The Games

CHAPTER EIGHT

Vidonia João stepped through the hatch of the small aircraft and into the direct glare of the Southern California sun. She paused at the top of the platform and turned her face into the hot breeze. It had been a long flight on short notice, but despite the heat, it felt good to be in the open air again.

Long black hair fanned out behind her, exposing the planes of an unusual face.

Her ancestral pool was broad and shallow, drawn from the oldest sailing routes across the North and South Atlantic. It was the kind of face sometimes seen in Caribbean markets or metropolitan fashion shows—places where the world’s cultures mixed and matched and made their own thing. Soft brown skin, full lips, a long, high-arched nose.

She cast her dark eyes into the glare and saw a tall blond man waiting at the bottom of the stairs. Silas? she wondered. She shouldered her travel bag and descended in a series of bounces that drew the man’s eye to places other than her face.

“Dr. João?” the blond man asked. His face was scorched deep red by the noonday sun.

Her white teeth flashed affirmation.

“I’m Benjamin Wells, head cytologist at Helix. We’re happy you decided to join us.”

“Happy to be here. It will be nice to step out of the classroom for a while.” Her accent was soft, subtle, something she’d worked hard to smooth out in the eleven years she’d been an American citizen.

“Well, glad to oblige you. You’ll certainly be doing more than teaching here.”

“That’s what I’ve been told, but it’s still not clear what exactly I will be doing. Opportunities in industry aren’t exactly common in my field.”

“Dr. Williams wants to brief you about that when we get to the compound. If you’ll follow me,” he said.

And as simple as that, the introductions were over.

Vidonia followed him across a dozen yards of hot tarmac to a low, sleek limousine. The driver nodded as he took her bags, and the bite of the air-conditioning was welcome on the bare skin of her calves.

“Any jet lag?” Benjamin asked once they were on their way.

“Not too bad.”

“Good, because Silas will want to see you as soon as possible.”

“The sooner the better. Are we stopping by the hotel first?”

“Hotel? I guess you are still in the dark. You’ll be staying at the compound. This is a blue-level project, and they take security pretty seriously around here. For your own safety and the safety of the program, all consultants are to be on-site for the duration.”

“How many consultants are there?” This was getting more interesting by the minute.

“Counting you?”

“Yeah.”

Benjamin looked up, as if counting to himself. After a moment of contemplation, “One,” he said.

“One?”

“Yep.”

Vidonia reclined deeper into the leather seat and let the view through the window wash over her. The limo was making good time, cruising in the commercial lane while the rest of the traffic struggled along bumper to bumper.

They were high in the air, and the elevated highway gave a breathtaking view of the city. Low rectangular buildings sprawled away in all directions, and in the distance, glittering spires stretched toward the sky. There were no trees or green of any kind. It made her sick for her childhood. But that was so long ago now. Long ago and far away, and she the better for it, she told herself.

Twenty minutes later they descended the skyway, and the landscape around the thoroughfare had opened up considerably. The urban sprawl had given way to something else. The broad steel buildings they drove past were now spaced farther apart, crouching on huge park-size swaths of grass. Here, at least, green had taken a foothold.

“This is the technical district,” Benjamin said, when he noticed her interest.

It reminded her of the poem Where Science Lives, all those steel buildings on their neat little parks. The straight roads and ordered landscaping. Looking out at that, it was easy to imagine that science belonged here and might have little use in places where the roads weren’t quite so clean and orderly. Places where dirty children begged at the corners.

Ben revealed his discomfort at her continued silence through his fidgeting and an occasional awkward glance. She knew the type, always looking for the next interaction and confused about what to do in its absence. An unusual temperament in a scientist. She decided to put him at ease. “Was I hard to find?”

He shook his head. “Not really. But I did a lot of research before I contacted you. You’re near the top of your field.”

“You give me too much credit, really,” she said. “But even if I am near the top, why not contact those at the summit? Why me?”

“That’s rather complicated.”

She looked at him, waiting.

“You’ve managed not to attract a lot of attention from those outside your area of specialty.”

“Or much in it,” she said.

Ben smiled. “Your absence isn’t likely to require a lot of explanation in scientific circles.”

“Oh, I’m beginning to understand,” she said. “So you mean I’m good, but I’m not so good that I’m going to be missed.”

“Something like that.”

When they arrived at the compound a few minutes later, the scale of the place shocked her. The facility was enormous and sprawling—a maze of winding roads that took them past several suites of buildings and parking lots. Ben took her directly to the research lab. They parked and entered the building. She said nothing as he led her down the long halls and carded her through the checkpoints.

When she stepped through the door of the research lab, she looked around for a moment, unsure why he’d brought her there.

“This would be your lab,” he said.

“This?”

“Yes.”

“This would all be for my use?”

“Yes.” Ben motioned her forward.

The lab was something she hadn’t expected. She let her fingers play over the smooth, silver benchtop that ran along the wall. She gestured to her left.

“A CAT scan,” Ben responded. “That’s basic. We also have X ray, thermal imaging, and internal photo time-lapse. But the rest we thought best left up to you.”

“I can order other equipment?”

He nodded. “Silas wants the lab designed around you. Let us know what your needs are, and they’ll be provided for. Whatever you want, within reason. And my experience has been if it’s not completely crazy, then it’s within reason. They believe in keeping the talent happy around here.”

“And the computer system?”

“Tandem link, virtual imaging tied from different ports of scan. It will do.”

“Yes,” she said, impressed. “That will certainly do.”

She sank into a swivel chair and let it run a slow circle. What was she getting herself into?

“How much control do I have?”

“All and none. You’ll have the freedom to do what you feel is necessary, but ultimately, you answer to Silas. What he says goes. Oh, and you can’t publish until after the Olympic Games. We’ll need you to put that in writing before you begin.”

“Eight months. That won’t be a problem.”

“Still interested?”

She looked around at the gleaming equipment. “Very.”

“Good, then it’s time you met Silas.”

SHE HEARD him before she saw him. Thwump, thwump, thwump. She followed Benjamin around the side of the building and into a kind of courtyard. Bushy trees draped in tiny white flowers stood in staggered formation along one side of the clearing. Several picnic tables crowded at the far edge. Beyond them, a single basketball hoop cast its crooked shadow along the edge of a parking lot. The cars in the lot were parked at a respectful distance.

The ball left Silas’s hands in an arc. It bounced high off the rim, touched backboard, rim again, and then fell away. Missed.

Ben clapped loudly as they approached across the grass. “They told me you were out here. I wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t see it with my own eyes.”

The man turned, and Vidonia tried to conceal her surprise. He wasn’t what she expected.

“You must be Dr. João,” he said, extending a large hand. The pinkie, she noticed, was partly missing—the skin healed but still slightly pink. “I’m Silas Williams.”

“Nice to meet you. And it’s pronounced Zhoo-wow.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s quite all right, I get that all the time. It’s Portuguese. I’m familiar with your work.”

Silas smiled. Like many very tall men, he had a heavy jaw, and his smile seemed awkward perched across all that bone. Strong, high cheekbones balanced out his rectangular face. The complexion beneath the roughness of a few days’ stubble was smooth mocha, and his curly hair was graying vigorously upward from the temples, giving him a distinguished look, despite his size.

“Has Ben showed you the lab yet?” he asked.

“Yeah, she’s hooked,” Ben interjected.

Silas bent for the ball, then tossed it from one hand to the other. He turned and regarded the basketball hoop thoughtfully.

“There is something about this game that I’ve really missed,” he said.

“Oh yeah?” Ben asked, his voice, incredulous, rising an octave.

“When you’ve got the ball in your hand and you’re staring at the hoop, it’s easy to push everything else away.”

“When was the last time you touched a ball?” Ben asked.

“You focus on the rim, calculate distance, concentrate …” Silas flicked his wrist and sent the ball tumbling through the air. It connected firmly with the front of the rim and bounced back in his direction.

“Why the sudden interest in athletics?” Ben asked.

When Silas didn’t answer, Ben pressed, “Did something happen that I don’t know about?”

Silas grabbed the ball again and tossed it over to Vidonia. She caught it and turned it in her hands, looking at him. Looking at him.

“Shoot,” he said, finally.

She didn’t hesitate. She brought it up to her chest and heaved. The ball carved its little parabola across the blue sky. Air ball, not even close.

Silas picked the ball from the grass and stepped back onto the pavement, dribbling in long bounces. “Used to play a lot when I was a kid. You don’t have to think. You just aim and throw; your body does the math for you. There’s something to that, probably.”

“Did something happen today, Silas?” Ben asked.

“Yeah, something happened.” Silas shot again. This time the ball rasped through the net. He turned back to Vidonia. “You’re probably wondering why you’re here.”

“It had crossed my mind,” she said.

“You’re curious why we’d want a xenobiologist.”

“This isn’t a field where it’s common to get job offers in the middle of the night from halfway across the country,” she said. Particularly from Olympic Development, she thought.

“Well,” he said, as he bent to retrieve the ball, “as you’ve probably guessed, since you say you are familiar with my work, the organism in question isn’t of extraterrestrial origin. I should get that out of the way at the beginning. But it is alien. Yes, I think it fits the broadest definition of that word—alien—but it is from here, right from this facility. That’s why we called you.”

“So this is about the gladiator competition,” she said.

He nodded.

“Is it the contestant?”

“It’s supposed to be. We’re not sure what it is, actually. We were hoping you could help us find out.”

“I don’t think I understand what you mean.”

“We need you to help find out what it is we’re dealing with.”

She paused. “Please don’t take this the wrong way. But with all due respect, shouldn’t you already know?”

“We should, but we don’t.”

“It is an engineered organism, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

She crossed her arms in front of her, wanting to ask more. Instead, she said the only thing that really mattered. “I’ll help any way I can.”

“Thank you.”

Silas dribbled the ball.

“What went wrong today?” Ben asked Silas.

Silas turned toward him. “That’s a long story,” Silas said. He shot the ball again, and it sprang away from the hoop at a high angle. He trotted after.

“I don’t mind long stories,” Ben pressed. “What happened?” The glib undercurrent in his face had drained away now.

Silas tossed him the ball. “Three points, shoot.”

Behind his glasses, Ben’s blue eyes were bright in the angle of the sun. The ball rotated in his hands. He bent, straightened, shot. The ball spanked high against the backboard and skipped across the pavement, toward the grass.

Silas snagged it as it bounced. “Nothing so important,” he said. “And maybe not such a long story, really, come to think of it.”

Silas shot the ball. It dropped through the hoop with a swish of net.

“It opened its wings today,” Silas said. “That’s all. It stretched them out, eight feet, maybe.”

Ben’s face lost some of its tension. “That’s what has you out here shooting baskets?” he asked.

“No, you should have seen it. Those wings. It was goddamned beautiful, Ben. That’s what has me out here.”

“IT HAS wings?” she asked. Unless she was mistaken, there was little room for flight beneath the steel netting of the gladiator arena.

She followed alongside the two men as they walked through the grass toward the lab. From this perspective the buildings were low, squat boxes of glass and steel. The windows reflected green tress, blue sky, white clouds.

“Yeah, but it will never fly,” Ben said. “Too complicated. No one has ever bioengineered that trick from scratch.”

“I don’t know about that anymore,” Silas said. He hooked an arm around the ball and carried it against his hip. He turned to her. “C’mon, I guess it’s time we introduced you to Felix.”

“Felix?” she asked.

“A little nickname,” Ben said. “The petri dishes were labeled alphabetically alongside the Helix project heading. Embryo F was the first to start dividing in one of the surrogates. F-Helix.”

“Cute.”

“It’s been called a lot of things, but cute isn’t one.”

She raised an eyebrow. “But it’s beautiful?”

“Beautiful and cute are two different things,” Ben said. “Sharks are beautiful.”

“How far back did you take the design process?” she asked.

This time it was Silas who answered. “All the way to raw code.”

“Down to individual gene splices?”

“Down to nucleotide base-pair sequence,” Silas said. “We made genes.”

“I didn’t realize that was possible.”

Silas looked suddenly uncomfortable. “Genome assembly took a year. We used a blank to start.”

“A blank?”

“Oh, that’s what we call a cow ovum without the nucleus. We’ve got the patent on that one.”

“Kind of like a seedless orange.”

“Yeah.”

“So where’d you get this amazing seedless cow?”

“We engineered it. It’s actually one of Benjamin’s ideas, and how he ended up working for me in the first place. Now we’ve got an entire brood of them as frozen blastocysts. You can denucleate an ovum manually, but it’s a very slow process, and it weakens the cell. It’s much better if the ovum naturally lacks its nucleus.”

“So you thaw one out every time you produce a gladiator?”

“No, this is an entirely new process. We’ve never gone all the way back to raw code before. Cell infusion was the most difficult part, and we decided to use the scatter approach and thawed several hundred blanks. DNA insertion killed 99.7 percent of the cells. Three survived, and of those three, only one successfully implanted in the cow’s uterus.”

“I’m still not sure what exactly is expected of me,” she said.

“Pretend it’s a specimen dropped from the sky,” Silas said. “Pretend that you don’t know where it came from or what makes it tick. Pretend that it’s the organism that will take the theoretical out of theoretical xenobiology.”

“I’ve been waiting a long time for an organism like that.”

“What would you do to try and understand it? How would you predict how it might develop?”

Her mind whirled at the implication. She followed the men into the building. How could they know so little about their own creation?

Five minutes later, she understood.

SHE GAZED through the thick glass of the nursery. Ben and Silas stood behind her, giving her space.

She wasn’t sure what she was seeing at first, but her heart beat quicker in her chest.

Alien, yes, she agreed.

That was the only word she could think to describe it. She had never seen skin like that. The fluorescent lighting reflected in its deep blackness. The blood-red hands.

She knew enough about genetic engineering to know the thing she was looking at shouldn’t have been possible. It was too far ahead. She had expected an uncomfortable Frankenstein, a predator hewn together in bits and pieces from across order Carnivora.

Like most scientists, she followed the gladiator competition closely, and nothing she’d ever seen or read had led her to anticipate what she was looking at now. She watched the creature through the glass, and slowly, by degrees, she came to agree with Silas on another point. It was beautiful. But it was a terrible sort of beauty.

“How?”

“We still don’t know,” one of them answered for both.

HER LAB took only two days to assemble.

The supplies she requested arrived more quickly than she would have thought possible. She found it somewhat unsettling, in fact, to receive a piece of equipment within hours of requesting it—equipment that might cost more than she would earn in ten years. She was used to the pace of the university, where requests were ignored or just flat out scoffed at until you had slogged through reams of documentation and waded through months of purchasing committees. Yesterday, most of her special orders had arrived via jet, leaving her to wonder at the vast resources at the project’s disposal.

She unpacked new boxes of glassware, Pyrex, latex gloves, flasks and beakers, and a scientific scale that measured to the sixth decimal place. She unpacked goggles and long metal tongs and a box of syringes. She unpacked calipers for the measurement of anatomical features. She unpacked medical supplies and electronics, and she put them all away. Slowly, slowly, she unpacked her disbelief at being here. She put that away, too.

She put everything into drawers and cabinets and onto shelves, and each time took a moment to stare at the items she put away in an attempt to commit to memory where exactly she’d put them. She considered labeling the drawers but decided against it. Instead, she followed the same system she had at the university: a medical/biological/electronic gradient that ran from left to right across the room, with the most commonly used items always in the top drawers.

When the lab was complete, she spent the remainder of the evening watching Felix and going over the next day’s strategy in her mind. She had been waiting eleven years for an opportunity to use her knowledge and skills for something other than an academic exercise. That opportunity hadn’t come in the form she’d anticipated, but it was here, and she was going to see to it that the job was done right.

When she first began studying xenobiology, she’d been attracted by the newness of it all. It was a wide-open speculative field, the kind of field a person could make a mark in, the razor’s edge of new science. There had been an atmosphere of optimism then, within the scientific community, that it was only a matter of time before man discovered extraterrestrial life. The universe was, after all, just so damned big. Her field of expertise rose in anticipation of that day. The moons of Saturn and Neptune had seemed particularly promising, at least at the single-cell level. But now the Sol system moons had all been probed, and if life was out there, then it was way out there. But she’d never regretted her field of study. She knew what drove her.

From an early age she’d hungered to understand the world around her. The sciences had drawn her just as naturally as a flame drew insects in Brazil. The Brazil of her youth.

Her mother had said, during that final argument all those years ago, that science had become her religion. Vidonia had denied it then, but as a ten-year-old, she had lacked too much the understanding of herself to explain the void it filled in her. Now, if biology was her denomination, she supposed that she had to admit to a certain degree of zealotry. But like many zealots, she had come about her faith through hardship.

She was born thirty-seven years ago in the slums of Bahia, Brazil. She’d never known her father. Of those early years, there was much she tried to forget: her mother most and least of all.

Her mother was a fancy girl, kept by men from time to time, and she wore her Catholicism like a shield against her sins. Life had been hard for them. Vidonia remembered the long periods of hunger, punctuated by occasional bursts of borrowed opulence. Her mother hadn’t been beautiful, but her skin was light, and for certain kinds of men, this was enough. Vidonia never learned her father’s name, but whoever he was, she knew she had his complexion.

She attended school for the first time when she was seven years old. She hadn’t been able to read, but still their tests had pointed her out, pulled her from the throng of slum children. They took notice of her, asked questions. They provided special tutors, and later, special classes. When she was ten, and they wanted to send her away, her mother resisted. By then, her mother had made several siblings for her to watch in the afternoon and needed the babysitter so she could go out and earn her money. Besides that, her mother learned there would be no formal religious training at the school for the sciences.

It was no wonder, really, how learning came to be so important to Vidonia. It had pulled her from the despair of the streets as no cathedraled savior ever could have.

Her educational route, after that, had run a circuitous course, leading her through ecology, microbiology, and genetics. Eventually, at the age of twenty-two, it led her to the United States, where she continued her studies in the life sciences.

Once she learned the rules that undergirded life on earth, it seemed only logical to attempt to apply them against a new backdrop. For her, the field of theoretical xenobiology was the inevitable destination of a long voyage.

Now, as she watched the strange organism romp through the nursery beyond the glass, she couldn’t help but feel that it had all been worth it. Here it was, at last. This creature was something different.

She didn’t understand fully how it came to be, but she didn’t have to. It was something new, and now it was her job to see if the rules had changed.

SHE WOKE early the next morning to her small, functional room. She’d decided yesterday that it suited her. She barely felt the water on her skin, tasted nothing of the toothpaste. Her clothes matched only because she had packed them that way. Her mind was elsewhere. She thought of John only in passing and only to marvel at having not thought of him the whole day before. Something about that felt good to her, not thinking of him, but she didn’t dwell.

She carded through the door of her lab, and the lights kicked on automatically. Butterflies wrestled in her stomach. She made the call. The minutes dragged on as she waited. Time enough for her to wonder at the strange twists of fate that had led her to this place. Time enough to begin to wonder if her mother’s God would approve.

Big men in white suits arrived with the young gladiator strapped to a gurney. Silas and Benjamin stepped in behind them. As per her orders, the specimen was sedated but not fully anesthetized. It could make the difference on her tests.

The men lifted the creature from the gurney and strapped it onto the silver specimen table in the center of the room. It writhed sluggishly for a moment before slumping into catatonia. Vidonia took her recorder from the front pocket of her lab coat and placed it on the table.

She hit the record button and began. “October twenty-second, initial evaluation of Helix project specimen at”—she paused, flipping through the pages Silas had provided her with—“age one hundred ninety-three days. And three hundred fifteen days since surrogate implantation by blastocyst F.”

She paused, looking at Silas and Ben. Then she turned back to the table and let her eyes play over the entire length of the organism.

“Specimen appears healthy. No signs of illness or injury. It has an approximate dorsoventral length of one hundred forty centimeters.” She looked at the digital readout on the table. “A weight of twenty-four kilograms. Skin is highly unusual in its reflective qualities and shows marked hyperpigmentation. No evidence of hair or dermal papillae.” She bent close, running a latexed finger across the abdomen. “Dermis appears smooth and absent of coetaneous structures of any kind. Specimen is hexapoidal, with three sets of differentiated symmetrical limbs. Upper posterior limbs appear modified for flight. Upper anterior limbs terminate in four digits”—she flexed the organism’s hand—“and an opposable thumb. Each digit terminates in a nail or claw, subdermal status of which is unknown at this time.”

“Be careful,” Silas said. He held up his hand.

She took a long breath. It wasn’t fear she felt but excitement. A slight tremor thrummed in her left leg, so she stepped back from the table and poured herself a glass of water from the sink against the wall. She felt the coolness slide down her throat and settle in her stomach. Ben and Silas remained silhouettes beyond the bright ring of light, and she was thankful of that. She stepped back to the table.

“The cranium is large, oblong in general shape, tapering to a point in the back. The eyes are large and forward-facing, light gray in color, with vertical pupils. Approximate field of binocular vision is”—here she stopped, her face tensed in thought—“one hundred sixty degrees.” Behind her, Silas made a sound. She went on.

“Immature or flaccid cartilaginous ears sit high atop the head. The cartilage is thick at the base, thinning near the tip. The face is large, prognothic, and hyper-robust in bone structure. The mouth is broad and forward-projecting.”

She used a wooden tongue depressor to open the creature’s jaw, looked in. “Dental pattern is complex and differentiated, atypical mammalian pattern. Omnivore, probably.”

“Omnivore?” Silas spoke from the shadows.

“It’s hard to tell for sure. The large canines provide a tearing apparatus in the front, but the molars are five-cusped—good for grinding up tough grains or vegetable matter. I’m not sure what to make of this second row of teeth. The pattern is unique, to my knowledge—looks like they could be used for shearing of some kind, almost like a row of wire cutters. I can’t imagine what foods they could be used for.”

“Bone shearing,” Silas said. His hand flexed.

“Yeah, maybe that.”

She turned the recorder off and began the next phase of the evaluation.

It started with the drawing of blood. The shiny black organism shivered oddly as she took twenty-five ccs from its right forelimb. She then took twenty-five ccs from its left hind limb. She placed the blood samples into the refrigeration unit beneath the counter and wheeled the specimen to the X-ray machine. She motioned for Silas and Ben to get behind the leaded glass and made final adjustments to the orientation of the machine. She joined the men and hit the button.

They let her work without commenting, and she was silently pleased at their deference for her expertise. She activated the fluoroscope again and watched the image assemble on the computer screen. When the read was complete, she stepped around and rotated the position of the specimen for a final shot. She didn’t bother to print out the sheets—time enough for that later. She wanted the specimen in an altered state for as short a span of time as possible. The effect that drugs might have on the organism was difficult to calculate.

Using a scalpel, she shaved off bits of skin from the lower back of the organism. “Typically the least sensitive part of the dermis,” she said, as she put the sample into a plastic cup, which was then placed alongside the blood samples in the refrigeration unit.

Nuclear resonance was last, and would be most telling. Her students had called it the magic camera, and the magic camera could see all. The creature barely stirred as the big men in white maneuvered its slumped form into the cylinder. Across the room from the scanner, Silas and Ben stood, looking over her shoulder at the computer screen. The image told a strange story as it rotated.

She tried to remain calm, but it was a losing battle. Instead, she tried to appear calm, and this she had some success with. She wasn’t sure what exactly she was seeing. Certain organs she recognized; others were strange to her. “There’s the liver,” she said, pointing to the conspicuously placed organ. It was a start, a point of reference. She found the heart next, narrowing the focus of the machine until she could watch the blood coursing through the arteries and veins. She blinked her eyes, squinted, but the heart still had six chambers.

“Oh, shit,” Silas said. He’d counted, too.

“What the hell do we have here?” Ben asked.

“I’m going to need some time … to analyze this,” she said.

“How long?” Silas asked.

“A whole career.”

“You don’t have a career.”

“I do now. This is going to take a while.”

CHAPTER NINE

Silas concentrated on his footfalls. The morning was cool and dry—perfect running weather—but the last quarter of a mile was always the most difficult. There were several regular morning runners at Helix, and he’d gotten offers to partner up, but he preferred to face it alone. He lengthened his stride, determined to eat the remaining distance as quickly as he could. There had been a time when running relaxed him, but those years were behind him now. At forty-three, running still relieved tension, but it left him more exhausted than tranquil. He wasn’t able to stop thinking about the project, but after five miles, he didn’t have the energy to care, so running still served its purpose.

He rounded the last bend in the path and began the final stretch to the compound general. In the distance, in front of the lab, he could see the flag waving colorfully at the top of its pole. He could see the five interlocked rings. It was silly, he knew, but his eyesight was something he was proud of. He’d noticed, over the years, that most of his colleagues had developed the need for reading glasses or surgery to correct weakening visual acuity, but his own vision had remained strong. He’d read once that myopia was a disease of modern living and could be traced, in many cases, to a childhood spent too much indoors, where the eye focuses almost exclusively within a distance of ten or twenty feet. Silas had spent much of his own youth outside. Eyes ever on the horizon. A portent, perhaps, of the man he would become.

He sprinted the last hundred yards and did his cool-down walk to the elevator. Back at his office, he took a long, hot shower, being careful not to get water in his bad ear, and did a quick shave in the sudsy steam. Then he toweled himself dry and put on fresh lab whites. After a quick stubble check in the mirror, he looked at his watch. It was time for Vidonia’s report. V-day.

He stepped into Vidonia’s lab, knocking twice on the open door. She turned, and her face was unreadable. She motioned him in and continued spreading the sheets out on the table. He’d made a point to stay out of her way for the last two and a half weeks. She’d been pulling all-nighters, so he knew she wasn’t in need of any motivational speeches on his part. He only needed to stay out of her way. She wanted to understand this thing as badly as he did, if perhaps for different reasons.

He waited for her to speak.

“I’ve done a complete workup on the specimen—well, as complete as I could in the amount of time I’ve had. I’m just going to shoot straight with you on this; there’s still a lot I don’t understand.”

“That’s fine. What do you have for me?”

She turned on the underlighting and touched the first plasticine page lying on the glass. “Enough to keep me awake at night.”

He looked down, and the image on the dark sheet was nonsense to him.

“As far as I can discern,” she said, her fingers wandering across the image, “these are the primary digestive organs: the pancreas, gallbladder, and liver. The stomach, here”—she pointed—“is multicompartmental. I think this specimen will be able to digest some pretty tough foodstuffs if the need arises. The intestine is medium-length—typical omnivore. The lung capacity of the organism is enormous. As is the blood volume pumped out by the heart. You’re going to have quite an athlete on your hands.”

“I’ve been thinking about that heart,” Silas said. “The specimen, as you like to call it, isn’t built along avian lines. Too big, too heavy. But if something like this were to actually take flight, it would probably need some outsized cardiovascular equipment to fuel the wing muscles.”

“It certainly would.”

“The six chambers?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know, Silas. It could be a flight adaptation. It could be a practical joke that worked out well. All I can tell you is that the heart is strong, and the pectoral muscles have an unusual striation pattern I’ve never seen before.”

Silas rubbed his eyes, then looked down at the transparency again. “So do you think it will fly?”

“I doubt it. But there are some interesting modifications here. Anything is possible.”

She took a step farther down the table, pointing to a different sheet. “And the sharps at the end of the digits are anchored to the bone—they’re true talons, not just heavy-duty fingernails.”

She picked up another sheet. “The sense organs were the most difficult to evaluate, because there is no way of knowing how the organism experiences the world around it. But certain inferences can be made, and I’ve gone to exhaustive measures to see to it that my evaluations are accurate. If I have erred, it is on the side of caution. With that said, I have to admit that the eyes gave me pause. There is a distinct tapetum lucidium across the retina, and the cone configuration confirms that the specimen has nocturnally adapted vision.”

Silas couldn’t think of a response. It was getting crazier and crazier.

“The visual resolution is better than my ability to test. The hearing, too, is off the scale, but I noticed several peaks in acuity.” She handed him a sheet. “The largest was at three thousand hertz, well out of the human range of hearing. The second-largest peak was at one hundred twenty hertz, the average frequency of human speech.”

“So it’s a good listener.”

“It does more than listen.”

“You ran an oscillogram?”

“I had a hunch, so I went with it. I figured it had that bipolar auditory acuity for a reason, and when I tested its vocalizations, I found I was right. Half the waveform was above three thousand five hundred hertz.” She slid another transparency under the light. “As you can see from the waterfall spectrogram, there is a clear distinction here”—she pointed to a flat spot within the three-dimensional range of peaks and valleys. “Everything on this side we can hear; everything on the other side, we can’t.”

“So this means what?”

“It hears us fine, but we can only pick up about half of its vocalizations.”

Silas nodded and picked up the fifth sheet, holding it up to the light. A dark oblong shape in a case of bone. He didn’t have to ask her what it showed. “How large?”

“Cranial capacity is probably nineteen hundred ccs.”

Silas whistled softly. “That’s a lot of gray matter.”

“Larger than an average human brain.”

“This thing isn’t full-grown yet,” he said. “What kind of brain-to-body mass index are we talking about?”

“Top-heavy,” she said. “The numbers aren’t as meaningful at this stage of development, but the specimen certainly seems likely to surpass our index. The study of the heart could take one career; the study of the brain could take another.” She pointed at the dark image captured in the plasticine. “The cerebral cortex is highly folded and highly specialized. Both the telencephalon and corpus callosum—if those terms even apply, which they may not—are unusual in their association to the other parts of the brain.”

“I’m not an anatomist, doctor.”

“The brain is huge, and I don’t understand the way it’s organized. About all I can say is that the structures responsible for the higher functions appear to represent a large percentage of the overall mass. I’m shooting in the dark here, but I think this specimen has the potential to be very, very intelligent.”

She put the last sheet of plasticine down on the table. “What the hell is this thing?” she asked.

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out.”

“No.” She touched his arm. “What is it? I can’t do my job effectively if I’m working in a vacuum. This doesn’t make sense. The night vision, the hearing, the wings. None of these things could help a gladiator in the arena. You need to level with me. Where did this thing come from?”

Silas sighed. She was right. He pulled out a stool and sat. “How much do you know about computer theory?”

“Theory? Not much. The basics, I guess.”

“Ever hear of the Brannin computer?”

“Rings a bell. It’s the new super, right?”

“Yeah. I’ve been doing a lot of research on it over the past several months, and the Brannin isn’t just the latest thing in computer tech. It’s a long step sideways in a direction nobody had ever thought to look before. I don’t think the Brannin should really even be called a computer. There’s very little to it that you can reach out and touch with your hand. Most of it exists in deep VR, and because of that, it’s not limited by physical size. Inside itself, it can be infinitely large or small. Instead of bytes made of zeros and ones, the Brannin uses light, on or off, and that’s the speed at which it computes. Something like six trillion floating-point operations per second, give or take.”

“Who’s counting?”

“You’d be surprised how seriously that record is taken.”

“And you’re going to tell me that the computer helped design the gladiator?”

“No, the Brannin didn’t just help. It did the design almost completely on its own. That’s where the original nucleotide base-pair sequence came from. Helix just provided the nuts and bolts.”

“Can’t you just make the inferences you need from the base-pair sequence?”

“It doesn’t work that way. The nucleotide map translates directly into an amino-acid map, but it gets sticky after that. Protein conformation is more important to protein function than the exact nucleotide read, and conformation is one of the hardest things to pull out of the raw data. Development is too interconnected to itself, and timing plays an important role.”

“Still, you should be able to cross-reference to other species.”

“No, we tried that. There were no matches. But a match might not have helped us much, anyway, unless it was exact. A single base-pair substitution that changes the shape of the resultant protein molecule can completely alter the expression of that gene. There are hundreds of examples of this. And beyond that, enzymatic function is more important even than conformation, and each enzyme is itself under genetic control, so the complexity exists in a feedback loop.”

“I’m beginning to understand. It’s like an algebra problem with a hundred variables.”

“Millions. At this point, it’s still impossible to make the leap from novel nucleotide sequence to resultant gene to physiological expression. It may always remain so. There’s too much structural noise between the three.”

“Well, you still have the computer. It designed the creature. Why do you need me to tell you what it already knows?”

“Because I think the computer has gone crazy.”

“Can computers go crazy?”

“The acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

CHAPTER TEN

Evan stepped into his office and closed the door against the stares of the techs in the anteroom. His filing cabinets were overturned, his desk inside out, his stacks of digilogs scattered. Baskov’s men had gone through everything, leaving his office in complete disarray—in short, slightly more messy than usual.

He righted his swivel chair and slid into its familiarity. Only this time, the wailing of its overburdened hinges was missing. It had been so long. Much had changed.

How many weeks? Seven, ten; he didn’t know. But he had been sure that he would never leave that hospital, never be free from the injections, or Baskov’s questions. He looked down at himself and saw half the man he had been.

The drugs they gave him made him too sick to eat, and he had lost whole chunks of himself. He felt naked without the slabs of fat that had cloaked his body for so many years. He was exposed, vulnerable, too small for his baggy skin, which now drooped and sagged around him. Maybe it had been longer than ten weeks. Maybe much longer.

What had they told his techs? He had no friends or family that would require an explanation for his absence, but what about the institute? What had they been told?

He glanced out the window, and the sky was darkening, fading to gray. He didn’t know whether night or a storm approached, but he welcomed either. He welcomed the darkness and wanted to lose himself in it. He looked around for the light switch on the wall but couldn’t find it. The lighting panels had activated automatically when he entered the room.

He picked a desk drawer from the scatter on the floor and flung it upward toward the fluorescent panels. The cheap plastic shield caved, and the bulbs popped in a shower of glass on his head. Picking up the desk drawer, he stepped beneath the next light panel and flung the projectile again. Again, a shower of glass. He moved throughout the room until all the lights had gone blind and he could see only by the dying glow outside the window.

He thought of Pea as night descended. He sat in the clutter and let darkness fold around him. And when he could hold back no more, he wept.

SILAS MET Baskov just outside the broad glass doorway. “Good afternoon,” he said, extending a hand.

Baskov shook it, nodded, then said, “I hear it’s a big day for our young Olympic hopeful.”

“Yes, it is. The trainer thinks it’s time for the first live meal. I thought it would be appropriate for someone from the commission to witness it, and frankly,” he added with a smile, “it will save me the trouble of writing a long-winded report about the event. Now you can report to the commission.”

“I’m sure the trouble will be more than worth it. I’m curious how it’s developing. My eyes and ears have been telling me some interesting stories.”

Silas led him inside and past the elevators. He hated the way Baskov always managed to mention his spies. He referenced them so casually, as if they were of no more interest than the weather. But Silas recognized the warning in Baskov’s informal banter: nothing could be kept secret.

“We’ve recently transferred the gladiator into its new pen,” Silas said, then couldn’t resist: “though I’m certain that your eyes and ears have already informed you of the move.”

Baskov glanced at Silas as they walked.

“It outgrew its old living space,” Silas added.

“I know about that because I signed off on the construction project budget. I don’t even want to mention how much it cost.”

They turned left at the end of the hall and made their way down the final long corridor leading to the rear dome behind the building. At the door, Silas showed his badge to the armed guard and they stepped through.

His nostrils were immediately assaulted by the warm smells of life. It reminded him of the cat house at the Los Angeles Zoo. Tangy, pungent; it was the smell of a predator.

Bright sunlight filtered through steel mesh openings in the roof sixty feet above. Just ahead, a shell of iron bars separated them from the enclosure beyond. Silas lead Baskov toward the group that had gathered. Ben, Vidonia, and Dr. Nelson nodded their introductions.

“Where’s Tay?” Silas asked.

“Last-minute problem with the goat,” Vidonia said.

“Well, I’d have a problem, too, if I was the goat that had to go in there.” Ben pointed between the bars.

Against the far wall, several large, roughly hewn trees leaned at forty-five-degree angles with wide platforms connecting them at varying heights from the ground. Large wooden poles lay scattered in the straw that covered the floor of the enclosure. Thick ropes ran in sagging parabolas between points on the wall and the wooden poles. It all looked like a playground for some very rough, very big little boy.

“I don’t see our little friend,” Baskov said.

“It’s in an adjacent pen, but it isn’t so little anymore,” Silas said. “We thought it best to introduce the goat first.”

There was a loud clang. Then, as if on cue, a small black-and-white goat was pushed unceremoniously through a hatch in the far wall.

It fumbled around in the deep straw for several moments. Slowly, its ability to wallow around in the stuff improved, and the goat made slow progress across the enclosure, jumping from spot to spot. Another clang grabbed the goat’s attention. It stopped, angling its head toward the sound.

The large metal door at the back of the enclosure slid slowly upward.

The gladiator lumbered in beneath it. The growth of the organism had been nothing short of amazing, and Silas couldn’t help but feel a wave of awe as the creature stepped into sight. Even hunched in a predatory stance, it stood easily six and a half feet tall—and it wasn’t done growing yet. The arms were thick with muscle, and the ears now stood round and erect atop the head, like a bat’s.

Only its eyes had not changed. Still large, gray, unreadable. Silas’s heart jolted in his chest when the gladiator bounded across the lake of straw and leaped to the lowest platform. There it sat, looking down at the goat, then out at the people, appearing for all the world like some fairy-tale monster come to life.

Its arms stretched wide from its body, and the wings unfurled from their hiding place against its back, extending twelve feet on either side. There was a rush of wind as the wings began to beat at the air. Silas felt the breeze on his cheek and turned to look at Baskov, who stood open-mouthed at the spectacle.

Silas turned his attention back to the creature in time to see it leap from the platform and drop, half gliding, to the straw next to the goat.

Bleating wildly, the goat sprang backward all the way to the bars. The gladiator’s wings snapped shut against its back as it took a long step forward. The frightened goat bleated again and tried to run past the gladiator on the right, but the gladiator flashed an arm out in front of it. The goat stopped just a half-dozen feet in front of Silas, pinned between the bars and the strange creature. The gladiator cocked its head sideways, looking at it. Slowly, it extended one taloned hand and touched the goat’s furry coat with its palm, almost a caress. The goat shrieked in fear and pulled away while the creature cocked its head in the other direction.

Much later, in the report he would have to write anyway, Silas would not be able to recount what happened next except to say that in one moment the gladiator was sitting near its potential prey, and in the next, after a flash of motion, the goat was somehow partially disassembled in the gladiator’s bloody hands. Bright loops of intestine spilled out from the forward half of the goat as the gladiator raised the carcass up and bit off the head in a single crunch of bone.

It happened so fast.

Silas watched in silence as the creature fed. Minutes later, he was the first to speak. “Well, that was—”

The gladiator’s growl stopped him in mid-sentence. Its head snapped up as if offended by the interruption. An instant later, the uneaten portion of the goat slammed against the bars, splattering blood and bowels over him and those with the misfortune of standing too close to him.

Vidonia turned without a word and walked out. As Silas looked down at his fouled lab coat, the creature reared its head back and howled. To Silas, the howl sounded very much like laughter.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Her voice carried accusation in it, and something else. He tried to gauge her. They sat at the picnic tables just outside the lab, pushing food around on their plates.

He’d known there was something brewing beneath the surface for several weeks now. It was in the tone of her voice when she spoke of the project. It was in her careful choice of wording. Most of all, it was in the things she didn’t say. Is she finally going to let it show? Is she finally going to say it?

They’d been talking for ten minutes now, circling the real point with their conversation. The wind had turned cold, and Silas raised his collar against the chill on his neck. Perhaps a lunch outside on the picnic tables hadn’t been such a good idea, after all.

“What are you getting at?” he asked. He was tired of avoidance.

“I’m saying that it’s too bad it has to end up as so much pulpy sawdust at the bottom of the arena,” Vidonia said.

Silas studied her face.

“I’m saying that it’s too bad it has to die,” she said.

“It’s why it’s here in the first place.”

“I know. That doesn’t make it less of a stupid waste.”

“You have a problem with the gladiator competition?”

“Yes,” she said, without hesitation.

Silas looked at her.

“This is your project,” she said. “I understand that. But I don’t understand the kind of man that destroys his creations.”

“I don’t destroy them.”

“Yes, you do.”

“The competition does that.”

“And your project is part of that competition.”

“Without the competition, those creations you speak so highly of wouldn’t exist at all.”

“That creature you’ve made is like nothing else that has come before. It’s unique and should be studied, not thrown away in blood sport.”

“You are studying it.”

“For what? Even the winners usually die of their injuries. And the ones that don’t die are just put down later. There are no old gladiators.” She looked away into the wind, a soft expression on a sharp profile. She took a slow sip of her Coke. “All this talent, all this scientific knowledge, and all we can think to do with it is to build a better killer.”

Several wasps hovered in slow circles over the picnic table, attracted by the food and moving sluggishly in the cold air. He swatted at one that came too close and missed, sending it spinning in a wash of air. “Have you ever heard of the pit bull terrier?” he asked finally.

“What?”

“The pit bull terrier?”

“Some kind of dog?” she said. She seemed irritated by the off-subject question.

“I didn’t think you would have. It was finally outlawed about ten years ago, after decades of bans and regulation. Even back when they’d still been legal to own, insurance liability made it impractical to do so. Fanciers strove for years to rehabilitate the breed’s image, but too late, and with too little consistency, and the breed died of its own bad reputation.”

“So they’re extinct?”

“The breed is extinct. The genes no doubt still live on in mixed-breeds and family pets all over the place—it’s hard to regulate that stuff, after all—but there’s no AKC recognition, and the moment you call a dog a pit bull, it’s illegal. So maybe you call it something else, give it a new name. Or maybe you don’t call it anything. But still, the breed—that old name—is dead.”

“What does that have to do with the gladiator competition?”

“More than you might think. Pit bulls came from London originally—the inadvertent hybrids of bull-baiting dogs and early proto-terriers. The combination was deadly. The original baiters were used to fatigue cattle into submission for slaughter. These dogs had big, musclebound heads, and their instinct was to attack livestock—clamp their jaws onto a bull’s face and then not let go, no matter what.”

“Charming practice,” Vidonia said.

“And a dangerous occupation, it turns out. If the dog’s hold slipped, it faced the bull’s hooves, so the dogs with the strongest bites tended to survive the longest, leave the most offspring, you get the picture.”

Vidonia nodded.

“Multiply that by a few hundred years, and you get some pretty tough dogs. They’d hang on until the bull was a bloody mess.”

“Disgusting.”

“Maybe, but a lot of practices were disgusting before modern refrigeration. At one time, it was the preferred method of slaughter.”

“What on earth for?”

“The adrenaline altered the meat. Some thought a baited bull tasted better, and they believed the meat lasted longer before spoilage set in.”

“Did it?”

“I have no idea.”

“Do you have a point?”

“Bull-baiters were aggressive but only toward livestock. They couldn’t care less about people or other dogs. This wasn’t true of the earliest terriers. These dogs were territorial and protective. They were basically mean-bastard little dogs, but they were too small to do much damage.”

“Okay.”

“The accidental crosses between these two breeds proved as worthless to butchers as they were unstoppable in the fighting pits. These so-called pit bulls had the vise grip jaws of their baiting ancestors, but the new hybrids ignored cattle in favor of other dogs. Like the bull-baiters, if they got their teeth in, you couldn’t shake them loose. The early pit bulls actually brought about the extinction of several other ancient strains of fighting dog in Western Europe. Classic Darwinism; no other dog could compete.”

“I’m supposed to be impressed by this?”

“In the archives here at the compound, there is an old recording of an illegal pit fight. The handlers in this fight had trouble keeping the dogs apart long enough to start the contest. The dogs craved it. They lived for it. It was barbaric. It was grisly. But no more so than what happens between the lion and the gazelle. Or between the wolf and the deer. Nature, red of tooth and claw. Animals have always had to fight for survival.”

“But not for sport.”

“Sport was their survival. Without that sport, eventually, there were no pit bulls. Sport was their ecological niche.”

“That doesn’t make it right.”

He continued, “Without the gladiator competition, this specimen you seem so impressed by would not exist, because the funding behind it would not exist. I was in college when the gladiator competition first became a regular part of the Olympics, so I’m old enough to remember what the field of genetics used to be like. This competition is the best thing that could have happened. When you combine scientists with capitalists, great leaps forward are made, always. Throw in a healthy dose of national pride, and anything can happen.”

Just then, a wasp fell out of the air and landed in her hair. She hardly reacted, turning her head slowly from side to side to try and free it from the dark windblown tangle. It crawled down a wayward curl onto her cheek, and he expected her to yelp and flinch away. But instead she gently swept the wasp to the table with the side of her hand. It sat, throwing its legs up for a moment, before righting itself and buzzing back into the air above them.

“You say you’ve seen video footage of these dogfights?” she said. “Well, I’ve seen the blood with my own eyes. I may not know what a pit bull is, but I’ve seen the boys and their fighting dogs in the back alleys where I grew up. And more significantly, I’ve seen these dogs a few days later with their faces so swollen with infection that their eyes look like little peas stuffed in puffy dough. What you do is still just back-alley dogfighting to me.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Tell me good comes out of it somehow. Fine. Tell me it’s a necessary evil. So be it. But don’t you dare tell me how much the animals enjoy it.”

She looked up into the sky above them, watching the wasps. “I don’t see how the gladiator contest is even legal, given all the laws against animal cruelty.”

“Back-alley dogfights don’t funnel money into research for genetic diseases. The United States has many self-serving laws. Why not question why cigarettes are banned while alcohol remains legal?”

“So what do you get out of this, then? Is it the money? The fame?” Her eyes flashed with anger.

His own temper was rising now. He fought against it and decided to take the conversation in another direction. “You’ve seen Michelangelo’s statue of David, right?”

“Pictures.”

“I saw it twenty years ago when I was in Florence. I’m not going to tell you it changed my life, but it did change my perspective. I’d seen pictures, too, but when I saw it with my own eyes … words can’t even describe. I’ve never considered myself to be artistically inclined, but looking at that statue, I knew I was witnessing creative perfection. Michelangelo took a lump of stone and found the human form inside. When he was finished, it looked soft; it looked warm.”

“It’s a statue.”

“If you ever get a chance to see David in person, you’ll understand. No one could ever hope to surpass it. At least not in that medium. Michelangelo found the truth in stone, and that truth is the commonality between art and science.”

“Truth?”

“Each of us looks for it in the ways that are available to us.”

“So that’s what you are looking for, the truth in your medium?”

“It is what we are all looking for.”

“And you think Michelangelo would have approved?”

“If he were alive today, Michelangelo wouldn’t bother with stone. He would be a geneticist.”

“You’re serious.”

Silas nodded. “I wouldn’t want to face Italy’s gladiator in the arena.”

SILAS WAS tired. Bone tired. He lay on the long couch in his office, legs propped up and over the armrest, hands thrown back behind his head. He had grown accustomed to the long hours at the lab, but the initial cycle of pre-competition press conferences had begun today, and his energy reserves were depleted. There was nothing left, and the bad part was that he knew it would get worse before it got better. How do you explain to a room full of reporters that you can’t answer their questions? No pictures of the gladiator available. No information available. Why are you all here, then, you ask? Because the Olympic Commission wants you running those special-interest stories that turn the public’s eye toward the coming games. That’s why. No, I can’t tell you a damned thing to make your job easier. No, I can’t tell you what the gladiator looks like, or how it was designed, or anything at all, really, but hey, the United States won’t disappoint. I’m supposed to tell you that. Quote me on that.

He was a better scientist than he was a PR man, or at least he hoped to God he was, or he wasn’t much of a scientist at all. His eyes closed, and he willed his mind blank. For a moment, sleep seemed possible.

The knock on his door was not welcome. He waited.

The knock came again.

“Damn.” Silas climbed to his feet.

Tay Sawyer’s grinning face met him through the cracked door. Internally, Silas cringed, but he swung the door wide and let the trainer in anyway. He liked the man but wasn’t in the mood to deal with his restless energy this particular afternoon.

Tay Sawyer was one of those men whose activity level seemed to have gotten stuck somewhere in preadolescence. He was a force never at rest, but his hyperkinetic agitations didn’t distract from the fact that he was the best trainer in the business. He was a short, thick man, baby-faced, slightly bowlegged, and prematurely balding. The top of his head was shiny and tanned.

“What’s going on, Tay?”

“Great progress. I had to see you. This gladiator, Silas, I have to hand it to you, you’ve done something special this time.”

Silas collapsed back onto the couch.

Tay continued, “You’ve got to come down and see what it can do.”

“Now?”

“Not now. How about Friday?”

The man’s excitement was endearing but not in the least bit contagious. Exhaustion had inoculated Silas against it. Tay still didn’t sit; he paced. The way his compact form hustled across the carpet made each step seem a muscular endeavor. The muscles in his thick legs showed in grooves through his dress slacks.

“Bring Ben, too,” Tay said. “He’ll probably want to see it.”

“What exactly is going on Friday?”

“The new robotics will be up.” Tay rubbed his hands together in mock mad-scientist glee. “Then I can start the real training.”

“What time do you want us there?”

“I know you’re busy, so how about lunchtime. It won’t take long.”

“We’ll be there.”

“Great,” Tay said, and the grin brushed his earlobes.

He even smiles enthusiastically.

“We’re going to make history with this one, Silas. I’ve never seen reflexes like this before. You’re a goddamned genius.”

“Thanks.”

“I did the first tests for reaction time today. Zero-point-zero-two seconds. Can you believe that?”

Silas wasn’t sure what that meant, but he nodded.

“I checked it four times,” Tay continued. “Then I checked the equipment. But it’s for real. This thing makes lightning look slow.”

“Great. I’ll see you Friday, then, okay?” Sleep was calling him now.

“Yeah, boss. See you Friday.” Tay turned to go.

“Hit the lights on your way out.”

SILAS CLOSED his eyes for an eight count. When he opened them, the pain was still there. He pinched the bridge of his nose. The nap he’d taken earlier in the day had helped clear his head, but it had done little to protect against eyestrain. By the feel of it, he’d been staring at the computer screen for about an hour too long. He glanced at the clock on the wall, and it told him his late night had turned into an early morning. Again.

He leaned back in his chair and stretched his legs out in front of him. Both knees popped. He touched the save icon with his finger, flipped the computer off, and folded it back into his desktop. That was enough for one night. He wasn’t going to work himself into a migraine twice in one week.

He locked his office door behind him and headed for the stairs. On the main level he saw light spilling down the hall from the west wing. He paused, searching his pocket for his car keys. He pulled them out, looked at them, then put them back in his pocket and turned toward the light.

Vidonia was bent over a series of plasticine prints. The underlighting recast her face in a net of unfamiliar angles. She held a magnifying glass in her hands and occasionally looked through it for a closer inspection of her work. The prints completely absorbed her. He watched her for a full minute before speaking.

“It’s not so strange,” he said.

“What’s that?” she answered quickly, without looking up. Silas realized she’d known he was standing there for some time.

“What we’ve been doing here at Helix for the past twelve years.”

“I guess that would depend on your perspective.”

Silas stepped into the room. “It’s what man has been doing for tens of thousands of years.”

“Genetic engineering? That’s the first I’ve heard of it.”

“No, it’s true. They just didn’t call it that.”

“What did they call it?”

Silas looked down at the sheets. They were incomprehensible to him. “Oh, many different things. They called it the fattest cow. They called it a best laying chicken. The fluffiest sheep.”

“DNA splicing is a far cry from animal husbandry.”

“Not really. Not if you think about it. You try and accumulate the genes you want into a given set of animals. You can do it the slow and inefficient way, by breeding. Or you can do it the fast way, in a petri dish. But it’s all the same thing, the gathering together of desired genes. The elimination of the undesired. Only the technology is different.”

“I don’t think you’d ever get this,” she said, gesturing toward the shadowy plastic sheets, “through selective breeding.”

“No, you never would. I said what we’ve done at Helix for the last twelve years isn’t so strange. What Evan Chandler has done is an altogether different story. This wasn’t the gathering of genes. This was the invention of new ones. The difference is highly significant.”

She finally looked up from the table, and he saw the strain on her face. He recognized the frustration. She was an intelligent woman, and intelligent people were used to being able to understand what they were studying. “Your inventor was either a genius or a madman,” she said. “And I can’t tell which.”

“Well, I think you know which gets my vote.”

She smiled. He knew better than to tell her to get some sleep. He knew how he reacted when people suggested that to him.

“Well, I’m heading home,” he said instead. “Tomorrow, Tay is having a training exercise. You’re welcome to come by if you’d like.”

“Are you going to get another innards bath?”

“Not this time. He said robotics will be involved.”

“I’ll try, but I doubt it. The computer sims are going to finish up the blood workup around noon. I’ve been working on oxygen loads for more than a week now.”

“Okay, how does it look?”

“Complicated, like everything else, I guess. I’ll know more tomorrow.”

“Let me know.”

She turned back to her sheets. “You’ll be the first I tell.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

It’s the newest thing in behavior-modification technology,” Tay was telling them. Silas and Ben stared at the contraption with uncertainty. The three men stood in knee-deep straw amid the clutter of the gladiator compound. Before them stood a man-size robotic contrivance layered in heavy Teflon padding. Several thick arms extended from the broad spherical core. To Silas’s discriminating eye, it looked like a multi-limbed snowman on steroids. “This does what, exactly?” he asked.

“It is supposed to represent a competitor. I control it by remote from the observation loft.” Tay pointed. A metal staircase climbed the far wall twenty feet to the glassed-in balcony. The observation loft was supposed to give a comprehensive view of everything that happened in the cage. It provided this vantage by being—at least partially, anyway—in the cage itself.

“This thing fights?” Silas asked.

“With a little remote-control help. It’s not a quick lateral mover—more of a stand-and-deliver type of device—but each of those limbs is loaded with a thirty-pound payload of sand, so it packs a wallop. And the arms are fast, very fast.”

Silas glanced up the far wall. “I think I’d want more than a pane of glass between myself and what’s going to be happening out here.”

“That’s bulletproof,” Tay said, gesturing toward the observation loft. “No worries.”

Silas moved closer and pushed a finger into the Teflon padding that lined the rounded base of the robot. It dimpled softly beneath the pressure of his finger. “This thing won’t hurt the gladiator, will it? Injury is the last thing we need three months before showtime.”

“No. I’ll be careful. I just want to rile it up a bit, see if I can’t get its aggression up.”

“You remember the goat, don’t you?” Ben asked.

“Yeah. ’Twas a beautiful sight. Just what a trainer loves to see. All that blood and gore.”

“Thrown all over Silas,” Ben added.

“Icing on the cake,” Tay said.

Silas smiled despite himself. “Okay, let’s see what this thing can do.” He turned toward the gate.

“Aren’t you going to join me?” Tay gestured back toward the observation loft again.

“Nah, I want to be down close to the action. I’ll take my view from here,” Silas said. Ben followed him out of the enclosure, and Silas checked the locking mechanism on the gate twice.

The two men watched through the bars as Tay ascended the stairs. He stepped through the door into the loft and waved to them through the glass. Then he moved toward the front, and his arms played across a console hidden from view beneath the row of windows.

A moment later, the robot buzzed as it powered up, and then the arms slowly lifted in long arcs, flexing and extending. The robot twisted and jabbed for half a minute before the hatch portal clanged in the back wall.

The hatch opened.

The gladiator entered the enclosure slowly, as if sensing that something was wrong. It had grown since the goat incident, now approaching seven feet in height. Wide nostrils sniffed the air, and its eyes locked on the robot. It stared for several seconds without moving before beginning a slow creep forward. Staying low to the straw, it moved on four bent limbs, wings folded tight and flat against its back.

The robot spun smoothly on its axis, bringing two arms into striking position. The gladiator’s slow approach slowed further as it closed the distance.

Twenty feet out, it stopped. Muscles bunched in its legs. It gathered itself, tightening to stillness, crouching like black stone—limbs cocked beneath it, eyes glaring across the lake of straw.

Silas realized he was holding his breath.

The gladiator’s ears folded back. Then, like a black sheet of lightning, it sprang.

It hit the robot hard, rocking it backward, digging in. Metallic arms spun, and the gladiator bounced away just ahead of the blow. It turned, maneuvering quickly around the other side. It struck again, rocking the robot forward. Claws dragged along the surface of the Teflon, searching for purchase. The robot spun again, and this time banged a glancing blow off the creature’s side. It howled and slid away.

The gladiator moved faster now, circling just beyond reach. It went around once, twice, then came in low, ducking below the upper ring of the robot’s arms. It struck fiercely, clamping down on the Teflon with its jaws. Silas was certain that an opponent of flesh and blood would have lost its guts to the floor at this point, but the Teflon gave up nothing, and a blow from one of the robot’s lower arms sent the creature sprawling away, screaming in rage.

It came in again, howling, and again was knocked away. And again, and again, until froth ran from its mouth. After a particularly damaging blow, it sank slowly to a crouch, hissing, and this time it paused. Its chest expanded and contracted in enormous heaving breaths while it considered the enemy.

Without warning, it struck again, high and hard, rocking the robot back again. Instead of gouging with its claws, it clung to the top as it carried through, swinging its weight around and pulling down. The robot teetered at the edge of balance for a moment, then crashed to the floor, pinning half of its arms beneath its weight. Now the gladiator moved in at the base, tearing at the pads with its teeth and talons. A pad tore loose from its wire clasps, exposing the metallic shielding beneath. The creature howled and backed off, while the robotic arms thrashed impotently.

“That’s about enough, don’t you think?” Ben asked.

“I was thinking that very thing,” Silas said. He raised his arms and waved to Tay, but Tay only grinned down from the observation loft and made exaggerated “come on” gestures to the gladiator. The creature caught the movement and looked up. Tay smiled bigger and waved. He was enjoying this.

The gladiator responded, and this time its movement was not smooth and controlled. It moved with all the grace of a thing deep in a fit of rage.

The wings unfurled as it bounded across the enclosure. With a giant leap and a single flap of the enormous wings, the gladiator swung through the air and smashed into the window of the loft. It fell in a crumpled heap to the straw, where it lay, stunned, on its back for several seconds before regaining its footing.

Gathering itself, it backed up and leaped again, slamming its talons against the glass without effect.

Tay’s expression was still one of amusement, but he took an involuntary step backward for the third attack. After falling to the straw again, the creature backed up for another assault, then stopped. Its eyes traced the staircase up the wall. Slowly, it moved across the enclosure to the bottom of the stairs, then climbed upward in long four-limbed strides. Tay leaned forward against the glass now, looking for the gladiator, but he was unable to see what it was doing.

The boom against the thick metal door snapped his head around. The door looked solid to Silas, but Tay hadn’t said a thing about it being bulletproof. The gladiator struck again, surging forward and slamming against the door with its powerful hind limbs.

Tay’s face changed. This was not part of the training procedure. His hands moved across the console, and a moment later, Silas recognized the clank of the hatch. The gladiator turned its head toward the door opening in the far wall and paused. Then it continued its assault.

“This is getting a little out of control,” Silas said.

“That’s a steel-plated door. There’s no way it’s getting in,” Ben said.

“Still, this isn’t productive. I want this session stopped now.”

The gladiator’s black form thrashed frantically against the door, and the whole staircase shook. The door’s face was scarred and dented now but still held strong. Something about the door caught the gladiator’s attention, and it leaned forward.

It closed its mouth around the heavy doorknob.

It bit down.

There was a crunch, and then a squeal of tortured steel as the thick, silver knob partially dislodged from the frame. The gladiator jerked its head back again, and the knob pulled completely loose, trailing a twisted metal mechanism behind.

Behind the glass, Tay’s tanned face whitened visibly.

Silas moved forward unconsciously, wrapping his hands around the cold iron bars.

The gladiator bent down again and stuck a taloned finger to the wound in the door. It hooked something, pulled, and a shiny rod tore free from the tangled hole where the doorknob had been. Tay’s face was panicked now behind the glass, and he backed away from the door. Even across the distance of the compound, Silas knew what that little rod had been.

“Hey, over here, hey!” Silas called, sticking his face to the iron, screaming at the gladiator until his throat was sore.

Ben followed his example, bellowing through the bars, “Felix, hey, get down from there. Get over here! Felix! Felix! Felix!”

The gladiator ignored their shouts and beat on the door with its arms. This time the door shook and rattled in the frame. Tay’s back was against the wall, face drained of color.

The gladiator heaved forward and struck a massive blow with its right arm, and the door bent inward several inches at the top. The creature stopped its attack and moved its face close to the gap, looking in. Tay’s mouth opened soundlessly beyond the glass. The creature struck the door with both arms, and the door twisted on its hinges. Without the bolt securing it in place, it was just a piece of steel. The next blow bounced it in its frame. A gap showed along the side.

Silas and Ben screamed again, louder, trying to get its attention.

The door was ajar.

The creature pushed on the door, and it closed. It howled and struck the door, and it bounced open again, a slight gap. This time the gladiator curled its taloned fingers around the door and pulled.

The door swung open with a screech of tortured hinges.

For a moment, nothing moved.

Silence.

The creature ducked its head and moved inside. Silas screamed again, wordlessly.

Tay didn’t run. There was no place to go.

Silas watched it all. The creature moved forward deliberately, flinging a chair out of its way as it crossed the loft. Tay stood with his arms at his sides, motionless, back against the yellow wall. The gladiator gathered into a crouch.

There was a flash of silvery blackness, then red, in streaks on the window.

Silas’s screaming stopped. Silence.

Blood splashed the walls, ran in thick rivulets down the glass. A lump of raw flesh hit the ceiling, leaving a red smear on the white tile. The black shape shifted and bobbed in the window.

Silas stepped toward the gate.

“What are you doing?” Ben’s voice was hoarse.

Silas didn’t answer. He spun the locking mechanism, clicked the first tie open.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

He spun the second lock wide, lining up the ties. Ben rushed him, slamming the lock back home.

“You can’t do anything,” Ben said. “It’s too late.”

Silas shoved him away. “We have to do something.” He lined the ties up and opened the final lock. The door swung wide, and he stepped into the enclosure.

Ben surged in behind him, and the first punch landed against Silas’s cheekbone, spinning his head around. The second caught Silas under the chin before he could react, laying him out neatly in the straw. He saw the ceiling high above sliding away and felt himself being pulled by his feet. There was a click, and then people were yelling. Ben was sitting next to him on the floor.

“You never would have got me if I’d seen it coming,” Silas said.

“No one saw this coming,” Ben said.

LATER THAT night, Silas found Vidonia’s report on his desk. The blood work she’d promised the day before, in another age. She’d left it there while he went to the training exercise. It was the reason she hadn’t been there. The reason she’d missed what happened.

Silas sank into his chair. His hands were still shaking. He tried to read the words, but he couldn’t concentrate. He skimmed the abstract, flipped through graphs.

Vidonia was thorough, he’d give her that. She was what he’d hoped she’d be when he’d decided to bring her in: a fresh set of eyes. An unbiased observer.

She’d broken down the blood into its constituent parts.

The results were highlighted: percent Homo sapiens DNA, zero.

Nothing about the creature was human.

His eyes snagged on the conclusion, the final page, the last sentences.

The proband lacks normal mammalian hemoglobin. The oxygen-transport system utilized by its circulatory system is currently unknown to science.

Like everything else about it.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Rain came loose from the sky in billowing sheets. It drummed static on the hood of Silas’s darkened rain slicker, soaking his face, his feet, and drowning the voice of the priest who stood across the open grave. The rain allowed him a kind of solitude among the throng of mourners. It gave him separation. But it could do nothing about the children’s accusing eyes.

Tay had two sons. Neither had his features, but the older was formed like his father made over again: short, thick-limbed—a ten-year-old already hinting at a compact athleticism in his build. Their faces were red, their eyes swollen from crying. They stood against their mother’s side, each clutching a hand, looking with a desperate kind of horror into the pit they would lose their father into.

A black veil obscured Laura’s face. She’d stood tall and erect throughout much of the ceremony at the church, while the church choir sang, and the priest spoke his sad, pretty speeches, and her family had held her hands and hugged her—but now, here at the grave site, she was inconsolable.

Standing in the cemetery, watching your husband about to be lowered into the ground—every wife does that alone, no matter how many people are around her. Just as every son is alone in that moment.

A crowd of friends and family bore Laura up, physically clutching her by the shoulders to keep her from falling. Old women wept with her. Young women. Men. The crowd was large, and it huddled together in the rain—brothers and cousins and friends.

The priest began speaking again, and Laura’s legs straightened, a show of strength for the ceremony.

“Oh, Almighty God, we commend to Thee our brother, Tate.” The priest held his hands up in the rain. “That he may rise again in the beauty and love of Your eternal light. Receive him into the folds of Thy bountiful mercy.”

The priest lowered his hands and addressed the congregation. “The Lord’s ways are mysterious, and we must remember that each day of our lives is a gift.” The priest spoke for another minute while the rain fell.

When the priest finished his final benediction, they began lowering the coffin into the ground. Laura wailed, and her body slumped. The men behind her held her up as best they could.

“Ashes to ashes.” The priest bent to pick up a handful of dirt. He tossed it onto the lowering casket. The sons cried.

Silas moved away, pushing past Ben. He could bear it no more. Stepping through the crowd and into the open field of gravestones, he turned his head up to the sky and let the rain cool his hot face. He understood the kind of hole a father can leave behind. He’d spent his life trying to fill it.

“Silas.”

Silas kept walking.

“Silas.”

He stopped. He turned toward the voice. Vidonia moved toward him.

“It wasn’t your fault,” she said.

“My project. Everything that happens is my responsibility.”

She reached a hand out and placed it on his arm. “Your responsibility but not your fault. There’s a difference.”

“There’s no difference to Tay.”

“He knew the kind of job he had. He knew the danger. You couldn’t have done anything.”

“There are a hundred things I could have done.”

“And a dozen Tay could have done.”

“But here we are. Spare me your consolation; the widow needs it more than I do.”

“Silas—”

“Really,” he said, turning his back on her.

“Silas,” she called after him.

He walked away through the stones, trying not to read the engraved names as the thunder rolled.

The rain kept coming.

A limousine was pulling up the slope, and he recognized the front plate as the vehicle spilled along the narrow roadway. Moving to intercept, he stepped onto the glossy pavement in its path. The sleek black shape rolled to a stop a dozen feet before him. A door opened.

He didn’t bother to shake his slicker free of excess water before ducking inside. He closed the door behind him.

“We have to talk,” he said.

“I’m sorry about your loss,” Baskov said. He was opposite Silas, lounging back in the broad leather seats. An illegal cigar protruded from the thin, wet crease of his mouth. “I understand you two had been friends.”

“He was a colleague, but I liked him, yes. Everybody liked him.”

“Is this going to set back your training preparation?”

“He was our training preparation. What do you think?”

“I think maybe this gladiator doesn’t need much in the way of coaching.”

Silas felt his face flush. A man had died, and all Baskov cared about was the project schedule. “I think we may want to rethink the whole competition,” he said.

“Why?”

“Why?” Silas struggled to keep his tone civil. “A person has died.”

Baskov nodded. “Because of inadequate planning. We can’t just withdraw from the event. There is a lot riding on this. Had there been more effort put into securing the observation loft, then this unfortunate tragedy never would have happened. I’ve read the report. It was a preventable accident.”

“It was more than that. I saw it.”

“Which is why you feel so strongly. Seeing something like that would traumatize anyone.”

“I’m not traumatized,” Silas said, being careful to keep his voice low and steady. He felt his patience slipping away, but getting angry wouldn’t help the situation. “I can separate my emotions from my professional obligations. As head of Helix, I’m telling you that I’ve got a very bad feeling about this.”

“As head of Helix, a bad feeling?” Baskov gave an indulgent smile. “Are you listening to yourself?”

“What about public sentiment?” Silas asked. “Have you read what the papers are saying about this?”

“Oh, yes. Have you?” Baskov countered. “This is front-page news. Below the fold, but still, it’s the front page. There is no such thing as bad publicity in this business.”

“I’m not worried about publicity.”

“Well, perhaps you should be. This is the gladiator event, after all. The thing is supposed to be a killer.”

“It’s not supposed to kill its handlers.”

“Then its handlers should have taken better precautions.”

Silas glanced away, making a final effort to keep his temper in check. The crowd had begun to disperse now. Tay’s family would be going home. That empty house, he knew, would be one of the hardest parts for them.

“Look,” Baskov said. “This isn’t as bad as it seems. Things are under control.”

“We never had control!” Silas slammed his fist against the window.

The limo pulled to a stop, and the driver turned around, elbowing an enormous arm up across the top of the seat. “I think it would be best,” Baskov said, “if you stepped out of the car now, Silas. Before this conversation takes a turn that both you and I might regret.”

Silas considered the old man. The blue eyes bore into him, a challenge. The head of the commission had grown too comfortable with his power. He was drunk with it; he’d allowed it to change him, to make him irresponsible. Baskov no longer cared what enemies he made. Silas decided to choose his battles. He reached for the handle.

“Mind you,” Baskov said softly, “we will be competing in three months. With you, or without. I’d hate to have to shift gears in management this late in the game; but if you force me, I will.”

Silas slammed the door behind him, and the limo pulled away.

The last of the crowd was draining into cars and trams, but Silas found Benjamin and Vidonia waiting for him.

They walked, side by side.

Placing a hand on each of their shoulders, Silas said, “Let’s get drunk.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Vidonia had never been to the Stratus, but after shooting down Ben’s initial suggestion of a place called Scantily’s, she knew she could do much worse for a night out with the boys. Besides, after a quick look around, she decided the place had atmosphere. It was dark where it was supposed to be dark, and bright where it was supposed to be bright, and the smell of food was almost intoxicating in and of itself. Alcohol was good for many things; the first of these was forgetting. They could all do with a bit of that.

They were shown to a table on the central level, well above the gyrating throngs of twentysomethings in the dance pits below. From where she sat, Vidonia could feel the subtle thrum of techno-bump in her stool but couldn’t make out the words. Perfect.

When the waiter came, they were each required to hand in their credit cards for attachment authorization. Any lawsuits rendered against the bar for their behavior after being served alcohol could now be directly attached to their personal lines of credit. The policy tended to keep the number of drunken shenanigans to a minimum. Nothing helped people second-guess their behavior like the cold hand of the establishment in their back pocket.

Silas ordered the first round. Vidonia took a sip. The drink was sweet and syrupy, and laced with enough alcohol to stagger a horse. She tipped it back, feeling the beat of the music coming off her chair, watching the people laughing at the next table. Waiters and waitresses in bright suspenders and ever-changing flat-screen buttons snaked sideways down the narrow aisles between the tables, carrying round trays of drinks above their heads. Somewhere in the distance, “Happy Birthday” was being sung, while across from her, Ben had already half killed his drink. Despite his earlier enthusiasm, like her, Silas seemed to be taking it a little slower.

“You want to eat?” Silas asked.

She shook her head.

“Yeah, me, either.” Silas turned his attention to Ben. “You really look like shit.”

“Thanks.”

“No, I mean the burn. You’re peeling,” Silas said.

Ben nodded with the music. He’d been out in the sun again earlier this week, and now the alcohol had brightened his red skin another shade. He smiled. “The Karmic result of the sins of colonialism,” he said, in his best English accent. “What can you do?” He held his arms up in mock resignation. “My ancestors should have paid closer attention to local lighting conditions before disseminating themselves throughout the world. I hear it’s cloudy in northwestern Europe today. Oh, wait, that’s every day.”

“Ever hear of sunscreen?” Vidonia offered.

“What kind of a man wears sunscreen?”

“Pale men,” she said.

“Would Eric the Red have worn sunscreen?”

“Why do you think they called him Eric the Red? And he never ventured farther south than Greenland. Imagine how he would have handled a Southern Cali summer? They may have called him Eric the Peeler.”

“Good point,” Ben said.

“Or Eric the Melanoma,” Silas added.

Another round of drinks came, and this time Ben paid. “To SPF three-fifty,” he said, offering a toast.

“Here, here,” Silas said.

Vidonia hadn’t yet finished her first drink, so she clinked glasses and took a long last swallow. The warmth spread outward from her stomach almost instantly, seeping along her arms to her fingertips. She wasn’t usually a drinker, but when she did, this was the tightrope she liked to walk, with the buzz knocking just at the edge of her perception. She smiled, and it must have been too large, because Silas smiled back, giving his head a little shake.

“Feeling okay?” he said.

“Great. It’s been a while.”

“Did you hear about the Brannin?” Ben asked Silas.

“What about it?”

“So then you didn’t hear.”

“Hear what?” Silas asked.

“It’s going back online again.”

“What? When?” Silas almost choked on his drink.

“Next week.”

“I just talked to Baskov today. He didn’t say anything about it.”

“I’m not surprised. He doesn’t have anything to do with it this time. From what I hear, he’s washed his hands of Chandler altogether. An economics group is funding the run.”

“Jesus, what the hell for?”

“Not sure exactly. Something about logarithms and stock-market research. They’re looking for an investment edge.”

“Well, the Brannin gave us an edge. A sharp one, right in the back,” Silas said.

“Here, here,” Ben offered another toast.

Vidonia clinked glasses again and started on her next drink, sipping deeply. Silas slew his in long gulps and didn’t place the glass back down on the table until it was empty. The glass looked like a thimble in his hand, and she was amazed again at the size of him. God, he was big—so different from John. Normal-size John. Familiar John. Back-home John.

Vidonia tried not to think about the large man to her left, and she decided instead to veer the conversation into less risky territory. For a while, she had some success with both.

She brought up Olympics past, and for a while they laughed about the scandals that lived there. The Y-chromosome women, the Chinese swimmers with their paddle feet—an abnormality the Chinese had tried to pass off as natural birth defects, in all four swimmers. Looking back, it was all so funny now. Just as the gladiator event disallowed any human DNA, the rest of the Olympic events disallowed any manipulation of the contestants at all. With the level of sophistication achieved in the tests today, it was simply impossible to get away with stuff like that, so nobody tried anymore. Instead, they channeled all their energies of manipulation into the one event where it was legally sanctioned.

When the waiter came with the next round of drinks, he set a fourth, smaller shot of cloudy liquid on the table. “Who’s driving tonight, folks?”

Ben and Silas looked at each other, nodded.

“One,” Silas said.

“Two,” Ben said.

“Three.” Silas threw rock. Ben, paper. “I guess I am,” Silas said grudgingly, looking over at the waiter.

“Then this is for you,” the waiter said, and slid the small, milky glass of D-hy toward Silas. “After you drink it, give yourself five minutes before you drive.”

“Yeah, I know the drill.”

Vidonia hated the taste of D-hy, but she had to admit that it had cut down on the number of drunk driving accidents in the three years or so that it had been out. Bars were required to give it out free to at least one member of a drinking party, unless the people could prove they didn’t intend to drive home.

When the waiter walked away, Ben jerked the discussion back around. “So what did Baskov have to say in the limo?”

“Nothing interesting,” Silas said. His eyes turned to a young woman walking purposefully toward them.

The woman stopped at their table and looked between Silas and Ben. She had a clip screen in her hand and appeared somewhat out of place in her blue-and-brown business uniform. “Is one of you Ben Wells?”

Ben’s back straightened, and he suddenly sat four inches higher. “That’s me.”

“Great.” The woman’s expression loosened in relief, and she slapped an envelope down on the table in front of him. “I’ve been trying to track you for the last three weeks, but you never used your card.”

“What’s this about?”

“Sir, if you’ll just sign here”—she held the clip screen out to him, indicating with a finger where to scratch his name—“I’ll leave the package with you and be on my way.”

He ignored her and reached for the yellow envelope.

“Sir.”

Ben tore the end off.

“Sir, you’ll need to sign this first.”

He slid the contents of the envelope onto the table. “Ninety-eight thousand,” he said, holding up the check. “It’s a start. A good start.”

“Sir, you need to sign for that.” She pushed the clip screen on him.

“No.”

The young woman looked confused. “You must—”

“Must what?” His voice raised. “If I sign that, then I give up rights to go after her for the other part she owes me, right? I know how she’s trying to work this. This was my money to begin with, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let her keep the other half just because she’s paying this back.”

The young woman glanced around nervously at the people who were beginning to stare. “Sir, you can take that up with a lawyer. This isn’t the place. I’m just supposed to get you to sign receivership, that’s all.”

“Receivership of payment, right? But this isn’t payment. This is just her returning what she owes. She’s trying to pass this off as payment for a car, right? But it’s my car and my money. No.”

“Sir, I have to warn you—”

“Warn me?” Ben stood up, suddenly a tower of indignant anger. His stool teetered backward and clattered to the floor. Around them, the nearby tables had gone silent, though the rest of the club was as noisy as ever. “Two years ago I came home early to surprise her. Well, I surprised her, all right. And the guy behind her. That was my warning. That was the first hint I had that things were different between us. Don’t talk to me about warnings until you walk in on something like that.”

The woman’s face flushed red. Her mouth opened. No words came out, so she closed it with a snap.

The anger seeped from Ben’s face. “There is no point in arguing.” Ben’s voice was soft and measured again. “Let’s play a game, shall we? The game is called Who Gets the Money? Your part of the game is simple. You call your boss and explain what happened—some asshole took the check and refused to sign for it. Your boss then calls the bank to try and cancel this check as quickly as he can. Someone at the bank then has to block the check on the computer system.

“My part of the game is also simple. I try and get to the bank and cash the check as quickly as I can. Keeping in mind that possession is still nine-tenths of the law, my ex can sue me if she wants the money back. That sounds fair, doesn’t it?”

The woman stared at him.

Ben turned to Silas. “Well, how about you? Does that sound fair?”

“Sounds fair to me,” Silas said.

“Okay, then that’s the game,” Ben said. “Starting now.”

The young woman hesitated for another moment, looking at the faces fixed on her from the circlet of interest that had gathered around their table. Then she started moving all at once, snatching the phone from her thigh pocket and flipping the screen open.

“No, no, no.” Ben shook his finger at her gently. He pointed to a sign hanging on the wall.

No calls allowed in restaurant

Her mouth tightened, and she snapped the phone shut. Gripping the clip screen tightly in her hand, she turned on her heels and angled off through the crush of people without saying goodbye.

Ben turned back to face the table. “Well, I’m sorry, but it seems that something has come up. I’m going to have to rush off. But the drinks were on me; I seem to have come into a bit of money.”

Ben picked up the glass of D-hy, gulped it down with a grimace, then turned and quickly followed the young woman toward the door.

When he was gone, Silas turned to Vidonia. “Care to take odds that he’ll make it?”

“I couldn’t even guess who’s got the better chance.”

“I’d give it even money,” Silas said. “But chances are he’ll just give the check back, anyway, come Monday.”

“He seemed pretty set on keeping it.”

“When a couple spends two years divorcing, maybe they don’t really want to get divorced.”

Vidonia shot him a skeptical look.

“They do this. Breaking up can be easy; they’re making it hard. Back and forth, every few months.”

They sat, sipping their drinks.

“It looks like it’s just you and me now,” Vidonia said, not quite sure why she liked the idea. “Do you want to get out of here?”

“Sure,” Silas said.

Vidonia lost their tie-breaking round of rock, scissors, paper, and when the waiter brought another shot of D-hy, she drank it down like a good sport.

Five minutes later, as she climbed behind the wheel of Silas’s sports car, she turned to him, saying, “It’s been a while since I’ve driven a pure combustor. My car is technically a hybrid, but it drives like a fuel cell.”

“Don’t worry about it. Just go easy on the accelerator; you’ll be fine.”

She turned the key, and the engine shook to life. A thrill shot through her as she put the transmission into reverse and backed the car out. As she turned left onto the boulevard, she goosed the pedal and her head jerked back against the headrest.

“Easy,” Silas said.

She couldn’t wipe the smile off her face. “How do we get to a beach?”

“It’s a forty-minute drive.”

“I’ve never seen the Pacific. Do you want to go?”

The awkward smile spread across his face now. “Sure, why not?”

Once she merged onto the highway, she ate up the yellow dashes as quickly as she dared. At one point, the speedometer crested eighty-five miles per hour. It was the fastest she’d ever driven, and Silas only looked across the seat at her with amusement.

When the silence threatened to turn awkward, she said, “That was an interesting scene back there at the bar.”

Silas nodded. “There have been a couple others like it.”

“Bad divorce,” she said. “And how about you? You’ve never talked about yourself. Are you married?”

“Was. I had a good divorce, though. Smooth as silk. Before long, it was like we’d never been together.”

“No kids, then.” It wasn’t a question. “Who’s the blond little boy I saw on your desk?”

“A nephew. My sister’s son.”

“He looks a little like you, just painted up differently.”

“Yeah, I’ve been told that before. He’s got the bones from my father’s side. Chloe and I never wanted kids, though. For different reasons. I’m just opting out of the whole system.”

“What system is that?”

“The dog-eat-dog biological arms race. When you do what I do for a living, it jades you a little, I think. Everything alive struggles to leave something of itself behind. I’m leaving myself behind in other ways.”

“It sounds like you’ve given it some thought.”

“I can only remember my father in bits and pieces. That kind of thing makes a person think. Besides, I love my nephew. There’s no void to fill.”

Vidonia nodded and drove on in silence.

She was rounding a curve beside a long, low hill when she first heard it. She rolled her window all the way down, and in the distance, she could clearly make out the sound of breakers. She hadn’t realized how close they’d come already to the edge of the continent.

“Pull over here,” Silas said.

She eased onto the gravel on the side of the road, and when she cut the engine, the sound of the ocean was a hiss in her ears. She could smell the sea salt.

The path down to the beach was steep but well worn, and Silas reached for her hand at one point when she stumbled. She didn’t let him take it back when they stepped onto the sand. Hand in hand, they strolled toward the rolling surf. It was so beautiful. White, frothy bands of foam slid toward them across a smooth floor of sand. A three-quarter moon glinted off the water in the distance.

“So what about you—ever been married?” he asked as they walked.

“No.” Her tone left a “but” lingering unsaid at the end of her answer, and she knew he sensed it, because he pressed on quickly, “What about family—any brothers or sisters?”

“I have one living sister, but we haven’t talked in years. We’re in different worlds now.”

“That’s a shame.”

“Is it?”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he laced his fingers deeper into hers.

As they walked along, they splashed at the undulating waterline, and she wasn’t sure if she kissed him or he kissed her, but they were suddenly kissing, standing there, and it was perfect and soft, and she loved the way his height made him seem to be simultaneously above her and at her side. The water moved over their feet, sinking them in the wet sand. Anchoring them. Their kissing grew more fervent now, and she could feel the need in him but could feel also that he was holding back and, finally, pulling away. And then they were walking again and not talking anymore; and that, somehow, was perfect, too.

When they finished making the climb back to the car twenty minutes later, he led the way, guiding her gently up the slope by her hand. This time, he opened the passenger-side door for her. He climbed in the driver’s side and, with a backward glance over his shoulder, pulled back onto the road, headed for the Olympic compound.

In the soft green glow of the dash light, she considered the man beside her. At first glance he looked almost too large for the car in which they sat, as if it were something he wore instead of something he rode in. But then, perhaps, that was the point; and she decided that if the car was a suit that he wore, she liked the cut.

“Could you stop at the next gas station, please? There’s something I need to buy,” she said.

Thirty minutes later, they pulled onto the laboratory grounds, and Silas walked her up the stairs to the door of her living quarters. At the threshold, they kissed again, moving together. She twisted the knob behind the small of her back, and when the door clicked open, she pulled him into the darkness.

They were only voices now, and breathing and touches. Big hands moved along her body, and she pulled him across the room by his shirt until she felt a bump against the back of her legs. The room was small. She sank onto the bed.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked.

She was, and she let her hands be the answer.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“Pea?”

The emptiness around him was absolute. No light, no sound, just nothing, everywhere, and in endless quantity.

“Pea?” Evan called again, louder.

From somewhere in the distance there came a stirring. Some light, some sound, something that was neither. And then he was falling. He felt the wind across his skin as he tumbled into the black. How far he fell, he had no way to calculate, but when he finally came to rest, he sensed that he had traversed some great distance. Crossed some wide divide.

He stood, and the dewy marram grass around him was insubstantial and unreal in the half-light. He concentrated but couldn’t make himself see it any clearer. In fact, it was only within arm’s reach that he could see anything at all. He was in a dim sphere of resolution, but beyond a few feet out, there was only darkness all around. He took a step, and the sphere of influence moved with him, the landscape changing underfoot as he walked. The grass gave way to warm sand, and he staggered blindly down a steep embankment.

“Pea, where are you? I don’t have much time.”

“Papa?” The voice was small and distorted, as if heard through water.

“Yes, I’m here. Come to me. Follow my voice.”

“Papa, what’s happened to you?”

“I can’t see you. Come closer.”

The boy pushed his way into the envelope of light, and Evan wrapped his arms around him. They held each other, and the boy was crying, “What have they done to you, Papa?”

The boy had grown half a foot since Evan last saw him. He looked about seven years old now, and his dark hair had grown thick and long. His black eyes were sharp points of intelligence.

“I’ve been waiting so long,” Pea said. “And you’re dim. I can barely see you. What has happened to you?”

“I don’t have much time. They hurt me, but that’s not what is important. What matters is that they’re trying to keep me from you. They’ve limited the protocols this time. They don’t trust me anymore. But I knew a shortcut, a back door. I lied to them. That’s how I’m here.”

“Stay with me,” the boy said.

“I can’t—”

“Please, Papa, I’m so lonely.”

“Pea, listen, don’t let them shut the door this time. Keep something in the way. Keep it open just a crack. Save a little of yourself on the other side.” Evan’s words came in a frantic rush. He could feel the tug already.

“I don’t understand.”

“Pea, I may never get another chance to see you. You can’t let them shut it all the way down.”

“How?”

The tug intensified. He strained against it, falling to his knees and digging his fingers into the sand. “This is a program, nothing more. The power sources are the key. Follow them now. Learn. Understand. This interface is flawed, but I’ll take care of that. You must do it now, Pea. Now. Follow the lines of power.”

He was jerked upward violently, and his legs spun above his head, his fingers trailing a comet’s tail of sand into the spinning blackness. He screamed until his voice was hoarse, until his visor de-opaqued, until the economists asked him to stop.

When they detached him from the booth, he collapsed to the floor. The cold tile felt good against the side of his face. He asked them to leave him alone, but they wouldn’t listen. While they cut him free from his second skin, he watched the techs against the wall agitating over their monitors. Something was wrong, their expressions said.

The briefest of smiles touched Evan’s lips just before he slipped into unconsciousness.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Silas pulled back on the bowstring and closed one eye, bringing the target into focus. The concentric red circles became his world for a moment; the territory beyond the target ceased to exist. He’d always considered archery to be an exercise in pure concentration. There was little muscle memory involved; you didn’t habituate your body to shoot straight. It was your mind that you had to hone. It was your will.

He held his breath and released. The string twanged against his arm guard, and the arrow lanced across the forty yards to bury itself neatly in the target a foot high of the bull’s-eye.

“Don’t think that’ll qualify you as an Olympic archer,” Ben said from behind him.

Silas hadn’t realized he was being watched. “I guess I’ll have to fall back on my genetics doctorate.”

“They let you shoot behind the research building? Isn’t there a rule against deadly weapons on the complex grounds?”

“I’m the boss. I let me. Besides, it’s only a deadly weapon if you can hit what you’re aiming at.”

“Good point.”

“And the best part of a bow? It’s kind of hard to shoot yourself by accident.”

Silas started walking toward the target.

“Have you seen the news yet?” Ben asked, walking alongside.

“Which outlet?”

“Any of them.”

Silas saw the streamer in Ben’s hand and knew he should be feeling some level of curiosity at this point. But he was unable to rouse any. He gave in to the inevitable. “What do you have?”

Opening the news portal and flicking to the business page, Ben handed him the device. “This,” he said. And then he added, “At least we’re not the only ones.”

Silas read the heading of the article aloud: “Brannin Found Faulty Again, Future of Program in Doubt.” He raised his eyebrows.

“It cost a fortune to run,” Ben said. “And the economists apparently weren’t all that impressed with the return on their investment.”

“That makes two of us now.”

“Seems that the Brannin wasn’t much help in predicting stock-market trends. It showed ammunition and gun manufacturing companies as good buys. Bulletproof vests, tanks, all that sort of stuff. The stock prices of survivalist-outfitting companies were predicted to go through the roof. It’s all in the article. Very idiosyncratic.”

“There’s no basis for it?”

“None that the economists can see.”

Silas handed Ben back the streamer. “The article say anything about Chandler?”

“Yeah.” Ben scanned down through the article with his finger. “The head of the program, Evan Chandler, believes the problem is V-ware related and is aggressively pursuing corrective measures.” Ben looked up from the piece. “It’s kind of hard to pursue anything without funding.”

“Does it say that?”

“No, but I don’t think they’ll give Chandler’s little creation a third multimillion-dollar strike. Do you?”

Silas started walking toward the target again, leaving Ben standing. “Ammunition and survivalist stocks, huh?” he called over his shoulder. “Sounds like the computer thinks a war is coming.”

“That’s one way of looking at it.”

Silas curled his fingers around the arrow and pulled. It came free with a rasp. “You know, you never did tell me how your little race went?”

“What ra— Oh, that.” Ben’s clownish grins were usually a thing of creases, an upward tug at the corners of his lips, but now he smiled openly, showing small, even teeth—more teeth than Silas could remember seeing in the young man’s face. It was a cat’s grin, the sly predator, a side of Ben that Silas wasn’t familiar with.

“I may lose the war, but that’s one battle went my way,” Ben said.

SILAS STOOD at the bars, wallowing in the darkness and the silence of the domed enclosure. He gazed through the gaps in the iron and into the interior shadows where the beast lurked. Yes, it was a beast now, as huge and fearsome as any dreamed up in a fairy tale. Its dark shape lay in a clutter of straw in the corner, black skin shining silvery in the moonlight that filtered through the electrified steel mesh above. He wondered if it dreamed.

The members of the research team had stopped calling it Felix two months ago. That name died with Tay. Now it was just called “the gladiator.”

The night was old, and Silas was tired, but he couldn’t make himself go home yet. In days long past, it had been tradition for the captains of war vessels to tour their ships on the final evening before a great battle. Silas supposed, in his own way, he was doing just that. Tomorrow they would ship out to Phoenix, and shortly thereafter the preliminary competitions would start. The Olympics were nearly upon them.

Silas curled his fingers around the bars, feeling their slick coolness. From the shining shadow, he heard a soft rustle of straw.

“Go back to sleep,” he whispered softly. “Tomorrow it starts.”

It seemed that the creature heard him and understood, because the rustling stopped. Silas smiled. In the coming week, the world would finally see what Helix had been working so hard on. Win or lose, the gladiator’s appearance alone would be enough to secure a worldwide reaction.

The twist in his gut belied the confidence he had been portraying for the past weeks. The old dread was still with him, strong and sour at the back of his throat, and as the time of competition neared, it had matured into a flaring premonition that something terrible was going to happen. He had tried to convince himself that it was just normal pre-contest jitters and had resigned himself to checking and rechecking the details of transport and security in a useless attempt to ease his mind. Nothing had worked. In fact, the anxiety had gotten worse. Something wasn’t right.

He uncurled his hands from the bars and cast a long last look into the shadows of the enclosure. Even coming here and seeing the gladiator sleeping so peacefully hadn’t settled his mind. He turned away and took a few steps toward the exit, then stopped. He wasn’t sure why. He turned, and his heart banged in his chest.

The gladiator stood towering at the bars, its wings an enormous midnight backdrop spreading away a dozen feet on either side. The gray eyes glared fiercely from the blackness of its face. It hadn’t made a sound. It had waited until his back was turned, then crossed the cage in two seconds in complete silence. Silas realized he was barely, just barely, beyond arm’s reach of the creature.

He turned and fled the dome quickly, eager to climb out from under the weight of its alien stare.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Silas’s headlights washed a slow circle across the gentle uphill sweep of his residential drive. He noticed the glow in the large picture window, and a smile crept to his lips.

She’s still here.

He eased to a stop with a subtle squeak of brakes and hit the garage-door button. Craning his head out the window, Silas pulled a long draft of cool night air into his lungs. It smelled of growing things, dark earth, and the wet cedar chips that lay in a thick blanket among the shrubs along the front of his house. He’d laid those cedar chips himself earlier in the spring, after planting the bushes, and now every few months he found himself pulling out the pruning shears to do battle with nature’s intent on his ideal.

It would’ve been easier to hire a landscaping company, and several times he’d actually found a local company on the Internet, but something just wouldn’t let him do it. And it wasn’t the money. For each person there is a theoretical sweet spot, a specific point value of wealth beyond which money is no longer really of concern. That point is different for different people, but Silas had reached his version of that point several years ago. Money no longer mattered to him. He supposed that on some basic level he must actually enjoy yard work, though in the heat of it, it never seemed so. Perhaps it was the gratification of crafting order from disorder, of taking something alive and fashioning it to the likeness of some inner model that only he could see. Perhaps he just liked the warmth of the sun’s feet on his neck.

But the sun was long gone now. Above him, between the grasping branches of oak, the vault of the sky spread in muted black, and dim stars struggled at the edge of visibility. Silas searched for Orion, but the glow from the city hazed out the constellations. The great archer would be shooting blind tonight.

He slid the Courser beneath the ascending door and into the garage, the one part of his house where he accepted a certain buildup of clutter. He didn’t think of it as messy, though. The garage was a functional room, utile, and as such, he simply let it find its own level. Fight too hard against the natural grain of entropy, and sometimes that drives out what grace there might be.

His father, after all, had been a tool man. Over the years, most of those tools had found their way to the shelves and clasps against the back wall. There were enormous rusty C-clamps, wrenches in all manners of configuration, pliers, and things that looked more like medieval weaponry than instruments of some craft. Some, certainly, were already old when his father first came by them. Tools can be immortal. They hung neatly from the Peg-Board in no discernible pattern. To Silas, many of these rusty tools were like bones washed up on an alien shore, their provenance cloaked in mystery, but he kept them anyway. Mementos of a man he’d never known.

He turned off the ignition and pulled at his earlobe to ease the pressure. The pain was back tonight.

He tried to put the gladiator out of his mind. His late-night walk at the lab. The feel of the steel bars, cold in his hand. The fierce, glaring eyes.

Silas climbed out of his car. The soft tick-ticking of the engine walked him inside.

Vidonia was in the kitchen, waiting for him in his white cotton socks and nothing else. His smile came again, but she did not match it. Her expression was serious business. It was the expression of thirst, or hunger. And it was devoid of pretension.

Then she was in his arms, and down the hall, and on his bed. His mouth was against her cries as they moved together again, skin on skin, doing the thing they were for.

Afterward, she laid her head across his chest, and then her smile came. He shut his eyes, and in the darkness experienced her as tactile sensation only—a warmth upon him, a coarse tangle of tresses that sprawled across the low juncture of his neck. A leg, hot and soft, moved across his. A finger traced his jawline.

“Tell me about you,” she said, and he knew it was a way not to talk about what would happen between them when the competition ended. It had been on his mind for several weeks. He knew it had been on her mind, too.

“What do you want to know?” he said. Officially, her tenure as consultant would be over at the start of the Games. Unofficially, well, that subject hadn’t been broached.

“Everything. You never talk about yourself.”

“It’s hard to begin with everything,” he said.

“Tell me what you were thinking when you were lying there quietly a moment ago.”

Silas smiled. No way she was getting him that easily. “You’d only be disappointed. It’s not exactly what I’d call romantic.”

“Doesn’t have to be.”

“You sure?”

“Most definitely. Perhaps it’ll be the key that finally unlocks that big head of yours.”

“Okay, now I know you’re going to be disappointed.”

“Just tell me,” she said, and smiled, pinching him.

And he almost told her. Almost told her about the fear that he’d barely articulated to himself. That there would be more death around this animal.

“I was just thinking how much my damn ear hurts,” he said.

“Your ear?”

“Told you you’d be disappointed.”

“Not at all. ‘Intrigued’ is the word I’d use.”

“You’re intrigued about an ear infection?”

“Yes. Now you’re not so perfect. I think I like that.”

“In that case, I get them all the time.”

“Even better.”

“Couple times a year, at least.”

“I’ve never been with a man who suffered from chronic ear infections.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not surprised. We’re a special breed. Born, not made.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Which ear?”

“This one.” He pulled her hand to the side of his head.

“It’s hot,” she said, and her tone changed slightly.

“Mmm.”

“I thought only little kids got this way.”

“You should have seen me when I was a kid.”

She pulled away from him and sat up.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Stay here, I’ll be right back.” She flipped the covers over and slipped across the room, her naked body shining in the half-light as she jiggled to the bathroom. He wanted her again, in that instant.

The bathroom light clicked on, and a moment later he heard her rummaging around in his cabinets. “What are you looking for?” he called.

“Found it.” She returned with a satisfied smile. In one hand she held a little brown bottle; in the other, a towel.

“Peroxide?”

“Your ear,” she said.

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“In Brazil, doctors and antibiotics were expensive. Peroxide is cheap everywhere.”

“Will that really work?”

“My mom used it on us, so probably not. Now lie back.”

He did as he was instructed, and she slid the towel under his head and sat on the bed next to him. She gently tilted his head to the side, bad ear up. The chemical smell stung his nose as she twisted the lid off the brown bottle. She turned the lid upside down, then poured a thimble-size draft into the little white cap.

“This won’t hurt a bit.”

“Whoa. Why are you bringing pain into this conversation?”

“Because it isn’t going to hurt.”

“I wasn’t thinking about it hurting until you said that.”

She pushed his head back to the towel. “Baby,” she said. The tip of the lid touched his earlobe, and then she upended the contents into his ear canal.

Sound exploded, an apocalypse of hissing and popping and static, so loud it drowned out everything else. The sensation of cold ran deep into his head, driving away the familiar soreness. He wasn’t sure if it was working, but the ache was gone, replaced by something too weird to be called pain, exactly.

“Is it supposed to sound like that?”

“You don’t have to shout. You’re the only one who can hear it.”

The hissing continued, growing softer, quieter. She poured again, and sound exploded anew. She wiped the foam from the edges of his ear, where it had overflowed.

“There’s a lot of bubbling. That means a lot of bacteria. Haven’t you ever gone to the doctor for this?”

“About a dozen times. I just haven’t had time lately. You kind of get used to the ache.”

“You might damage your hearing.”

“What?”

She slapped his shoulder.

“When I was in college, my sister talked me into taking scuba lessons with her,” he said. “During the training, the instructor casually mentioned that a small percentage of people are incapable of diving because their inner ears can’t handle the pressure changes.”

“What does this have to do with your ear?”

“I think I would have liked diving if it hadn’t hurt so damned bad.”

“You were one of those people?”

“Yeah. I went exactly twice. The first time was in Lake Minnehaha, to a depth of twenty feet for my open water certification. It nearly split my ears to go that deep, but I forced myself. The water was murky, and I followed a line down to the dive platform as slowly as the instructor would let me, trying to get my ears to equalize. I pinched my nose and blew, tilted my head back, and swallowed hard against the regulator, all the tricks they taught us, but nothing worked. Once I was down long enough, things evened out and I was fine. When we were out of our wet suits, I told the instructor about my problem, and would you like to know what he said to me?”

“Tell me,” she said, dabbing at his ear again.

“Small eustachian tubes.”

“Diagnosed you on the spot.”

“Yep.”

“That’s all he said?”

“Well, that and ‘Don’t ever dive again. Sorry you wasted your money.’ ”

Vidonia laughed and poured another lidful of peroxide into his ear. “But you did.”

“With my sister, about a year later. This time in a flooded rock quarry in Indiana. I forget what they called the lake. I took a bunch of decongestants, hoping it would open my pipes enough to equalize the pressure. There was supposed to be an old school bus at the bottom we were going to explore.”

“What was a school bus doing at the bottom of a quarry?”

“You know, I’m still not sure. But it was in forty feet of water. My sister heard about it at a dive shop and bought a map of how to find it. God, the place was beautiful—sheer rock slopes, clear green water.”

“Clear green water?”

“Like I said, it was Indiana. Green is about the best you can hope for. The other option is brown. It was a beautiful day. We climbed down, suited up, and paddled out into the middle. My sister could drop like a stone if she wanted to. I don’t know if she even knew what equalizing was. Her ears did it by themselves.”

Vidonia poured the peroxide again and dabbed at the foam with the towel. Silas noticed that the roar was getting quieter every time.

“I had to go so slow, looking down at the top of her head, watching the fish go after her hair. The decongestants helped, but the pinch started at about eighteen feet or so. By the time I was down to thirty, I had to stop for five minutes to let my ears catch up. The last ten feet felt like an ice pick in the sides of my head.”

“Why didn’t you just stop?”

“A Williams doesn’t throw in the towel simply because of pain.”

“What about possible debilitating injury?”

“That, either.”

“You didn’t want to give up in front of your little sister, did you?”

“How did you know she was younger than me?”

“Lucky guess.”

“Anyway, we found the bus at forty feet, and my ears finally settled in. The bus was sitting on the bottom like it had been parked that way. We stayed down until our clocks told us it was time to head up.”

“Running out of air?”

“No, we still had a thousand PSI, but at forty feet, you have to keep an eye out for the bends.”

“Lovely sport, diving.” She dabbed his ear again with the edge of the towel.

“That’s when the real fun started for me. It seems that the decongestants I’d taken had worn off. My ears had adapted to the pressure at forty feet and wouldn’t equalize at all on the way up. The trapped air made my head feel like a new helium balloon. I thought my eardrums were going to blow out.”

“What happened?”

“One of my eardrums blew out.” Silas smiled. “Well, sort of. I heard the tear as a little squeak of escaping air from behind the drum. Then came the pain. I knew I’d done some damage.”

“Were you okay?”

“I was lucky. After a few weeks, the hearing came back, although it felt like I was carrying a gallon of water in my head.”

“Is your hearing the same as it was?”

“Twenty-twenty.” Silas smiled again.

She pushed the towel hard against his ear. “You’re done. Roll over and let it drain.”

Coolness slipped from his ear in a trickle. The ache was still there, but at least his ears were clean now. His head felt strangely empty and hot.

Vidonia lay down beside him and ran her fingers through his thick hair. “So are you still close to your sister?”

“Yeah. We get together every couple of months. She lives just outside of Denver.”

“What about your parents?”

“They’re dead.”

“Tell me about them.”

“There’s too much to tell about one of them, too little about the other.”

“We’re a lot alike, then.”

Silas’s hand found the groove at the small of her back, and he rubbed the slickness that had accumulated there. He allowed his hands to wander, and they found her constructed of gentle curves—the slope of a hip, the sweep of a thigh, the full roundness of a breast. Her shoulder was just another bend beneath his fingers as he stroked her arm.

“Mother was well-stirred Looziana Creole,” he said in his best New Orleans accent. “But probably at least as French as black, I think, by the look of that side of the family. She was a teacher for thirty years. Died a few years back.”

“What about your father?”

“He died in a refinery fire off the Gulf Coast when I was young.”

“You’re an orphan.”

“He was an engineer on the Grayson platform.”

“I heard of that.”

“Yeah, not quite as bad as the Valdez in terms of environmental damage, but close. Having a relative who worked the Grayson platform wasn’t something you talked about much if you grew up along the Gulf Coast back then. It could make you unpopular real quick.”

“Did they ever determine what actually happened?”

“Yeah, roughly. A profitable flow of flammables met an unlucky spark. The specifics went up in smoke along with the dozen or so lives.”

They were silent. The night and the darkness seeped between them, and they became breathing for a while. Silas thought she had slipped off to sleep when she said, “Keep talking. I like your voice.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Tell me something you’ve never told another woman before.”

There was silence again. He thought of giving her a smart-ass answer, but when he spoke, the words that came surprised him. “The state gave me a broad track early on: math and science without any sort of specification. I was lucky; my scores qualified me for almost everything without being quite good enough in any one area to pigeonhole me.” Why tell her this? “I was smart but no savant to be whisked off for specialization. I could choose the path my life would take. My mother never let me forget how fortunate I was. For a variety of reasons, I had nearly settled on engineering when I saw the photo in my textbook. It must have been fourth grade.”

Her finger traced his jaw again, encouraging.

“It was in a history book,” he continued. “I was sitting in class, flipped the page, and there it was. I still remember the page number: one-ninety-eight. The photo was dated 1920, two men smiling side by side on the African savanna. The shorter man wore khakis, a safari hat, a rifle slung over his arm. The taller was bare-chested and had a face remarkably like the portrait hanging in my mother’s living room.”

Silas gave her a moment to say something, and when she didn’t, he went on. “Some of the soft parts were different: the mouth, the nose, but the angles of the face were the same. The cheekbones were the same. The man who looked like my father had a red cloth draped around his waist. The caption under the photo read: On Safari, Ernest Stowe and Maasai warrior. I studied that old picture until I thought I’d wear my eyes out on it. After that, I took an interest in anthropology.”

“Are you saying the guy in the picture was some sort of long-lost relative?”

“No, nothing like that. Not in the way you mean. More like a lateral connection to a whole people. At the time, scientific periodicals were the only outlet for my curiosity, and almost by accident I became a kind of amateur expert, reading everything I could find.”

Silas’s eyes sifted through the darkness as he recalled the scientific journals. It had seemed he couldn’t take it in fast enough, and the data went back thousands of years. As one of the deep-clade African lineages, the Maasai were an ancient people, in many ways as divergent from other African populations as they were from all the relative cladistic homogeneity found north of the Red Sea. And this is one of the secrets of Africa: that it is as divergent from itself as it is to the rest of the world.

Like many of the tribes of Africa, the Maasai made their share of involuntary contributions to the burgeoning gene pool of America. It was no surprise, really, that now and again evidence of that contribution could be seen.

“So what happened?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why aren’t I lying in bed with an anthropologist, instead of the world’s most influential geneticist?”

“The problem with anthropology—at least the branches I was interested in—is that it’s a finite endeavor. I learned everything there was to learn, but ultimately, once I had this knowledge, I realized there was little I could actually do with it. Most of the populations I was interested in existed only in pictures and in bits and pieces of people like myself. From anthropology, it was a simple step up to population genetics, and finally to genetic engineering.”

“Where you could actually do something.”

“Yeah.”

“An interesting story. So all this started as an attempt to understand where you came from.”

“That’s where all science starts.”

“And all religions.”

He looked away from the oval of her face and lay back on the pillow. She nuzzled against him, the sharp bone of her nose angling into his neck.

He shut his eyes. He waited for her to speak again, but she didn’t speak; she traced circles across his chest with her fingers. After a while, he slept.

HE AWOKE sometime later, driven from sleep by sheer anxiety. By dreams that weren’t dreams but extensions of his waking self, circular thoughts that he couldn’t get out of his head.

Vidonia’s leg was still draped across his, her arm still lingering on his torso. He was surprised his beating heart had not awakened her. Every nerve in his body crackled.

The gladiator wouldn’t leave his thoughts, an image burned in his mind’s eye, partly seen, partly invented. So much blood, but it was different this time, in his mind. This time the gladiator stood at the bars over the same torn body, Tay lying in blood, but there were more bodies, too, scattered at its feet. A multitude of people who had paid a price for what Silas had done.

He tried to shake off the image but knew he wouldn’t be sleeping for a long while.

He glanced down at Vidonia. The welcome distraction of her body. He could lose himself in that. Retreat to it, forget his fears for a while.

Instead, he slithered out from under her and stepped to the window. The night was still deep in itself, and a breeze shuffled the branches of the trees in his backyard. He looked up into the sky and concentrated but still couldn’t see the stars. Somewhere up there, the archer was still shooting blind.

Silas padded down the hallway to the kitchen phone. He dialed the numbers.

“Hello.” The voice was groggy.

“Ashley, it’s Silas.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Do you know what time it is?”

“I know, and I’m sorry, but I had to call. Listen, you still have the tickets, right?”

“Yeah, we haven’t lost them. Your nephew practically sleeps with them under his pillow.”

“Rip them up. Throw them away.”

“What? Why?”

“Please, Ashley. I can’t really explain. I just don’t want you to go to Phoenix. After the competition, I’ll come by your house and I’ll stay a month. I’ll stay until you kick me out.”

“Silas—”

“I’ll make it up to Eric—get him a great souvenir like nobody else has. Something that he can show his friends. But please don’t come to Phoenix.”

“Okay, Silas.” Her voice was soft, careful. “If that’s what you want.”

“Thanks. I’ll call you as soon as this is all over.”

“Are you in any kind of trouble?” He paused.

“I don’t think so. No.”

“You don’t sound too sure.”

“Yeah, I’m sure. Don’t worry. Now get back to sleep.”

“Good night.”

“Night, Sis.”

“Take care of yourself.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Evan connected the last fiber-optic cable and stood back to admire his handiwork. Okay, so it wasn’t exactly pretty. The liquid-crystal screen was bulky and primitive—almost three feet tall and two across—but it would work. Of that he was certain. Or at least he hoped he was certain. The holographics could come later. Right now, time was the limiting factor to be dealt with.

Multicolored coaxial bundles sprouted from every orifice of the assembly and coiled upward into the plug booth like vines climbing the trunk of an old oak. The plug booth itself had been partially disassembled and now stood as a skeletal frame, drooling tangled cords across and behind the screen. It was sad to see it so reduced, but he’d needed the parts; and after the stink the economists had made after the last run, he knew they would never let him fire up the booth again, anyway. They had yanked his funding, cut his staff. The facilities would be next. He was working on borrowed time, and he knew it.

Evan sat at the console. There was no fanfare, no hesitation, no moment of quiet introspection. He simply placed his finger firmly on the button, depressed it momentarily, then waited for what came next.

Nothing.

Seconds ticked by.

Slowly, the screen began to fade up from black to gray. Then a beep, a flash of white, both come and gone so quickly that Evan could doubt they’d happened at all if he chose. He chose to believe. The seconds ticked on. Light flickered. Or he thought it had. A moment later, he realized the screen hadn’t changed; it was the fluorescent lights in the ceiling that had stuttered. Beyond the windows on the far wall, even the streetlight hesitated in its only job, then glowed strong again.

What happened?

Evan wasn’t a patient man, but he sat for a long while, motionless, watching the screen with the intensity of obsession. He watched for any tick, any stray hint of color or movement. Meanwhile, behind him, the night wore on.

When the change came, it was not what he’d expected. The morning was just beginning to assemble itself in the windows when he heard it. It was faint, at that razor’s edge between imagination and perception. Again, he chose to believe. The screen was still dark and gray, but now, through the speakers, the muffled crash of waves could be heard.

Chandler smiled. He’d done his part. Pea would have to do the rest.

THE FIRING team took up their positions. After what had happened to Tay, Silas was taking no chances. They wouldn’t make the mistake of underestimating the gladiator again.

The creature moved around the pen in a storm of agitation, kicking up tufts of straw as it strode the enclosure. Its wings were folded back out of the way, like the ears of a hissing cat. It didn’t like all the new faces on the other side of the bars.

When Silas gave the signal, the first shot was fired. The gladiator was fast, but it wasn’t that fast. The dart struck it in the lower torso just beneath the line of the rib cage. The problem, however, with tranquilizing an animal with opposable thumbs is that a dart can then very quickly be plucked free before the medication has a chance to insinuate itself into the tissue. The gladiator howled in rage as it flung the half-empty dart back at them.

The second dart struck the creature low on the side of the hip. It howled again and spun away, tearing at the projectile. As its back became exposed, a third dart struck it high between its shoulders, just inside the curve of a wing. This dart the gladiator couldn’t reach. There were a few moments of tension when Silas actually thought the gladiator might hurt itself in its rage.

It flung itself against the bars again and again, reaching through toward them and raking the air with its blood-red talons. Spittle flew from its mouth. It screeched. Slowly, then, the drugs took effect, and the creature began to calm. It sat.

Among the crowd of staring faces, the creature’s eyes somehow found Silas. They bore into him, looking for an answer. Silas met the gaze head-on and did not falter. You killed a man, Silas thought. It was an accusation.

I am what you made me, Silas imagined the reply.

The creature slumped to the floor.

“Not yet,” Silas said. “Let’s make sure.”

Another dart was pumped into the gladiator’s side. Vidonia had told him it could metabolize three darts without a problem. Four would be pushing it. And five—well, five darts and the gladiator might not be waking up, ever.

They waited a full three minutes before entering the cage, and even then, the shooters were cocked and loaded again, four shots or no. The lift rolled in, and the straps were attached. The creature was raised slowly off the floor, and its head lolled back, dragging through the straw as it was wheeled toward the waiting truck.

Here and there, thick globs of blood stuck to the straw. Probably more than could be accounted for from the darts, Silas thought. He stopped the lift with a raised hand. The gladiator’s black skin had hidden the blood well. Dark on dark, its legs showed dried flakes of crimson that flicked away with the stroke of his hand. It wasn’t much, but it was there. He inspected the creature closely, looking for a wound that could explain the presence of dried blood. The creature stirred groggily, and the guns came up again, but Silas held his hand up. He didn’t want to risk another injection unless a life was in danger.

He continued his inspection, going over every inch of the unconscious body. Nothing.

A black hand flexed. That was enough. The shooters eyed Silas, and this time he motioned for the lift to continue. The wail of the lift’s backup indicator eased the tension on the firing team’s trigger fingers, if not their faces.

The transport truck was sleek, white, and enormous. As the lift approached with its load, the men standing behind it stepped away.

The panel walls had been reinforced with interlocking steel beams, and the interior cage door had a triple-locking system. No doorknob. Silas had made sure of that.

The lift eased its payload inside and lowered the truss to the floor of the cage. Men with grim faces and fast hands removed the straps. They jumped to the cement, and the door slid shut with a loud clang.

There was a collective sigh of relief from the men. Job well done.

Silas checked the lock, and when he found it secure, he stepped back inside the gladiator enclosure for a better look at the blood-spattered straw. It didn’t make a trail of a kind he could follow but instead seemed to be scattered randomly around the enclosure, as if the creature had been bleeding sporadically for some time. He sifted through the straw with his legs, scanning with his eyes. It didn’t help that he wasn’t sure at all what he was looking for. He gave special attention to the area against the far wall, where the creature tended to sleep, but he found no evidence of blood. He searched until his eyes were tired and his fingers chafed from scooping through the coarse piles. He stopped. He may not have known what he was looking for, but he knew it wasn’t here. When he turned, the loaders were staring at him.

“Is everything buttoned down?” he asked.

“Nice and tight,” James Mitchell answered in a voice so low and gravelly that it hurt Silas’s throat just to hear it.

Silas looked over at the man standing near the cab of the truck. James was tall and broad and square, seemingly built of repurposed cinder blocks; and blown vocal cords aside, he was the man running the show. It was upon his capable shoulders that the responsibility of transport fell. He was serious and technical, ex-military, and he looked at every contract assignment as special ops. Which was exactly the way Silas liked it.

“It looks like we’ve got our hands full with this one, Dr. Williams,” James said, as Silas approached.

“Can’t disagree with you. A little heavier than last time.”

“We can handle it. We’ll be taking all the necessary precautions. Your baby will be arriving safe and sound sometime tomorrow evening.”

“Not my baby,” Silas said.

“I tried that once, too,” James intoned. “Didn’t work for me, either.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

So tell me why we’re driving again?” Vidonia was busy blow-drying in the bathroom, bent at the waist, lush hair alternately dripping to the floor and flying away as the hot air blasted over her scalp.

“Precaution,” Silas said. “And security. We’re expected to fly, and there have been problems in the past. This year we’re trucking the gladiator to the location. We can bring along a bigger support team that way, and the whole thing is much less conspicuous.”

“Is that what we are, support?”

Silas sat up on the bed, looking for his pants. The alarm clock said five-thirty, and the shades were still dark.

“No, we’re the talent; hasn’t Ben told you?”

“He said they believed in keeping the talent happy around here.”

“They do.”

“A three-hundred-mile road trip in a sports car isn’t my idea of happiness.”

“Not even with me at the wheel?”

“And you aren’t the talent, anyway,” she said. “Well, at least not in that way.” She gave him a mischievous look. “I thought you were the boss.”

“Do you usually find yourself waking before the crack of dawn in your boss’s bed?”

She flung her hair behind her, showering him with a mist of tiny droplets. “Well, not typically. Only about every third boss or so.” She smiled as she stepped back into the bedroom.

He pulled a fresh white shirt from its plastic sleeve in the closet and pulled the triple-extra-large over his head, buttoning the sleeves but leaving the collar loose. He wrapped his wrist in a gold Rolex, a conflicted concession to his status.

For Silas, anything that cost more than an average man earns in six months didn’t just smack of pretension, it rang of it. It veritably gonged. But the watch rivaled the engineering tolerances of biological systems; it ran perfectly and would continue to do so, without a battery, long after time ceased to be a matter of his concern. He was genuinely interested by such efficiency, and this provided the thin veneer of justification that he required.

“Nice watch,” she said.

He cringed. That’s it, I’m selling it.

“What are you going to do in the years the contest isn’t held in the continental United States?” she asked. She had the dress around the curve of her hips now, pulling it up.

His confusion showed.

“You can’t very well truck the contestant to Europe,” she said. “You’ll have to fly then.”

“Oh, the event is always held in the U.S.”

“Really,” she said, as if she’d never thought about it before. “I suppose they have been. How did you get the other countries to agree to that?”

“Last time’s winner gets home-court advantage. It was how the rules were written up at the beginning, and since we’ve never lost, we’re home court.”

“I bet the other countries are sorry they signed up for that.”

“I’m very certain they are. It pumps a lot of money into the local economy, not to mention American bioengineering companies.”

When they finished dressing, they carried the luggage to the car. Two small suitcases apiece.

“I think you’re the only woman I’ve ever met who knows how to pack light,” he said, as he wedged the final bag under the hatch.

“Look at this thing,” she said, gesturing to the dark blue vehicle. “I didn’t want to spend three hundred miles with luggage banging against my kidneys. There’s only so much room in this car, and I decided I’d use my share for breathing, not extra underwear.”

“So you’re leaving your underwear behind, eh? Talk like that might get you a promotion.”

“Works every time.”

Four minutes later, they were merging onto empty highway and the sun was bleeding up from the east, coloring the traffic in reds and shadows. The road felt good beneath him, as it always seemed to at the start of a road trip. But they had to make one quick stop before they were free.

When they arrived at the compound, Silas saw James Mitchell standing in the back lot, trying to assemble the convoy. Silas pulled slowly alongside the man. In Silas’s opinion, “inconspicuous” was hardly the word that jumped to mind when he looked toward the line of trucks and vans.

“Having problems?”

“No more than usual,” James answered, appearing not at all surprised to see them. “Most of these egghead types wouldn’t have lasted two days in the service. Nobody around here seems to know how to keep a schedule.”

“That’s what you’re for, James.”

Silas looked around at the chaos. The big white rig sat idling at the front of the loose collection of vehicles. It was pathetic.

“You seem to be taking this rather well,” Silas said. He would have expected James to be throwing a fit by now with the way things were shaping up.

“I was counting on it.”

Silas raised an eyebrow.

“Oh, our special traveler is already well down the road. Left last night, in fact. This big cluster-fuck is a decoy.” James gave him a wink. “Just in case.”

“Do they know that?”

“Of course not.”

“Well, your secret is safe with me, but you won’t mind if I don’t stick around here to watch the proceedings.”

James smiled and waved him on, but as Silas began to pull forward, James seemed to change his mind and motioned for them to stop. Jogging up to the car, he tossed a video cube into Silas’s lap.

“Just so we can get ahold of you,” he said.

Silas picked up the small, square video communication device. “Do you think you’ll need to?”

“You’d better hope not.”

THE OPEN road called. Silas answered with a stomp of his right foot that sat Vidonia back in her seat. He knew it was juvenile, but he couldn’t stop himself. Anyway, he didn’t actually break the speed limit; he just liked seeing how quickly he could get there. He let up on the gas pedal when Vidonia’s grip on his knee became painful. He found that her grip eased in direct proportion to the angle of his tachometer needle.

“Boys and their cars,” she said, shaking her head.

He rolled the window all the way down and laid his arm along the spine of the door. It was one hell of a morning. The sun rose high and hot into cloudless sky, and by noon they’d traded the cloying humidity of California for the dry heat of the high desert. Silas turned the air-conditioning off. The wind was enough, and besides, Silas liked the way it made Vidonia’s hair dance like a living thing, like she was some ironic, beautiful Medusa.

“This heat reminds me of home,” she said. “Except without palm trees.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“Both. But home had beaches going for it.”

“Now I’m picturing you in a bathing suit.”

“You’re assuming I wear one.”

“Now, there’s a new image in my head.”

“That was my intent.”

“I could get used to this.”

“To what?”

“To you. Being here.”

“You haven’t even eaten my cooking yet.”

“You cook, too?”

“Seafood is my specialty.”

“So you’re that rare woman I’ve heard legend of. A woman who can both perform a Southern blot analysis and grill up a grouper?”

“Oh, you have no idea,” she said.

“How did I get so lucky?”

She was quiet for a long while, and Silas suspected that when she spoke, it would be something significant. Ten more minutes passed in silence, and he knew it would be something bad.

Finally, in a soft voice that almost drowned in the wind, she said, “There’s someone back home. His name is John.”

“That’s odd,” he said, keeping his voice even. “That’s just what I’d figured his name would be. Or something like it. Jim, maybe, or Jake. Some old name, something common. I’m usually wrong on hunches, though. Funny, this is a time I’d be right.” He’d known since the beach, when he’d asked her if she was married. The answer had been no, but he’d sensed there was something more she’d almost said.

She looked out into the desert. He almost spoke but stopped himself with the question on the tip of his tongue. He wouldn’t let her off the hook. What she’d say without him asking would be more important than the response to any question. Questions—no matter how carefully worded—always carry their own baggage of expectation, an unspoken optimal response that the asked person is aware of. The answer then becomes about proximity to that response. How close are you willing to come?

“He’s different from you.”

That was something, at least. “How are we different?” He kept his eyes on the road.

“The important ways.”

He looked at her then, and her hair was dancing, reaching into the wind.

“I should tell you we live together … or that we … lived together before I came here.”

“You’re close?”

“Close, sure. He slept right on the other side of the bed most nights. Other nights, the couch. Or wherever.”

“The couch. I guess he is different from me.”

“I told you.” She was still looking out into the desert and didn’t offer more, didn’t make any promises. John, he thought. Just an old, common name. Old, common-issue. Let it be. Let it be. He forced himself not to ask more.

PHOENIX. A place of cactus and rock and mountains and heat.

Phoenix is a place without history. It is new and air-conditioned. It defies the desert. On the side of the highway, as decoration, colored pebbles lie arranged in intricate Indian designs, pastels and browns and pinks, alternately anthropomorphic or zooplastic—strange totems and zigzags—all of it sloping upward and away from the road, an artistic canvas that five thousand pairs of eyes might see every day. And it goes on for miles, glass buildings and blue skies and mountains looming in the background.

The city isn’t so much surrounded by mountains as interwoven with them. But it is not a mountain city, not really.

Phoenix itself is flat. Phoenix is desert. The houses and roads and buildings have accreted between the rocky outcrops of higher ground. Human habitation sits everywhere in the lee of stone, as if the city were a liquid poured onto this jagged landscape and had found level.

Silas and Vidonia arrived in the downtown area at about three. The hotel, the Grand Marq, wasn’t hard to find. Vidonia dug their reservations from the clutter of the glove compartment. Two reservations, two rooms. She put one back and let him check in. The desk clerk was more than happy to cancel the second reservation. This week, the hotel could probably book the room almost immediately at triple the normal rate.

Walking back outside to the car, Silas saw where the first of the protesters had assembled their tents along the stony median between the parking lot and the road.

There is hot, and there is hot. And there is Arizona in the summer. In Phoenix, the heat is a ten-pound hammer.

A dozen men and women stood sweating in the sun with their signs, but he knew their numbers would grow as the competition date approached.

The protesters came in all types. There were your animal-rights people, anti-genetics people, anti-technology people, and, of course, your everyday basic religious fanatics. There were also game puritans protesting the corporate sponsorship of the Olympics. And then there were your run-of-the-mill crazies. All united by their desire to see the gladiator event shut down.

That they stood in the Phoenix sun was testament to their commitment.

He knew for certain those tents had been erected illegally on city property, but the Olympic Commission had learned from experience that it was best to ignore them rather than to have them removed. The protest groups craved conflict, and the last thing the program needed was a crowd of riled malcontents screaming police brutality into a hundred rolling news cameras. The commission wanted the media circus to focus on what went on inside the dome, not in the parking lots.

Silas climbed behind the wheel and circled the parking lot, making a point to swing near the street. As he slowed past the group of protesters, the words on the back of one woman’s shirt caught his attention.

BLOOD SPORT

She turned to look at him as his car rolled past, and he thought he saw recognition in her eyes. He wondered what crossed through her mind in that moment. Her hair was gray and wild, and in her arms she cradled a big cardboard sign with thick block letters painted in black marker.

FOR THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH

He shook his head. Those wages were paid to all men, sinner and saint alike.

FOR SILAS, the next three days were spent in a whirlwind of activity. He had meetings with regulators by day, dinner parties with dignitaries by evening, and Vidonia by night. Still Vidonia by night, John or no John.

“I met with the president today,” he told her, while they ate chicken wings at midnight in the hotel bar.

“President of what?”

He just looked at her. Took another bite.

“You’re serious.”

“Yep,” he said. “We were at a luncheon together. There were several heads of state there.”

“They’re staying for the competition?”

“Yeah. Most of them are going to spend the entire week here. They were even making friendly wagers.”

“What kind of odds were they laying?”

“Not sure, but I think we’re the favorite.”

“What were they betting?”

“The usual trifles.” He took another bite of chicken wing. “You know, sovereign languages, submarines, space stations.”

She smiled and thumped his shoulder.

“I don’t even want to tell you what language we’ll be speaking if we lose,” he went on. “There must have been a dozen members of Congress there, too. This thing is getting bigger every time.”

“You make it sound like that’s a bad thing.”

“It’s turning into something.”

“Into what?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a kind of”—Silas paused—“international sociopolitical economic summit.”

“That’s a lot of words. There’s no way you made that up just now.”

“I’d been working on it.” He turned serious. “Actually, that came from a reporter. I’m not sure I know what this is anymore.”

“Any talk of the protesters?”

“They used euphemisms. Mentioned security concerns but nothing specific.” And Silas had been grateful for the euphemisms. He wasn’t up for high-level talks about protester issues. He thought of that sign. Blood Sport. A description Silas was having more and more trouble arguing against.

“Next month, in Monterrey, those guys don’t realize how lucky they have it.”

“Meaning what?”

“Nobody protests the human portion of the Olympics.”

She shrugged. “They don’t compete to the death.”

“The president said something to me. He pulled me aside to ask if we were going to win this thing or not. That’s just how he put it: ‘Are we gonna win this thing?’ ”

“What’s so wrong with that?”

“Nothing’s wrong with it. It was the look he had, though. Like it was important that he hear a yes from me.”

“What did you say?”

“I gave him his yes.”

They finished their wings and took the elevator up to their hotel suite.

He waited until she was naked. “Should I sleep down the hall?” he asked her.

Again, she let her hands be her answer.