The fact that he felt compelled to credit the ISA with a capacity for restraint meant that he wasn’t convinced they had any.
No one spoke for maybe ten miles, silenced by the increasing strangeness of our situation. I had been telling myself that we were forming a kind of family, bonded not by blood but by the shared mystery of our circumstances, by mutual respect and affection and necessity. Now it seemed that before we could be a family, we would be a posse, four spiritual heirs of Professor Van Helsing, chasing down Nihilim as the professor had chased down Dracula. A posse was not a bad thing to be if it was righteous and its quarry was evil. Peril and stress and a sense of purpose could inspire an affinity among the members of a posse. Maybe even an enduring sense of family would grow from that. Of course, a posse in pursuit of murderers was itself a collection of targets; and the dead don’t tend to celebrate Thanksgiving with their kin.
The gravel road was a bit slushy but passable. The old federal highway flooded in the lower swales, the pools shallow enough that we could negotiate them, pale wings of water flaring on both sides of the Explorer. In the flashes of lightning, the lonely landscape appeared to be a ghastly vista of wet soot and ashes, and the windshield wipers thumped like the drums in a funeral cortege.
For Bridget, perhaps the storm and the silence were oppressive. Although she couldn’t put an end to the former, she chose to break the latter. “Quinn having no knowledge of his origins, my background being mysterious in its own way—I thought that might be a pattern. But you, Panthea, have a family.”
“Yes and no. I’m a Ching by adoption. My parents were told my birth mother, born and raised in Tucson, was fifteen when she had me, and she refused to identify the boy who was the father—perhaps because there was no boy.”
“Do you think that all of us, the other squads wherever they might be, have been brought into the world in the same way, with as few blood connections as possible?”
“Yes. When I was twenty-one, I tried to find my birth mother and thank her for my life. The agency in Phoenix that handled the adoption was out of business, most of their records destroyed in a fire. The woman who had handled placements was willing to help. She turned up my mother’s name in what files remained—Heather Ing-wen Han. But I never could find anyone by that name or any record that such a person had ever been born in Arizona.”
Bridget had not been spared from the mood that had damped the spirits of the rest of us. “But why should we be denied the roots that give us a sense of belonging to a place, a time, a people?”
“Having asked the same question,” Panthea said, “I arrived at two answers, though I don’t know if either—or maybe each—is true. First, the work we’ve been chosen to perform will require us to have learned to be comfortable with being rootless, because we’ll be nomadic, going wherever we need to go to confront the Nihilim.”
I found it possible to come to terms with our extraordinary mission in part because the risks came with the reward not only of Bridget Rainking but also of her genuine affection. However, I was sobered, if not even discouraged, to consider that in order to serve humanity, we had to be to some extent separated from it. I like people, after all, and have always thought of myself as being as potentially noble as the best of them and certainly as foolish as all of them. I didn’t want to feel . . . apart, estranged.
This concern was exacerbated when Bridget asked for the second of Panthea’s reasons why our origins were such a mystery.
The seer said, “Could it be that Heather Ing-wen Han, Corrine Rainking, and the unknown young woman who left Quinn’s bassinet on that highway weren’t our mothers? Could it be that they were merely the vessels, surrogate mothers, by which we were brought into the world, and that we share no DNA with them? I suspect that we’re fatherless and motherless in a basic biological sense, that we were created—engineered—by some mysterious maker and that the sequences in our DNA that alarm authorities aren’t from an extraterrestrial race, but are from the Rishon of the first universe. If we have in us genetic material that provides us with a watered-down version of that race’s special gifts before they grew arrogant and destroyed their world, if we have no biological roots in this world, maybe we don’t exude the scent of prey, so to speak. We’re not recognized by the Nihilim as potential targets. Because they aren’t drawn to us either to kill us or make us suffer. They aren’t concerned with us at all—and so we may therefore stalk them.”