Prophet of Bones

1

The Prophet set his nine-millimeter on the kitchen counter.

He leaned forward, bleeding hard into the sink, the only sound a rhythmic tap of blood on stainless steel. The blood struck in little dime-sized drops, bright red, gathering into a pool on the metallic surface. He hit the knob with the back of his hand and cold water swirled down the drain.

Behind him, feet crunched on spent shell casings as two men entered the room.

“My disciples,” the Prophet said. He did not turn. “I knew you’d find me here.”

But his disciples, for their part, remained silent. They pulled chairs out from the table and sat. They cocked their weapons. First one, then the other, making a point of it.

Somewhere in the house a TV blared daytime talk, or something like it—intermittent applause, and a deep male voice saying, She a damn lie, that baby don’t look nothing like me, and the crowd hooting and hollering its approval.

The Prophet splashed cold water on his face, trying to clear the blood from his eyes. Head wounds bled like a bitch. They always looked worse than they were. Well, not always, he thought. He remembered the guard at the lab and clenched his eyes shut, willing the image away. Sometimes head wounds were exactly as bad as they looked. Sometimes they fucking killed you.

The Prophet peeled loose his tattered white sweatshirt, revealing a torso lean, and dark, and scarred. Tattoos swarmed up both arms to his shoulders—gang symbols across his deltoids, a crucifix in the center of his chest. He wiped his face, and the shirt came away red. The Prophet was not a big man, but wiry muscle bunched and corded beneath his skin when he tossed his stained shirt across the room. He was twenty years old or a thousand, depending on who you asked. Who you believed.

The Prophet turned and regarded his faithful. A smile crept to his lips. “You look like you could use a beer.”

He walked to where the dead woman lay against the refrigerator. He kicked her body out of the way enough to open the door. Glass bottles clinked. “All they have is Miller,” he said, a kind of apology. Blood trailed across the yellow linoleum. Not his blood, he noted. Not this time. He carried three beers back to the table and collapsed into a chair.

His faithful did not smile. They did not reach for their beers. They sat in their dark suits and black sunglasses; they sat perfectly still and watched him. The first was young, blond, baby-faced. A white scar ran diagonally across his upper lip where a cleft lip had been surgically corrected in childhood. If anything, the scar made him more boyish. The one imperfection in an otherwise perfect face. He held his gun casually, arm resting on the table. His white shirt collar was open at the neck, black tie loosened. The second man was older, darker—all jaw, chin, and shoulders. The hired muscle of the pair. But Babyface was still the one to watch. The Prophet knew this at a glance.

“What’s your name?” he asked the blond.

“Does it matter?” the blond answered.

The Prophet shook his head. “I guess not.” Babyface was right after all. In heaven there would be no need for names, for all are known to the eyes of God.

“We’ve been looking for you for a long time, Manuel,” Babyface said.

The Prophet leaned back in his chair and took a long swig of beer. He spread his hands. “My followers,” he said. “You have found me.”

“You’ve cost a lot of money,” the blond continued. “Which is something our employer could forgive.” He took off his sunglasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He looked up, and his eyes were a bright baby blue. “But you’ve also caused a lot of trouble, which is something he cannot.”

“I never asked forgiveness.”

“Then we’re agreed on the issue. None asked. None given.” The man’s pale eyes bore into him. He leaned across the table, pitching his voice low. “Tell me something, Manuel, just out of curiosity, between you and me, before this thing goes the way it’s gonna go—what the fuck were you thinking?”

The Prophet wiped a runnel of blood from his face. “I was called for this. You wouldn’t understand.”

“Oh, I suspect you got that right.”

The Prophet sipped his beer.

“So then where is it?” Babyface snapped, seeming to lose patience.

The Prophet didn’t answer.

“Come on, Manuel. We came such a long way. Don’t give us the silent treatment now.” He tapped the muzzle of the gun on the table.

“Our most holy is resting.”

“Most holy?” Babyface laughed and shook his head. “You know, I thought that bullshit was a joke when they told me.” He turned to his partner. “You hear this shit?”

But the muscle only stared, jaw clenched tight. Babyface turned back around. “Or maybe this is all just some game you’re playing. Some elaborate con that didn’t work out the way you wanted. I heard you’re one to play games.”

“No game,” the Prophet said.

“So you believe it?”

“I do.”

“Then you’re out of your mind after all.”

The TV droned on, filling the silence, the deep male voice cohering again from out of the background noise—I told you she was lying about it. I told you.

“Where is it?”

The Prophet lowered his eyes. “I laid him upstairs on the bed. It’s peaceful up there.”

Babyface nodded to his partner. The second man stood. “You don’t mind if we check, do you?” Babyface asked. The second man turned and disappeared up the stairs, taking them two at a time. His footfalls crossed heavily above them as he moved from room to room.

Babyface stared from across the table, his blue eyes deep and expressionless. The gun never wavered, held casually in a soft, pale hand.

The footfalls stopped.

The Prophet took another long pull from his beer. “I fed him every three hours, just like I was supposed to.”

“And did it matter?”

The Prophet didn’t respond. In the distance, the TV broke into applause again. Theme music, end of show. The footfalls crossed above them, slower this time, coming down the stairs. A moment later, the second man was back, carrying a dark form wrapped in a blanket. The bundle didn’t move.

The blond man flashed his muscle a questioning look.

“It’s dead,” the big man said. “It’s been dead.”

The blond turned to him. “It’s not your fault, Manuel,” he said. “Most of them die in the first few weeks. Sometimes their mothers eat them.”

The Prophet smiled. “He will rise again.”

“Perhaps he will,” Babyface said. “But I’d like to see that trick.” He raised his gun.

The Prophet took a final, cool swallow, finishing his beer. Blood dripped from his forehead and fell to the stained Formica table. He glanced around the room and shook his head. He saw broken dishes, stained wooden cabinets, dirty yellow linoleum. He looked at the dead woman, resolute in her silence. “Nothing good will come of this,” he prophesied.

“That’s where you’re wrong,” the blond man said. He smiled, and the old surgical scar curled his lip slightly. “This part will make me feel a whole lot better.”

“Though you strike me down, there will be other prophets after me. I won’t be the last.”

The muscle placed the body on the table, and the blanket opened at one end. A small, dark arm swung free of the blanket—a tiny distorted hand. A hand not quite human.

“I’ve got a secret for you,” Babyface said. “God hates His prophets. Always has.”

“God cannot hate.”

“That’s blasphemy,” the blond man said. He lifted the gun to Manuel’s face. “God is capable of all things.”

He pulled the trigger.

2

Paul liked playing God in the attic above his family garage.

That’s what his father called it, playing God, the day he found out. That’s what he called it the day he smashed it all down.

Paul built the cages out of discarded two-by-fours he’d found under the deck and quarter-inch mesh he bought from the local hardware store. He gathered small scraps of carpet, odds and ends of plywood, a bent metal bracket that used to belong to his mother’s old sewing machine table.

Paul drew the plans out carefully on graph paper during the last week of school.

Two weeks into summer break, his father left town to speak at a scientific conference. “Be good while I’m gone,” his father warned him as they stood in the foyer. “Keep studying your verses.”

“I will.”

Paul watched from the window as the long black car backed down the driveway.

Because he wasn’t old enough to use his father’s power tools, he had to use a handsaw to cut the wood for the cages. He used his mother’s sturdy black scissors to snip the wire mesh. He borrowed hinges from old cabinet doors, and nails from the rusty coffee can that hung over his father’s unused workbench.

That evening his mother heard the hammering and came out to the garage.

“What are you doing up there?” She spoke in careful English, peering up at the rectangle of light that spilled down from the attic.

Paul stuck his head through the opening, all spiky black hair and sawdust. “Nothing.”

“You’re doing something; I can hear you.”

“I’m just playing around with some tools,” he said. Which was, in some sense, true. He couldn’t lie to his mother. Not directly.

“Which tools?”

“Just a hammer and some nails.”

She stared up at him, her delicate face a broken Chinese doll—pieces of porcelain reglued subtly out of alignment.

“Be careful,” she said, and he understood that she was talking both about the tools and about his father.

The days turned into weeks as Paul worked on the cages. The summer wore on, Lake Michigan humidity cloaking the region like a veil. Because the wood was big, he built the cages big—less cutting that way. The cages were enormous, overengineered structures, ridiculously outsized for the animals they’d be holding. They weren’t mouse cages so much as mouse cities—huge tabletop-sized enclosures that could have housed border collies. He spent most of his paper-route money on the project, buying odds and ends he needed: sheets of Plexiglas, plastic water bottles, and small dowels of wood he used for door latches. While the other children in the neighborhood played basketball or wittedandu, Paul worked on his project.

He bought tiny exercise wheels and cedar chip bedding. He pictured in his head how it would be once he finished: a mouse metropolis. Rodent utopia. The mice themselves he bought from a pet store near his paper route. Most were white feeder mice used for snakes, but a couple were of the more colorful, fancy variety. And there were even a few English mice—sleek, long-bodied show mice with big tulip ears and glossy coats that felt slick under his fingers. He wanted a diverse population, so he was careful to buy different kinds.

The woman at the pet store always smiled at him when he came in. She was in her sixties, with bright, bottle-red hair and a pleasant, chubby face. A bell above the door would ring as he stepped inside the shop, and then he’d walk to the back, bend low, and stare through the glass at all the mice for sale. He’d tap his finger on the glass. “That one,” he’d say. “And that one over there—the brown one in the corner grooming itself.”

“Those are good ones,” she always said, no matter which mice he picked. “Those are good ones.”

Then the woman would pop the lid and reach inside the cage while the mice ran in berserk little circles to avoid being caught. Catching the mice wasn’t easy. Paul understood their fear. For most of them, when that hand came down, it meant death. It meant they were about to join the food chain. He wondered if they sensed this, if they sensed anything at all. He wondered if they thought the hand was the hand of God.

“It’s okay,” he whispered to them, willing them to be still. “Not this time.”

The woman put the mice in little cardboard travel boxes so he could carry them home in his paper-route bag. Later in the evening, when no one was watching, he snuck them up to the attic.

While he worked on their permanent homes, he kept his mice in little glass aquariums stacked on a table in the middle of the room. He fed them scraps of food he stole from the dinner table—chunks of buttered bread, green beans, and Ritz crackers. During the last weeks of summer break, Paul stood back and surveyed all he’d created. It was good. The finished cages were huge, beautiful habitats. He’d heard that word, “habitats,” when doing research about zoos. Paul understood that his cages weren’t natural habitats; they didn’t have plants and rocks inside them. But Mus musculus wasn’t a natural animal, not really. Maybe for a mouse, a habitat didn’t have to look like nature. Maybe it looked like this.

In the attic, Paul opened the lids on the aquariums and released his mice into their new enclosures one by one. The mice advanced cautiously, sniffing the air—the first explorers on a new continent.

That afternoon, to mark the occasion, he set out on his bike to the local grocery store, where he bought a head of lettuce as a treat for the mice. He brought along his pad of graph paper, stuffed into his paper-route bag, and on the way back stopped at a park a few blocks from his house. The late afternoon sun slanted through the trees. The park was mostly empty. A few older kids hung out on the bleachers near the tennis courts. Kids his own age played near the swings.

Paul looked down at his graph paper and studied his designs. Already he could see ways in which the habitats might be improved. He put pencil to paper, bent over his work, and so didn’t hear the footsteps behind him.

“What you doing?” The voice came from directly behind him.

Paul turned. It was Josh, a kid from his school, two grades older.

“I said, what you got there?”

“Nothing,” Paul said. He knew Josh well. Knew his tactics from the school yard, all smiles and friendly until it turned bad.

“Doesn’t look like nothing to me. Let’s see.”

Josh grabbed for the notebook and Paul jerked it away.

“Leave me alone.”

The older boy slammed the pad out of Paul’s hand and then kicked it, scattering the pages across the ground. He laughed. “I didn’t really want to see it anyway,” he said, and walked off.

Paul bent to pick up his drawings. The pad had split apart, and the papers were drifting away in the wind. On the bleachers, one of the older kids cackled. Paul had nearly gathered the last of his drawings when a sudden gust carried the final sheet toward the swings.

A narrow, sandaled foot came down on the paper, catching it.

“That guy is such a jerk,” came a female voice.

Paul looked up from the sandal. A girl from the neighborhood. He’d seen her around but had never spoken to her. She didn’t go to his school. He could tell by her long hair and dress that she went to Nearhaven. You could almost always tell Nearhaven kids that way. Just as they could tell the pubbies. And there beside her, on the swing, was a small boy. She bent, picked up the paper, and handed it to Paul.

“Thanks,” he told her.

“You’re as big as him. Why’d you let him do that?”

Paul shrugged. “He’s older.”

“I’m Rebecca, and this is my cousin Brian.”

“Paul.”

Rebecca turned and looked toward the bleachers. “We should go,” she said. Josh was talking to the bleacher group now, glancing meaningfully in their direction.

Paul followed Rebecca and her cousin out of the park, riding his bike slowly as they walked beside him. The cousin, it turned out, was a quiet, gap-toothed boy of seven who was staying with Rebecca’s family for summer break. Paul had no cousins, and he felt a momentary pang of jealousy. He had no family other than his parents.

When they arrived at her house, he was shocked to find how close she lived. On the other side of the street, one block down.

“We’re practically neighbors,” he told her.

Paul rode his bike up her driveway. The screen door squeaked as she opened it, but she didn’t step inside.

“Those papers,” she said. “What were you drawing?”

For a moment, Paul wasn’t sure how to answer. She must have sensed the hesitation. “You don’t have to say if you don’t want to,” she added.

Her saying that made it possible. So he told her.

“What do you mean, ‘cages’?” she asked. She let the screen door close and sat on the stoop.

He pulled the pad from his paper-route bag. “Here,” he said.

Rebecca took the papers, and her cousin leaned close.

“Construction plans, I guess you’d call them,” Paul said.

She flipped to the next sheet. This one showed his largest cage, drawn out in intricate detail.

“You built this?”

“Yeah. It wasn’t that hard.”

“It looks hard to me. Where is it?”

“In the attic over my garage.”

“Can we see?”

Paul glanced in the direction of his house. “No, I better not.”

Rebecca flipped the page and studied the final drawing carefully. “It must have taken you a long time to put all this together.”

“Months.”

“What are they for? I mean, if these are cages, what’s supposed to go inside?”

“Mice.”

She nodded to herself. “Mice,” she repeated under her breath, as if it made perfect sense. “Where’d you get the stuff? All the wood and nails.”

Paul shrugged. “Here and there. Just scraps, mostly. Other stuff I had to buy.”

The little cousin finally spoke: “My parents don’t let me have pets.”

“Neither do mine,” Paul said. “But anyway, the mice aren’t pets.”

“Then what are they?” the boy asked. He stared over his cousin’s shoulder at the drawings.

“A project,” Paul said.

“What kind of project?”

Paul looked at the graph paper. “I’m still working on that.”

The bell rang at two thirty-five.

By two forty-nine, school bus No. 32 was freighted with its raucous cargo and pulling out of the parking lot, headed for the highway and points south and east.

Paul sat near the back and stared out the window, watching the Grand Kankakee Marsh scroll by. Around him, the other kids talked and laughed, but only Paul sat silently, fidgeting with the large blue textbook on his lap, waiting for the road to smooth out so that he could read. As they crossed the bridge, he finally opened his life sciences book.

Today Mr. Slocam had gone over the study guide for the test.

Figure 73 showed two ellipses graphed like a crooked half-smile between an x- and a y-axis. The caption explained that the first slope represented the number of daughter atoms. The second slope represented the parent atoms. The point of intersection of the two slopes was the element’s half-life.

“You will need to know this for the test,” the study guide declared in bold heading, followed by a series of bullet-pointed facts.

The study guides were always like this.

Need to know this for the test. The common refrain of the public schools, where academic bulimia was the order of the day—and tests simple exercises in regurgitation. Paul knew the drill.

The bus made several stops before finally pulling to rest in front of his house. Paul climbed out.

His father was out of town again, at another scientific conference, so dinner that evening was a quiet undertaking. Later that night he went up to his room and copied his study guide onto a series of flash cards. Just before bed, he found his mother in the kitchen. “Will you quiz me?”

“Of course.” His mother’s doll face shattered into a smile.

They sat at the dining room table, and his mother flipped the first card, on which was drawn two crooked lines on an x- and y-axis. “Describe the point of intersection,” she said.

“It’s an element’s half-life.”

“Good,” she said, flipping to the next card. “When was radiometric dating invented?”

“In 1906, but the results were rejected for years.”

“Rejected by whom?”

“By evolutionists.”

“Good.” She flipped to the next card. “In what year did Darwin write On the Origin of Species?”

“In 1859.”

“When did Darwin’s theory lose the confidence of the scientific community?”

“That was 1932.” Anticipating the next question, Paul continued: “When Kohlhorster invented potassium-argon dating.”

“Why was this important?”

“The new dating method proved the earth wasn’t as old as the evolutionists thought.”

“When was the theory of evolution finally debunked completely?”

“In 1954, when Willard F. Libby invented carbon-14 dating at the University of Chicago.”

“Good,” his mother said and flipped another card. “And why else was he known?”

“He won the Nobel Prize in 1960, when he used carbon dating to prove, once and for all, that the earth was fifty-eight hundred years old.”

3

Paul wore a white lab coat when he entered the attic. It was one of his father’s old coats, so he had to cut the sleeves to fit his arms. Paul’s father was a doctor, the PhD kind. He was blond and big and successful. He’d met Paul’s mother after grad school while consulting for a Chinese research firm in Nanjing. Paul’s mother had been one of the scientists at the university there, and she sometimes told Paul stories about working in a lab, about her home in China, and about meeting his father. “He was so handsome,” she said.

After they married, they’d continued to work on the same projects for a while, but there was never any doubt that Paul’s father was the bright light of the family. The genius, the famous man. He was also crazy.

Paul’s father liked breaking things. He broke telephones, and he broke walls, and he broke tables. He broke promises not to hit again. One time, he broke bones; and the police were called by the ER physicians who did not believe the story about Paul’s mother falling down the stairs. They did not believe the weeping woman of porcelain who swore her husband had not touched her.

Paul’s father was a force of nature, a cataclysm. As unpredictable as a comet strike or a volcanic eruption. Over the course of his childhood, Paul became an expert on his father’s moods. He learned to interpret the tone of a brooding silence, could read whole volumes of meaning into a single blue-eyed glance around the side of a clenched periodical. He had two fathers, he learned. One who smiled and charmed and made people laugh. And another, who stormed. The attic over the garage was a good place to retreat to when the dark clouds gathered.

Paul studied his mice like Goodall’s chimps, watching them for hours. He documented their social interactions in a green spiral notebook. At first he gave them names, borrowed from characters from his favorite books. Names like Algernon and Nimh. Later, as the population grew, he started giving them numbered codes instead, saving names for only the most special.

Mice are social animals, and he found that within the large habitats, they formed packs like wolves, with a dominant male and a dominant female—a structured social hierarchy involving mating privileges, territory, and almost-ritualized displays of submission by males of lower rank. The dominant male bred most of the females, and mice, Paul learned, could kill each other. Mice could war.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and the mouse populations slowly expanded to fill the new territories he’d created for them. The habitats thronged. The babies were born pink and blind, and as their fur came in, Paul began documenting coat colors in his notebook. There were fawns, blacks, and grays. Occasional agoutis. There were Irish spotted, banded, and broken marked. In later generations, new colors appeared that he hadn’t purchased, and he knew enough about genetics to realize these were recessive genes cropping up.

Paul was fascinated by the concept of genes, the stable elements through which God provided for the transport of heritable characteristics from one generation to the next.

Paul did research and found that the pigmentation loci of mice were well mapped and well understood. He categorized his population by phenotype and found one mouse, a pale, dark-eyed cream, that must have been a triple recessive: bb, dd, ee. Three gene pairs lining up in just the right way, each diluting the coat pigmentation by a certain quantum, until you were left with a mouse with almost no coat pigment at all. But not an albino, because albinos had red eyes.

In November the school sent home an announcement about the science fair, which would be held in the spring.

“Are you going to participate?” his mother asked him as she signed the parental notification.

Paul shrugged. “If I can think of something,” he said. He knew instantly that his mice were the answer, though he wasn’t sure how exactly.

It wasn’t enough to just have them, to observe them, to run the Punnett squares. He’d need to do real science. He’d need to do something new. And because real scientists used microscopes and electronic scales, Paul asked for these things for Christmas. His parents were pleased with his sudden analytical interest and bought him what he asked for.

But mice, Paul quickly discovered, did not readily yield themselves to microscopy. They tended to climb down from the stand.

The electronic scale, however, proved useful. Paul weighed every mouse and kept meticulous records. He considered developing his own inbred strain—a line with some combination of distinctive characteristics—but he wasn’t sure what characteristics to look for. He imagined that his special new strain would be useful to science someday, a genetic model destined to play a role in some far-future discovery, but he didn’t know where to start.

He imagined winning the science fair. He imagined his father proud of him, clapping him on the shoulder with his big hand.

Paul was going over his notebook when he saw it. January-17. Not a date but a mouse, January-17. The seventeenth mouse born in January.

He went to the cage and opened the door. A flash of sandy fur, and he snatched it up by its tail—a brindle specimen with large ears. Over the previous several months he’d become good at handling the mice. It was a knack you picked up without realizing it—the ability to hold the mice softly, so that you didn’t hurt them, and yet firmly, so they couldn’t get away. This mouse was not particularly fast or hard to catch. There was nothing obviously special about it. It was rendered different from the other mice only by the mark in his notebook. Paul looked at the mark, looked at the number he’d written there.

Of the more than ninety mice in his notebook, January-17 was, by two full grams, the largest mouse he’d ever weighed.

In school they taught him that through science you could decipher the truest meaning of God’s word. God wrote the language of life in four letters: A, T, C, and G. A family of proteins called AAA+ initiated DNA replication, genetic structures conserved across all forms of life, from men to archaebacteria—the very calling card of the great designer.

That’s not why Paul did it, though: to get closer to God. He did it because he was curious.

It was late winter before his father asked him what he spent all his time doing in the attic.

“Just messing around,” Paul answered.

They were in his father’s car, on the way home from piano lessons. “Your mother said you built something up there.”

Paul fought back a surge of panic. The lie came quickly, unbidden. “I built a fort a while ago.”

Paul’s father glanced down at him. “What kind of fort?”

“Just a few pieces of plywood and a couple blankets. Just a little fort.”

“You’re almost twelve now. Aren’t you getting a little old for forts?”

“Yeah, I guess I am.”

“I don’t want you spending all your time up there.”

“All right.”

“I don’t want your grades slipping.”

“All right.”

“Your grades are what you should be focusing on right now, not screwing around with kids’ games in an attic.”

Paul, who hadn’t gotten a B in two years, said, a third time, “All right.”

The car slowed to a stop at a red light. “Oh,” Paul’s father added, almost as an afterthought. “There’s something else. I don’t want you hanging out with that girl from up the street.”

“What?” Paul said. “Who?”

“The Nearhaven girl.”

Paul blinked. He hadn’t realized his father knew.

His father added, “You’re getting too old for that, too.”

The light turned green.

They rode the rest of the way in silence, and Paul explored the walls of his newly shaped reality. Because he knew foreshocks when he felt them.

He watched his father’s hands on the steering wheel.

Though large for his age, like his father, Paul’s features favored his Asian mother; he sometimes wondered if that was part of it, this thing between his father and him, this gulf he could not cross. Would his father have treated a freckled, blond son any differently? No, he decided. His father would have been the same. The same force of nature; the same cataclysm. He couldn’t help being what he was.

Paul watched his father’s hand on the steering wheel, and years later, when he thought of his father, even after everything that happened, that’s how he thought of him. That moment frozen. Driving in the car, big hands on the steering wheel, a quiet moment of foreboding that wasn’t false but was merely what it was, the best it would ever be between them.

4

Winter stayed late that year in the land of marshes and highways. A mid-March storm came howling down across Lake Michigan, laying waste to an early spring thaw. Murdered stalks of corn jutted from the snow, turning roadside farms into fields of brown stubble.

On most days, Paul lingered inside after school. But on some afternoons when his father wasn’t around, Rebecca would meet him, and on those days the two of them ventured into the woods. They explored the frozen marshes that sprawled behind the back fence of the subdivision—a wild place beyond the reach of roads and sidewalks and parents.

Instead there were cattails, and sway-grass, and old-growth oaks. Dark water hidden under whole plains of snow. And the marshes extended for miles.

On that cold Saturday afternoon, Paul and Rebecca walked the trail down to the river. The morning had dawned cold and windy—northern gusts raking through the trees, a twenty-degree temperature drop from the day before. Their breath made smoke on the frigid air. They didn’t speak as they walked; it was too cold to speak. They rounded a final bend in the trail, and the river lay before them: the Little Cal—a blank white ribbon that cut a swath through the heart of the wetland snowscape. Stubborn patches of dogwood and black oak clung to the riverside floodplain. In the spring, Paul knew, whole acres of lowland marsh would be transformed, submerged, become river itself. But in the cold months, the river retreated to its banks, dug deep, and capped itself over in ice.

It was a crazy thing to do, to play on the river ice. They knew this.

“Come on,” Rebecca said.

“I’m coming. Hold your horses.”

They walked the ice like a winding roadway.

Even in winter, the wetlands teamed with life; you could read the signs all around—animal tracks like lines of grammar on the snow. Sometimes deer came bounding through, graceful as dancers—just another shape in the woods until a white flash of tail drew your attention. Where one ran, the others followed, by some instinct staying clear of the ice.

Months from now this place would be unrecognizable. A burst of foliage, and the low shrubs would hide their bones in green. Everywhere he looked, Paul saw it—the endless cycle of birth, growth, and senescence. A cycle old as the first day. Old as God saying, Let it be.

The children’s feet crunched on snow. They hunted lures that day, knives in hand, serrated edges making short work of twenty-pound-test line.

For three seasons of the year, the river belonged to fishermen—casting their lines into coffee-colored water through a web of low-hanging branches. Inevitably, some lures got hung up, and the fishermen would curse and pull on their lines, until those lines snapped; the lures would dangle over the river like unreachable, low-hanging fruit. The anglers fished three seasons of the year, but winter belonged to the children.

So they walked the ice like a roadway, serrated edges parting twenty-pound-test like strands of spider silk. They gathered red-and-white bobbers, and colorful spinners, and desiccated egg sacks wrapped in white nylon mesh.

The first to see the lure earned the right to claim it. There was no running on the ice. No rush to grab. They moved slowly, six feet apart to disperse their weight. They respected the ice and worked hard to learn its rules.

Paul was larger and heavier than Rebecca, so some lures only Rebecca could dare.

That Saturday, they walked the river south.

Here are some of the rules of ice. The ice is thinner near the shoreline, so getting on and off can be difficult. The ice is thinner near bends in the river, where the water moves quickest. In places where the snow cover is darker, slushier, the ice beneath is sure to be rotten and soft.

Last year, when walking alone on the ice, in that last leap to shore, Paul had broken through, his leg plunging into frigid water up to his knee. He’d been close to home, but by the time he’d been able to peel off his boot, his foot had been blue. A warm bath had brought it excruciatingly back to life.

But today he wasn’t close to home. Today they were miles out to the south, and the day was colder. Today they walked in the middle of the river, like it was a roadway, knives drawn, tempting fate.

“Do you have science fairs at your school?” Paul asked as they rounded a curve.

“Yeah, every year,” Rebecca said.

“Have you entered?”

“No, never. Why are you asking?”

“Because I’m going to enter this year. And I’m going to win.”

“You sound sure.”

“Sure enough,” he said. His steps slowed. “Be careful, the ice is weak here.”

Their feet made crunching sounds on the snow.

Rebecca touched his arm. “I see one.”

Paul stopped. He looked to where his friend was pointing, up the river, near the bend. “Yeah, I see it. Green spinner bait.”

They walked slowly. Rebecca moved ahead.

“Getting thin,” Paul warned.

“I know.”

“Slow down.”

“Come on, Grandma. Don’t be a wuss.”

They inched forward. Paul stopped again. He studied the ice with his feet. Like Eskimos, they had a dozen names for ice, their own private language—the jargon of ice walkers. There was slick ice, and new ice, and chalk ice. There was rotten ice. There was ice-you-did-not-walk-on. You could feel the give, the gentle flex, a kind of sag. Ice on the river didn’t break without warning. It wasn’t like the movies: one minute you’re standing there, then a loud crack—and splash, you’re under. In reality, the ice had flex. And the sound… the sound was more of a creaking, like old leather, or the sound a tree makes in the two seconds between when it starts to fall and when it hits the ground—the low cry of rending fiber, of nature bending, failing. Of that which had been structured becoming unstructured.

In truth, you only heard a loud crack when the ice was good and strong. That’s when you hear the cracks like gunfire, invisible beneath a layer of snow—a shotgun sound that propagates forward so fast that you hear it beneath you and up ahead at the same time.

They advanced.

Near the bend, the snow was darker, revealing a cycle of freeze and melt.

Paul walked until the ice creaked like old leather. Rebecca looked back at him. The wind blew through the trees, clacking branches against branches.

“You should stop,” Paul said.

“It’s not much farther.”

“No, you should stop.”

Paul spread his feet. He watched his friend; he listened.

Rebecca inched ahead. The ice groaned. She turned and made eye contact with him, her cheeks rosy with the cold. Long brown hair spilled out from beneath her knitted hat. She smiled at him, and something fluttered in his stomach, and it occurred to him at that moment that she was pretty. Her smile shifted into a look of determination, and she turned back toward the lure.

The lure dangled just ahead of her, ten feet forward at chest level.

Ten more feet and she’d have it.

Rebecca shifted her weight and took another step as the ice creaked like an oak in a storm. She paused, as if unsure of herself, before stepping again—a slow, gentle sag forming beneath her feet, barely perceptible. She stopped. You’d only see it if you knew what to look for, but Paul did see it—the way the whole area beneath her seemed to give, just a little, as she stood balanced in perfect equipoise. A bare centimeter at first, then more, a slow downward flex of the ice. There would be no warning beyond this. Rebecca shot Paul another look, then shifted her weight again—

—and took a long step back.

And another, and another. Backing away, accepting defeat.

The lure would stay where it was for another season.

“Next time,” he told her when she was back on the thick ice again.

She shook her head. “It was this time or nothing.”

Paul clapped her on the shoulder, and together they turned and headed for home.

As they walked, the sky darkened, evening coming on. Paul looked at his friend and imagined what it would be like to die that way, to drown in the cold and dark, carried forward beneath the ice by the force of the current.

He imagined crawling out on the ice on his stomach and reaching for her through the hole, because he couldn’t have left her there to drown, not without trying—and he imagined the ice breaking and both of them going under.

The dark and numbing cold. An end to everything.

It wouldn’t be so bad.

An hour later they were at her door, shivering from the cold.

“Shut your eyes,” she said. It was dark now. The only light came from the streetlamp on the corner. Her face was a shape in the shadows.

Paul closed his eyes.

Her lips touched his. A gentle kiss. The first of his life.

She pulled away. “After today, I’m not allowed to spend time with you anymore.”

Paul opened his eyes. “Why not?”

“Your father visited my parents.”

“He what?” Paul stared at her, horror-stricken.

“He came and told them he didn’t want me over there.”

“But why?”

She shrugged. “He said we’re getting too old to be playing together. We should play with kids from our own schools.”

Paul looked at her. In their town, Catholics went to the public schools; Presbyterians, Baptists, and Lutherans all had their own private institutions. “But you came today,” he said.

“One last time. To tell you.”

“Your parents don’t have to listen. We can still hang out when he’s not around.”

“We can’t,” she said. “My parents don’t want me to.”

“Why?”

“Your father.” She lowered her eyes. “My parents think he’s crazy.”

Later that night, Paul stood in the dim attic light next to the cages.

“This is what I wanted you to see,” he told his mother.

His mother stood in the half-light.

“What is this?” There was something in his mother’s voice. Some mixture of emotions he couldn’t identify. She stood facing the cages, a startled expression on her face.

Paul held Bertha up by her tail for his mother to see. The mouse was a beautiful golden brindle, long whiskers twitching.

“She’s the most recent generation,” Paul said. “An F4.”

“An F4, you say?” She shook her head with wonder. “Where did you learn these terms?”

“Books.” Paul smiled as he looked down at the mouse. “She’s kin to herself.”

“So this is your project for the fair?”

“Yeah. I’ve been working on it for a long time.”

“That’s a big mouse,” his mother said.

“The biggest yet. Fifty-nine grams, weighed at a hundred days old. The average weight is around forty.”

Paul stroked the mouse’s tawny fur. The little nose twitched—long colorless whiskers that existed at the very edge of visibility. Paul gave the mouse a tiny sunflower seed, and it rose up on its haunches, gripping the seed in tiny front paws. Paul had always thought there was something strangely human about a mouse’s stance when it fed that way.

“What have you been feeding it to get so big?” she asked.

Paul put the mouse on her hand. “It has nothing to do with food,” he said. “I feed all the mice the same. Look at this.” Paul showed her the charts he’d graphed on the white poster board, like the figure in his life sciences book, a gentle upward ellipse between the x- and y-axes—the slow upward climb in body weight from one generation to the next.

“One of my F2s tipped the scales at forty-five grams, so I bred him to several of the biggest females, and they made more than fifty babies. I weighed them all at a hundred days old and picked the biggest four. Then I bred those and did the same thing with the next generation, choosing the heaviest hundred-day weights. I got the same bell-curve distribution—only the bell was shifted slightly to the right. Bertha was the biggest of them all.”

“You just bred the biggest ones?” his mother said.

“Yeah. I keep the big ones in the glass aquariums, apart from the others.”

“It was easy as that?”

“It’s the same thing people have been doing with domestic livestock for the last five thousand years. Cattle are bigger now than they used to be. Sheep give more wool. Our chickens lay more eggs.”

“But this didn’t take thousands of years.”

“No, it kind of surprised me it worked so well. This isn’t even subtle. I mean, look at her, and she’s only an F4. Imagine what an F10 might look like. I think I can make them even bigger.”

She laughed nervously. “It sounds like you want to turn them into rats.”

“Rats are a different species, but I bet with enough time… hundreds of generations… I might be able to get them close to that size.”

Her face grew serious. “You shouldn’t talk like that.”

“It’s just directional selection. With a diverse enough population, it’s amazing what a little push can do. I mean, when you think about it, I hacked off the bottom ninety-five percent of the bell curve for five generations in a row. Of course the mice got bigger. I probably could have gone the other way if I wanted, made them smaller.”

“You father won’t like this,” she said. She handed the mouse back to Paul.

“I know. I’ll tell him about it at the science fair. After I’ve won. He can’t get mad at me then.”

His mother’s brow furrowed. “I don’t know,” she said. “What if he finds them before the fair?”

“He won’t,” Paul said. He put the brindle mouse back in the aquarium. It scampered across the cedar chips toward the food dish. “Besides,” he said softly, so that his mother couldn’t hear. “This is all I have now.”

“Just be careful,” she said.

“There’s one thing that surprised me though, something I only noticed recently.”

“What’s that?”

“When I started, at least half of the mice were albino. Now it’s down to about one in ten.”

“Why does that matter?”

“I never consciously decided to select against that.”

“So?”

“So, when I did culls… when I decided which ones to breed, sometimes the weights were about the same on two mice, so I’d just pick one. I thought I was picking randomly, but now I’m not so sure. I think I just happened to like one kind more than the other.”

“Maybe you did.”

“So what if it happens that way in nature?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s like the dinosaurs. Or woolly mammoths, or cavemen. They were here once; we know that because we keep finding their bones. But now they’re gone, and we can only see them in museums.” He paused. “God made all life about six thousand years ago, right?”

“Yes.”

“But some of it isn’t here anymore.” Paul looked at his mice. “What if it’s like that with God? It wouldn’t have to be on purpose, just a few percentiles of difference, the slightest perturbation from random, this big hand reaching down, picking which ones stay and which ones go.”

Paul put the lid back on the aquarium. “Some kinds die out along the way.”

5

It happened on a weekend. Bertha was pregnant, obscenely, monstrously. Her distended abdomen spread around her as she squatted on her haunches and nibbled at a piece of lettuce.

Bertha sat alone in the smallest aquarium, an island unto herself isolated on a table in the middle of the room. A little tissue box sat in the corner of her glass enclosure, and Bertha had shredded bits of paper into a comfortable nest in which to give birth to the next generation of goliath mice.

Paul dropped another piece of lettuce into the cage and smiled.

Whiskers twitching, Bertha lumbered forward across the cedar chips and sniffed the new arrival.

Then Paul heard it: the sudden hum of the garage door. He froze.

His father was home early.

When the garage door finally stopped, Paul heard his father’s car ease into the open parking bay below. The brakes squeaked as the car pulled to a stop, and then his father cut the engine. Paul considered turning off the attic light but knew it would only draw suspicion. Instead he waited, hoping.

The garage was strangely quiet, the only sound the ticking of the car’s engine down below. Paul listened, waiting for the tread of his father’s footsteps heading into the house. The sound didn’t come.

Paul’s stomach dropped when he heard the creak of his father’s weight on the ladder.

There was a moment of panic then—a single hunted moment when Paul’s eyes darted for a place to hide the cages. It was ridiculous; there was no place to go.

The creaking ladder grew louder as Paul’s father ascended.

“What’s that smell?” his father asked as his head cleared the attic floor. He stopped and looked around, a pale disembodied head jutting from the floorboards. “Oh.”

And that was all he said at first.

That was all he said as he climbed the rest of the way. He rose to his height and stood like a giant, taking it in. The single bare bulb draped his eyes in shadow. The muscle in his jaw clenched and loosened. “What is this?” he said finally. His dead voice turned Paul’s stomach to ice.

“What is this?” Louder now, and something changed in his shadow eyes. Paul’s father stomped toward him, above him.

“Are you going to answer me? What is this!” The words more shriek than question, spit flying from his mouth.

“I, I thought—”

A big hand shot out and slammed into Paul’s chest, balling his T-shirt into a fist, yanking him off his feet.

“What the fuck is this? Didn’t I tell you no pets?” The bright light of the family, the famous man.

“They’re not pets, they’re—”

“God, it fucking stinks up here. You brought these things into the house?”

“I’m sorry, Dad, I—”

“You brought this vermin into the house? Into my house!”

“It’s a projec—”

The arm flexed, sending Paul backward into the big cages, toppling one of the tables—a flash of pain, wood and mesh crashing to the floor, the squeak of mice and twisted hinges, months and months and months of work.

His father kicked at the wood, splintering the frame, crushing the cage in on itself, stomping it to twisted wreckage. “You brought these things into my house!”

Paul scrambled away, just out of reach.

His father followed, arm raised, and the big hand came down on Paul’s shoulder, knocking him to the floor, where his chin split against the rough wood. And still his father came, stomping toward him, while Paul rolled away. His big leg lashed out and missed. And he came again, arm raised high—but then stopped, attention snagged. His head turned toward the glass box. He strode to the middle of the room. He grabbed Bertha’s aquarium in his big hands.

“Dad, no!”

He lifted it high over his head—and there was a moment when Paul imagined he could almost see it, almost see Bertha inside, and the babies inside her, a final generation that would never be born.

Then his father’s arms came down like a force of nature, like a cataclysm.

Paul closed his eyes against exploding glass, and all he could think was This is how it happens. This is exactly how it happens.

6

There is a place where the sky touches the ground. Martial Joseph Johansson knew that place. He stared out through the glass bubble of the helicopter as it tunneled through the downpour. Rain sheeted off the glass, transformed by the curvature of the windshield into writhing little rivers that streamed away, found edges, fell. Became rain again.

“Five minutes, sir!”

The horizon, Martial Johansson knew, was an illusion of perspective. Below a certain altitude, each point in the sky occupies the horizon when viewed from some specific corresponding vantage. A formula could be deduced involving the curvature of the earth, the altitude of the helicopter, and the distance from the observer. So from some theoretical miles-off viewpoint, the helicopter sat like a microscopic insect on the dark line of the horizon. A lightning bug in a storm.

Martial closed his eyes.

The helicopter bucked beneath him, a deep vibration felt in every cell of his body.

Beside him sat his assistant Guthrie, looking at his watch. His knuckles were white on the handle of his briefcase. Although he’d worked for Martial for six years, Guthrie still hadn’t gotten used to the frequent flights. Running a corporation the size of Axiom required Martial to be on three coasts, often in the same day. Mostly, that meant jets, but every now and then the helicopter was required. Guthrie still seemed a bit nervous in the helicopter, even in the best of weather. This was not the best of weather.

Martial coughed phlegm into a dark handkerchief. It took a moment for the coughing to subside.

“You okay?” Guthrie shouted over the roar of the helicopter.

Martial nodded.

The noise discouraged conversation. But this was okay. Martial was a man with little use for small talk.

The helicopter banked against the wind, and the world swiveled. Martial’s stomach went light and feathery as he looked out through the glass. They were almost there. He could see it. From this height, the facility looked like any nice hotel retreat. Or maybe a high school campus that Frank Lloyd Wright had designed—all hard angles and elegant symmetry. A structure built so perfectly into the landscape that you secretly suspected it had always been there. Huge and beautiful, a sprawling compound of laboratories and research buildings, interconnected by a series of covered walkways. This was Axiom’s epicenter, his third home.

The helicopter swiveled again, changing the world’s orientation. Lights and a red cross, a helipad—and standing there, against the rain, waiting for the helicopter to land, three men in suits.

Always three men. Martial liked it that way. His security detail. Though he’d learned a long time ago not to trust anyone completely—even those closest to him.

All three had guns, but only two of the guns were loaded with live rounds. Nobody knew which two.

Not even the men.

The helicopter touched down with a gentle thump. The door swung open and cold, wet air blasted Martial’s face.

He followed Guthrie out into the storm.

“Two transplants, and this fucking rain will be the death of me!” Martial shouted into the roar of the machine. The tropical storm had been born in the Gulf, two hundred miles to the south, and now it lashed the Gulf States, shedding its moisture as it moved inland.

Guthrie made some response, but the sound was yanked away. Guthrie ducked as he ran beneath the spinning blades. A common, involuntary reflex. Though Martial was a few inches taller, he stood upright and walked slowly, reaching up to hold his hat onto his head.

He’d done the math when he’d first bought the helicopter. He was six foot one. The blades, at their center, were eight feet off the ground. Therefore, he didn’t need to duck. Later he read of a man who’d died in a windstorm, his head taken off by the overhead prop. For though the blades were eight feet high at the center, they drooped while the helicopter idled down; and during gusty weather an idling helicopter could be rocked ever so slightly by the force of the wind, producing a slight pitch. Blades that were eight feet off the ground in the center might be suddenly, on one side of the helicopter, only five or six feet at their spinning tips. Martial took the news as a lesson: When God wants you, he will take you.

The three men in suits walked forward to greet them.

“Sir,” the first man said. This was Scholler. As big as he was dedicated, and one of Martial’s longest-serving personal guards.

They shook hands. “I trust you had a good flight, sir.”

“We’re here, aren’t we?”

“And glad to see it, sir.”

Behind Scholler was Ekman. Blond, serious, unsmiling. He looked younger than his actual age, as much boy as man, but he was the one Martial trusted to handle the more difficult operations. A diagonal scar split his upper lip. To Ekman’s left was Phillips, who really was as young as he looked. A newer asset. Ex-military and kept the crew cut.

They crossed the helipad to the waiting doorway. Once inside, they took the stairs down. “How were the latest trials?” Martial asked.

“Negative,” Scholler said.

Martial nodded, accepting the news. “And how is he?”

“The same, sir.”

“The others?”

“Another numbers reduction, sir.”

“Cause of?”

“We haven’t finished the autopsy yet but we’ll—”

Martial cut him off with a raised hand. “What do you think?”

“Probably the same as the others. Methylation imprint. Unbalanced base-pair alignment.”

“Which is another way of saying you have no idea.”

“Yes, sir. You could say that.”

There were men in Martial’s shoes who did not sweat the details, who ran their companies like drivers raced cars, foot on the gas, aware only of the output of their machine rather than the intricacies of its inner workings. Martial prided himself on looking under the hood. To be any other way made no sense, considering the circumstances.

“I was hoping for good news,” he said.

“Sorry, sir. The new trials are scheduled to begin next month.”

Martial shook his head dismissively. “The price of progress. There’s an old saying, If you want to achieve the impossible, you must first accept that you may fail.”

They took the stairs down to the third floor. At the doorway, Martial paused and turned toward the smallest man. “Ekman, I’d like a word.” The others continued down the stairs. Only Ekman followed Martial into the hall.

“The problem I tasked you with,” Martial said. “I’m told you took care of it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And the mess?”

“Cleaned up as best we could.”

“Did you talk to him first?”

“Yes. We sat in the kitchen and had a chat.”

“And your opinion?”

“My opinion, sir?”

“Of Manuel. His state of mind. His motive. Why did he do it?”

“I think he was crazy.”

Martial nodded. “It seems to be an occupational risk.” He stopped at the door of his private quarters. “And our property was recovered?”

“Yes. Deceased. The autopsy will take place at the same time as the others.”

“Excellent work. I appreciate the efficiency with which you handled the situation.”

Ekman dipped his chin slightly in response.

“Is there anything else I need to know?”

Ekman gestured toward the door. “She’s waiting for you, sir,” he said.

“Wait outside.”

“Yes, sir.”

Martial stepped through, and Ekman closed the door after him.

Martial kept apartments at several of his facilities. It made the travel more bearable. They were small and functional and clean. Everything his life wasn’t. He wandered into the kitchen and mixed a drink. A tall one.

In his office, he found Sacha. She was standing at the window. She’d lost weight. They kissed awkward hellos on the cheek. “Joseph,” she said, using his middle name. His Christian name. She wrapped her arms tightly around herself and pulled away.

“How have you been?” he asked.

She smiled. “As you see.”

“You’re looking healthy.”

“Ah, the glow of docetaxel. They should market it to all the girls. Also, it keeps you thin. A wonderful purgative. And if you’re lucky, the burst capillaries in your eyes give you that perfect come-hither look.”

“You’re particularly sarcastic tonight.”

“Particularly?”

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing that a few months won’t cure.” She stared out the window for a moment before continuing. “I saw it again.”

“Why do that to yourself?”

She stayed silent.

“I told you not to go down there again.”

“But still I went, didn’t I? Imagine that. A world where not everyone does what you say. The thought of it must keep you awake at night.”

“Why did you go?”

“I heard it was sick.”

“It was. It got better. And how about you?”

“I’m fine,” she said. Though of course she wasn’t. “That thing,” she whispered, “it’s not natural.”

Martial took a sip of his drink. “Are any of us anymore?”

The words were out before he could stop them. Sacha had tried to kill herself three times already. Three times in seven years, each attempt more serious than the last. So when cancer had struck, it came to her as both a shock and a relief. The medical team told him before they told her. A thin medical report on his desk that explained exactly how she would die. Later, she’d found him in the cell lab, and he’d given her the news.

“If I’d only known,” she’d said. And he’d understood that she was talking about the three wasted attempts. That last one a nightmare of blood and razors. When all she’d had to do was wait.

And then, with genuine surprise in her voice, she’d said, “But I thought only the good died young.”

Now Martial took a seat on his couch.

“It’s been a while since you’ve visited the lab,” she said.

“Three months. Not so long.”

“Time isn’t the same here. I think you’re avoiding me.”

“Don’t be silly.”

She sat next to him on the couch. She laid her head in his lap, and he touched her hair.

“I worry about what will become of you when I’m gone,” she said.

It was sarcasm again, he thought at first. But when she stayed silent, he was no longer sure.

Sacha had been a call girl once. Then something more. Then something less.

She had two months.

“You collect things,” she said. “These fascinations. And then you never let them go.”

“I let things go.”

She shook her head. “One day you will be solely comprised of what you hoard.”

“You can go anytime you wish.”

“Is that what you tell yourself? You have always been a great liar. Even to yourself.”

She was the only person who could speak to him like this. She was the only person with nothing left to lose. Soon, she would be gone. Perhaps this is what she’d meant when she’d said she worried what would become of him. That there would be no one left to tell him what he didn’t want to hear.

“We’re doing our best to keep you comfortable.”

“The drugs are good, Joseph, if that’s what you’re asking. It’s my memories that aren’t comfortable. Can you do something for those?”

She stared at him, ice coming off.

He knew that she hated him. She’d hated him for a long time—for at least as long as she’d felt anything else toward him. This felt fitting to him. It felt deserved.

“Have you seen it yet?” she asked.

“Not yet, no. I just landed.”

“It’s changing.”

“What do you mean?”

She was about to say something but stopped. He studied her. An oval face, pretty but too thin. She might have been a model once, if things had gone differently. She had the bones for it. There was a look in her eyes now that he’d never seen.

“I don’t think you have any idea what you’ve done,” she said.

“I know better than anyone.”

“Better than me?”

Martial took another sip of his drink.

“You can’t quite bring yourself to claim that, can you?” she asked.

“Everything happens for a reason.”

“If you really think that, you’re a fool.”

There was a time when hearing those words, spoken in that tone, would have driven him into a rage, but now it elicited only the beginnings of a tired irritation. Still, she’d pushed him far enough.

“Your mouth is not the ocean,” he said. “But still it can drown you.”

The phone on his desk rang. He didn’t move. He tried to remember if he’d ever heard that phone ring before. He hadn’t realized the apartment even had a phone. After five rings, it stopped.

A moment later, an alarm began to sound. It came from somewhere in the distance. It wasn’t a fire alarm. The phone rang again.

“I better get that,” he said.

He stood and crossed the room.

He picked up the phone. “Yes?”

“There is a problem.” It was Scholler.

“What kind of problem?”

“You better get down here.”

“On my way.” Martial hung up and turned to Sacha.

Just then, a new alarm sounded. Louder, closer.

Sacha’s smile made Martial think of bitter almonds. “It’s changed,” she said again. “You’ll see.”

Martial walked out of his quarters. In the hall, a strobe light flashed red. He broke into a run, thousand-dollar shoes on tile floors. He panted as he ran. Within a hundred feet, his lungs spasmed, breaths coming in a series of high-pitched whistles. He slowed but didn’t stop. When God wants you, he will take you.

Ekman found him in the hall. They ran together. They rounded the bend. It was a nightmare he’d once had. Down two flights of stairs. Lab lights flickering. A dream he woke sweating from. Only in the dream his feet were swollen and sticky, mired to the floor. In the dream, he couldn’t move at all. They pushed through a double set of doors and entered the lab.

An Asian man stood swaying in the hall, holding an obviously dislocated shoulder. He was in shock, his white lab coat red with gore. From the other side of the wall came the sound of screams.

“Where are you cut?” Martial asked, catching his breath.

“I’m not,” the man said.

Martial’s other two guards burst into the room. Phillips, the youngest, didn’t hesitate. He ran ahead, toward the screams.

Martial and his remaining guards followed.

The researcher shouted after them, “Don’t go in there!”

They pushed through another set of double doors, the word ANTHROPOGENY stenciled across the white surface.

Inside, a woman clutched at the mangled gore of her wrist. Her hand dangled at an obscene angle. “It bit me… it bit me” was all she could say.

Farther in were more researchers. He knew some of their names. Others he couldn’t be sure of.

Behind him, the woman continued, “It bit…”

Another researcher stood at the shattered glass doors. He didn’t seem hurt, but he looked dazed.

“What happened?” Martial snapped.

“A routine examination,” he said. “There was the sound of the helicopter outside. We tried to get it back inside… but it… it didn’t want to go.”

Martial stepped through the broken glass doors and moved farther into the room. Somewhere, the screaming man went silent. Scholler pulled out his gun.

Up ahead, Phillips, the new asset, crouched low and kept moving.

“Stay back!” Martial called.

“There are people still alive in there!” Phillips shouted. On the opposite side of the room was another set of doors, bright red, leading to a secured area. Phillips pushed through and disappeared. From inside came a loud clang. Metal on metal.

Martial turned to Scholler. “Give me your gun.”

“Sir?”

“Your gun. Now.”

The guard handed it over. “The safety’s off.”

Martial strode forward and looked through the safety glass, into the next room.

“You should stay back, sir.”

“Get the tranquilizers.”

Scholler hesitated.

“Now!”

The big man crossed the room to the metal shelves.

“No live ammo, tranqs only!” Martial shouted after him.

Scholler opened the metal cabinets, fumbling with the tranq gun. He turned. “Sir, wait!”

Martial hit the button and the doors opened.

“Wait!”

Martial stepped through.

Blood everywhere, a severed arm.

A dead researcher lay spun at an odd angle, neck arched, face a mask of surprise. Scattered around him on the floor were blood and broken glass. Pieces of swivel chair, smashed lights. Broken ceiling tiles. And in the dark shadows farther into the room, a shape. The sound of weeping. This was the behavior lab.

Martial couldn’t see Phillips.

Behind him, Scholler entered the lab, tranquilizer gun raised. Ekman was close behind him, his pale hair standing out in the shadows. Martial held up his hand. “Stop.”

“Sir?” Ekman said.

Lights swung free of their cases, dangling on swaying chords. The sound of moaning. Then a flash of movement near an overturned table. Martial saw Phillips, up ahead, standing near the wall, saw his gun come up, tracking the flash of movement in the shadows.

“Phillips, stand down!” Martial shouted.

“There are people still alive.”

“Phillips!”

The shape moved in the shadows.

“My God.” There was panic in the young guard’s voice, and disbelief. It was the first time Phillips had seen it. The gun came up.

“Stand the fuck down!” Martial screamed.

Phillips fired. The gun went off, lighting the darkness with a muzzle flash.

Martial raised his own gun at Phillips and pulled the trigger.

The gun clicked.

Phillips turned toward Martial, eyes going wide.

Martial pulled the trigger again and again, the barrel pointed at Phillips’s chest—but the gun carried only blanks. Only two guards had loaded guns. Nobody knew which two, not even guards.

Phillips stared at Martial in disbelief—at the gun, the pulled trigger.

“I told you not to shoot,” Martial said, gun still raised.

Phillips raised his own gun toward Martial, a reflex.

There were two pops, in quick succession. Red flowers bloomed on Phillips’s shirt, center of mass.

Behind Martial, Ekman reholstered his weapon.

Phillips crumpled. He was dead before he hit the floor.

“He was raising his weapon toward you, sir,” Ekman said.

Martial nodded.

A flash of movement crossed the room. The dark shape slid behind a desk that had been flipped onto its side.

Martial moved into the center of the room and sank to his knees. He dropped the gun, which clacked loudly on the tile floor. Around him, the room was a disaster. He saw strange prints in the blood. Something not quite a hand. Not quite a foot.

From the shadows came the sound of sobbing. The scrape of movement, the slap of bare skin on the floor.

“Come out,” Martial said.

The sobbing grew louder. Then a strange voice, almost unintelligible: “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Martial said softly. “Just come out. Come to me.”

The dark shape moved into the light.