Jackson said, not at all chastened. His color had returned. He looked vigorous and healthy.

“This is over,” Cross declared. “Everyone go home. Now.”

Liz helped Kaye from the room. Jackson did not deign to look at them as they left.

“What in hell is going on?” Liz asked Kaye in an undertone as they walked toward the elevator.

“I’m fine,” Kaye said.

“What in hell was La Robert on about?”

Kaye did not know where to begin.

22

OREGON

Eileen escorted Mitch down the slope on a crude stairway made of boards hammered into the dirt. As they walked through a copse of pines and up a short embankment, gaining a closer view of the camp, Mitch saw that a large excavation of about ten thousand square feet, L-shaped and covered by two joined Quonset huts, had been hidden by brush arranged over netting. From the air, the entire site would be little more than a smudge in the landscape.

“This looks like a terrorist base, Eileen. How do you conceal the heat signature?” he asked half-seriously.

“It’s going to terrorize North American anthropology,” Eileen said. “That’s for sure.”

“Now you’re scaring me,” Mitch said. “Do I have to sign an NDA or something?”

“I trust you,” Eileen said. She rested a hand on his shoulder.

“Show me now, Eileen, or just let me go home.”

“Where is home?” she asked.

“My truck,” Mitch said.

“That heap?”

Mitch mockingly implored forgiveness with his broad-fingered hands.

Eileen asked, “Do you believe in providence?”

“No,” Mitch said. “I believe in what I see with my eyes.”

“That may take a while. We’re into high-tech survey for now. We haven’t actually pulled up the specimens. We have a benefactor. He’s spending lots of money to help us. I think you’ve heard of him. Here’s his point man now.”

Mitch saw a tent flap open about fifty feet away. A lean, red-headed figure poked out, stood, and brushed dust from his hands. He shaded his eyes and looked around, then spotted the pair on the bluff and lifted his chin in greeting. Eileen waved.

Oliver Merton jogged toward them across the pale, rugged ground.

Merton was the science journalist who had dogged Kaye’s career and footsteps during the SHEVA discoveries. Mitch had never been sure whether to look on Merton as a friend or an opportunist or just a damned fine journalist. He was probably all three.

“Mitch!” Merton called. “How grand to see you again!”

Merton stuck out his hand. Mitch shook it firmly. The writer’s hand was warm and dry and confident. “My god, all Eileen told me was she was going to fetch someone with experience. How absolutely, bloody appropriate. Mr. Daney will be delighted.”

“You always seem to get there ahead of me,” Mitch said.

Merton shaded his eyes against the sun. “They’re having a kind of mid-afternoon powwow, if that’s the right word, back in the tents. Bit of a knockdown, really. Eileen, I think they’re going to decide to uncover one of the girls and take a direct look. You have perfect timing, Mitch. I’ve had to wait days to see anything but videos.”

“It’s a committee decision?” Mitch asked, turning to Eileen.

“I couldn’t stand having all of this on my shoulders,” Eileen confessed. “We have a fine team. Very argumentative. And Daney’s money works wonders. Good beer at night.”

“Is Daney here?” Mitch asked Merton.

“Not yet,” Merton said. “He’s shy and he hates discomfort.” They hunkered their shoulders against a gritty swirl blowing up the gully. Merton wiped his eyes with a handkerchief. “Not his kind of place at all.”

The wide, bush-studded net flapped in the afternoon breeze, dropping bits of dry branch and leaf on them as they stooped to enter the pit. The excavation stretched about forty feet north, then branched east to form an L. Mottled sunlight filtered through the net. They descended four meters on a metal ladder to the floor of the pit.

Aluminum beams crossed the pit at two-meter intervals. Rises in the pit, like little mesas, were topped with wire grids. Over the mesas, some of the beams supported white boxes with lenses and other apparatus jutting from the bottoms. As Mitch watched, the closest box slowly railed right a few centimeters and resumed humming.

“Side scanner?” he asked.

Eileen nodded. “We’ve scraped off most of the mud and we’re peeking through the final layer of tephra. We can see about sixty centimeters into the hard pack.” She walked ahead.

The Quonset structure—arched wooden beams covered by sheets of stamped, ribbed steel and a few milky sheets of fiberglass—sheltered the long stroke of the L. Sunlight poured through the fiberglass sheeting. They walked over flat, hard dirt and haphazard cobbles of river rock between the high, irregular walls. Eileen let Mitch go first, ascending a dirt staircase to the left of a flat-topped rise being surveyed by two more white boxes.

“I don’t dare walk under these damned things,” Eileen said. “I have enough skin blotches as is.”

Mitch knelt beside the mesa to look at alternating layers of mud and tephra, capped by sand and silt. He saw an ash fall—tephra—followed by a lahar, a fast-moving slurry of hot mud made of ash, dirt, and glacier melt. The sand and silt had arrived over time. At the bottom of the mesa, he saw more alternating layers of ash, mud, and river deposits: A deep book going back far longer than recorded history.

“Computers do some really big math and show us a picture of what’s down there,” Eileen said. “We actually debated whether to dig any deeper or just cover it over again and submit the videos and sensor readings. But I guess the committee is going for a traditional invasion.”

Mitch moved his hand in a sweeping motion. “Ash came down for several days,” he said. “Then a lahar swept down the river basin. Up here, it slopped over but didn’t carry off the bodies.”

“Very good,” Merton said, genuinely impressed.

“Want to see our etchings?” Eileen asked.

Eileen unrolled a display sheet in the conference tent and tuned it to her wrist computer. “Still getting used to all this tech,” she murmured. “It’s wonderful, when it works.”

Merton watched over Mitch’s shoulder. Two women in their thirties, dressed in jeans and short-sleeved khaki shirts, stood at the rear of the long, narrow tent, debating in soft but angry voices. Eileen did not see fit to introduce them, which clued Mitch that she was not the only high-powered anthropologist working the dig.

The screen glowed faintly in the tent’s half-light. Eileen told the computer to run a slide show.

“These are from yesterday,” she said. “We’ve done around twenty-seven complete scans. Redundancy upon redundancy, just to be sure we’re not making it up. Oliver says he’s never seen a more frightened bunch of scientists.”

“I haven’t,” Merton affirmed.

The first image showed the pale ghost of a skeleton curled in fetal position, surrounded by what looked like sheets of grass matting, a few stones, and a cloud of pebbles. “Our first. We’re calling her Charlene. As you can see, she’s fairly modern Homo sap. Prominent chin, relatively high forehead. But here’s the tomographic reconstruction from our multiple sweeps.” A second image came up and showed a dolichocephalic, or long-headed, skull. Eileen told the computer to rotate this image.

Mitch scowled. “Looks Australian,” he said.

“She probably is,” Eileen said. “About twenty years of age. Trapped and asphyxiated by hot mud. There are five other skeletons, one close to Charlene, the others clustered about four meters away. All are female. No infants. And no sign of males. The grass matting has decayed, of course. Just molds remain. We have a shadow mold around Charlene, a cast of fine silt from seepage through the mud and ash showing the outlines of her body. Here’s a tomographic image of what that cast would look like, if we could manage to pry it loose from the tephra and the rest of the overburden.”

A distorted ghost of a head, neck, and shoulders appeared and rotated smoothly on the display sheet. Mitch felt odd, standing in a tent that would have been familiar to Roy Chapman Andrews or even to Darwin himself, while staring down at the rolled-out sheet of the computer display.

He asked Eileen to rotate the image of Charlene again.

As the image swung around and around, he began to discern facial features, a closed eye, a blob of ear, hair matted and curled, a hint of cooked and distorted flesh slumped from the back of the skull.

“Pretty awful,” Merton said.

“They suffocated before the heat got to them,” Eileen said. “I hope they did, anyway.”

“Early-stage Tierra del Fuegan?” Mitch asked.

“That’s what most of us think. From the Australian migration out of South and Central America.”

Such migrations had been charted more and more often in the last fifteen years; Australian skeletons and associated artifacts found near the tip of South America had been dated to older than thirty thousand years BP, before the present.

The two other women walked around them to reach the exit, as serious and unsocial as porcupines. A plump, red-faced woman a few years younger than Eileen held the flap open for them then stepped in and stood before Mitch. “Is this the famous Mitch Rafelson?” she asked Eileen.

“Mitch, meet Connie Fitz. I told her I’d bring you here.”

“Delighted to meet you, after all these years.” Fitz wiped her hands on a dusty towel hanging from her belt before shaking hands. “Have you showed him the good stuff?”

“We’re getting there.”

“Best picture of Gertie is on sweep 21,” Fitz advised.

“I know,” Eileen said testily. “It’s my show.”

“Sorry. I’m the mother hen,” Fitz said. “The others are still arguing.”

“Spare me,” Eileen said. Another image cast their faces in a pale greenish light.

“Say hello to Gertie,” Merton said. He glanced up at Mitch, waiting to see his reaction.

Mitch poked the surface of the screen, making the light pool under his finger. He looked up, on the edge of anger. “You’re kidding me. This is a joke.”

“No joke,” Merton said.

Eileen magnified the image. Then, clearing his throat, Mitch asked, “Fraud?”

“What do you think?” Eileen asked.

“They’re in close association? Not in different layers?”

Eileen nodded. “They were buddies, probably traveling together. No infants, but as you can see, Gertie was maybe fifteen or sixteen, and she was probably gravid when the ash covered her.”

“Either that or she ate babies,” Merton said. Another twitch of the lip from Eileen.

“Oliver’s on borrowed time,” Fitz said.

“Matriarchy,” Merton accused, deadpan.

The tent suddenly seemed very stuffy. Mitch would have sat down had there been a convenient chair. “She looks early. Different from Charlene. Is she a hybrid?” he asked.

“No one’s willing to say,” Eileen replied. “You’ll like our late-night debates. A few weeks back, when I wanted you to join us, everyone shouted me down. Now, we’re all at each other’s throats, and Oliver, I’m told, convinced Daney it was time.”

“I did,” Merton said.

“Personally, I’m glad you’re here,” Eileen added.

“I’m not,” Fitz said. “If the feds find out about you, if there’s any publicity at all, we’re NAGPRA toast.”

“Tell me more, Mitch,” Eileen suggested.

Mitch massaged the back of his neck and for the ninth time watched the image of the skull grow and rotate. “Skull seems compressed. She’s long-headed, more even than the Australian. There’s a flint implement near her hand, and she’s carrying some sort of grass bag over her shoulder, if I’m not mistaken.”

“You’re not.”

“Filled with what looks like bush or small tree roots.”

“Desperation diet,” Fitz said.

“Maybe that was just her assignment, gathering roots for the stone soup.”

Merton looked puzzled. Eileen explained stone soup.

“How colonial,” Merton said.

“Ever the B-movie Brit, aren’t you?” Fitz said.

“Please, children,” Eileen warned.

“Relatively tall, taller than Charlene, maybe, and pretty robust, heavy boned,” Mitch continued, trying to talk himself out of what he was seeing. “Sloping forehead, mid-sized to small brain case, but the face is fairly flat. Impressive supraorbital torus. A bit of a sagittal keel, even an occipital torus. I’d love to get a better look at the incisors.”

“Shovel-shaped,” Eileen said.

Mitch rubbed his limp hand to still the tingling and looked at the others as if all of them might be crazy. “Gertie is much too early. She looks like Broken Hill 1. She’s Homo erectus.”

“Obviously,” Fitz said with a sniff.

“They’ve been extinct for more than three hundred thousand years,” Mitch said.

“Apparently not,” Eileen said.

Mitch laughed and stood back with a snap as if he had been leaning over a wasp that had suddenly taken flight. “Jesus.”

“Is that it?” Eileen asked. “Is that the most you can say?” She was kidding, but her tone had an edge.

“You’ve had longer to get used to it,” Mitch said.

“Who says we’re used to it?” Eileen asked.

“What about the fetus?”

“Too early and too little detail,” Fitz said. “It’s probably a lost cause.”

“I’m thinking we should drive a tube, take a thin core sample, and PCR mitochondrial DNA from the remaining integuments,” Merton said.

“Dreamer,” Fitz said. “They’re twenty thousand years old. Besides, the lahar cooked them.”

“Not to mush,” Merton countered.

“Think like a scientist, not a journalist.”

“Shh,” Eileen said in deference to Mitch, who was still staring at the rolled-out screen, mesmerized. “Here’s what we have on the central group,” she said, and paged through another set of ghostly images. “Gertie and Charlene are outliers. These four are Hildegard, Natasha, Sonya, and Penelope. Hildegard was probably the oldest, in her late thirties and already racked with arthritis.”

Hildegard, Natasha, and Sonya were clearly Homo sapiens. Penelope was another Homo erectus. They lay entwined as if they had died hugging each other, a mandala of bones, elegant in their sad way.

“Some of the hardliners are calling this a flood deposition of unassociated remains,” Fitz said.

“How would you answer them?” Eileen challenged Mitch, reverting to his teacher of old.

Mitch was still trying to remember to breathe. “They’re fully articulated,” he said. “They have their arms around each other. They don’t lie at odd angles, tossed together. This is in no way a flood deposit.”

Mitch was startled to watch Fitz and Eileen hug each other. “These women knew each other,” Eileen agreed, tears of relief dripping down her cheeks. “They worked together, traveled together. A nomadic band, caught in camp by a burp from Mount Hood. I can feel it.”

“Are you with us?” Fitz asked, her eyes bright and suspicious.

“Homo erectus. North America. Twenty thousand years ago,” Mitch said. Then, frowning, he asked, “Where are the males?”

“To hell with that,” Fitz fumed. “Are you with us?”

“Yeah,” Mitch said, sensing the tension and Eileen’s discomfort at his hesitation. “I’m with you.” Mitch put his good arm around Eileen’s shoulders, sharing the emotion.

Oliver Merton clasped his hands like a boy anticipating Christmas. “You realize that this could be a political bombshell,” he said.

“For the Indians?” Fitz asked.

“For us all.”

“How so?”

Merton grinned like a fiend. “Two different species, living together. It’s as if someone’s teaching us a lesson.”

23

NEW MEXICO

Dicken showed his pass at the Pathogenics main gate. The three young, burly guards there—machine pistols slung over their shoulders—waved him through. He drove the cart to the valet area and presented the pass for his car.

“Going for a drink,” he told the serious-faced middle-aged woman as she inspected his release.

“Did I ask?” She gave him a seasoned, challenging smile.

“No,” he admitted.

“Don’t tell us anything,” she advised. “We have to report every little thing. Vodka, white wine, or local beer?”

Dicken must have looked flustered.

“I’m joking,” she said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

She returned driving his leased Malibu, adapted for handicapped drivers.

“Nice setup, all the stuff on the wheel,” she said. “Took me a bit to figure it out.”

He accepted the inspection pass, made sure it was completely filled out—there had been some trouble with such things yesterday—and slipped it into a special holder in the visor. The sun was lingering over the rocky gray-and-brown hills beyond the main Pathogenics complex. “Thanks,” he said.

“Enjoy,” the valet said.

He took the main road out of the complex and drove through rush hour traffic, following the familiar track into Albuquerque, then pulled into the parking lot of the Marriott. Crickets were starting up and the air was tolerable. The hotel rose over the parking lot in one graceless pillar, tan and white against the dark blue night sky, proudly illuminated by big floodlights set around stretches of deep green lawn. Dicken walked into a low-slung restaurant wing, visited the men’s room, then came out and turned left to enter the bar.

The bar was just starting to crowd. Two regulars sat at the bar—a woman in her late thirties, looking as if life and her partners had ridden her hard, and a sympathetic elderly man with a long nose and close-set eyes. The worn-down woman was laughing at something the long-nosed man had just said.

Dicken sat on a tall stool by a high, tiny table beside a fake plant in an adobe pot. He ordered a Michelob when the waitress got around to him, then sat watching the people come and go, nursing his beer and feeling miserably out of place. Nobody was smoking, but the air smelled cold and stale, with a tang of beer and liquor.

Dicken reached into his pocket and withdrew his hand, then, under the table, unfolded a red serviette. He palmed the serviette over the damp napkin on the table, also red, and left it there.

At eight, after an hour and a half, his beer almost gone and the waitress starting to look predatory, he pushed off the stool, disgusted.

Someone touched his shoulder and Dicken jumped.

“How does James Bond do it?” asked a jovial fellow in a green sport jacket and beige slacks. With his balding pate, round, red Santa nose, lime green golf shirt bulging at the belly, and belt tightened severely to reclaim some girth, the middle-aged man looked like a tourist with a snootful. He smelled like one, too.

“Do what?” Dicken asked.

“Get the babes when they all know they’re just going to die.” The balding man surveyed Dicken with a jaundiced, watery eye. “I can’t figure it.”

“Do I know you?” Dicken asked gravely.

“I’ve got friends watching every porthole. We know the local spooks, and this place is not as haunted as some.”

Dicken put down his beer. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“Is Dr. Jurie your peer?” the man asked softly, pulling up another stool.

Dicken knocked his stool over in his haste to get up. He left the bar quickly, on the lookout for anyone too clean-cut, too vigilant.

The balding man shrugged, reached across the table to grab a handful of peanuts, then crumpled Dicken’s red serviette and slipped it into his pocket.

Dicken drove away from the hotel and parked briefly on a side street beside a used car lot. He was breathing heavily. “Christ, Christ, Cheee-rist,” he said softly, waiting for his heart to slow.

His cell phone rang and he jumped, then flipped it open.

“Dr. Dicken?”

“Yes.” He tried to sound coldly professional.

“This is Laura Bloch. I believe we have an appointment.”

Dicken drove up behind the blue Chevrolet and switched off his engine and lights. The desert surrounding Tramway Road was quiet and the air was warm and still; city lights illuminated low, spotty cumulus clouds to the south. A door swung open on the Chevrolet and a man in a dark suit got out and walked back to peer into his open window.

“Dr. Dicken?”

Dicken nodded.

“I’m Special Agent Bracken, Secret Service. ID, please?”

Dicken produced his Georgia driver’s license.

“Federal ID?”

Dicken held out his hand and the agent whisked a scanner over the back. He had been chipped six years ago. The agent glanced at the scanner display and nodded. “We’re good,” he said. “Laura Bloch is in the car. Please proceed forward and take a seat in the rear.”

“Who was the guy in the bar?” Dicken asked.

Special Agent Bracken shook his head. “I’m sure I haven’t the faintest idea, sir.”

“Joke?” Dicken asked.

Bracken smiled. “He was the best we could do on short notice. Good people with experience are kind of in short supply now, if you get my meaning. Slim pickings for honest folks.”

“Yeah,” Dicken said. Special Agent Bracken opened the door and Dicken walked to the Chevrolet.

Bloch’s appearance was a surprise to him. He had never seen pictures and at first he was not impressed. With her prominent eyes and fixed expression, she resembled a keen little pug. She held out her hand and they shook before Dicken slid in beside her on the rear seat, lifting his leg to clear the door frame.

“Thank you for meeting with me,” she said.

“Part of the assignment, I guess.”

“I’m curious why Jurie asked for you,” Bloch said. “Any theories?”

“Because I’m the best there is,” Dicken said.

“Of course.”

“And he wants to keep me where he can see me.”

“Does he know?”

“That NIH is keeping an eye on him? No doubt. That I’m speaking with you, now, I certainly hope not.”

Bloch shrugged. “Matters little in the long run.”

“I should get back soon. I’ve been gone a little too long for comfort, probably.”

“This will just take a few minutes. I’ve been told to brief you.”

“Who told you?”

“Mark Augustine said you should be prepped before things start happening.”

“Say hello to Mark,” Dicken said.

“Our man in Damascus,” Bloch said.

“Beg your pardon? I don’t get the reference.”

“Saw the light on the road to Damascus.” She regarded Dicken with one eye half closed. “He’s being very helpful. He tells us Emergency Action is soon going to be forced to do some questionable things. Their scientific underpinnings are coming under severe scrutiny. They have to hit pay dirt within a certain window of public fear, and that window may be closing. The public is getting tired of standing on tiptoes for the likes of Rachel Browning. Browning has put all her hopes on Sandia Pathogenics. So far, she’s keeping the Hill off her back by appealing to fear, national security, and national defense, all wrapped in tight secrecy. But it’s Mark’s belief that Pathogenics will have to violate some pretty major laws to get what they want, even should it exist.”

“What laws?”

“Let’s leave that open for now. What I’m here to tell you is that the political winds are about to shift. The White House is sending out feelers to Congress on rescinding Emergency Action’s blanket mandate. Cases are coming up in the Supreme Court.”

“They’ll support EMAC. Six to three.”

“Right,” Bloch said. “But based on our polling, we’re pretty sure that’s going to backfire. What’s the science look like so far, from the Sandia perspective?”

“Interesting. Nothing very useful to Browning. But I’m not privy to what’s going on with all the samples brought in from Arizona—”

“The Sable Mountain School,” Bloch said.

“That’s the main source.”

“Goddamned bastard is consistent.”

Dicken sat back and waited for Bloch’s face to clear an expression of angry disgust, then concluded, “There’s no evidence that social interaction or stress is causing viral recombination. Not in SHEVA kids.”

“So why is Jurie persisting?”

“Momentum, mostly. And fear. Real fear. Jurie is convinced that puberty is going to do the trick. That, and pregnancy.”

“Jesus,” Bloch said. “What do you think?”

“I doubt it. But it’s still a possibility.”

“Do they suspect you’re working with outside interests? Beyond NIH, I mean?”

“Of course,” Dicken said. “They’d be fools not to.”

“So, what is it with Jurie—a death wish?”

Dicken shook his head. “Calculated risk. He thinks I could be useful, but he’ll bring me into the loop only when it’s necessary and not a second before. Meanwhile, he keeps me busy doing far-out stuff.”

“How do the others feel about what Pathogenics is doing?”

“Nervous.”

Bloch clenched her teeth.

Dicken watched her jaw muscles work. “Sorry not to be more helpful,” he said.

“I will never understand scientists,” she murmured.

“I don’t understand people,” Dicken said. “Anybody.”

“Fair enough. All right,” Bloch said. “We have about a week and a half. Supreme Court is scheduled to release their decision on Remick v. the state of Ohio. Senator Gianelli wants to be ready when the White House is forced to cut a deal.”

Dicken fixed her gaze and raised his hand. “May I have my say?”

“Of course,” Bloch said.

“No half measures. Bring them down all at once. Tell the big boys Department of Health and Human Services needs to revoke EMAC’s blanket national security exception to 45 CFR 46, protection of human subjects, and exceptions to 21 CFR parts 50 and… amended, what is it, 312? 321? Informed consent waiver for viral national emergency,” Dicken said. “Are they going to do that?”

Bloch smiled, impressed. “21 CFR 50.24 actually applies. I don’t know. We’ve got some institutional review boards coming over to our side, but it’s a slow process. EMAC still funds a boatload of research. Get us whatever you can for ammunition. I don’t want to sound crass, but we need outrage, Dr. Dicken. We need more than just pitiful bones in a drawer.”

Dicken tugged nervously on the door handle.

“We’re on the knife edge of public opinion here. It could go either way. Understand?” Bloch added.

“I know what you need,” Dicken said. “I’m just disgusted that it’s gone this far, and we’ve become so difficult to shock.”

“We don’t claim any moral high ground, but neither the senator nor I are in this for political advancement,” Bloch said. “The senator’s approval rating is at an all-time low, thirty-five percent, twenty percent undecided, and it’s because he’s outspoken on this issue. I’m beginning to take a dislike to our constituents, Dr. Dicken. I really am.”

Bloch offered him her small, pale hand. He paused, looking into her steady black eyes, then shook it and returned to his car.

Special Agent Bracken closed his door for him and leaned down to window level. “Some friends in the New Mexico State Police tell me that citizens around here aren’t happy about what’s going on at Sandia,” he said. “They—the police, and maybe the citizens—plan to engage in some civil disobedience, if you know what I mean. Not much we can do about it, and damned few details. Just a heads up.”

“Thanks,” Dicken said.

Bracken tapped the roof of the car. “Free to go, Dr. Dicken.”

24

ARIZONA

Stella awoke before dawn and stared at the acoustic tile ceiling over her bunk. She was instantly vigilant, aware of her surroundings. The dormitory was quiet but she smelled something funny in the air: an absence. Then she realized she couldn’t smell anything at all. A peculiar sensation of claustrophobia came over her. For a moment, she thought she saw a pattern of dark colors form a circle over her bunk. Little flashes of red and green, like distant glowing insects, illuminated the circle, became tiny faces. She blinked, and the circle, the lights, the faces faded into the shadowy void of the ceiling tiles.

Stella felt a chill, as if she had seen a ghost.

Her thighs were damp. She reached under the covers with her hand and brought up her finger, curling it to keep the sheet clean. The finger was tipped with a smudge of black in the moonlight shining through the windows. Stella made a little sound, not of fear—she knew what it probably was, Kaye had explained it years ago to her—but of deeper recognition.

Just that afternoon, she had seen spots of blood on a toilet lid in the bathroom. Not her own; some other girl’s. She had wondered if somebody had cut herself.

Now she knew.

With a sigh, she wiped the blood on her nightgown, beneath the fabric of her short sleeve, then thought for a moment, and touched the finger to the tip of her tongue. The sensation—taste was not really the right word—was not entirely pleasant. She had done something that seemed to violate her body’s rules. But slowly her sense of smell returned. The sensation on her tongue lingered, sharp with an undertone of mystery.

I’m not ready, she thought. And then remembered what Kaye had told her: You won’t believe you’re ready. The body propels us.

She lifted the sheets with her knees and then let them drop, wafting her own scent through the small gaps around her midriff. She smelled different, not unpleasant, a little sour, like yogurt. She liked her earlier smell better. She recognized it. This new smell was not welcome. She did not need any more difficulties.

I don’t care. I’m just not ready.

She shivered suddenly, as if a ropey loop of emotion had been pulled, rasping, through her body, then felt a sudden contraction of muscles around her abdomen, a cascade of unexpected pleasure. The tip of her tongue seemed to expand. Her entire body flushed. She did not know whether she was dreaming or what was happening.

Stella kicked back the covers, then rolled on her side, wincing at the stickiness, wanting to get up and get clean, wash away the new smell. Slowly, as the minutes passed, she relaxed, closed her eyes. Natural stuff. Not so bad. Mother told me.

Her nostrils flared. Currents of slow air moved around the dormitory, propelled by drafts through the doorways, cracks in the ceiling; at night, it was possible sometimes for girls to scent and communicate, reassure each other, without getting out of bed. Stella was reasonably familiar with the circulation patterns of the building at different hours and with the wind outside coming from different directions.

Around the room, she smelled the other girls on their bunks and heard them moving quietly in the bars and shadows of moonlight. Some of them moaned. One and then another coughed and softly called out her friends’ names.

Celia rolled out of the bottom bunk and stood up beside Stella. Her eyes were large in the dim light, her face a moving blob of paleness framed by wild black hair. “Did you feel that?” she whispered.

“Shh,” Stella said.

Felice’s face joined Celia’s beside Stella’s bed.

“I think it’s okay,” Stella said, almost too softly for them to hear.

“We’re getting-KUK our first periods,” Celia said.

“All together?” Felice asked, squeaking.

Someone in another bunk heard and giggled.

“Shh,” Stella insisted, wrinkling her face in warning. She sat up and looked along the rows of bunks. Some of the younger girls—a year or more younger—were still asleep. Then, her back tingling, Stella looked up at the video cameras mounted in the rafters. Moonlight reflected from the linoleum floor glinted in their tiny plastic eyes.

Four girls left their bunks and padded into the bathroom, walking bowlegged.

Useless to hide it, Stella thought. They’re going to know.

And they would be even more frightened. She could predict that easily and with assurance. Everything different frightened the humans, and this was going to be very different.

25

OREGON

Eileen set the Coleman lantern on a metal table and laid out the cold dinner: a nearly frozen loaf of white bread, Oscar Meyer bologna in a squat, rubbery cylinder, American cheese, and a chilled, half-eaten tin of Spam. A Tupperware box, yellow with age, contained cut celery stalks. She positioned two apples, three tangerines, and two cans of Coors beside this assortment. “Want to see the wine list?” she asked.

“Beer will do. Breakfast of diggers,” Mitch said. The plastic roof of the hut over the long reach of the L-shaped excavation rattled in the wind rolling down the old riverbed.

Eileen sat in the canvas seat of her camp chair and let out her breath in a sigh that was halfway to a shriek. But for them and the still-hidden bones, the excavation was empty. It was almost midnight. “I am dead,” she proclaimed. “I can’t take this anymore. Dig ‘em out, don’t dig ‘em out, keep your cool when the academics start to scrap about emergence violations. The whole goddamned human race is so primitive.”

Mitch cracked his can and tossed back a long gulp. The beer, almost tasteless but for a prolonged fizz, satisfied him intensely. He put down the can and picked up a slice of cheese, then prepared to peel back the wrapping. He turned it into a grand gesture. Eileen watched as he lifted the slice, rotated it on tripod fingers, and then, using his teeth, delicately lifted and pulled off the intercalary paper. He glanced at her with narrowed eyes and raised one thick eyebrow. “Expose ‘em,” he said.

“Think so?” Eileen asked.

“Give me that old-time revelation. I’d rather see them personally than trust future generations to do it better. But that’s just me.” The beer and exhaustion both relaxed Mitch and made him philosophical. “Bring them into the light. Rebirth,” he said. “The Indians are right. This is a sacred moment. There should be ceremonies. We should be appeasing their troubled spirits, and our own. Oliver is right. They’re here to teach us.”

Eileen sniffed. “Some Indians don’t want their theories contradicted,” she said. “They’d rather live with fairy tales.”

“The Indians in Kumash gave us shelter when Kaye was pregnant. They still refuse to hand their SHEVA kids over to Emergency Action. I’ve become more understanding of anybody the U.S. government has repeatedly lied to.” Mitch raised his beer in toast. “Here’s to the Indians.”

Eileen shook her head. “Ignorance is ignorance. We can’t afford to hang on to our childhood blankies. We’re big boys and girls.”

Mostly girls, Mitch thought. “Are anthropologists any more likely to see what’s under their noses?”

Eileen pursed her lips. “Well, no,” she said. “We’ve already got two in camp who insist these can’t possibly be Homo erectus. They’re creating a tall, stocky, thick-browed variety of homo sap on their laptops even as we speak. We’re having a hell of a time convincing them to keep their mouths shut. Ignorant bitches, both of them. But don’t tell anybody I said so.”

“Absolutely,” Mitch said.

Eileen had finished assembling a Spam and American cheese sandwich, with two stalks of celery sticking out like lunate Gumby feet from the pressed layers of perfect crust. She bit into a corner and chewed thoughtfully.

Mitch wasn’t particularly hungry, not that he minded the food. He had eaten much worse on previous sites—including a meal of roasted grubs on toast.

“Was it another SHEVA episode?” Eileen mused. “A massive leap between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens?”

“I wouldn’t think so,” Mitch said. “A little too radical even for SHEVA.”

Eileen’s speculative gaze rose beyond the rattling plastic roof. “Men,” she said. “Men behaving badly.”

“Uh-oh,” Mitch said. “Here it comes.”

“Men raiding other groups, taking prisoners. Not very choosy. Gathering up all the females with the appropriately satisfying orifices. Females only, whomever and whatever they might be.”

“You think our absent males were raiders and rapists?” Mitch asked.

“Would you date a Homo erectus? I mean, if you weren’t at the absolute bottom of any social hierarchy?”

Mitch thought of the mother in the cave in the Alps, more than a lifetime ago, and her loyal husband. “Maybe they were more gentle.”

“Psychic flower children, Mitch?” Eileen asked. “I say these gals were all captives and they were abandoned when the volcano blew. Anything else is pure William Golding bullshit.” Eileen was pushing the matter deliberately, playing both proponent and devil’s advocate, trying to clear her head, or possibly his.

“I suppose the Homo erectus members of the group might have been slaves or servants—captives,” Mitch said. “But I’m not so sure social life was that sophisticated back then, or that there were such fine gradations of status. My guess is they were traveling together. For protection, maybe, like different species of herd animals on the veldt. As equals. Obviously, they liked each other enough to die in each other’s arms.”

“Mixed species band? Does that fit anything in your experience with the higher apes?”

Mitch had to admit it did not. Baboons and chimps played together when they were young, but adult chimps ate baby baboons and monkeys when they could catch them. “Culture matters more than skin color,” he said.

“But this gap… I just don’t see it being bridgeable. It’s too huge.”

“Maybe we’re tainted by recent history. Where were you born, Eileen?”

“Savannah, Georgia. You know that.”

“Kaye and I lived in Virginia.” Mitch let the thought hang there for a moment, trying to find a delicate way to phrase it.

“Plantation propaganda from my slave-owner ancestors, my thrice-great grandpappy, has tainted the entire last three hundred years. Is that what you’re suggesting?” Eileen asked, lips curling in a duelist’s smile, savoring a swift and jabbing return. “What a goddamned Yankee thing to say.”

“We know so little about what we’re capable of,” Mitch continued. “We are creatures of culture. There are other ways to think of this ensemble. If they weren’t equals, at least they worked together, respected each other. Maybe they smelled right to each other.”

“It’s becoming personal, isn’t it, Mitch? Looking for a way to turn this into a real example. Merton’s political bombshell.”

Mitch agreed to that possibility with a sly wink and a nod.

Eileen shook her head. “Women have always hung together,” she said. “Men have always been a sometime thing.”

“Wait till we find the men,” Mitch said, starting to feel defensive.

“What makes you think they stuck around?”

Mitch stared grimly at the plastic roof.

“Even if there were men nearby,” she said, “what makes you think we’ll be lucky enough to find them?”

“Nothing,” he said, and felt hazily that this was a lie.

Eileen finished her sandwich and drank half her can of Coors to chase it down. She had never liked eating very much and did it only to keep body and soul together. She was hungry and deliberate in bed, however. Orgasms allowed her to think more clearly, she had once confessed. Mitch remembered those times well enough, though they had not slept together since he had been twenty-three years old.

Eileen had called her seduction of the young anthropology grad student her biggest mistake. But they had stayed friends and colleagues all these years, capable of a loose and honest interaction that had no pretense of sexual expectation or disappointment. A remarkable friendship.

The wind rattled the roof again. Mitch listened to the hiss of the Coleman lantern.

“What happened between you and Kaye, after you got out of prison?” Eileen asked.

“I don’t know,” Mitch said, his jaw tightening. Her asking was a weird kind of betrayal, and she could sense his sudden burn.

“Sorry,” she said.

“I’m prickly about it,” he acknowledged. He felt a waft of air behind him before he saw the woman’s shadow. Connie Fitz stepped lightly over the hard-packed dirt and stood beside Eileen, resting a hand on her shoulder.

“Our little stew pot is about to boil over,” Fitz said. “I think we can hold the lid down for another two or three days, max. The zealots want to issue a press release. The hardliners want to keep it covered up.”

Eileen looked at Mitch with a crinkled lower lip. All that was outside her control, her expression said. “Enslaved women abandoned in camp by cowardly males,” she resumed, getting back to the main topic, her eyes bright in the Coleman’s pearly light.

“Do you really believe that?” Mitch asked.

“Oh, come on, Mitch. I don’t know what to believe.”

Mitch’s stomach worked over the meal with no conviction. “You should at least tell the students that they need to expand the perimeter,” he said. “There could very well be other bodies around, maybe within a few hundred yards.”

Fitz made a provisional moue of interest. “We’ve talked about it. But everybody wants a piece of the main dig, so nobody was enthusiastic about fanning out,” she said.

“You feel something?” Eileen asked Mitch. She leaned forward, her voice going mock-sepulchral. “Can you read these bones?”

Fitz laughed.

“Just a hunch,” Mitch said, wincing. Then, more quietly, “Probably not a very good one.”

“Will Daney continue to pay if we dawdle and poke around a couple of more days?” Fitz asked.

“Merton thinks he’s patient and he’ll pay plenty,” Eileen said. “He knows Daney better than any of us.”

“This could become every bit as bad as archaeology in Israel,” said Fitz, a natural pessimist. “Every site loaded with political implications. Do you think Emergency Action will come in and shut us down, using NAGPRA as an excuse?”

Mitch pondered, slow deliberation being about all he was capable of this late, this worn down by the day. “I don’t think they’re that crazy,” he said. “But the whole world’s a tinderbox.”

“Maybe we should toss in a match,” Eileen said.

26

BALTIMORE

Kaye woke to the sound of the bedside phone dweedling, sat straight up in bed, pulled her hair away from her face, and peered through sleep-fogged eyes at the edge of daylight slicing between the shutters. The clock said 5:07 a.m. She could not think who could be calling her at this hour.

Today was not going to be a good day, she knew that already, but she picked up the phone and plumped the pillow behind her into a cushion. “Hello.”

“I need to speak with Kaye Lang.”

“That’s me,” she said sleepily.

“Kaye, this is Luella Hamilton. You got in touch with us a little while ago.”

Kaye felt her adrenaline surge. Kaye had met Luella Hamilton fifteen years ago, when she had been a volunteer subject in a SHEVA study at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda. Kaye had taken a liking to the woman, but had not heard from her since driving west with Mitch to Washington state. “Luella? I don’t remember…”

“Well, you did.”

Suddenly Kaye held the phone close. She had heard something about the Hamiltons being connected to Up River. It was reputed to be a very choosy organization. Some claimed it was subversive. She had forgotten all about her letter; that had been the worst time for her, and she had reached out to anyone, even the extremists who claimed they could track and rescue children.

“Luella? I didn’t—”

“Well, since I knew you, they told me to make the return call. Is that okay?”

She tried to clear her head. “It’s good to hear your voice. How are you?”

“I’m expecting, Kaye. You?”

“No,” Kaye said. Luella had to be in her middle fifties. Talk about rolling the dice.

“It’s SHEVA again, Kaye,” Luella said. “But no time to chat. So listen close. You there, Kaye?”

“I hear you.”

“I want you to get to a scrambled line and call us again. A good scrambled line. You still have the number?”

“Yes,” Kaye said, wondering if it was in her wallet.

“You’ll get a cute mechanical voice. Our little robot. Leave your number and we might call you back. Then, we’ll go from there. All right, honey?”

Kaye smiled despite the tension. “Yes, Luella. Thank you.”

“Sorry to ring so early. Good-bye, dear.”

The phone went dead. Kaye immediately swung her legs out of bed and walked into the kitchen to fix coffee. Thought about trying to reach Mitch and tell him.

But it was too early, and probably not a good idea to spread such news around when any phone call was risky.

She stood by the window looking out over Baltimore and thought about Stella in Arizona, wondering how she was doing, and how long it would be until she saw her again.

Something snapped and she heard herself making little growls, like a fox. For a moment, clutching the coffee cup in her trembling hand, Kaye felt a blind, helpless rage. “Give me back my daughter, you FUCKHEADS,” she rasped. Then she dropped back into the nearest chair, shaking so hard the coffee spilled. She set the cup on a side table and wrapped herself in her arms. With the thick terry sleeve of her robe, she wiped tears of helplessness from her eyes. “Calm down, dear,” she said, trying to copy Mrs. Hamilton’s strong contralto.

It was not going to be an easy day. Kaye strongly suspected she was going to be put at liberty. Fired. Ending her life as a scientist forever, but opening up her options so she could go get her daughter and reunite her family.

“Dreamer,” she said, with none of the conviction of Luella Hamilton.

27

ARIZONA

They pumped a thick strawberry smell into the dorm at eight in the morning. Stella opened her eyes and pinched her nose, moaning.

“What now?” Celia asked in the bunk below.

The humans did that whenever they wanted to do something the children might object to. Shots, mass blood samples, medical exams, dorm checks for contraband.

Next came a wave of Pine-Sol, blowing in through the vent pipes slung under the frame roof. The smell came in through Stella’s mouth when she breathed, making her gag.

She sat on the edge of the bed in her nightgown, her stomach twisting and her chest heaving. Three men in isolation suits walked down the center aisle of the dormitory. One of the men, she saw, was not a man; it was Joanie, shorter and stockier than the others, her blank face peering through the plastic faceplate of the floppy helmet.

Joanie reminded Stella of Fred Trinket’s mother; she had that same calm, fated expectancy of everything and anything, with no emotional freight attached.

The suited trio stopped by a bed four down from Stella’s. The girl in the top bunk, Julianne Nicorelli, not a member of Stella’s deme, climbed down at a few soft words from Joanie. She looked apprehensive but not scared, not yet. Sometimes the counselors and teachers ran drills in the camp, odd drills, and the kids were never told what they were up to.

Joanie turned and walked deliberately toward Stella’s bunk. Stella slid down quickly, not using the ladder, and flattened her nightgown where it had ridden up above her knees. She hid her chest with her hands; the fabric was a little sheer, and she didn’t like the way the men were looking at her.

“You, too, Stella,” Joanie said, her voice hollow and hissy behind the helmet. “We’re going on a trip.”

“How many?” Celia asked.

Joanie smiled humorlessly. “Special trip. Reward for good grades and good behavior. The rest get to eat breakfast early.”

This was a lie. Julianne Nicorelli got terrible grades, not that anyone cared.

28

BALTIMORE

“Heads up. Marge will be here in twenty minutes,” Liz Cantrera said. “Ready?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Kaye said, and took a deep breath. She looked around the lab to see if there was anything that could be put away or cleaned up. Not that it mattered. It was her last day.

“You look fine,” Liz said sadly, straightening Kaye’s lapels.

Marge Cross understood the messy bedrooms of science. And Kaye doubted that she wanted to check up on their housekeeping.

Around Kaye, Cross was almost always cheerful. She seemed to like Kaye and to trust her as much as she trusted anybody. Today, however, Cross was saying little, tapping her lip with her finger and nodding. She lifted her head to peer at the pipes hanging from the ceiling. She seemed to study a series of red tags hanging from various pressurized lines.

Only three people accompanied Cross. Two handsome young men in charcoal gray suits made notes on e-tabs. A slender young woman with long, thin blonde hair and a short, upturned nose took photos with a pen-sized camera.

Liz kept to the background, conspicuously allowing Kaye the point position. She gave them all a brief tour, well aware they were taking inventory in preparation for a transfer or a shutdown.

“We’ve lost,” Cross said. “Everything this company has been charged to do by the government and by the people has turned into a can of worms,” she added quietly, and chewed her lower lip. “I hear you did a good job on the Hill this week.” Cross regarded Kaye with a faint smile.

“It went okay.” Kaye shifted her eyes to one side and shrugged. “Rachel Browning tried to pull down my shorts.”

“Did she succeed?” Cross asked.

“Got them down to my curlies,” Kaye said.

The young men looked ready to appear shocked, should Cross be. Cross laughed. “Jesus, Kaye. I never know what I’m going to hear from you. You drive my PR folks nuts.”

“That’s why I try to keep my head down and stay quiet.”

“We’re not learning how to stop SHEVA,” Cross said reflectively, still examining the ceiling pipes.

“That’s true,” Kaye said.

“You’re glad.”

Once again, Kaye felt it was not her place to answer, that she had responsibilities to others besides herself.

“La Robert is failing, too, but he won’t admit it,” Cross said. She waved her hands at the others in the lab. “Time to go, kiddies. Leave us sacred monsters alone for a while.”

The young men filed through the door. The slender blond tried to remind Cross of appointments later in the morning.

“Cancel them,” Cross instructed her.

Liz had stayed behind, solicitous of Kaye. The way she twitched, Kaye thought her assistant might try to physically intervene to protect her.

Cross smiled warmly at Liz. “Honey, can you add anything to our duet?”

“Not a thing,” Liz admitted. “Should I go?” she asked Kaye.

Kaye nodded.

Liz picked up her coat and purse and followed the blond through the door.

“Let’s take the express to the top floor,” Cross suggested pleasantly, and put her arm around Kaye’s shoulder. “It’s been far too long since we put our heads together. I want you to explain what happened. What you thought you’d find in radiology.”

The Americol boardroom on the twentieth floor was huge and extravagant, with a long table cut lengthwise from an oak trunk, handmade William Morris–style chairs that seemed to float on their slender legs, and walls covered with early twentieth-century illustrative art.

Cross told the room what to do and two of the walls folded up, revealing electronic whiteboards. Sections of the table rose up like toy soldiers, thin personal monitors.

“If I were starting over again,” Cross said, “I’d turn this into a kindergarten classroom. Little chairs and wagons with little cartons of milk. That’s how ignorant we are. But… We do cling to our beauty and wealth. We like to feel we are in control and always will be.”

Kaye listened attentively, but did not respond.

Cross pushed another button and the whiteboards replayed long strings of scrawled notes. Kaye guessed these were a frozen record of several late-night and early-morning pacing sessions, Cross alone up here in the heights, wielding her little pen wand, moving along the boards like a sorcerous queen scattering spells on the walls of her castle.

Kaye could decipher very few of the scrawls. Cross’s handwriting was notorious.

“Nobody’s seen this,” Cross murmured. “It’s hard to read, isn’t it?” she asked Kaye. “I used to have perfect penmanship.” She held up her swollen knuckles.

Kaye wondered where Cross intended to go with this. Was it all some devious way of letting her go gracefully, with a hearty handshake?

“The secret of life,” Cross said, “lies in understanding how little things talk to each other. Correct?”

“Yes,” Kaye said.

“And you’ve maintained, from before the beginnings of SHEVA, that viruses are part of the arsenal of communications our cells and bodies use to talk.”

“That’s why you brought me to Americol.”

Cross dismissed that with a slight frown and a lift of one shoulder. “So you turned yourself into a laboratory to prove a point, and gave birth to a SHEVA child. Gutsy, and more than a little stupid.”

Kaye clenched her jaw.

Cross knew she had touched an exposed nerve. “I think the Jackson clique is right on the money. Experience biases you in favor of believing SHEVA is benign, a natural phenomenon that we’ll just have to knuckle under and accept. Don’t fight it. It’s bigger than all of us.”

“I’m fond of my daughter,” Kaye said stiffly.

“I don’t doubt it. Hear me out. I’m going somewhere with this, but I don’t know where just yet.” Cross paced along the whiteboards, arms folded, tapping one elbow with the remote. “My companies are my children. That’s a cliché, but it’s true, Kaye. I am as stupid and gutsy as you were. I have turned my companies into an experiment in politics and human history. We’re very much alike, except I had neither the opportunity—nor, frankly, the inclination—to put my body on the line. Now, we both stand to lose what we love most.”

Cross turned and flicked the whiteboards clean with the press of a button. Her face curled in disgust. “It’s all shit. This room is a waste of money. You can’t help but think that whoever built all this knew what they were doing, had all the answers. It’s an architectural lie. I hate this room. Everything I just erased was drivel. Let’s go somewhere else.” Cross was visibly angry.

Kaye folded her hands cautiously. She had no idea what was going to happen, not now. “All right,” she said. “Where?”

“No limos. Let’s lose the luxuries for a few hours. Let’s get back to little chairs and cookies and cartons of milk.” Cross smiled wickedly, revealing strong, even, but speckled teeth. “Let’s get the hell out of this building.”

A gray, drizzly light greeted them as they pushed through the glass doors to the street. Cross hailed a cab.

“Your cheeks are pinking,” she told Kaye as they climbed into the backseat. “Like they want to say something.”

“That still happens,” Kaye admitted with some embarrassment.

Cross gave the driver an address Kaye did not recognize. The gray-haired man, a Sikh wearing a white turban, looked over his shoulder.

“I will need card in advance,” he said.

Cross reached for her belt pouch.

“My treat,” Kaye said, and handed the driver her credit card. The cab pushed off through traffic.

“What was it like, having those cheeks—like signboards?” Cross asked.

“It was a revelation,” Kaye said. “When my daughter was young, we practiced cheek-flashing. It was like teaching her how to speak. I missed them when they faded.”

Cross watched her absorbedly, then gave a little start and said, “I learned I couldn’t have children when I was twenty-five. Pelvic inflammatory disease. I was a big, ungainly girl and had a hard time getting dates. I had to take my men where I found them, and one of them… Well. No children, and I decided not to reverse the scarring, because there was never a man I trusted enough to be a father. I got rich pretty early and the men I was attracted to were like pleasant toys, needy, eager to please, not very reliable.”

“I’m sorry,” Kaye said.

“Sublimation is the soul of accomplishment,” Cross said. “I can’t say I understand what it means to be a parent. I can only make comparisons with how I feel about my companies, and that probably isn’t the same.”

“Probably not,” Kaye said.

Cross clucked her tongue. “This isn’t about funding or firing you or anything so simple. We’re both explorers, Kaye. For that reason alone, we need to be open and frank.”

Kaye peered out the taxi window and shook her head, amused. “It isn’t working, Marge. You’re still rich and powerful. You’re still my boss.”

“Well, hell,” Cross said with mock disappointment, and snapped her fingers.

“But it may not matter,” Kaye said. “I’ve never been very good at concealing my true feelings. Maybe you’ve noticed.”

Cross made a sound too high-pitched to be a laugh, but it had a certain eccentric dignity, and probably wasn’t a giggle, either. “You’ve been playing me all along.”

“You knew I would,” Kaye said.

Cross patted her cheek. “Cheek-flashing.”

Kaye looked puzzled.

“How can something so wonderful be an aberration, a disease? If I could fever scent, I would be running every corporation in the country by now.”

“You wouldn’t want to,” Kaye said. “If you were one of the children.”

“Now who’s being naÏve?” Cross asked. “Do you think they’ve left our monkey selves behind?”

“No. Do you know what a deme is?” Kaye asked.

“Social units for some of the SHEVA kids.”

“What I’m saying is a deme might be the greedy one, not an individual. And when a deme fever scents, we lesser apes don’t stand a chance.”

Cross leaned her head back and absorbed this. “I’ve heard that,” she said.

“Do you know a SHEVA child?” the driver asked, looking at them in the rearview mirror. He did not wait for an answer. “My granddaughter, a SHEVA girl, is in Peshawar, she is charmer. Real charmer. It is scary,” he added happily, proudly, with a broad grin. “Really scary.”

29

ARIZONA

Stella sat with Julianne Nicorelli in a small beige room in the hospital. Joanie had separated them from the other girls. They had been waiting for two hours. The air was still and they sat stiff as cold butter on their chairs, watching a fly crawl along the window.

The room was still thick with strawberry scent, which Stella had once loved.

“I feel awful,” Julianne said.

“So do I.”

“What are they waiting for?”

“Something’s screwy/ Made a mistake,” Stella said.

Julianne scraped her shoes on the floor. “I’m sorry you aren’t one of my deme,” she said.

“That’s okay.”

“Let’s make our own, right here. We’ll/ Like us/ join up with anyone else/ locked away/ who comes in.”

“All right,” Stella said.

Julianne wrinkled her nose. “It stinks so bad/ Can’t smell myself think.”

Their chairs were several feet apart, a polite distance considering the nervous fear coming from the two girls, even over the miasma of strawberry. Julianne stood and held out one hand. Stella leaned her head to one side and pulled back her hair, exposing the skin behind her ear. “Go ahead.”

Julianne touched the skin there, the waxy discharge, and rubbed it under her nose. She made a face, then lowered her finger and frithed—pulling back her upper lip and sucking air over the finger and into her mouth.

“Ewww,” she said, not at all disapprovingly, and closed her eyes. “I feel better. Do you?”

Stella nodded and said, “Do you want to be deme mother?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Julianne said. “We’re not a quorum anyway.” Then she looked alarmed. “They’re probably recording us.”

“Probably.”

“I don’t care. Go ahead.”

Stella touched Julianne behind her ear. The skin was quite warm there, hot almost. Julianne was fever scenting, desperately trying to reach out and both politely persuade and establish a bond with Stella. That was touching. It meant Julianne was more frightened and insecure than Stella, more in need.

“I’ll be deme mother,” Stella said. “Until someone better comes in.”

“All right,” Julianne said. It was just for show, anyway. No quorum, just whistling down the wind. Julianne rocked back and forth. Her scent was changing to coffee and tuna—a little disturbing. It made Stella want to hug somebody.

“I smell bad, don’t I?” Julianne said.

“No,” Stella said. “But we both smell different now.”

“What’s happening to us?”

“I’m sure they want to find out,” Stella said, and faced the strong steel door.

“My hips hurt,” Julianne said. “I am so miserable.”

Stella pulled their chairs closer. She touched Julianne’s fingers where they rested on her knee. Julianne was tall and skinny. Stella had more flesh on her frame though as yet no breasts, and her hips were narrow.

“They don’t want us to have children,” Julianne said, as if reading her mind, and her misery crossed over into sobs.

Stella just kept stroking her hand. Then she turned the girl’s hand over, spit into her palm, and rubbed their palms together. Even over the strawberry smell, she got through to Julianne, and Julianne began to settle down, focus, smooth out the useless wrinkles of her fear.

“They shouldn’t make us mad,” Julianne said. “If they want to kill us, they better do it soon.”

“Shhh,” Stella warned. “Let’s just get comfortable. We can’t stop them from doing what they’re going to do.”

“What are they going to do?” Julianne asked.

“Shh.”

The electronic lock on the door clicked. Stella saw Joanie in her hooded suit through the small window. The door opened.

“Let’s go, girls,” Joanie said. “This is going to be fun.” Her voice sounded like a recording coming out of an old doll.

A yellow bus, like a small school bus, waited for them on the drive in front of the hospital. The bus that had brought Strong Will had been a different bus, secure and shiny, new; she wondered why they were not using that bus.

Four counselors in suits moved five girls and four boys forward, toward the door of the bus. Celia and LaShawna and Felice were in the group once again. Julianne walked ahead of Stella, her loose clogs slapping the ground.

Strong Will was among the boys, Stella saw with both apprehension and an odd excitement. She was pretty sure it wasn’t a sexual thing—based on what Kaye had told her—but it was something like that. She had never felt such a thing before. It was new.

Not just to her.

She thought maybe it was new to the human race, or whatever the children were. A virus kind of thing, maybe.

The boys walked ten feet apart from the girls. None of them were shackled, but where would they run? Into the desert? The closest town was twenty miles away, and already it was a hundred degrees.

The counselors held little gas guns that filled the air with a citrus smell, oranges and limes, and a perennial favorite, Pine-Sol.

Will looked dragged down, frazzled. He carried a paperback book without a cover, its pages yellow and tattered. He did not look at the girls; none of the boys did. They appeared to be okay physically, but shuffled as they walked. She could not catch their scent.

The door to the bus opened and the boys were led in first, taking seats on the left-hand side. Through the windows, Stella saw plastic curtains being drawn and fastened. They looked flimsy, like shower curtains. Joanie moved the girls up to the door. They walked to the right of the curtain and sat in the five middle rows of slick blue plastic bench seats, one girl to each seat.

Stella squirmed and her pants stuck to the plastic. The seat felt funny, tacky and oily. It exuded a peculiar smell, like turpentine. They had sprayed the interior of the bus with something.

Celia sat directly in front of her and leaned forward to talk to LaShawna.

“Stay where you are,” Joanie instructed them in a monotone. “No talking.” She surveyed the children on both sides of the curtain, then walked forward and took Julianne by the arm. She removed Julianne, backing out of the bus. Julianne shot a frightened but relieved look at Stella, then stood outside, arms straight by her sides, shivering.

A security guard came aboard. He was in his middle forties, stocky and bare-armed, wearing a pair of khaki pants and a short-sleeved white shirt that clung to his shoulders. He carried a small machine pistol in a holster on his belt. He glanced back at the boys, then leaned to one side, and peered along the right side of the bus at the girls.

Everyone on the bus was silent.

Stella’s stomach seemed to shrink inside her.

The door closed. Will swung his hand against the plastic curtain and made the hooks rattle on the rail bolted to the roof. The guard leaned forward and frowned.

Stella couldn’t smell a thing now. Her nose was completely clogged.

“Am I allowed to read on the bus?” Will yelled.

The guard shrugged.

“Thank you,” Will shouted, and the girls giggled. “Thank you very much.”

The man obviously did not like this duty. He faced forward, waiting for the driver.

“What about lunch?” Will shouted. “Are we going to eat?”

The boys laughed. The girls sank back into their seats. Stella thought maybe they were being taken away to be killed and dissected. Felice was clearly thinking the same thing. Celia was shivering.

Finally, Will stopped yelling. He pulled a page from the paperback, crumpled it into a ball, and tossed it over three seats into the well next to the driver’s window. Tongue between his lips and making a clownish grin, he pulled out another page, crumpled it, and lobbed it into the empty driver’s seat. Then another, which fell to the floor in front of the driver’s seat. Stella watched through the transparent sheeting between the rows, embarrassed and exhilarated by this show of defiance.

The driver climbed up the steps. He picked up the crumpled paper with his gloved hand, made a face, then tossed it out the door. It bounced from the chest of the second security guard as she came aboard. She was also large and in her forties. The female guard muttered something Stella could not hear. Both guards were equipped with noseys pinned to their breast pockets. The noseys were switched off, Stella noticed.

The driver took his seat.

“Let’s go!” Will shouted. Behind him, one of the boys began to hoot. The female guard swiveled and glared at them, just in time to be hit by another crumpled ball of paper.

The male guard walked to the back along the boys’ side of the plastic barrier.

“Go! Go!” Will shouted, and bounced in his seat.

“Sit down, damn it,” the first guard said.

“Why not tie us down?” Will asked. “Why not strap us in?”

“Shut up,” the guard said.

Stella felt a chill. They were being taken somewhere by a team that had had little experience with SHEVA children. She had an instinct for such things. These two, and the driver, looked even dumber than Miss Kantor. None of the humans inside or outside of the bus looked happy; they looked as if something had gone wrong.

Stella wondered what had happened to that other bus, the one they usually used.

Will was watching the guards and the driver like a hawk, eyes steady. Stella tried to keep his face in focus through the plastic, but he leaned back and got fuzzy.

The wire-reinforced plastic windows were locked shut from the outside; this was the kind of bus she had seen as a child carrying prisoners to pick up trash or cut down brush along the highways. She stared out through the window and shivered.

Her body ached. In front of her, Celia hunched forward, whispering to herself, her hands clasping the padded rail. LaShawna was yawning, pretending not to care. Felice had wrapped herself in her arms and was trying to go to sleep.

“Go, go, go!” the boys hooted, bouncing in their seats. Felice laid her head against the window. Stella wanted the boys to be quiet. She wanted everything to be quiet so she could close her eyes and pretend she was somewhere else. She felt betrayed by the school, by Miss Kantor, by Miss Kinney.

That was stupid, of course. Being at the school was a betrayal in the first place. Why would leaving be any worse? She leaned her head back to keep from feeling nauseated.

The female guard told the driver to close and lock the door. The driver started the bus and put it in gear. It lurched forward.

Celia began to throw up. The driver jerked the bus to a halt at the end of the concrete apron before the main road.

“Never mind!” the female guard shouted, her face a mask of disgust. “We’ll clean it up when we get there. Just go!”

“Go, go, go!” the boys chanted. Will glanced at Stella, straightened his lips, and began to peel another page from the paperback.

Once the bus was under way, air began to move through small vents above the windows and Stella felt better. Celia stayed quiet, and the two other girls sat stiffly in their seats. Stella was thinking over their situation and decided it was all very clumsy and badly planned, probably last-minute. They were being transported like lobsters in a tank. Time was of the essence. Someone was eager to get to them while they were still fresh.

Stella tried to make some spit to moisten her mouth. The taste on her tongue was terrible.

“This will take about an hour and ten minutes,” the driver said as they pulled out of the school parking lot. “There’s water in bottles below each seat. We’ll make one bathroom stop.”

Stella reached below the blue seat and picked up a plastic bag with a bottle of water inside. She looked down at it, wondering what it held besides water; what was going to happen at the end of the ride, their treat for being such good little boys and girls? To stay calm, she thought of Kaye, and then she thought about Mitch. Last, but not least, she remembered holding their old orange cat, Shamus, and stroking him while he purred.

If she was going to die, she could at least be as dignified as old Shamus.

30

OREGON

Mitch got up before sunrise, dressed without waking Merton, and left the tent they shared to stand at the rim of the Spent River gulley. He watched the early-morning sun try to spread light over the shaded landscape. He could clearly see Mount Hood, twenty miles away, its snows purple in the dawn.

He found a twig and stuck it between his lips, then bit it with his teeth.

Mitch had never thought he was prescient, sensitive, psychic, whatever name one gave to having second sight. Kaye had told him, years ago, that scientists and artists shared similar origins for creative thinking—but that scientists had to prove their fancies.

Mitch had never told Kaye what he had gotten out of that conversation, but in a way it had helped him put things in perspective—to see the artistic side of how he came to his own, often logically unsupportable conclusions. It wasn’t ESP.

He was just thinking like an artist.

Or a cop. Nature was the world’s most efficient serial killer. An anthropologist was a kind of detective, not so much interested in justice—that was entirely too abstract in the face of time’s immensity and so many deaths—but in figuring out how the victims had died and, more important, how they had lived.

He wiped his eyes with one finger and looked north along the gulley, to the deeper gorge that had long ago been cut through alternating layers of mud and lava and ash. Then he turned and peered at the L-shaped site with its array of canvas and plastic covers, concealed by camouflage netting.

“Shit,” he said, almost in wonder at the way his feet began to walk him along the rim of the gulley, away from the main dig.

That bear. That damned, enigmatic bear that had started it all.

The bear had come down to the river to do some fishing and had been suffocated by a fall of ash—but several days before the humans had arrived. The humans typically tracked bears, he was almost sure of it, relying on them to find good fishing. Someone had claimed the skull, but had not butchered the carcass—there were no cut marks on the bones—which meant it was probably in an unappetizing condition by the time they found it.

Salmon came back in the spring, summer, and fall to spawn and die, different groups and different species at different seasons. Nomadic bands had timed their journeys and arranged their settlements to take advantage of one or more of these returns, when the rivers ran thick with rich, red-fleshed fish.

Leaves changing color. Water running crisp and cold. Salmon wriggling over the rocky streambeds like big red pull toys. Bears waiting to march across the stream and grab them.

But most of the bears had probably left with the first ash fall, leaving behind one old male too sick to travel far, maybe chewed up in a fight, waiting to die.

Guessing. Just guessing, goddamnit.

Why would people walk up the river and ignore the ash fall? Not even hunger could have driven them into that landscape, or made them stay once there. Unless it had been raining, every step would have brought up a cloud of choking ash. Setting up a fishing camp would have been stupid in the extreme.

Like the bear, they were being followed.

He had dreamed about the bones in the night. He did not know whether artists dreamed their work—or whether detectives dreamed solutions to their cases. But the way he worked was, he often dreamed of the people he found, in their graves or where they had fallen and died.

And sometimes he was right.

Often he was right.

Hell, nine times out of ten, Mitch’s dreams turned out to be right—so long as he waited for them to evolve, to ripple through their necessary variations and reach their inevitable conclusion. That was how it had been with the Alpine mummies. He had dreamed about them for months.

But now there was not enough time. He had to rely on what amounted to a hunch.

The Australians had clued him, even more than the Homo erectus skeletons. They were very far north. Only now was anthropology accepting the many tides and clashes of peoples in the Americas—the early arrival by storm-driven boats of a few Australians in the south, the later and frequent arrivals of the Asians moving along and over the land and ice bridges in the north.

The Australoids had been in South America—and now it was apparent North America—for tens of thousands of years before they met the Asians. The Asians conquered and killed, subdued, pushed them back south from whatever northern territories they might have explored. It must have been a monumental war, spread out over millions of square miles and many thousands of years, race-based and violent.

In the end, the Australians had all but vanished—leaving only a few mixed-race descendants on the eastern coast of South America: the Tierra del Fuegans familiar to Darwin and other explorers.

They were being chased. They partnered with the Homo erectus individuals because they faced a common enemy.

Mitch stepped out like an automaton, eyes sweeping the ground ahead, ignoring everything but the pound of his boots on the old rounded river rocks. It was no place to take a tumble, especially with one bum arm.

Too far north. In dangerous territory, surrounded by Asians. They had come up here for the rich runs of fish, following the bears; men and women, an extended family group. Perhaps united under one powerful male—and maybe he did like dabbling with the Homo erectus females. No sense being naÏve.

But his women did not care. No babies ever resulted. Mitch could almost see the Homo erectus males and females tagging along, behind the Australians, begging at first, then being set up to do work for the women, then offering themselves to the men, their own males indifferent to the exchange. Attitudes of a hungry, dying people.

In the end, there had been some measure of affection, perhaps more than masters for their pets. Equals? Probably not. But the Homo erectus members of the group were not stupid. They had survived for more than a million years. Homo sap was just a newcomer in the equation.

Mitch snuffed air and blew his nose into his handkerchief; the warming air was thick with grass pollen. He was not normally susceptible, but his years in prison, with musty air and lots of mold, had exaggerated his reactions.

If the men are out here—and no guarantee of that—they couldn’t save the women. They failed, and they probably died, too. Or they hightailed it out of this miserable place ahead of the wave of hot mud—leaving the women behind.

How am I any better?

I left my women behind, and they took Stella.

What if I do find the males, what of it? What in hell am I looking for? Salvation? An excuse?

He glanced up at the sun, then shaded and dropped his eyes. The thickest deposit of mudstone had set in a dark brown layer all around the banks of the old river, weathered in spots to soil rich enough to support shrubs and trees, hard and stripped and barren elsewhere. Boulders the size and shape of soccer balls pocked the ground, and nowhere any clue as to where an elusive collection of fossils might just poke up underfoot.

He sat on a weather-split boulder and lifted his left elbow onto his knee to get the tingle out of his slack arm. Sometimes the blood just cut off in that arm, and then the nerves, and after a while the arm jerked awake and hurt like hell.

It wasn’t easy staying attentive and on point. Something insisted on getting in the way, perhaps an all-too-real sense of the complete futility of what he was trying to do. “Where would you go?” he whispered. He hunched his knees slowly around the rock, turning his eyes to sweep the rugged land, up the high ground and down into the swales filled with brush. “Where would you weather out twenty thousand years after you died? Come on, guys. Help me out.”

A light breeze whistled through the brush and touched his hair like phantom fingers. He blew a fly away from his lips and brushed the hair out of his eyes. Kaye had always chided him about getting haircuts. After a while she had just let it drop, giving up, and Mitch wondered what he resented more—being treated like a little boy or being given up on by his own wife.

His teeth ground lightly, like a beast scaring away enemies. His chest ached from loneliness and guilt.

Wandering.

His eyes could tell a chip of bone from a pebble at a dozen paces, even now. He could set mental filters to ignore squirrel and rabbit bones, any recent subset of bleached, chewed, or sinew-darkened remnant.

His eyes narrowed to slits.

An experienced band of males might have seen or heard the lahar and become frightened, tried to make it to high ground. That’s where he was now, where his feet had taken him, to the highest ground in the area, a ridge of hard rock and cupped pockets of soil and brush. He could see the camp, or at least where he knew it was, about half a mile away, obscured by tall brush and trees.

And north, the ever-present sentinel of Mount Hood, a quiet, squat dunce cap of repressed Earth energy, hissing faint plumes of steam but confessing nothing about past tantrums, past crimes.

Mitch closed his eyes completely and visualized the head male of the band. The picture cleared. Mitch went away, and in his place stood the band’s lead hunter, the chief.

The chief’s face was dark and intent, hair flecked with ash, skin streaky gray with ash, like a ghost. In Mitch’s imagination, the chief started out purple-brown and quite naked, but pieced skins suddenly appeared on his lanky, stooped frame, not crude rags even twenty thousand years ago, because people were savvy about fashion and utility even then; leggings and tunic tied at the waist, pouch for flints and obsidian tips or whatever they might have with them.

Their hearts beat fast seeing the pallor on their skins, they already look dead. They’re afraid of each other. But the chief holds them together. He jumps and makes faces until they crow at their ashen complexions. The chief is more than smart; he cares about the anomalous little group of males, partners in this harsh land; and he is solicitous of the females, the chewers of skins and makers of the clothing he wears.

Never underestimate your ancestors, your cousins. They lasted a long, long time. And even then they loved, they cared, they protected.

31

ARIZONA

The bus cut through a Flagstaff suburb, low, flat, brown brick and stucco houses surrounded by dusty gravel yards. Stella had lived in such a suburb as a girl. She laid her head back on the plastic seat and stared at the passing homes. Even with air-conditioning, the bus was hot inside and her water was running out fast.

The boys had stopped talking and Will seemed to be asleep next to a small pile of crumpled yellow pages from his old paperback book.

Someone tapped her shoulder. It was the male guard. He had a larger plastic bag from which he pulled another bottle of water.

“Not long now,” he said, and stuck the bottle into her hand. “Give me the empties.” The girls handed him their empties and he passed them to the female guard, who stuck them into another bag and sealed it. Then he stepped around the curtain at the front of the bus and gave the boys fresh bottles, again collecting the empties.

The male guard shook his head and glared down disapprovingly at Will’s mess before giving the boy a bottle.

“Having fun?” he asked Will.

Will stared up at him and shook his head slowly.

The bus driver was making lots of turns, taking them up and down many streets as if he were lost. Stella did not think the driver was lost. They were trying to avoid someone or something.

That made her sit up. She looked behind. The bus was being followed by a small brown car. Up front, as they turned a corner she saw another car, this one green, with two people in the front seat. The bus was following the lead car. They had escorts.

Nothing too unexpected about that. Why, then, did Stella feel that none of this had been planned out well, that something had gone awry?

Will was watching her. He pushed close to the plastic curtain and moved his lips but she could not hear what he was saying over the road noise; they were on gravel now, rumbling across a farm track through a fallow dirt field to a state road. The bus bounced up onto the asphalt and swung left. The lead car slowed for the bus to catch up.

She tracked Will’s lips more carefully now that the bouncing had stopped: Sandia, he was mouthing silently. She remembered him asking earlier if she had heard of it, but she still did not know what Sandia was.

Will drew his finger across his throat. Stella closed her eyes and turned away. She could not watch him now. She did not need to be any more scared than she already was.

Another hour, and they rode on a straight stretch of highway between rocky desert with low red mountains on the horizon. The sun was almost directly overhead. The trip was taking a lot longer than Joanie had said it would.

The highway was almost empty, only a few cars going either way. A small red BMW with New Mexico plates swung around to the left of the short caravan and zoomed by. The boys tracked its speedy passage listlessly, then held up their hands with crooked finger signs and laughed.

Stella did not know what they meant. The laughter sounded harsh. The boys worried her. They seemed wild.

The long, sandy, rocky stretches beside the highway hypnotized her. The mountains were always far away. She wondered what Sandia meant once more, then stuffed the word away, hating the sound of it, more so because it was actually a pretty word.

Screech of tires.

She was jerked up out of a doze by a sudden swerve. Stella clung to the seat back in front of her as the bus veered left, then right, then tilted. Tires kept on screaming over the asphalt. Celia’s head and shoulders bounced one way then another, and as Stella looked right, the outside world flew up and dropped down, mountains and desert and all. Then everything shoved sideways, and she slipped along the plastic seat and crashed down on the window, jamming her head, neck, and shoulder against the plastic. Plastic crazed and peeled away in wire-clasped ripples and her shoulder pressed into dirt and gravel.

For a moment, the bus was very quiet. It seemed to be lying on one side, the right side, her side. The light was not very good and the air was thick and still and full of the smell of burned rubber.

She tried to move and found that she still could, which caused a surge of excitement. Her body was still working, she was still alive. She pushed up slowly and heard jingling and ripping sounds. Then, a boy fell onto the curtain and jammed his knee into her side. Through the taut veil of plastic above her, she saw another boy’s denim-clad butt and a vague, contorted face. Will, she thought, and with a grunt, pushed up against the body, but could not move it.

“Please, get off,” she demanded, her voice muffled.

Stella was in pain. She thought for a minute she was going to panic, but she closed her eyes and made that go away. She could not bring her hand around to feel her shoulder, but she thought it might be bleeding, and her blouse seemed to be ripped. She could feel gravel or something sharp against her bare skin.

Outside, she heard some voices, men talking, one man yelling. They seemed far away. Then a door squealed open. The knee on her chest drew up and a foot came down hard on her ankle, pressing it into the frame of the seat in front. She screamed; that really hurt.

“Sorry,” a boy said, and the foot was lifted. She saw shadows moving over her, clumsy, dazed, pressing against the plastic curtain. Will’s face seemed to blur and fade, and he was gone. The curtain lay lightly around her. Something sighed, a brake cylinder maybe, or a boy. She rolled enough to finally touch her shoulder and lifted her hand against the curtain to see a bit of blood there, not a lot. Light filtered around the seat back behind her. Someone had opened the bus’s rear emergency door, and maybe a ceiling hatch as well.

“We’d better get you out of there,” a man called congenially. “Everybody hear me?”

Stella lay on her back now against the gravel and the dirt and the side of the bus. She rolled over completely and did a kind of knee-up, arm-up between the seats, which were jammed together closer than they had been before the crash. A feathery, leafy branch somehow got into her mouth and she spit it out, then finished wriggling until she was on her knees.

She had cuts all over, but none of them were bleeding a lot. Stella flailed against the plastic curtain until someone pulled it away with a jingle of hooks.

“Who’s in here? LaShawna? You in here?” A man’s voice, deep and distinct.

And someone else, “Celia? Hugh Davis? Johnny? Johnny Lee?”

“It’s me,” Stella said. “I’m here.”

Then she heard LaShawna call out. The girl began crying. “My leg is hurt,” she wailed.

“We’re going to get you, LaShawna. Be brave. Help is coming.”

Someone cursed loud and long at someone else.

“You just back off. You stay away from here. This is horrible, but you back off.”

“You drove us the fuck off the road!”

“You went into a skid.”

“Well, what the hell else could I do? There were cars all over the road. Jesus, we need an ambulance. Call an ambulance.”

Stella wondered if perhaps she should just stay where she was for the time being, in the half-dark, and nobody knowing she was there.

Suddenly, someone was pulling on her arm, tugging her out from between the seats and into the space between the top of the seats and the roof of the bus, now a kind of hallway with windows on the floor. It was Will. He crouched and peered at her like a frazzle-haired monkey, his face smeared with blood.

“We can go now,” he said.

“Where?” Stella asked.

“It’s people coming for us. Humans. They want to rescue us. But we can leave.”

“We have to help.”

“What can we do?” Will asked.

“We have to help.”

For a passing moment, she wanted to smear her hand on his face. Her ears felt hot.

Will shook his head and scrambled in a half-hunch to the front of the bus. He looked for a moment as if he were just going to climb out through a window, but then two pairs of arms stretched down, and he glanced back at Stella. A sour look came to his face.

“There’s a girl back there; she’s okay,” he said. “Take care of her, but leave me alone.”

Stella sat by the side of the long two-lane highway with her face in her hands. She had banged her head pretty hard in the wreck and now it throbbed. She peeked between her fingers at the adults walking around the bus. About twenty minutes had passed since the crash.

Will lay beside her, hand tossed casually over his eyes as if he were taking a nap. He had ripped his pants and a long scratch showed through. Otherwise, they both seemed to be okay.

Celia and LaShawna and the three other boys were already sitting in the backs of two cars, not the escort cars. Both of the escort cars had run off into a culvert and were pretty banged up—crumpled grilles, steam hissing, trunk lids popped.

She thought she heard the two security guards on the other side of the bus, and possibly the bus driver as well.

Parked by the side of the road about a hundred yards behind were two law enforcement vehicles. She could not see the insignia but their emergency lights were blinking. Why weren’t they helping out, getting ready to take the children back to the school?

Would there be an EMAC van coming soon, or an ambulance?

A black man in a rumpled brown suit approached Stella and Will. “The other girls and boys are pretty badly bruised, but they’re going to be fine. LaShawna is fine. Her leg is okay, thank God.”

Stella peered up at him doubtfully. She did not know who he was.

“I’m John Hamilton,” he said. “I’m LaShawna’s daddy. We’ve got to leave here. You have to come with us.”

Will sat up, his cheeks almost mahogany from the combination of sun and defiance. “Why?” he said. “Are you taking us to another school?”

“We have to get you to a doctor for checkups. The closest safe place is about fifty miles from here.” He pointed back down the road. “Not back to the school. My daughter will never go there again, not while I’m alive.”

“What’s Sandia?” Stella asked John, on impulse.

“It’s some mountains,” John said, with a startled expression, and swallowed something that must have been bitter. “Come on, let’s get going. I think there’s room.”

A third car pulled up, and John talked to the driver, a middle-aged woman with large turquoise rings on her fingers and brilliant orange hair. They seemed to know each other.

John came back. He was irritated.

“You’ll go with her,” he said. “Her name is Jobeth Hayden. She’s a mom, too. We thought her daughter might be here, but she isn’t.”

“You ran the buses off the road?” Stella asked.

“We tried to slow down the lead car and take you off the bus. We thought we could do it safely. I don’t know how it happened, but one of their cars spun out and the bus plowed into it and everyone went off the road. Cars all over. We’re damned lucky.”

Will had retrieved his battered and torn paperback book from the dirt and clutched it in his hand. He peered at the rip in his jeans, and the scratch. Then he stared back down the road at the cars with the emergency lights. “I’ll just go by myself.”

“No, son,” John Hamilton said firmly, and he suddenly seemed very large. “You’ll die out here, and you won’t hitch any rides because they’ll know what you are.”

“They’ll arrest me,” Will said, pointing at the blinking lights.

“No, they won’t. They’re from New Mexico.”

Hamilton did not explain why that was significant. Will stared at Hamilton and his face wrinkled in either anger or frustration.

“We’re responsible,” Hamilton said quietly. “Please, come with us.” Even more quietly, focusing on Will, his voice deep, almost sleepy, Hamilton said again, “Please.”

Will stumbled as he took a step, and John helped him to the car with the orange-haired woman, Jobeth.

On the way, they came close to the red Buick that carried Celia, Felice, LaShawna, and two of the boys. LaShawna leaned back in the rear seat, in the shadow of the car roof, eyes closed. Felice sat upright beside her. Celia stuck her head out the window. “What-KUK a ride!” she crowed. A white bandage looped around her head. She had blood on her scalp and in her hair and she clutched a plastic bottle of 7-Up and a sandwich. “I guess no more school, huh?”

Will and Stella got in the car with Jobeth. John told Jobeth where they were going—a ranch. Stella did not catch the name, though it might have been George or Gorge.

“I know,” the woman said. “I love there.”

Stella was sure the woman did not say “live,” she said “love.”

Will leaned his head back on the seat and stared at the headliner. Stella took a bottle of water and a bottle of 7-Up from John, and the cars drove back on the road, leaving the wreck of the bus, two guards, and three drivers, all neatly tied and squatting on the shoulder.

The official vehicles turned out to be from the New Mexico State Police, and they spun off in the opposite direction, their lights no longer flashing.

“Won’t be more than an hour,” Jobeth said, following the other two cars.

“Who are you?” Stella asked.

“I have no idea,” Jobeth said lightly. “Haven’t for years.” She glanced back over the seat at Stella. “You’re a pretty one. You’re all pretty ones to me. Do you know my daughter? Her name is Bonnie. Bonnie Hayden. I guess she’s still at the school; they took her there six months ago. She has natural red hair and her sparks are really prominent. It’s her Irish blood, I’m sure.”

Will ripped a page out of his paperback and crumpled it, then waggled it under his nose. He grinned at Stella.

32

OREGON

They’ve been out hunting, the men, taking along the younger males, those near or beyond puberty; heading up to the high ground to see where there might be some game left after the ash fall. But the ash has covered everything with grit for a hundred miles and the game has moved south, all but the small animals still quivering in their burrows, in their warrens, waiting…

And then the men hear the lahar coming, see the pyroclastic cloud that has melted all the snow and ice rippling around the base of the mountain like a dirty gray shawl falling from the black Storm Bear whose claws are lightning… or the mountain goddess sitting and spreading her wrap, the edge of the soft skin rushing over the land tens of miles away with a sound like all the buffalo on Earth.

Beneath the wrap, the meltwater has mixed with hot gas and gathers ash and mud and trees, roaring toward where the men stand, pallid and weak with fear.

The chief, with the sharpest eyes, the quickest brain, the strongest arm, the most sons and daughters in this band, yet probably only thirty-five or forty years of age, at the oldest… The chief has never encountered anything like the approaching lahar. The ash was bad enough. The distant wall of gray smudge looks as if it might take days to reach them, rolling over and through the distant forests. How could it ever touch where he stands with his sons and hunters, no matter how furious and powerful?

But, just in case, he walks back to be with the women.

Mitch pushed on his knee to get up and started walking toward the camp.

The men lope down the hills, taking the short route from the high ground, puffs of ash rising around their feet as they run, and the chief looks up above the ash cloaking the tiny crew in a choking haze and sees that the cloud has come that much closer in just a few minutes. He trembles, knowing how ignorant he is. Death could be very near.

Mitch strode down into the swale, across the old mudstone and around the whistling patches of brush.

Big old splash coming. Hot breath out of hell unnamed, perhaps unthought of then. The chief runs faster as the roar grows louder, the sound bigger even than the biggest stampeding herd in the biggest hunt, the wall of cloud rampaging over the land with a swift but lumbering dignity, like a great bear.

For a moment, the chief pauses and points out that the gray cloud has stopped. They laugh and hoot. The gray cloud is thinning, breaking up. They cannot see the flood beneath.

Then comes the biggest ash fall yet, thick curtains and fat billows, blinding, stinging the eyes and catching in the nose and mouth, gritty between lips and gums, choking. They try to cover their eyes with their hands. Blind, they stumble and fall and shout hunting cries, identity cries, not yet names. The roar begins again, grows louder, rhythmic pounding, screaming of trees, ripping.

Mitch stopped briefly on the upslope of the swale, peering at the weathered layers, the broken, crumbling remains of the ancient lahar. He rubbed his eyes, trying to push back a sliver of light in his vision.

From the top of the crest, he half-slid, half-walked down to the edge of the Spent River, a bluff overlooking the dried-up watercourse. They might have been near the river, waiting to cross, in a straight line between the high ground where Mitch (and the chief) had been a few minutes before, not far from where Mitch stood now, his dead arm at his side, ignoring the tingling there as well as the precessing, aching silver crescent.

He walked along the bluff. His eyes swept the ground a few meters ahead, looking for that weathered-out phalange or even bigger bone or chip of bone not worried over by a coyote or hauled off by a ground squirrel, falling out of its little hollow in the ash, that hard little mold of death.

The roar is loud and growing louder, but the cloud seems to be dissipating. What they cannot see, from where they stand, is the lahar breaking up into long fingers, finding channels already carved and ripped in the land, blowing out the last of its energy, reaching, reaching, but growing weaker. What they cannot see clearly is that this new threat is trying with all of its fading might to kill them.

Perhaps they will live.

They would be on his right, if they were anywhere at all, if they were still here. Their bones might have weathered out and fallen from the bluff centuries ago. He was walking so near the edge that there might be nothing left. The river would have been higher then, its bed not so worn and deep; but the bluff might have been high enough to give them pause…

The chief looks northwest. The leading run of the dying lahar roars down the channel. His eyes grow wide, his nostrils flare in rage and disappointment. It is a fuming, curling, leaping torrent of mud and steaming water. It fills his eyes, his brain. It travels faster than they can run. They hunker down and it roars past, below their feet, digging out the embankment. They crawl up the bank to safety, but the lahar vaults up and the spill catches them as they raise their arms. The thick liquid scalds, and the chief hears the others screaming, but only for a moment.

Mitch’s breath hitched.

Their women must have died at the same moment, or within seconds, across the Spent River.

The chief falls with his arms over his head. He and all his sons and the other hunters struggle for tenths of seconds against the scalding mud and then must lie still. It covers them, a blanket more than two feet thick, larded with sticks and chunks of log and rocks the size of fists, with bits of dead animals.

As Mitch walked, he grew calmer. Things seemed to fall into place. When the search was on, his mind became a quiet lake.

The land is hot and steaming. Nothing near the river lives that stood above ground. Bushes denuded of their leaves crouch smashed and wilted along the river course. Corpses lie baked and half-buried under gouts of steaming mud. The ground smells like mud and steamed vegetables. It smells like cooked herbs in a meaty stew.

The mud cools.

And then comes the third fall of ash, entombing the remains of the men, the women, and the ravaged land along the Spent River and for miles around.

It was over.

Mitch kept his head down and pressed one eye with a finger, but the pain was coming anyway. Price to be paid.

Rod Taylor pushes the lever forward on the old time machine. The mud hardens under the gray pall of falling ash. Time flies past. The bodies decay within their molds, staining the hard mud. The flesh seeps away and the bones rattle with earthquakes and the mud and stone cracks and fresh water and mud enters, filling the hollow with mud of different density, different composition, holding the bones, finally, still.

The men can rest.

Mitch knew they were still here, somewhere.

He stopped walking and looked to his right, into a step cut into the bluff by hundreds of centuries of erosion. At first he could not see what had attracted his attention; it was hidden by the painful little sliver of light.

The top of the mudstone step was at least six feet above his head. A streak of dark gray capped the step beneath a superficial wig of soil and brush. But his vision tunneled into a bright ball and all he saw was the shiny brown prominence lying horizontally in the stone.

He hardly dared to breathe.

Mitch stooped, arm hanging, propping his knees against the mound of weathered-out clods and pebbles. Reached out with his right finger and brushed along the compacted gray ash and caked mudstone.

The prominence was firm in the hardened layer. It could have been a bone from a deer, a mountain goat, or a bighorn sheep.

But it was not. It was a human shin, a tibia. In this layer, it had to be at least as old as the bones in the camp. He reached down with one hand, sparks flying in his right eye, and felt for the small piece he had seen there, a dark brown talus of bone amongst the rocky talus.

He held it up, turning it until he could see it clearly. It was small, but also from a human. Homo at least. He replaced it. Position would be important when they surveyed.

He took a dental pick from his jacket and worked at the hardened mud and ash around the tibia until he was sure, fighting the pain in his cranium for long minutes. Then he sat back and drew up his knees.

He could no longer put it off. The migraine had arrived. He hadn’t had one this bad in more than ten years. The dental pick fell from his hand as he curled up on the ground, trying not to moan.

He managed to reach up with one finger and stroke the half-buried length of bone.

“Found you,” Mitch said. Then he closed his eyes and felt his own lahar wash over him.

33

NEW MEXICO

Dicken’s monitor was filled with comparisons of protein expression in embryonic tissues at different stages of development, looking for the elusive retroviral or transposon trigger that might have crept into a complex of developmental genes, promoting the hymen in human females. Even using prior searches and comparisons—incredibly, he had found some in the literature—it looked as if this would take months or years.

Dr. Jurie had shunted Dicken into the safest and least interesting position at Sandia Pathogenics. Putting him in safe, cold storage until needed.

An odd little dance of utility and security. Jurie was keeping Dicken under his thumb, as it were, just to know where he was and what he was up to, and possibly to pick his brain.

But also to confess? To be caught out?

Dicken would not rule out anything where Aram Jurie was concerned.

The man had passed along a list of rambling, long e-mail messages, cryptic, elusive, and a little too evocative for Dicken’s comfort. Jurie might be on to something, Dicken thought, a twisted and crazy but undeniably big insight.

Jurie held the belief—not exactly new—that viruses played a substantial but crude role in nearly every stage of embryonic development. But he had some interesting notions about how they did so:

“Genomic viruses want to play in the big game, but as genetic players go, they’re simple, constrained, fallen from grace. They can’t do the big stuff, so they engage in cryptic little elaborations, and the big game tolerates and then becomes addicted to their subtle plays…

“Weak in themselves, endogenous viruses may rely on a very different form of apoptosis, programmed cell suicide. ERVs express at certain times and present antigen on the cell surface. The cell is inspected by the agents of the immune system and killed. By coordinating how and which cells present antigen, genomic viruses can participate crudely in sculpting the embryo, or even the growing body after birth. Of course, they work to increase their numbers and their position in the species, in the extended genome. They work by maintaining a feeble but persistent control in the face of a constant and powerful assault by the immune system.

“And in mammals, they’ve won. We have surrendered some of the most crucial aspects of our lives to the viruses, just to give our babies time to develop in the womb, rather than in the constraining egg; time to develop more sophisticated nervous systems. A calculated gamble. All our generations are held ransom because of our indebtedness to the viral genes.

“Like getting a loan from the Mafia…”

Maggie Flynn knocked on the open door to Dicken’s office. “Got a moment?” she asked.

“Not really. Why?” Dicken asked, turning in his rolling chair. Flynn looked flushed and upset.

“Something’s come up. Jurie’s off the campus. He tells us to sit tight. I don’t think we can. We just aren’t prepared.”

“What is it?”

“We need expert advice,” Flynn said. “And you could be the expert.”

Dicken stood and stuck his hands in his pants pockets, alert and wary. “What sort of advice?”

“We have a new guest,” Flynn said. “Not a monkey.” She did not appear at all happy with the prospect.

If Maggie Flynn believed Dicken had Jurie’s confidence, who was he to correct her? Flynn’s pass could clear them both if his own pass was blocked—he had learned that much yesterday, visiting Presky’s monotreme study lab.

Flynn took him outside the building to a small cart and drove him around the five linked warehouses that contained the zoo. Out in the open, away from listening devices, she expressed herself more clearly.

“You’ve worked with SHEVA kids,” Flynn began. “I haven’t. We have a tough situation, medically speaking, ethically speaking, and I don’t know how to approach it. As the only married female in this block, Turner picked me to provide some moral support, establish a rapport… but frankly, I haven’t a clue.”

“What are you talking about?” Dicken asked.

Flynn stopped the cart, even more nervous. “You don’t know?” she asked, her voice rising a notch.

Dicken’s mind started to race and he saw he was on the edge of screwing up a golden opportunity. You’ve worked with… As the only married female…

They’re doing it. They’ve done it. He felt his pulse going up and hoped it did not show.

“Oh,” he said, with a fair imitation of casualness. “Virus children.”

Flynn bit her lip. “I don’t like that phrase.” She pushed the cart forward again with the little control stick. “Jurie never worked directly with them. Only with specimens. Neither has Turner, and of course Presky is an animal guy, no bedside manner whatsoever. We thought of you. Turner said that must be why you’re here, and why you’re being given shit theoretical work—so you can be pulled loose for something like this when the time comes.”

“Okay,” Dicken said, putting on a mask of professional caution. He pressed his lips together to keep from saying anything revealing or stupid.

“Something’s gone wrong at the border, I don’t know what. I’m not in that particular loop. Jurie’s in Arizona. Turner told me to bring you in before he gets back.” Her smile was fleeting and desperate. “The cat’s away.”

It was an in-house conspiracy after all, and not a very convincing one. Flynn seemed to expect him to say something reassuring and glib. The whole damned lab functioned on a morphine high of glibness, as if to hide the gnawing awareness that what they were doing might someday attract the attention of The Hague.

“God bless the beasts and children,” Dicken said. “Let’s go.”

On the north side of the array of Pathogenics warehouses, a segmented, inflatable silver enclosure perched on a black expanse of parking lot like some huge alien larva. An access tube led from the enclosure into Warehouse Number 5, which contained most of the primate study labs. Dicken noticed two outside compressors and a complicated, freshly assembled sterilization unit on the south end of the sausage.

He didn’t realize how big the enclosure was until they were almost upon it. The whole complex was as big as one of the warehouses and covered at least an acre.

They parked the cart and entered Warehouse 5 through the delivery door. Turner met them in a small clinic inside the warehouse—a hospital clinic, obviously equipped for humans and not just for primates. “Glad you could make it, Christopher,” he said. “Jurie’s dealing with some mess at the border. A bunch of protesters blocked a lab bus, refused to let it enter Arizona. They had help from the local police, apparently. Jurie had to order up another bus at the last minute and route it around the roadblocks.”

“No surprise,” Flynn said. Dicken glanced between them both. What he saw chilled him. The glibness had completely evaporated. They knew their careers were on the line.

“The preparations have been obvious, but Jurie only told us yesterday,” Turner said. Their statements piled together.

“She’s a very unhappy girl,” Flynn said.

“I’m not sure we should even have her here,” Turner said.

“She’s pregnant,” Flynn said.

“A rape, we’re told. Her foster father,” Turner said.

“Oh, God, I didn’t know it was rape,” Flynn said, and pressed her knuckles to her cheek. “She’s only fourteen.”

“They brought her from a school in Arizona,” Flynn said. “Jurie calls it our school. That’s where we’ve been getting most of our specimens.”

“She’s pregnant?” Dicken asked, dumbfounded, and then wondered if he had blown his cover.

“That’s not generally known even in the clinic,” Turner said. “I’d appreciate some discretion.”

Dicken let his astonishment come forward. “That’s major.” His voice cracked. “But she’s 52 xx. What about polyploidy?”

“I only know what I see,” Turner said grimly. “She’s pregnant by her foster father.”

“That’s absolutely huge,” Dicken said.

“She arrived at the school a month ago,” Turner said. “We discovered her pregnancy when we processed a set of her blood tests. Jurie almost had a heart attack when he got the results from the lab. He seemed elated. He got her transferred to Pathogenics last week without telling the rest of us.”

“I was so mad,” Flynn said. “I could have clobbered him.”

“What else could we do? The school couldn’t take care of her, and it’s for damn sure no hospital would touch her.”

Dicken held up his hand. “Who’s working the clinic?” he asked.

“Maggie, Tommy Wrigley—you met Tommy at the party, and Thomas Powers. Some people brought in from California; we don’t know them. And, of course, Jurie, on the research side. But he’s never even visited the girl.”

“What’s her condition?”

“She’s about three months along. Not doing too well. We think she may have self-induced Shiver,” Flynn said.

“That is not confirmed,” Turner said angrily. “She’s acting as if she has the flu, and that’s all it may be. But we’re being extra cautious. And this information goes nowhere… don’t even tell anyone else at Pathogenics.”

“But Dr. Dicken would know if it’s Shiver, wouldn’t he?” Flynn said defensively. “Isn’t that why Jurie brought you here?”

“Let’s look at the girl,” Dicken said.

“Her name is Fremont, Helen Fremont,” Flynn said. “She’s originally from Nevada. Las Vegas, I think.”

“Reno,” Turner corrected. Then, his face collapsing in utter misery, his shoulders slumping, he added, “I don’t think I can take this much longer. I really don’t.”

34

BALTIMORE-WASHINGTON

Kaye and Marge Cross sat in the back of the taxi in silence. Kaye looked at the passive neck of the driver below his turban, caught a glimpse of his small grin in the rearview mirror. He was whistling to himself, happy. For him, having a SHEVA granddaughter was no great burden, obviously.

Kaye did not know much about conditions for SHEVA children in Pakistan. Generally, traditional cultures—Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists—had been more accepting of the new children. That was both surprising and humbling.

Cross drummed her fingers on her knee and looked out the window at the highway, passing cars. A long semi rolled past with TRANS-NATIONAL BIRMINGHAM PORK emblazoned in huge red letters on the sides of its two trailers.

“Spent lots of money on that one,” Cross murmured.

Kaye assumed she was referring to pig tissue transplants. “Where are we going, Marge?” she asked.

“Just driving,” Cross said. Her chin bounced up and down, and Kaye could not be sure whether she was nodding or just moving her jaw in time to the truck ruts in the roadway.

“That address is in a residential neighborhood. I know Baltimore and Maryland pretty well,” Kaye said. “I assume you aren’t kidnapping me.”

Cross gave her a weak smile. “Hell, you’re paying,” she said. “There’s some people I think you’ll want to meet.”

“All right,” Kaye said.

“Lars came down pretty hard on Robert.”

“Robert’s a sanctimonious prick.”

Cross shrugged. “Nevertheless, I’m not going to take Lars’s advice.”

“I didn’t think you would,” Kaye said. She hated to lose her labs and her researchers, even now. Doing science was her last comfort, her lab the last place she could take refuge and lose herself in work.

“I’m letting you go,” Cross said.

To her surprise, the blow did not feel so heavy after all. It was Kaye’s turn to nod in time to the cab’s rubbery suspension.

“Your work with me is over,” Cross said.

“Fine,” Kaye said tightly.

“Isn’t it?” Cross asked.

“Of course,” Kaye said, her heart thumping. What I have been putting off doing. What I cannot do alone.

“What more would you do at Americol?”

“Pure research on hormonal activation of retroviral elements in humans,” Kaye said, still grasping at the past. “Focus on stress-related signaling systems. Transfer of transcription factors and regulating genes by ERV to somatic cells. Study the viruses as common genetic transport and regulatory systems for the body. Prove that the all-disease model is wrong.”

“It’s a good area,” Cross said. “A little too wild for Americol, but I can make some calls and get you a position elsewhere. Frankly, I don’t think you’re going to have time.”

Kaye lifted her eyebrows and thinned her lips. “If I’m no longer employed by you, how can you know how much time I’ll have?”

Cross smiled, but the smile vanished quickly and she frowned out the window. “Robert picked the wrong hammer to hit you with,” she said. “Or at least he did it in front of the wrong woman.”

“How’s that?”

“Twenty-three years ago come August, I was beginning to drum up venture capital for my first company. I was packing my schedule with meetings and heavy-duty lunches.” Her expression turned wistful, as if she were recalling an old, wonderful romance. “God dropped in. Bad timing, to say the least. He hit me so hard I had to drive to the Hamptons and hide out in a hotel room for a week. Basically I swooned.”

She was avoiding direct eye contact, like a little girl confessing. Kaye leaned forward to see her face more clearly. Kaye had never seen Cross look so vulnerable.

“I can’t tell you how scared I was that He was a sign of madness, epilepsy, or worse.”

“You thought it was a he?”

Cross nodded. “Doesn’t make sense for a couple of strong women, does it? It bothered me a lot, then. But no matter how bothered I was, how scared I was, I never thought about visiting a radiology center. That was brilliant, Kaye. Not cheap, but brilliant.”

Kaye glanced at the driver’s face in the rearview mirror. He was obviously trying to ignore the words being spoken in the backseat, trying to give them privacy—and not succeeding.

“Love isn’t the word, but it’s all we have. Love without desire.” Cross reached up to wipe her perfectly manicured fingers beneath her eyes. “I’ve never told anybody. Someone like Robert would have used it against me.”

“But it’s the truth,” Kaye said.

“No, it isn’t,” Cross said peevishly. “It’s a personal experience. It was real to you and to me, but that doesn’t get us anywhere in this old, cruel world. That same vision might have compelled someone else to burn old women as witches or kill Englishmen, like Joan of Arc. Cranking up the old Inquisition.”

“I don’t think so,” Kaye said.

“How do you know the butchers and murderers didn’t get a message?”

Kaye had to admit that she did not.

Cross said, “I’ve spent so much of my time trying to forget, just so I could do the work I had to do to get where I wanted to be. Sometimes it was cruel work, stepping on other folks’s dreams. And whenever I remembered, it just crushed me again. Because I knew this thing, it, He, would never punish me, no matter what I did or how I misbehaved. Not just forgiveness—no judgment. Only love. He can’t be real,” Cross said. “What He said and what He did doesn’t make any sense.”

“He felt real to me,” Kaye said.

“Did you ever hear what happened to Thomas Aquinas?” Cross asked.

Kaye shook her head.

“The most admired theologian of all. Furiously adept thinker, logical beyond all measure—and pretty hard to read nowadays. But smart, no doubt about it, and a young fellow when he made his mark. Student of Albertus Magnus. Defender of Aristotle in the Church. He wrote big thick tracts. Admired throughout Christendom, and still revered as a thinker to this day. On the morning of December 6, 1273, he was saying Mass in Naples. He was older, about my age. Right in the middle of the sermon, he just stopped speaking, and stared at nothing. Or stared at everything. I imagine he must have gawped like a fish.” Cross’s expression was quizzical, distant.

“He stopped writing, dictating, stopped contributing to the Summa, his life’s work. And when he was pressed to explain why he had stopped, he said, ‘I can do no more; such things have been revealed to me that all I have written seems as straw, and I now await the end of my life.’ He died a few months later.” Cross snorted. “No wonder Aquinas was brought up short, the poor bastard. I know a hierarchy when I see one. I’m little better than a wriggly worm in a pond compared to what touched me. I wouldn’t dare try to tell God how to behave.” She smiled. “Yes, dear, I can be humble.” Cross patted Kaye’s hand. “And that’s that. You’re fired. You’ve done all you need to do, for now, at my company.”

“What about Jackson?” Kaye asked.

“He’s limited, but he’s still useful, and there’s still important work for him to do. I’ll have Lars watch over him.”

“Jackson doesn’t understand,” Kaye said.

“If you mean he’s narrowly focused, that’s just what I need right now. He’ll cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s, trying to prove he’s right. Good for him.”

“But he’ll get it wrong.”

“Then he’ll do it thoroughly.” Cross was adamant. “Robert’s problem was familiar to Aquinas. He called it ignorantia affectata, cultivated ignorance.”

“God should touch him,” Kaye said bitterly, and then flushed in embarrassment, as if that were any kind of punishment.

Cross considered this seriously for a moment. “I’m surprised God touched me,” she said. “I’d be shocked if He wanted to have anything to do with Robert.”

35

NEW MEXICO

Inside the silver tent were eight single wide mobile home trailers, sitting up on blocks on a wrinkled and patched gray plastic floor and surrounded, at a distance of thirty feet, by a circle of transparent plastic panels topped with razor wire. The trailers did not look in the least comfortable or friendly.

Dicken tried to orient himself in the general gloomy light that seeped through the silver tent. They had entered on the western side. North, then, was where a small Emergency Action van was parked, the same van that had presumably brought Helen Fremont from Arizona. South of the mobile homes and the wall of plastic and razor wire, a small maze of tables and lab benches had been set up and stocked with standard medical and lab diagnostic equipment.

A few klieg lights mounted on long steel poles supplemented the dim sunlight.

Dicken saw no one else under the tent.

“We don’t have a team in place yet,” Flynn said. “She just came down sick this morning.”

“Is there a phone connection in the trailer, an intercom, a bullhorn, anything?”

Flynn shook her head. “We’re still putting it together.”

“Goddamnit, she’s alone in there?”

Turner nodded.

“For how long?”

“Since this morning,” Flynn said. “I went in and tried to do an exam. She refused, but I took some pictures, and of course, there’s the video. We’re running tests on the waste line fluid and the air, but the equipment here isn’t familiar to me. I didn’t trust it, so I took the samples over to the primate lab. They’re still being run.”

“Does Jurie know she’s ill?” Dicken asked.

“We called him,” Turner said.

“Did he give any instructions?”

“He said to leave her alone. Let nobody in until we were sure.”

“But Maggie went in.”

“I had to,” Flynn said. “She looked so scared.”

“You were in a suit?”

“Of course.”

Dicken swung about on his stiff leg and leaned his head to one side, biting his cheek to keep his opinions to himself. He was furious.

Flynn would not meet his eyes. “It’s procedure. All tests done under Level 3 conditions.”

“Well, we sure as hell follow the goddamned rules, don’t we?” Dicken said. “Haven’t you at least asked her to come out and have a doctor inspect her?”

“She won’t come out,” Turner said. “We have video cameras tracking her. She’s in the bedroom. She’s just lying there.”

“Dandy,” Dicken said. “What in hell do you want me to do?”

“We have the pictures,” Flynn said, and took her data phone from her pocket.

“Show me,” Dicken said.

She brought up a succession of five pictures on the phone’s screen. Dicken saw a young SHEVA girl with dark brown hair, pale blue eyes with yellow specks, thin features but prominent cheekbones, pale skin. The girl looked like a frightened cat, her eyes searching the unseen corners, refusing even in her misery to be intimidated.

Dicken could tell the girl was exhibiting no obvious signs of Shiver—no lesions on her skinny arms, no scarlet cingulated markings on her neck. A live update chart butted in at the conclusion of the slide show and displayed a temperature of 102.

“Remote temperature sensing?”

Flynn nodded.

“You said her viral titers were high.”

“She cut herself getting into the van. They had been instructed not to draw blood, but they sequestered the stain and we took a sample under controlled conditions. That’s why the van is still here. She’s producing HERV.”

“Of course she is. She’s pregnant. She doesn’t present any of the necessary symptoms,” he said. “What makes you think it’s Shiver?”

“Dr. Jurie said it might be.”

“Jurie isn’t here, and you are.”

“But she’s pregnant,” Turner said, scowling, as if that explained their concern.

“Have you tested for pseudotype viruses?”

“We’re still running the samples,” Turner said.

“Anything?”

“Not yet.”

“You’ve had Shiver,” Flynn said sullenly. “You should be even more cautious.” She looked more angry than distressed now. They were wondering whose side he was on, and he was half inclined to tell them.

“I won’t even need a suit,” he said contemptuously, and tossed the phone back to Flynn. He walked toward the trailer.

“Hold it,” Turner said, his face red. “Go in there without a suit, and you’ll stay. We won’t—we can’t let you out.”

Dicken turned and bowed, holding out his arms in exasperated placation. There was work to do, a problem to resolve, and anger wasn’t helping. “Then get me a goddamned suit! And a phone or an intercom. She needs to communicate with the outside. She needs to talk with someone. Where are her parents—her mother, I mean?”

“We don’t know,” Flynn said.

The narrow rooms inside the mobile home were neat and cheerless. Rental-style furniture, upholstered in beige and yellow plaid vinyl, lent them an air of cheap and soulless utility. The girl had brought no personal effects, and had touched none of the stuffed animal toys that lined the shelves in the tiny living room, still in their plastic wrappings.

Dicken wondered how long ago the stuffed animals had been purchased. How long had Jurie been planning to bring SHEVA children into Pathogenics?

A year?

Two dining chairs had been upset beside the dinette. Dicken bent to set them right. The plastic in his suit squeaked. He was already starting to sweat, despite the air conditioner pack. He had long since come to sincerely hate isolation suits.

He looked for other obstructions that might snag the plastic, then moved slowly toward the bedroom at the back of the trailer. He knocked on the frame and peered through the half-open door. The girl lay on her back on the bed, still wearing pedal pushers, blouse, and a denim jacket. The bed’s green plastic covers had been tossed aside, and she was staring at the ceiling.

“Hello?”

The girl did not look at him. He could see her skinny chest moving, and her cheeks were ruddy with fever or fear or perhaps despair.

“Helen?” He walked along the narrow space beside the bed and bent over so she could see his face. “My name is Christopher Dicken.”

She swung her head to one side. “Go away. I’ll make you sick,” she said.

“I doubt it, Helen. How do you feel?”

“I hate your suit.”

“I don’t like it much, either.”

“Leave me alone.”

Dicken straightened and folded his arms with some difficulty. The suit rustled and squeaked and he felt like one of the plastic-wrapped stuffed animals. “Tell me how you’re feeling.”

“I want to throw up.”

“Have you thrown up?”

“No,” she said.

“That’s good.”

“I keep trying.” The girl sat up on the bed. “You should be afraid of me. That’s what my mother told me to say to anyone who tries to touch me or kidnap me. She said, ‘Use what you have.’”

“You don’t make people sick, Helen,” Dicken said.

“I wish I could. I want him to be sick.”

Dicken could not imagine her pain and frustration, and did not feel comfortable probing it out. “I won’t say I understand. I don’t.”

“Stop talking and go away.”

“We won’t talk about that, okay. But we need to talk about how you’re feeling, and I’d like to examine you. I’m a doctor.”

“So was he,” she snapped. She rolled to one side, still not looking at Dicken. Her eyes narrowed. “My muscles hurt. Am I going to die?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I should die.”

“Please don’t talk that way. If things are going to get any better, I have to examine you. I promise I won’t hurt you or do anything that makes you feel uncomfortable.”

“I’m used to them taking blood,” the girl said. “They tie us down if we fight.” She stared fixedly at his face through the hood. “You sound like you’ve helped a lot of sick people.”

“Quite a few. Some were very, very sick, and they got better.”

“And some died.”

“Yes,” Dicken said. “Some died.”

“I don’t feel that sick, other than wanting to throw up.”

“That might be your baby.”

The girl opened her mouth wide and her cheeks went pale. “I’m pregnant?” she asked.

Dicken suddenly felt the bottom fall out of his stomach. “They didn’t tell you?”

“Oh, my God,” the girl said and curled up, facing away from him. “I knew it. I knew it. I could smell something. It was his baby inside of me. Oh, my God.” The girl sat up abruptly. “I need to go to the bathroom.”

Dicken must have showed his concern even through the hood.

“I’m not going to hurt myself. I have to throw up. Don’t look. Don’t watch me.”

He said, “I’ll wait for you in the living room.”

She swung her legs out over the side of the bed and stood, then paused, arms held out as if to keep her balance. She stared down at the fake wooden floor. “He used nose plugs and scrubbed me with soap, and then he covered me with cheap perfume. I couldn’t make him stop. He said he wanted to learn whether he would ever have grandchildren. But he wasn’t even my real father. A baby. Oh, my God.”

The girl’s face wrinkled up in an expression so complex Dicken could have studied it for hours and not understood. He knew how a chimpanzee must feel, watching humans emote.

“I’m sorry,” Dicken said.

“Have you met anyone else like me who was pregnant?” the girl asked, holding, compelling his gaze through the plastic.

“No,” Dicken said.

“I’m the first?”

“You’re the first in my experience.”

“Yeah.” She got a panicky look and walked stiffly into the bathroom. Dicken could hear her trying to throw up. He went into the living room. The smell of his sorrow and loathing filled the helmet and there was no way to wipe his eyes or his nose.

When the girl came out, she stopped in the doorway, then sidled through, as if afraid to touch the frame. She held her arms out to her side like wings. Her cheeks were a steady golden brown and the yellow flint-sparks in her eyes seemed even larger and brighter. More than ever, she looked like a cat. She glared at him quizzically. She could see his puffy eyes and wet cheeks through the plastic. “What do you care?” she asked.

Dicken shook his head inside the helmet. “Hard to explain,” he said. “I was there at the beginning.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m not sure there’s time,” he said. “We need to find out why you’re sick.”

“Explain it to me, and then you can look at me,” the girl said.

Dicken wondered how they would react outside if he spent a couple of hours in the trailer. If Jurie should happen to come back…

None of that mattered. He had to do something for the girl. She deserved so much more than this.

He pulled up the covering seal and unzipped his helmet, then removed it. It certainly wasn’t the worst risk he had ever taken. “I was one of the first to know,” he began.

The girl lifted her nose and sniffed. The way her upper lip formed a V was so strangely beautiful that Dicken had to smile.

“Better?” he asked.

“You’re not afraid, you’re angry,” the girl said. “You’re angry for me.”

He nodded.

“Nobody’s ever been angry for me. It smells kind of sweet. Sit in the living room. Stay a few feet away, in case I’m dangerous.”

They walked into the living room. Dicken sat on a dinette chair and she stood by the couch, arms folded, as if ready to run. “Tell me,” she said.

“Can I examine you while I talk? You can keep your clothes on, and I won’t stick you with anything. I just need to look and touch.”

The girl nodded.

Rumors and half-truths were all she had ever heard. She remained standing for the first few minutes, while Dicken pressed his fingers gently under her jaw, into her armpits, and looked between her fingers and toes.

After a while, she sat on the vinyl couch, listening closely and watching him with those incredible flint-spark eyes.

36

ARIZONA

The three cars split off at a crossroads going through a small desert town. Stella looked through the rear window at the diminishing dot of the car that contained Celia and LaShawna and two of the boys. Then she turned to look at Will, who seemed to have fallen asleep.

JoBeth Hayden had talked about her daughter for the first half hour or so, about how she had been glad Bonnie was not on the bus, being taken to Sandia, yet how disappointing it was not to see her and have her be free.

After a while, Stella had felt her muscles tighten from the aftereffects of the crash, and she had tuned out Jobeth, focusing instead on the pile of crumpled pages that Will had arranged on the seat between them.

Will opened his eyes and leaned forward. “Mrs. Hayden,” he said, and ran his tongue over dry lips, avoiding Stella’s curious stare.

“Yes. Your name is William, isn’t it?”

“Will. I’d like to put these up by you.” He dropped some crumpled pages in the middle of the front bench seat.

“That’s trash,” Jobeth Hayden said disapprovingly.

“I can’t keep it back here,” Will said.

“I don’t see why not.”

Stella could not figure out what Will was up to. She rubbed her nose. The front bench seat was in direct sunlight. Will was fever-scenting. She could smell him now, subtle but direct, like cocoa powder and butter. She had never smelled anything exactly like it.

“Can I?” Will asked.

Jobeth Hayden shook her head slowly. Stella saw her eyes in the rearview mirror; she looked confused. “All right,” she said.

Stella picked up a crumpled page and smelled it. She drew back, rejecting the urge to frith, and stared at Will resentfully. The paperback was a reservoir. Will had been rubbing the pages behind his ears, storing up scent. She poked him with her finger and flashed a query with her cheeks. He took the paper from her hands.

“We don’t want to go to this ranch,” Will said to Mrs. Hayden.

“That’s where we’re going. There’s a doctor there. It’s a safe place, and they’re expecting you.”

“I know a better place,” Will said. “Could you drive us to California?”

“That’s silly,” Jobeth Hayden said.

“I’ve been trying to get there for more than a year now.”

“We’re going to the ranch, and that’s that.”

Will dropped another wadded-up page onto the pool of sun on the front seat. Stella could smell Will’s particular form of persuasion very clearly now, and however much she fought against it, what he said was beginning to seem reasonable.

Mrs. Hayden continued to drive. Stella wondered if too much persuasion would confuse her and make her drive off the road.

Will cradled his head in his arms. “We’re fine. I don’t need a doctor./ She’s fine, she can still drive.”

“We’re going to see a doctor in a small town in Arizona, and then we’re going straight to the ranch,” Mrs. Hayden said.

“It’s right across the state line. You have to drive through Nevada, though. Can I see the map?”

Mrs. Hayden was frowning deeply now, and she started to toss back the pieces of crumpled paper. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said. “What are you doing?”

“I just want to see the map,” Will said.

“Well, I suppose that’s okay, but no more of this trash, please. I thought you children behaved better.”

Stella touched Will’s arm. “Stop it,” she whispered, leaning forward so only he would hear.

Will ignored Stella and tossed the paper again onto the front seat, in the pool of sunshine that warmed it and made it release its scent.

“This is really intolerable,” Mrs. Hayden said, but her head straightened and she did not sound angry. She reached over, opened up the glove box, and handed Will an Auto Club map of Arizona and New Mexico. “I don’t use them often,” she said. “They’re pretty old.”

Will opened the map and spread it across their knees. His finger followed highways going north and west. Stella leaned into the corner where the seat met the door and folded her arms.

“You’ll have to sit up straight, sweetie,” Mrs. Hayden told her. “The car has side airbags. It’s not safe to slump over.”

Stella sat up. Will looked at her. Her back was really hurting now. Calmly, he reached over and touched her hands, her legs, then her back.

“What are you doing back there?” Mrs. Hayden asked, dimly concerned.

Will did not answer, and she did not press the question. His fingers marched lightly up Stella’s spine, and she rolled over to let him examine her back.

“You’ll be okay,” Will said.

“How do you know?” Stella asked.

“You’d smell different if you were bleeding inside, or if something was broken. You’re just suffering from a little whiplash, and I don’t think there’s any nerve damage. I smelled a boy with a broken back once, and he had a sad, awful smell. You smell good.”

“I don’t like you telling us what to do,” Stella said.

“I’ll stop once she takes us to California,” Will said. He did not seem very confident, and he did not smell sure of himself. This was one nervous young man.

“It’s a beautiful day/ I learned a lot in North Carolina,” Will doubled. “I’m glad you’re here/ That was before they burned our camp.”

Stella had never met anyone more adept at persuasion. She wondered whether his talent was natural, or whether he had been taught somewhere. She also wondered whether they would be in any danger. But Stella was not willing, not yet anyway, to tell Mrs. Hayden her suspicions. She apparently had suspicions of her own. “I’d like to roll down the windows,” Mrs. Hayden said. “It’s getting stuffy in here.”

“It’s fine, really,” Will said. At the same time, he undered to Stella, “/I need your help. Don’t you want to see what we can do?”

Stella shook her head, thinking of Mitch and Kaye, thinking irrationally of the house in Virginia, the last place she had really felt safe, though that had been an illusion.

“Didn’t you ever want to run away?” Will asked in a near whisper.

“It really is stuffy,” Mrs. Hayden said. Will was running out of pages.

“Help me,” Will pleaded softly, earnestly.

“What is this place?” Stella asked.

“I think it’s in the woods,” Will said. “It’s hidden, far from the towns. They have animals and grow their own food./ They raise marijuana and sell it to make money to buy stuff.”

Marijuana was legal now in most states, but still that sounded dangerous. Stella suddenly felt very cautious. Will looked and smelled scary, with his jumbled hair and cocoa-powder richness, his face that seemed capable of so many expressions. He’s been with others and they’ve taught him so much. What could they teach me—and what could I add?

“Would I be able to call my parents?”

“They’re not like us/ They’d take you back,” Will replied. “We need to be with our own people/ You’ll grow and learn who you really are.”

Stella felt her stomach knot with confusion and indecision. It was what she had been thinking about in the school. Forming demes was impossible with humans around; they always found ways to interfere. For all she knew, demes were just what children tried on for practice. Soon they would be adults, and what would they do then?

How would they ever find out if humans kept clinging to them?

“It’s time to grow up,” Will said.

“Why, you’re so young,” Mrs. Hayden said dreamily. She was driving straight and steadily, but her voice sounded wrong, and Stella knew they had to do something in concert soon or Mrs. Hayden could go one way or the other.

“I’m only fifteen,” Stella said. Actually, she had not yet had her fifteenth birthday, but she always added in the time her mother had been pregnant with the first-stage embryo.

“There’s supposed to be a man there in his sixties, one of us,” Will said.

“That’s impossible,” Stella said.

“That’s what they say. He’s from the south, from Georgia. Or maybe Russia. They weren’t sure which.”

“Do you know where this place is?”

Will tapped his head. “They showed us a map before the camp was burned.”

“Is it real?”

Will could not answer this. “I think so./ I want it to be real.”

Stella closed her eyes. She could feel the warmth behind her eyelids, the sun passing over her face, the suspended redness, and below that the rising up of all her minds, all the parts of her body that yearned. To be alone with her own kind, making her own way, learning all she needed to learn to survive among people who hated her…

That would be an incredible adventure. That would be worth so much danger.

“It’s all you’ve wanted, I know it,” Will said.

“How do I know you’re not just persuading me?” Her cheeks added unconscious quotes to the emphasis on that word, which sounded so wrong, so lacking in nuance, so human.

“Look inside,” Will said.

“I have,” Stella said, a little wail that brought Mrs. Hayden’s head around.

“I’m fine,” Stella said, arms folded tightly across her chest. The tires squealed as Mrs. Hayden straightened the car out on the road.

Stella gripped the arm of her seat.

“I’m sweating like a bastard,” she told Will with a little giggle.

“So am I,” Will said, and smiled crookedly.

There was one last question. “What about sex?” she asked, so quietly Will did not hear and she had to repeat herself.

“Don’t you know?” Will said. “Humans can rape us, but we don’t rape each other. It just doesn’t work that way.”

“What if it happens anyway, and we don’t know what we’re doing, or how to stay out of trouble?”

“I don’t know the answer to that,” Will said. “Does anybody? But I know one thing. With us, it doesn’t happen until it’s right. And now it isn’t right.”

That was honest enough. She could feel her independence returning, and all the answers were the same.

She was strong. She was capable. She knew that.

She focused on fever-scenting for Mrs. Hayden.

“Whoo,” Will said, and waved his hand in the air. “You strong, lady.”

“I am woman,/ I am strong,” Stella sang softly, and they giggled together. She leaned forward. “Please, would you take us to California?” she asked Mrs. Hayden.

“We’ll have to stop for gas. I only brought a little money.”

“It’ll be enough,” Will said.

“Do you need the book?” Stella asked him. It was a yellowed, dog-eared, and now thoroughly reduced paperback called Spartacus by Howard Fast.

“Maybe,” Will said. “I really don’t know.”

“Did you learn that in the woods, too?”

Will shook his head. “I made it up myself,” he said. “We have to be smart. They were taking us to Sandia. They wanted to kill us all. We have to think for ourselves.”

37

MARYLAND

The cab dropped off Kaye and Marge Cross at a single-story brick house on a pleasant, slightly weedy street in Randallstown, Maryland. The grass in the front yard stood a foot high and had long since turned straw yellow. A big old Buick Riviera from the last century, covered with rust and half-hearted patches of gray primer, sat up on blocks in the oil-stained driveway.

They walked up the overgrown path to the front porch. Kaye stood on the lower step, unsure where to look or what to expect. Cross punched the doorbell. Somewhere inside the house, electronic chimes played the four opening notes from Beethoven’s Fifth. Kaye stared at a plastic tricycle with big white wheels almost lost in the grass beside the porch.

The woman who opened the door was Laura Bloch, from Senator Gianelli’s office. She smiled at Kaye and Cross. “Delighted you could be here,” she said. “Welcome to the Maryland Advisory Group on National Biological Policy. We’re an ad hoc committee, and this is an exploratory meeting.”

Kaye looked at Cross, lips downturned in dubious surprise.

“You belong here,” Cross told her. “I’m not sure I do.”

“Of course you do, Marge,” Bloch said. “Come on in, both of you.”

They entered and stood in the small foyer opposite the living room, separated by a low wall and a row of turned wooden columns. The inside of the house—brown carpet, cream-colored walls decorated with family pictures, colonial-style maple furniture and a coffee table covered with magazines and a flattop computer—could have been anywhere in the country. Typical middle-class comfort.

In the dining room, seven people sat around a maple table. Kaye was not acquainted with most of them. She did recognize one woman, however, and her face brightened.

Luella Hamilton walked across the living room. They stood apart for a moment, Kaye in her pants suit, Mrs. Hamilton in a long orange and brown caftan. She had put on a lot of weight since she and Kaye had last seen each other, and not much of it from her pregnancy.

“Dear baby Jesus,” Mrs. Hamilton let out with a small, wild-eyed laugh. “We were just on the phone. You were going to stay put. Marge, what is this all about?”

“You know each other?” Cross asked.

“We sure do,” Kaye said. But she did not explain.

“Welcome to the revolution,” Luella said, smiling sweetly. “You know Laura. Come meet the others. Quite a high-toned group we have here.” She introduced Kaye to the three women and four men seated at the table. Most were in their middle years; the youngest, a woman, appeared to be in her thirties. All were dressed in suits or stylish office work clothes. All looked like Washington insiders to Kaye, who had met plenty. She saw gratefully that they were all wearing name tags.

“Most of these folks come from the offices of key senators and representatives, eyes and ears, not necessarily proxies,” Laura Bloch explained. “We won’t connect the dots until later. Ladies and gentlemen, Kaye is both a working scientist and a mommy.”

“You’re the one who discovered SHEVA,” said one of the two gray-haired men. Kaye tried to demur, but Bloch shushed her.

“Take credit where it’s due, Kaye,” Bloch said. “We’re presenting a paper to the president within the week. Marge sent us your conclusions about genomic viruses, along with a lot of other papers. We’re still digesting them. I’m sure there are lots of questions.”

“Wow, I’ll say,” chuckled a middle-aged man named Kendall Burkett. “Worse than homework.”

Kaye remembered Burkett now. They had met at a conference on SHEVA four years ago. He was a fundraiser for legal aid for SHEVA parents.

Luella returned from the kitchen carrying a pitcher of orange juice and a plate of cookies and celery stalks with peanut butter and cream cheese fillings. “I don’t know why you folks come here,” she told the group. “I’m not much of a cook.”

Bloch put her arms around Luella’s shoulders. They made quite a contrast. Kaye could tell Luella was six months or more along, although it was only slightly apparent on her ample frame.

“Come sit,” said the younger woman. She pointed to an empty chair beside her and smiled. Her name, printed neatly on her tag, was Linda Gale. Kaye knew that name from somewhere.

“It’s our second meeting,” said Burkett. “We’re still getting acquainted.”

“Orange juice okay for you, honey?” Luella asked, and Kaye nodded. Luella filled her glass. Kaye felt overwhelmed. She did not know whether to resent Cross for not warning her in advance, or to just hug her, and then hug Luella. Instead, she walked around the table and settled into the seat beside Gale.

“Linda is assistant to the chief of staff,” Bloch said.

“At the White House? For the president?” Kaye asked, hopeful as a child looking over a Christmas package.

“The president,” Bloch confirmed.

Gale smiled up at Bloch. “Am I famous yet?”

“About time,” Luella said, passing around the plate. Gale demurred, saying she had to keep in fighting trim, but the others snatched the cookies and held out glasses for juice.

“It’s the legacy thing,” Burkett said. “The polls are going fifty-fifty. Net and media are tired of being scaremongers. Marge tells us the scientific community will come out in support of the conclusion that the SHEVA kids won’t produce disease. Do you go along with that?”

In politics, even a fragile certainty could move mountains. “I do,” Kaye said.

“The president is taking advice from all sectors of the community,” Gale said.

“They’ve had years,” Kaye said.

“Linda is on our side, Kaye,” Bloch said softly.

“Won’t be long,” Luella said, and nodded, her eyes both angry and knowing. “Mm hmm. Not long now.”

“Dr. Rafelson, I have a question about your work,” Burkett said. “If I may…”

“First things first,” Bloch interrupted. “Marge knows already, but Kaye, you have to be absolutely clear on this. Everything said in this room is in the strictest confidence. Nobody will divulge anything to anybody outside this room, whether or not the president chooses to act. Understood?”

Kaye nodded, still in a daze.

“Good. We have some papers to sign, and then Kendall can ask his questions.”

Burkett shrugged patiently and chewed on a cookie.

Two phones rang at once—one in the kitchen, which Luella pushed through the swinging door to answer, and Laura Bloch’s cell phone in her purse.

Luella clutched an old-fashioned handset on a long cord. “Oh, my God,” she said. “Where?” Her eyes met Kaye’s. Something crossed between them. Kaye stood and clutched the back of her chair. Her knuckles turned white.

“LaShawna’s with them?” Luella asked. Then, once more, “Oh, my God.” Her face lit up with joy. “We caught a bus in New Mexico!” she cried. “John says they got our children! They have LaShawna, dear Jesus, John has my sweet, sweet girl.”

Laura Bloch finished her call and clacked her phone shut, furious. “The bastards finally did it,” she said.

38

OREGON

“You found them,” a voice said, and Mitch opened his eyes to a haze of faces in the shadows. The migraine was not done with him, but at least he could hear and think.

“The doctor says you’re going to be okay.”

“So glad,” Mitch said groggily. He was lying on an air mattress under a tent. The mattress squeaked beneath his shifting weight.

“One of your migraines?”

That was Eileen.

“Yeah.” He tried to sit up. Eileen gently pushed him down again on the mattress. Someone gave him a sip of water from a plastic cup.

“You should have told us where you were going,” a woman he did not know said disapprovingly.

Eileen interrupted her. “You didn’t know where you were going, did you?” she asked him. “Just what you wanted to find.”

“This whole camp is on the knife edge of anarchy,” the other woman said.

“Shut up, Nancy,” said Eileen’s colleague, what was her name again, Mitch liked her, she seemed smart: something Fitz. Then, it came to him, Connie Fitz, and as if in reward, the pain flowed out of his head like air from a balloon. His skull felt cold. “What did I find?”

“Something,” Fitz said admiringly.

“We’re taking scans now with the handheld,” said Nancy.

“Good,” Mitch said. He took a plastic bottle of water from Eileen and swallowed long and hard. He was as dry as a bone; he must have lain out on the rock and dirt for at least an hour. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“De nada,” Eileen said with a hint of pride.

“It’s a tibia, isn’t it?” Mitch asked.

“It’s more than that,” Eileen said. “We don’t yet know how much more.”

“I found the guys,” he said.

The women would not commit.

“Just be happy you didn’t die out there,” Eileen said.

“It’s not that hot,” Mitch said.

“You were three feet from the bluff,” Eileen said. “You could have fallen.”

“They weathered out,” Mitch mused, and took another swallow of water. “How many are left, I wonder?”

He peered into the blue light of the tent at the three women: Nancy, a tall, striking woman with long black hair and a stern face; Connie Fitz; Eileen.

The tent flap opened and the light assaulted him, bringing back a stab of pain.

“Sorry,” Oliver Merton said. “Just heard about the incident. How’s our boy wonder?”

“Explain it to me,” Merton said.

Mitch sat alone with Oliver under the sun shade. He sipped a beer; Oliver was working away, or pretending to, on his small slate. He had a tracer cap on one finger and typed on empty air. All the archaeologists from the camp, except for two younger women standing guard at the main site, were at the bluff, leaving Mitch grounded, “to recover,” as Eileen put it, but he strongly suspected it was to keep him out of their hair, out of trouble, until it was determined what he had found.

“Explain what?” Mitch asked.

“How you do it. I sense a pattern.”

Mitch covered his eyes with his hands. The sunlight was still dazzling.

“You undergo some sort of psychic revelation, enter a trance state, troop off in search of something you’ve already seen… . Is that it?”

“God, no,” Mitch said, grimacing. “Nothing like that. Was I showboating, Oliver?” he asked, and did not know himself whether he spoke with satisfaction, pride, or real curiosity as to what Merton thought.

Before Merton could answer, Mitch winced at a spike in his thoughts. His neck hair prickled.

Something’s wrong.

“Oh, most definitely,” Merton said with a nod and a sly little grin. “Sherlock Holmes, I presume?”

“Holmes was not psychic. You heard them. They still don’t know what I found.”

“You found a hominid leg bone. All of Eileen’s students, searching for two months around this site, haven’t found so much as a chip.”

“They were making us look bad,” Mitch said. “Men in general.”

“A camp full of angry women digging out a camp full of abandoned women,” Merton said. “Look bad? Right.”

“Have there ever been any men here?”

“Beg your pardon?” Merton asked petulantly.

“Working at the camp. Digging.”

“Besides me, not a one,” Merton admitted, and scowled at the screen on the slate.

“Why is that?” Mitch asked.

“Eileen’s gay, you know,” Merton said. “She and Connie Fitz… very close.”

Mitch thought this over for a few seconds but could not connect it right away with reality, his reality. “You’re kidding.”

Merton tried to cross his heart and hope to die, but got it wrong.

The closest Mitch could come to acknowledging this bit of information was to wonder why Eileen had not introduced her lover to him as such. He said, very slowly, “You could have fooled me.”

That’s not what’s wrong.

“Mr. Daney is amused by it all. He takes quite an anthropological view.”

Mitch pulled back from somewhere, an unpleasant place coming closer. “They’re not all gay, are they?”

“Oh, no. But it is a bit of a crazy coincidence. The others appear to be single, to a woman, and not one has shown any interest in me. Funny, how that slants my view of the world.”

“Yeah,” Mitch said.

“Nancy thinks you’re trying to steal their thunder. They’re sensitive about that.”

“Right.”

“It’s just you and me, until Mr. Daney gets here,” Merton said.

Mitch finished the can of Coors and propped it gently on the wooden arm of the camp chair.

“Shall I crush that for you?” Merton asked with a twinkle. “Just to keep up masculine appearances.”

Mitch did not answer. The camp, the bones, his discovery, suddenly meant nothing. His mind was a blank sheet with vague writing starting to appear, as if scrawled by ghosts. He could not read the writing, but he did not like it.

He jerked, and the can fell off the arm of the chair. It struck the gravel with a hollow rattle. “Jesus,” he said. He had never had a hypnagogic experience before.

“Something wrong?” Merton asked.

“Eileen was right. Maybe I’m still sick.” He pushed up out of the chair. “Can I use your phone?”

“Of course,” Merton said.

“Thanks.” Mitch sidled awkwardly one step to the left, as if about to lose his balance, perhaps his sanity. “How secure is it?”

“Very,” Oliver said, watching him with concern. “Private trunk feed for Mr. Daney.”

Mitch did not know whom to trust, whom to turn to. He had never felt more spooked or more helpless in his life.

No ESP, he thought. Please, let there be no such thing as ESP.

39

NEW MEXICO

Dicken sat beside Helen Fremont on the couch in the trailer. She was staring at the wall opposite the couch, fever-scenting, he suspected, but he could not tell what she was hoping to accomplish, if anything. The air in the trailer smelled of old cheese and tea bags. He had finished his story ten minutes ago, patiently going back over old history and trying to justify himself as well: his existence, his work, his loathing for the isolation he had felt all these years, buried in his work as if it were another kind of plastic suit, proof against life. There had been silence for several minutes now, and he did not know what to say, much less what would happen to them next.

The girl broke the silence. “Aren’t you at all afraid I’ll make you sick?” she asked.

“I’m stuck,” Dicken said, lifting his hands. “They won’t let me out until they can make other arrangements.”

“Aren’t you afraid?” she repeated.

“No,” Dicken said.

“If I wanted to, could I make you sick?”

Dicken shook his head. “I doubt it.”

“But if they know that, why keep me here? Why keep any of us away from people?”

“Well, we just don’t know what to do or what to believe. We don’t understand,” he added, speaking softly. “That makes us weak and stupid.”

“It’s cruel,” the girl said. Then, as if she was just coming to believe she was pregnant, “How will they treat my baby?”

The door to the trailer opened. Aram Jurie entered first and was almost immediately flanked by two security men armed with machine pistols. All wore white isolation suits. Even through the plastic cowl, Jurie’s pallid face was a pepperball of irritation. “This is stupid,” he said as the security men stepped forward. “Are you trying to sabotage everything we’ve done?”

Dicken stood up from the couch and glanced at the girl, but she did not seem at all surprised or disturbed. God help us, it’s what she knows. Dicken said, “You’re holding this young woman illegally.”

Jurie was comically incredulous for a man whose face was normally so placid. “What in God’s green Earth were you thinking?”

“You’re not an authorized holding facility for children,” Dicken continued, warming to his subject. “You illegally transported this girl across state lines.”

“She’s a threat to public health,” Jurie said, suddenly recovering his calm. “And now you’ve joined her.” He waved his hand. “Get him out of here.”

The security men seemed unable to decide how to react. “Isn’t he safe where he is?” one guard asked, his voice muffled inside the hood.

The girl reached up to Dicken and tightly gripped his arm. “There is no threat,” Dicken told Jurie.

“You do not know that,” Jurie said, staring hard at Dicken, but the comment was more for the benefit of the guards.

“Dr. Jurie has stepped way over the line,” Dicken said. “Kidnapping is a tough rap, guys. This is a facility doing contract work under EMAC, which is under the authority of the Department of Health and Human Services. All of them have strict guidelines on human experimentation.” And nobody knows whether those guidelines still apply. But it’s the best bluff we have. “You have no jurisdiction over the girl. We’re leaving Sandia. I’m taking her with me.”

Jurie shook his head vigorously, making his hood waggle. “Very John Wayne. You got that out very nicely. I’m supposed to growl and play the villain?”

The situation was incredible and tense and fairly funny. “Yeah,” Dicken said, abruptly breaking out in a shit-kicking, full-out hayseed grin. He had a tendency to do that when confronted by authority figures. It was one reason why he had spent so much of his life doing fieldwork.

Jurie misinterpreted Dicken’s smile. “We have an incredible opportunity here. Why waste it?” Jurie said, wheedling now. “We can solve so many problems, learn so much. What we learn will benefit millions. It could save us all.”

“Not this girl. Not any of them.” Dicken held out his hand. The girl got to her feet and together, hand in hand, they walked cautiously toward the door.

Jurie blocked their way. “How far do you think you’ll get?” he asked, livid behind the cowl.

“Let’s find out,” Dicken said. Jurie reached out to hold him, but Dicken’s arm snaked up and he grabbed the edge of the faceplate, as if to remind Jurie of their unequal vulnerability. Jurie dropped his hands, Dicken let go, and the man backed off, catching up against a chair and almost falling over.

The security men seemed rooted to the trailer’s floor. “Good for you,” Dicken murmured. “Hire some lawyers, gentlemen. Time off for good behavior. Mitigating factors in sentencing.” Still murmuring legal inanities, he peered through the door of the trailer and saw a cluster of scientific and security staff, including Flynn, Powers, and now Presky, hanging back beyond the open gate in the reinforced acrylic fence. “Let’s go, honey,” Dicken said, and they stepped out onto the porch.

Behind, he heard a scuffle and swiveled his head to see Jurie, his face contorted, trying to grab a pistol and the security guards doing an awkward little dance keeping their weapons out of his reach.

Scientists with guns, Dicken thought. That really was the living end. Somehow, the absurdity cheered him. He squeezed the girl’s hand and marched toward the others standing by the gate.

They did not stop him. Maggie Flynn actually held the gate open. She looked relieved.

40

CALIFORNIA

Stella and Will had left the car after it ran out of gas near a town called Lone Pine. They were in the woods now, but she did not feel any closer to freedom, or to where she wanted to be.

They had left Mrs. Hayden asleep in the car, drained after driving all night and then cutting back and forth across the state routes and freeways and back roads all morning. Will trudged ahead of Stella, carrying two empty plastic bottles.

At noon, the air was cool and hazy. Summer was turning into fall. The pines and larches and oaks seemed to shimmer as breezes blew and clouds raced over the low mountains.

They had seen very few houses along the road, but there were some. Will talked about a place that was in the middle of nowhere, with no humans for tens, if not hundreds, of miles. Stella was too tired to feel discouraged. She knew now they did not belong anywhere or to anyone; they were just lost, inside and out. Her feet hurt. Her back hurt. The discomfort from her period was passing. That was a small blessing, but now she was beginning to wonder who and what Will really was.

He looked more than a little feral with his hair sweaty and sticking straight up at the back where he had leaned against the rear seat in Mrs. Hayden’s car. He smelled gamy, angry, and afraid, but Stella knew she did not smell any better.

She wondered what Celia and LaShawna and Felice were up to, what had happened to the drivers trussed up and left by the side of the road.

She had only a dim idea how the map in Will’s back pocket correlated with where they were. The road looked like a long black river rolling into the distance, vanishing around a tree-framed curve.

For a moment, she stopped and watched a ground squirrel. It stood on a low flat rock beside the shoulder, hunched and alert, with shiny black eyes, like the Shrooz in her room in Virginia.

She hoped they would end up on a farm and she could be with animals. She got along well with animals.

Will came back. The squirrel fled. “We should keep moving,” he said. They trotted clumsily into the trees as two cars rumbled by.

“Maybe we should hitchhike,” Stella suggested from behind a pine trunk. She smelled the cloying sweetness of the tree’s sap and it reminded her of school. She curled her lip and pushed away from the rough bark.

“If we hitchhike, they’ll catch us,” Will said. “We’re close. I know it.”

She followed Will. She could almost imagine a big blue Chevy or a big pickup barreling down the road with Mitch behind the wheel. Mitch and Kaye, together, looking for her.

The next time they heard a car coming, Will ran into the trees but she kept walking. After the car had passed, he caught up with her and gave her a squinch-faced look.

“We’re helpless out here,” Stella said, squinching back at him, as if that were a reasonable explanation.

“More reason to hide.”

“Maybe somebody knows where this place is. If they stop we can ask.”

“I’m not very lucky,” Will said, his mouth twisting into a line that was not a smile and not quite a smirk. Wry and uncertain. “Are you lucky?” he asked.

“I’m here with you, aren’t I?” she asked, deadpan.

Will laughed. He laughed until he started waving his arms and snorting and had to stop to wipe his nose on his sleeve.

“Eeyeew,” Stella said.

“Sorry,” he said.

Against her better judgment, Stella liked him again.

The next car, Will stuck out his hand, thumb up, and gave his biggest smile. The car flashed by doing at least seventy miles an hour, smoked windows full of blurred faces that did not even look their way.

Will hunched his shoulders as he resumed walking.

They heard the next vehicle twenty minutes later. Stella looked over her shoulder. It was an old Ford minivan, cresting a rise in the two-lane road and laying down a thin cloud of oily white smoke. Neither she nor Will moved back from the road. Their water bottles were empty. It wouldn’t be long before they had to turn around and retrace their journey.

The minivan slowed, moved into the opposite lane to avoid them, and passed with a low whoosh. An older man and woman in the front seats peered at them owlishly; the back windows were tinted blue and reflected their own faces.

The minivan pulled over and stopped about two hundred feet down the road.

Stella hiccupped in surprise and crossed her arms. Will stood sideways, like a fencer expecting a strike, and Stella saw his hands shake.

“They don’t look mean,” Stella said, but she thought of the red truck and Fred Trinket and his mother who had cooked chicken, back in Spotsylvania County.

“We do need a ride,” Will admitted.

The minivan backed up slowly and stopped about twenty feet away. The woman leaned her head out of the right side window. Her hair was salt-and-pepper gray and she had a square, strong face and direct eyes. Her arm, elbowing out, was covered with freckles, and her face was heavily wrinkled and pale. Stella saw she had lots of big silver rings on the fingers of her left hand, which rested on her forearm as she looked back at them.

“Are you two virus kids?” the older woman asked.

“Yeah,” Will said, hands shaking even harder. He tried to smile. “We escaped.”

The older woman thought about that for a moment, pursing her lips. “Are you infectious?”

“I don’t think so,” Will said, and stuck his hands in the pockets of his jeans.

The older woman turned back to the man in the driver’s seat. They shared a glance and reached a silent agreement possible only to a couple who had lived together a very long time. “Need a ride somewhere?” the woman asked.

Will looked at Stella, but all Stella could sniff was the thick fume of oil. The man was at least ten years older than the woman. He had a thin face, bright gray eyes, and a prominent nose, and his hands, on the wheel, were also covered with rings—turquoise and coral and silver, birds and abstract designs.

“Sure,” Will said.

The minivan’s side door popped and slid open automatically. The interior stank of cigarette smoke and hamburgers and fries.

Stella’s nose wrinkled, but the smell of food made her mouth water. They hadn’t eaten since the morning of the day before.

“We’ve been reading about kids like you,” the old man said as they climbed in. “Hard times, huh?”

“Yeah,” Will said. “Thanks.”