Skin Game

Chapter five Reality bites

Most of the transgenics were deep asleep, catching the peace the waking world refused them, when the call came in from a guard post near the main gate.

But Max was awake — waiting.

She keyed the radio. “Say again?”

The guard said, “Got a guy approaching the main gate. Black dude with two white uniforms tagging along.”

Looking up at the security camera, she saw Detective Ramon Clemente and two other officers at the gate. “Tell him I’ll be right down,” she told the guard.

“What’s up?” Dix chimed, unrumpling his clothes as he came up the two stairs to his work area. He apparently slept in that half-goggle “monocle” of his; Whatever, Max thought.

“Light sleeper?” she asked him.

“Always. Gotta be, if you wanna make a habit of waking up in the morning... We got visitors?”

“Time to start talking,” Max said with a nod. “You got a discreet transmitter?”

The mashed-potato-headed transgenic looked injured. “Of course I do.”

She grinned. “That’s what I like about you, Dix — always ready.”

“And willing, and able.” He pinned a tiny microphone to the inside of her black leather vest. “This baby’ll pick up both of you, easy deezy.”

“Thanks, Dix.” She started off, then had a thought. “Do me a favor?”

“As long as it’s illegal, sure.”

“Record this, will you?”

“You want the audio equiv of a paper trail, huh? No problem.”

Max skipped down to the door, then snugged on a ball cap and stepped outside. Rain fell steadily, as if God was trying to calm the world, and the night felt damn near cold. As she strode toward the gate, she could make out Clemente, bundled in a dark overcoat, the two cops behind him looking like they would rather be anywhere else.

“You reading me, Dix?” she said easily.

“Loud and clear,” came his voice in the minuscule earpiece she wore.

Max passed between two transgenic guards — fearsome critters designed to give the ordinaries pause — and approached the gate.

“You wanted me?” Clemente asked by way of a greeting.

The detective looked only slightly more rested and less stressed than the last time she’d seen him. He wore no hat and the rain ran down his impassive face like tears. His large brown eyes still appeared red-rimmed, and Max couldn’t help but wonder what sort of debriefing the detective had endured.

“I missed you,” she said, smiling at him.

The two people who had done the most to keep Jam Pony and its immediate aftermath from turning into a bloodbath faced each other with respect and perhaps a smidgen of affection.

He gave her a little grin. “I missed you too, Max.”

“You’re here because you want to be here?”

“Of course.”

She didn’t believe him for a second. “If we’re going to make progress here, Detective, you’re going to have to start telling the truth.”

“It’s the truth, Max. You know I don’t want this to get any uglier than it has to — and that’s not true of everybody on my side of the fence.”

She knew who he meant: Ames White. And she knew too that White’s influence might spread within the police department. That was why she had wanted Clemente as her police liaison.

Nodding, she said, “That’s part of what I want to talk about.”

“So, talk.”

She shook her head. “Alone — you and me.”

Now Clemente shook his head. “I have orders to maintain my bodyguards and stay on this side of the fence.”

“Orders are always contingent upon field conditions, Detective. We talk alone — inside.”

His expression revealed genuine frustration. “Max... I’ve got no power — this is way over my head.”

“Don’t underestimate yourself, Detective Clemente. You’re here now, aren’t you?”

“Obviously.”

“And how did it go down? You’re home asleep in your warm dry bed, and someone very important — the police chief maybe, possibly a general — demanded that you get your ass out of bed and haul it down here to the siege site.”

He grunted a tiny laugh. “That’s about it. Are you psychic, Max?”

“No — but I was bred to this kind of shit. I don’t like it, but we can’t choose our parents, can we?”

If so, she thought, I wouldn’t have picked a test tube.

She gestured in a welcoming fashion. “Come on in out of the rain — somebody on the Seattle PD must be smart enough to do that, right? We’ll get a cup of coffee and talk.”

He gave her a long look. “If I come in, what about my guards?”

“The bookends stay out here in the rain. Just you.”

Clemente eyed the two transgenic sentries. “You’ve got two guards.”

“They’ll stay here keeping your boys company. Just the two of us, Detective.”

Nonetheless, Clemente looked uneasy.

Max stepped closer to the gate. “If I were going to kill you, Detective, you would have been dead Friday — think back... I had half a dozen chances.”

His eyes tightened, acknowledging the truth of that.

“I need someone trustworthy on your side of this thing, and unfortunately for you, you’re the closest candidate the Seattle PD has provided me, lately.”

“And you trust me?”

“So far. You trust me?”

He thought about that. “You know... I think I do.”

“Then you got two choices, Detective — come in, or leave.”

Clemente wheeled, said something sotto voce to his two companions, then turned and nodded, curtly.

“You’ll love it here,” Max said, and pulled the gate open a little.

Clemente came cautiously through. Slowly, he scanned the twisted metal and derelict buildings rising around him, making ominous abstract shapes in the rain-streaked night.

“They’re around,” Max said, referring to the transgenics he was checking for. “But they’ll leave us alone.”

She led him inside a nearby building that had once housed a stem cell research facility. It was a low-slung brick structure and the glass door had long ago been shattered, but at least the roof didn’t leak. The receptionist would have sat to the right. A door on the left led to what had once been offices, while another door in front of them went to the former labs in the back.

Inside what would have been the receptionist’s cubicle sat a desk with a straight-back chair on either side. A single lamp perched on one end of the desk, and in the middle was a tray with a pot, two cups, two spoons, a carton of milk, and a bowl of sugar.

The walls were white, the floor dusty but free of clutter, and a window was to their right. Looking out the window, they could see the main gate, and would be able to make out any movement around it.

“I wanted you to have a nice view,” she said. “But when I turn on the lamp, we won’t be able to see outside.”

“But your snipers will be able to see their target,” Clemente said, “just fine.”

“Then maybe we won’t turn on the lamp,” she said. “Doesn’t bother me none — I have pretty good night vision.”

Which of course was an understatement.

“Cozy is fine by me,” Clemente said.

Max walked around the desk, and waved for the detective to take the seat across from her.

“You want that coffee I promised you?”

“Kind of late for me,” he said. “I may want to get back to sleep someday.”

“Whatever — but we may be here awhile.”

He considered, said, “Make mine black.”

She poured for them both. She had hers black as well.

Clemente sipped his coffee, and his expression had mild surprise in it. “Hey — this is good.”

“We’re multitalented. I’m sure the outside world would rather we drank blood or crushed insect guts. But we’re people, Detective.”

He drank some more. “Yes — people who are in a lot of trouble.”

“You might be surprised how long we can hold out,” she said. “We’ve anticipated this kind of situation for months. We’ve stockpiled food and water. We’re well-armed.”

This wasn’t exactly true, though with Logan’s tunnel supply line, they could indeed hold out for a good long time.

“Anyway,” she said, “you’re the one that’s risking his health inside Terminal City. Ordinaries can’t stay in here long — this is no-man’s-land, a real biochemical bad trip for everybody but the transgenics.”

“Are you suggesting that I tell the general who called me — it was a general, not the police chief, Max — and say all we have to do is back our troops out, and let you... people inhabit Terminal City?”

“We aren’t negotiating yet... but why not? What good does Terminal City do anyone but transgenics?”

“Max, this is not going to end well.”

She shook her head. “I don’t see it that way. Call me an optimist, but I think this can turn out for the best.”

He looked at her as if she were insane. “How in hell?”

“That’s what you and I are going to hammer out.”

Clemente patted the air in front of him. “Whoa, whoa. You think the two of us are just going to talk this thing out?”

Max sipped her coffee. “Why not?”

“We can’t—”

“We already did it once — at Jam Pony.”

He shook his head. “We didn’t keep the peace there and we sure as hell didn’t talk it out. You jumped White and his goons and kicked their asses.”

She smiled.

“If one little victory makes you smile, fine,” he said. “But us talking... Max, I can’t negotiate this. And nobody else wants to.”

“You have to reason with them, Detective. Encourage your superiors to sit down and talk with us.”

He looked into her eyes in the darkness. “You have two options, Max. One is put your hands in the air and walk en masse through that gate into custody, and hope that in the light of day, given due process and a full-scale public hearing, you’ll get a fair shake.”

“I can’t wait till I hear the other option.”

“It’s a lot worse. Last time, we were lucky — only one person died. There’s a hell of a lot more at stake now, and a lot more emotion on the outside. The media has people all stirred up, crying out, ‘Kill the monsters.’ Most of the military is up for just storming the place and painting the walls red.”

She didn’t break eye contact and her voice remained matter-of-fact. “You know that trying that would be a big mistake.”

He stared at her for a long moment. “Do I?”

“You have the numbers, but don’t forget — this is what we were trained for. Frankly, Detective, we’d wax your ass, then we’d disappear into the night, and you’d never know where we would hit next.”

His expression was grave enough to indicate he’d taken that as the promise, not threat, that it was; but he said, “There’s a far superior force mustering on the other side of that fence.”

Shaking her head, she said, “They’re not superior, Detective — there’s just more of them.”

And now, despite it all, he smiled. “You are one cocky little shit.”

“I’m glad you didn’t call me a ‘cocky little bitch,’ ” she said, “’cause I woulda hated having to kick your ass.”

His smile disappeared, but she chuckled and patted his arm. “Look, Detective Clemente—”

“If I’m going to call you Max, you call me Ramon.”

“All right, Ramon. Look... I’ve been running since I was nine. Most of the residents of Terminal City will tell you the same or something very similar. I’m tired of running, we’re all tired of it. We didn’t bring this on — they made us, then they tried to kill us. All we did was defend ourselves. In that situation, anyone would have done as much.”

“Most people aren’t genetically engineered killing machines.”

“From what I’ve seen, Ramon, the so-called ordinaries may not be genetically engineered, but they kill way more often... and for far less reason than the transgenics ever have.”

“I can’t argue that. But those ordinaries you speak of aren’t going to be able to identify with you, Max — some of you have monstrous appearances, and all of you have superhuman abilities that make you dangerous.”

“We have to make them understand that we have hearts and minds and maybe even souls, too.”

“So, how do we do that?”

She shook her head. “We’re still trying to figure that out. I’m hoping we can get the word out, stop some of this media garbage that—”

“Wait, wait. Max, a battalion is waiting outside your door, and you want to stave that off with a PR campaign?”

“Ramon — I’m looking for answers. I need you to look for some, and seek allies within your ranks, cooler heads that don’t have a hidden agenda served by the blood of my people.”

He sighed. “Fair enough.”

“It’s going to take some time, and you’ve got to do anything you can to hold back the troops — keep them from storming our castle for a while... okay?”

“And if I try to accomplish that, do I have your word that the transgenics will stay inside?”

She gave him a decisive nod. “Those that are in will stay in. The others, the ones that are still out there,” she said, and gestured toward the other side of the fence, “them I can’t control.”

“All right,” Clemente said, and sighed. “How long do you need me to stall this thing?”

“I told you. We’ve got supplies for the next year — how ’bout you guys?”

“Max,” the detective said forcefully, trying to brush aside her glibness. “Just how the hell long do you think I can keep them from attacking?”

“Ramon,” she said, “this is my first transgenics-versus-the-United-States-military siege. I’m making this up as I go.”

Clemente looked as if he were trying to decide whether to laugh or cry. Before he made any decision, his cell phone rang. He looked at her, and she said nothing. It went off again and he pulled it out and checked the caller ID.

“Fed number,” he said.

“Take it — see what they want.”

He touched a button and held the phone to his ear. “Clemente,” he said, but the identification sounded more like an angry question.

Max watched the detective’s face as the caller spoke. Ramon Clemente did not look happy.

“Yeah, I remember you,” he told the phone, his disgust apparent. “Do you have any idea what fucking time it is?”

Clemente listened some more, his face shifting from pissed to serious.

Then the cop asked, “Where and when?”

Max felt herself growing uneasy — something wasn’t right somewhere.

Clemente’s expression was blank now, except for a fire in his eyes. “And why do you think a transgenic is responsible?”

A sick feeling oozed into her stomach.

“That’s the opinion of your superior officer?” he asked whoever he was talking to. “You wouldn’t happen to mean Special Agent in Charge White?”

Max rocketed to her feet. Wanting to rip the phone out of Clemente’s hand, she started pacing behind the desk.

“You know I can’t trust that son of a bitch,” the detective said.

Did he mean White?

“I know he’s high-ranking, but he’s still a son of a bitch... Where are you now, Agent Gottlieb?”

The caller said something — if the phone hadn’t been pressed so tight to the detective’s ear, Max would have been able to hear it — and Clemente’s expression shifted back to pissed off.

“You left the scene of a murder?”

Now her stomach did a little back flip into the pool of nausea flooding her belly.

“You people never fail to amaze me,” Clemente said. “We need to talk, and soon... All right you tell me where and when! God knows I should defer to your high standards of professionalism.”

Again the caller’s response didn’t help Clemente’s mood.

“You better know in one hour, Agent Gottlieb, and you better call me back within that time span or I’ll have a warrant issued for your goddamned arrest. The last I heard, federal agents weren’t exempt from the laws of this land.”

And the detective thumbed End.

“Murder involving a transgenic?” Max asked, stopping to lean on the desk. “What the hell is going on?”

She was doing her best to stay cool; she wanted to project power and control to this man. The half of that phone call she’d just heard raised too many questions, and she had a feeling she wasn’t going to like any of the answers.

Clemente seemed to be working at controlling himself as well, though his anger and anxiety were clearly not directed at her. “A sector officer at the checkpoint between Eleven and Twelve was killed tonight.”

Max tried to keep the rage out of her voice, with little success. “And Ames White thinks a transgenic did it.”

Clemente nodded once, gravely. “And he’s supposed to have proof.”

“What kind of proof? That wasn’t him on the phone; that was his stooge Gottlieb, right?”

“Right. As you probably gathered, Otto discovered the body but left the scene, so I don’t know how the hell they secured any kind of evidence.”

She drew a deep, slow breath; then she let it out and said calmly, “You do know that there’s more to Ames White than just your typical government pain-in-the-ass scumbag.”

“Well, he’s definitely a government pain-in-the-ass scumbag. You don’t have to talk hard to convince me of that.”

“Ramon, if you just take a close look at him, you’ll find out that there’s a lot more going on than NSA duties.”

Clemente’s eyes tightened. “Such as?”

“White’s—”

She stopped.

She knew that whatever she said was going to sound completely crazy, and she would lose all cred with the cop.

“Go on, Max. What do you know about White? Is he... dirty, somehow?”

“That hardly covers it.”

“You have to tell me more.”

Hell, she could barely believe the true agenda of Ames White herself... and she’d seen the agents of the cult firsthand. How could she hope to convince Clemente without the risk of losing his confidence completely?

“You just... need to take a good hard look into him,” she managed.

“I can only look so hard.”

“You’re a detective, aren’t you? Fucking detect!”

He gestured with open hands. “Max — if there are bad things to be found out about Ames White, what makes you think that either White or the government will let a local cop find them?”

“I found out, didn’t I?”

“Then take the load off my shoulders — share what you know.”

She sighed and sat back down, heavily; she wished the darkness of the room would just swallow her. “Look, you’re not going to believe me... so I want you to check it out on your own. Seeing is believing, you heard of that?”

Intrigued, Clemente rubbed a hand over his chin. “What makes you think I won’t believe you?”

Max rolled her eyes, shook her head. “It’s too whack to be true... It just is.”

A tiny, teasing grin appeared. “Like the government making genetically engineered killing machines without the public’s knowledge?”

She smirked at him. “Yeah, like that — only a whole lot weirder.”

The detective’s smile disappeared. He looked confused, and she could hardly blame him. At last he said, “You said you trusted me. Well, that goes both ways. Trust me with this, Max — trust me that I’ll take you seriously.”

And, so — taking a deep breath, and a leap of faith — she launched into the story of the ancient breeding cult whose snake-worshiping conclave of leaders manipulated events and people, and had for centuries; she pressed on, telling the detective how these crazies had been trying to breed genetically superior humans for the last thousand years or so, an objective that had eventually led to the modern-day creation of Manticore.

To some degree, they had succeeded in their attempt to build a “better” human. She had seen Ames White, who did the bidding of the conclave, perform acts of strength and daring that rivaled anything any transgenic could accomplish... with the added detail that White and the others like him could feel no pain.

When she had finished what even she knew sounded like the most absurd of tall tales, Clemente looked even more confused, and a little bit like she’d punched him out.

But at least he wasn’t eyeballing her as if she were a madwoman. In fact, her gut instinct told her he believed her, or at least believed in her sincerity.

“Can you prove any of this?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Not really — anytime I’ve gotten anything, they’ve covered up, sort of a scorched earth policy. But that team that came into Jam Pony — you saw those pumped-up uber-humans — they didn’t work for any government agency... They worked for the conclave of the snake cult.”

He said nothing for a long time. They just sat there in the darkness, with his eyes moving in thought, and Max studying him to see if she had outright lost him.

Finally, quietly, Clemente said, “You’re right, Max — it does sound crazy.”

Max’s heart sank.

“But,” he said, getting up, shaking his head and grinning wryly, “in this job, it doesn’t pay to not look into things, just because they sound crazy.”

A warmth for this man filled her, and she stood and extended her hand; they shook, and she said, “Thanks, Ramon.”

He checked his watch. “I’ve got to split... but I’ll dig into this weird shit, as much as I can. Snakes, huh?”

“Snakes.”

“Those I may not dig into.”

She smiled a little. “Don’t blame you.”

“Why is White’s agenda — the snake cult’s agenda — antitransgenic? Shouldn’t all you genetic wonders hang together?”

“I don’t understand it myself, Ramon. Still putting pieces together. The point is, White wants to wipe us out... and blaming murders on transgenics is a good way to win that PR war we were talking about.”

“People don’t usually die in PR wars.”

“I don’t mean anything light by that, Ramon. I’m sorry that the cop got killed, no matter who did it.”

“Thanks, but getting killed wasn’t the worst of it, not for him or your PR war — he was another skinning victim.”

Max let out a long breath. “Skinned — how many does that make?”

“Three. One we found two nights ago... it was all over the news, you saw that, right?... Now this one tonight, and there was another a few months ago.”

“All cops?” Max asked.

Clemente shook his head. “The first guy’s prints came up on the computer that he was a shoe salesman, but there was something hinky about that one.”

“Hinky how?”

Another head shake. “I’ve already told you way too much, Max. Now I’m outta here.”

She walked along with him. “We’ll talk again?”

“I don’t know,” Clemente said with a shrug. “This cop killing will be a priority, and if we are looking for a transgenic, well... you might not want to invite me back in.”

“Ramon, this changes nothing about what we discussed; in fact, it shows we were on the right track — Ames White and others like him will try to use this to further inflame the public.”

“Yeah, and it’ll work.”

“So find the real killer, why don’t you?”

“Even if it’s a transgenic?”

“It certainly won’t be a transgenic from inside Terminal City.”

“Are you saying it would be impossible for one of you to sneak out of here?”

That made her uncomfortable. “We are penned up, but... it would be possible, yes. So I tell you what — we’ll look into this from this end too. After all, if the killer is a transgenic, we want him caught as much as you do.”

The cop stopped to look at her. “You do?”

Max stopped and nodded. “Ramon, if we want to be part of this society, we have to prove to people that we’re not monsters. If one of us is doing this, he needs to be stopped.”

“Now that would be good PR,” Clemente said.

“It’s more than just PR — it’s the right thing.”

She escorted the detective to the gate, where the two transgenic sentries awaited. As he walked through, he turned back to face her.

“No one in, no one out — right?”

“Right.”

Clemente started to turn away, but turned back. “And, Max...”

“Yeah?”

“We will talk again.”

Her smile tight and sober, she said, “Good.”

Clemente walked off into the early morning darkness, his two uniformed bodyguards falling in alongside him, heading for the National Guard barricade.

Her back to the gate now, Max asked, “Dix, did you get all that?”

“Oh yeah,” came the voice in her earpiece.

“Call Logan, and transmit that tape to him. And, Dix?”

“Yeah?”

“Tell Joshua I need to talk to him right away.”

“I’ll get on it. Where are you gonna be?”

She started walking. “Coming to you.”

Already waiting when she arrived, Joshua looked up when Max entered the media center. Dix, Luke, and several other transgenics manned the monitors, most of them concentrating either on the security screens or watching the TV news coverage. Dix sat up on his raised platform in front of his computer monitor.

“You get Logan?” she asked.

Dix nodded. “Got him online right now. You wanna talk to the boy?”

“Yeah.” She climbed the two stairs up to Dix’s work station. He slid aside so she could ease in front of the camera mounted on top of his monitor.

“Hey, you,” Logan’s face on the screen said.

“Hi — need your help.”

“When did I ever say no?”

“Did Dix send you the conversation he taped?”

“I’ve got it.”

“Good. When you check it out, you’ll hear Clemente refer to a killing a while back. It was mentioned in passing on the news coverage of the cop who was skinned two nights ago.”

“Rings a faint bell.”

“It’ll ring clearer when you listen to that conversation. What I need you to do is find out all you can about that first murder.”

“Okay — get right on it. Are we trying to solve a murder? Do we have some sort of serial killer out there, skinning his — or her — victims?”

“All of the above and more. But mostly, know this: White’s involved with this somehow. One of White’s minions, Otto Gottlieb, called Clemente while he and I were confabbing.”

“Does White suspect a transgenic? The TV newscast indicated that, remember. Or is this just antitransgenic media games?”

“I don’t know,” Max said. “But there’s definitely something going on — typical Ames White manipulation and disinformation — and we need to know exactly what that is.”

Logan said, “All right, Max. I’ll find out what I can.”

Relief flowed through her.

Somehow, having Logan working on this made her feel that it would all come out all right in the end. The other problems they’d met together had turned out all right, hadn’t they?

Then she thought about where she was and the situation they were in and felt like laughing. Even surrounded by police and the National Guard, not knowing when an all-out genocidal attack might be launched on Terminal City, she felt everything was all right simply because Logan was on her side.

Max allowed that perhaps Original Cindy had been right in saying, “Boo, you are so whipped.”

She couldn’t help but smile; maybe she was.

“Something funny?” Logan asked.

She shook her head. “Just nice to know you’re working with us.”

“Nice to be appreciated... I’ll let you know when I have anything.”

“Thanks,” she said, wanting to say, I love you, instead saying, “I’ll seeya.”

“Yeah,” he said, pausing, as if fighting his own urge to say something significant, but saying only, “Seeya.”

And the screen went blank.

Max climbed down from Dix’s perch and put a hand on Joshua’s shoulder. “Can we go talk?”

“Sure, Little Fella.”

They went for a walk, ending up again in the tunnel below the far end of Terminal City. Though it gave them privacy, the claustrophobic space also reminded Max of the basement at Manticore; and she found herself feeling uneasy about being down here, especially when she considered what she wanted to talk to Joshua about.

Finally, she just dove in. “You remember us talking about the others — the ones like Isaac.”

“Yes, Max.”

“I want to talk about them again.”

“Okay.” His canine brow wrinkled. “Something wrong?”

They took a few steps, the tunnel dark, their footfalls echoing very softly off the walls. Neither of them really needed the lights to see, and without Logan along, they didn’t bother to turn them on.

“There... may be.”

Joshua said nothing.

“You see... another policeman died tonight.”

“And now Max thinks it was one of us too.”

Max shook her head quickly. “No — it’s just that Detective Clemente thinks there might be evidence that it was a transgenic.”

“Not good. Not good.”

“Joshua, that doesn’t mean it was someone from the Manticore basement, or even that the evidence is real... considering the source.”

“Source?”

“Ames White.”

A low growl escaped from Joshua and his eyes burned with hatred.

Though, like Max, Joshua sought only a peaceful life and a chance to fit in, a part of him longed to tear White into tiny pieces and watch him die very slowly. White had murdered his friend Annie — sweet Annie Fisher, a blind girl who had never hurt anyone.

Gentle giant or not, Joshua still wanted to exact a full measure of revenge for this heinous crime. Max had kept Joshua from killing White that night at Jam Pony; but they both knew that if he ever caught up with White again, she would be wasting her breath, trying to stop the beastlike man that was Joshua from killing the manlike beast that was Ames White.

Max eased down the wall and took a seat on the tile floor. Though she was someone who needed to sleep only every few days, she felt like she could just curl up on the cool tiles. Joshua slid down and sat facing her, his back propped against the opposite wall.

“Because it’s White,” she said, “I’ve got to find out what really happened... and the more I know about our brothers and sisters on the outside, the easier it will be to deal with whatever ‘evidence’ White supplies.”

Joshua considered this for a few moments, then said, “Father made many of us, but the others — the ones after Father — they didn’t care about us. They hated us, the ones in the basement.”

Nodding, Max asked, “What can you tell me about them, individually?”

The question seemed to perplex Joshua.

Taking a deep breath, Max asked, “You remember how you taught me about Isaac?”

“Isaac was easy to tell Max about — he was my brother, he was gentle. But they changed him.”

“The others down there, you told me some of their names before...”

“Dill.”

“Yes!”

Joshua looked surprised and a little scared.

“Sorry,” she said, “I don’t mean to startle you — it’s just that that was one of the names you mentioned before. I want to know about them. Start with Dill.”

Leaning back and closing his eyes, Joshua seemed to drift off for a moment. “He came after Isaac and me. Him and his brother, Oshi. After Father tried dogs, he moved to cats next.”

“Dill and Oshi have feline DNA?”

“Uh-huh.”

Of all the things in her genetic cocktail, the feline DNA had provided some of her most inconvenient if not biggest problems. She still battled going into heat twice a year — just one example of the kind of humiliating shit being a genetic test-tube baby could bring a girl.

“Any idea what kind of cats?” she asked him.

“Not sure for Dill. Oshi — a Siamese, I think. They hated being kept in cages, but because of the way they could run and jump, they were kept in the smallest cells. That was mean.”

“Very mean, Joshua. And when they got out?”

Joshua shrugged. “Don’t know.”

“Didn’t you mention a Gabriel?”

The snoutlike mouth smiled. “Joshua likes Gabriel. He comes from an ant.”

“An ant?” Max asked, stretching her legs out in front of her. “No kidding — insect DNA?”

“Oh yes. Gabriel looks like Max.”

That surprised her. “Like me?”

Joshua hesitated for a long moment. “Normal. Not like Normal at Jam Pony — normal like ordinaries. But Gabriel can lift six times his own body weight.”

“Anything else out of the ordinary?”

“No... Well, he has an extra pair of arms.”

“He has an extra pair of arms, but he looks normal.”

Nodding vigorously, Joshua said, “They come out of his ribs, so Gabriel just wraps them around himself. Gabriel looks chubby... but normal.”

She studied her shaggy friend. “You know where Gabriel is, don’t you?”

Joshua looked at the floor. “Not anymore. Not since I moved to Terminal City.”

“He’s in Seattle, though?”

“Gabriel was in Seattle.”

“And you two were friends?”

Joshua continued to look at the floor. “Yes.”

“You never mentioned him,” Max said. Her voice was matter-of-fact, not hurt, though oddly, she did feel that way, a little. She thought Joshua was her closest friend, among the transgenics; and yet he had kept things from her, clearly.

“Gabriel was passing for human. I only saw him when he came to visit me in Father’s house.”

“So... he could still be out there.”

“Yes. Still. Out there.”

“... Did they hurt him at Manticore?”

Finally looking up at her, he said, “They hurt us all, Max — you too.”

She could hardly argue with that.

“The guards, they were scared of Gabriel because of his strength. They hit him with the prods whenever they went near his cell.”

Max had tasted the electric prods of the guards herself, and knew firsthand how much it hurt.

“Guards try to keep Gabriel weak by always hitting him with them.”

In the darkness, she shook her head. “I’m sorry, Joshua. I’m sorry to... dredge this all up.”

“Nothing to be sorry for,” he said. “They did it, we didn’t.”

She knew that, but like all victims, she suffered strange pangs of guilt.

They had all suffered immeasurably, and it wasn’t a surprise that one of them might have gone rogue. To Max, the surprise was that the rest of them hadn’t.

After a while she said, “I think you mentioned another one.”

Joshua thought hard. “Oh! Almost forgot... Kelpy. ‘Chameleon Boy,’ the guards called him.”

Max needed no explanation about Kelpy’s DNA mix.

“Kelpy didn’t work right,” Joshua said.

“What do you mean, didn’t work right?”

Joshua shrugged. “I just remember, guards and others, talking about what a waste of time Kelpy turned out to be.”

“Was Kelpy beaten too?”

He shook his big head. “No, they said his power only worked when he was angry or scared or something...”

“Agitated,” Max supplied.

“That’s the word,” Joshua said. “Agitated. When he was agitated. So they didn’t agitate him. They ignored Kelpy. Left him to die.”

“No one to love him or help him,” Max said.

“No one. Sometimes, Kelpy would just disappear into his cage.”

Max knew that on some level all the transgenics felt that way. No one was going to help them, no one was going to love them. She’d learned different when she’d met Logan. Joshua had learned different when he’d met her.

“Was Kelpy still there when we came in?”

With a quick nod, Joshua said, “Yes — you even opened his cell yourself.”

She shook her head. “I have no memory of him.”

“I bet Kelpy has memory of Max. Later, Kelpy asked me your name and I told him, ‘Max.’ He said you were the only one who ever cared.”

Someone she had never noticed...

They got up and started walking back up the tunnel. She tried and tried, but she just couldn’t seem to remember Kelpy.

As they climbed the stairs back up to the first floor of Medtronics, her cell phone rang. “Go for Max,” she said.

“They’re listening,” a computer-altered voice said.

“Who’s listening?”

“The ones outside the gate,” the metallic voice said.

“Thanks, I already knew that,” Max said.

The voice said, “The last time we spoke we were interrupted.”

Clemente.

“Yes,” she said. “We were.”

Why was he calling now, and why all the secretiveness?

“Our mutual acquaintance supplied what looks like irrefutable information.”

White had given him evidence that a transgenic was the killer.

“You do understand?” the altered voice asked.

“Yes. But that information...”

“Initially, damned near absolute. I’ve seen it. We’ll talk later. Like I said we would.”

The phone went dead in her ear.

“What is it?” Joshua asked.

“I think it was very bad news,” Max said.

She thought about what Clemente had said last. Initially, damned near absolute. What the hell did that mean? Was that strange phrasing some kind of code? Initially...

But it wouldn’t come.

Max looked at Joshua. “We better get back.”

They stepped outside into the purplish light of breaking morning. The sun had barely dented the horizon, and she could already tell this was going to be another long day. They walked up the street in silence, Joshua lost in his thoughts, Max trying to figure out what Clemente had been talking about...

Initially, damned near absolute.

Finally, as if coming toward her out of a heavy fog, she put together the detective’s little code. Initially Damned Near Absolute. D-N-A. White had provided DNA evidence that the killer was a transgenic.

Now the next question was, why was Clemente telling her this?

There seemed to be only one reason for him to trust her at all: he didn’t trust White any more than she did.

So maybe they did have an ally on the other side. She felt she had connected with Clemente, and that he had believed her, even including the absurd — but true — snake cult story.

Even so, that good news was heavily outweighed by the bad. Either White was manipulating evidence to make it look like a transgenic was killing cops or, even worse, there really was a dangerous transgenic loose in the city.

A serial-killer transgenic, at that.