His wristwatch did not work in this house. But it felt as though fifteen minutes became sixteen, became eighteen, and then twenty.
He began to wonder if somehow they had gone away with Emily, not out the back door, which would have availed them nothing, but across the bridge between centuries, to the blighted future where David didn’t know how to follow them.
And then two figures emerged from the open kitchen door at the farther end of the hallway. The first was Emily Carlino, as glorious as ever she had been. Close behind her was the Nanette avatar.
Emily wore black jeans, a white T-shirt, a black denim jacket—which must have been the outfit she’d been wearing on that terrible long-ago night. At first he thought this might be yet another trick, a second clone previously created and kept ready to serve as an avatar, a control mechanism surgically implanted in its skull. As she drew closer, however, he saw beyond doubt that she was the real woman. If the clone had seemed to move with Emily’s grace, David now saw this wasn’t in fact the case. The real Emily moved with an ease of action and attitude and posture, with an elegance and harmony, that the cloned avatar had imitated but had not been able to match. Emily was grace personified, while the avatar had been merely comely and striving to be lithe.
His heart swelled at the sight of her, the true Emily. However, it swelled not just with love and joy, but also with fear for her. In this penultimate moment, seeming triumph could become disaster in more ways than he was able to anticipate. An inch from paradise was no better than a mile in a world ruled by devils.
As she approached him, her expression was one of emotional astonishment chastened with perplexity, hope twined with trembling uncertainty, mystification.
He smiled and made a come-to-me gesture with his left hand, and she glided toward him like a figure in a dream, closing not only the distance between them but crossing time itself, coming forward from the past, across a lost decade, still twenty-five and luminous.
Nanette halted at the midpoint of the hall, regarding them with fury and frustration.
David kept glancing at the staircase. Two clones lay dead in an upstairs room, surely as beyond revival as any ordinary human body in such condition. A brain shattered by a head shot or a heart torn by a bullet couldn’t mend magically and begin to function again. Yet he was wary of the stairs.
Emily came to him and put a hand to his face, as though needing to confirm by touch that he was real. “Davey. You’re bleeding.”
“It’s nothing. A scratch. Get out quick. There’s an Explorer in front of the house. Key in the cup holder. Start the engine, get in the passenger seat. I’ll follow.”
She was Emily, daughter of Calista, not just book smart but also street smart. Even in her bewilderment, she didn’t hesitate, opened the front door, and went out into the night.
The diminished wind had lost the power to pull the door shut. David stood listening to rain slashing through the trees, pounding the earth, drumming the roof over the front stoop.
At the farther end of the hall, behind the Nanette avatar, something appeared in the kitchen doorway, roughly human though misshapen, a configuration of malformed bones, sloughed facial features, eyes receding under a shelf of brow. She was as fearsome as she was wretched, and as she joined Nanette at the midpoint of the hall, David knew she could be no one but Anna.
The deceitful could know suffering and grief, could be humbled and broken by it, as David well knew. Although he could fear Anna, he couldn’t hate her, only pity her.
However, he must not allow pity to cloud his judgment. Anna and the others had their mission, and if it might be misguided, if they were unwittingly serving the very oppression they hated, they were nevertheless committed. Now that the real Patrick Corley had died, now that he was no longer a moderating influence on them, now that his house belonged to a foundation and was theirs forever, they would not continue to grant Emily the mercy with which Corley had forced them to treat her. And they would be merciless with David. They were killers who murdered in the name of humanity; they would be bloodthirsty.
When he heard the Explorer’s engine start, he pulled the string just hard enough to engage the timer switch. Now he had one minute.
He didn’t want to give Nanette and Anna enough time to get to the tote and zipper it open and jerk the bare wires out of the brick of plastic explosive. The moment he felt the switch click, he began to count the seconds in his head—one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three—praying that he might be at least ninety percent as accurate as a Rolex.