“I know.”
I aimed at her left rectus femoris, the muscle that flexes the hip and extends the lower leg at the knee. I would disable her without threatening her life.
The gunshot was deafening in the confines of the house.
My ears rang.
Kara was still there, upright. I looked for blood, but there was none. Looked for signs of impact, but there were none.
She stood just to the right of where I’d been aiming.
Unhit.
I—
She moved.
—fired again.
For a second, I wondered if she’d somehow slipped blanks into the magazine, if this had been some intricately orchestrated ruse. But then I saw the bullet hole in the floor behind her.
I took a step forward.
Just ten feet away now.
Again, she moved at the precise instant I pulled the trigger and vanished around the corner of the hearth.
What the fuck?
I rushed after her into the living room, trying to comprehend how my sister had dodged three bullets at point-blank range. Of course, she hadn’t dodged them. Most 9mm rounds move at a velocity of 1,200 fps. No human, upgraded or not, could move with anything approaching that speed.
She was anticipating, and moving, in that nanosecond between my intent and the trigger pull. But even with my upgraded perceptions, I couldn’t have pulled that off.
A floorboard creaked behind me.
I spun into the sole of a foot striking my chest and launched back, slamming through a glass coffee table, trying to bring my gun up, but Kara kicked the Kimber out of my hand and crashed down on top of me, holding the point of the knife she’d butterflied our chicken with to my throat.
She said, “Ever think maybe there was a reason Mom upgraded both of us?” I could feel the blade beginning to slide in. “Maybe she knew you weren’t capable of making the hard choice.”
“You upgraded yourself again, didn’t you?”
She didn’t answer. I worked my hand down into my pocket, got a grip on the remote switch, pressed the button, and held it down. Inside the left pocket of my jacket, I felt a quiet vibration as the coupling motor and vacuum generator began to hum.
Kara glared down at me, her mask slipping—rageful and heartbroken.
“I need you to know—there is no part of me that wants to do this.”
But she was going to. She had allowed me to find her to make one last attempt at bringing me along. That had failed, and now she had to do a very hard thing.
“I’m sorry,” she said, tears glassing over her eyes.
“If you kill me, we both die.”
She examined my face, searching for the lie. She didn’t find it.
I said, “My thumb is holding down a button. If I release it, the disperser in my jacket will instantly blast out a continuous, aerosolized—”
“Of what?”
“Ricin.”
Her pupils dilated. Adrenaline hit.
Ricin is a ribosome-inactivating protein, which infects cells and blocks their ability to synthesize their own protein, shutting down key functions in the body. It comes from the seeds of the castor plant, which are used to make harmless castor oil. Readily available and fairly easy to produce, the average adult requires just 1.78 mg of ricin, injected or inhaled, to die—the quantity of a few grains of table salt.
“Know what happens when you inhale ricin?” I asked.
Kara had become perfectly still.
“Within several hours, you develop a hacking, bloody cough. Your lungs fill with fluid. You drown. And there’s no treatment. No antidote.”
“This is a good bluff.”
I raised my left arm. “See the tube just inside my sleeve?”
Her eyes cut to my sleeve, back to me.
I watched her, my hand on the button. She looked at the Kimber—eight feet away.
I said, “The disperser is custom-made. It will fill this room with aerosolized dry powdered nanoparticles before you even touch the gun.”
“Just happen to have one of those lying around?”
“Get your knife off my throat.”
She withdrew the blade.
“Throw it across the room.”
It clattered to the floor behind us.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You can’t stop me.”
If I’d known to a certainty that killing Kara would end the threat of the upgrade getting unleashed across the world, I would’ve taken my thumb off the remote switch. But she had mentioned a virologist. And she’d recruited and upgraded Andrew, who’d shown up in Glasgow. She had other people working with her, people who could finish the upgrade in her absence. And it sounded like the finish line was close.
“Very slowly,” I said, “climb off me.”
She moved onto the floor.
“Lie on your stomach,” I said.
She rolled over, facedown in the broken glass, said, “If you make a move toward the gun—”
“I won’t.”
I shot a glance toward the front door. Twenty feet away.
I sat up.
Came slowly to my feet.
Kara watching me from the corner of her right eye, her palms on the floor, ready to spring up.
I took a careful step back.
And then another.
When I was ten feet from the massive door, I turned and bolted for the entrance. I heard glass crunching behind me, Kara on the move, but I didn’t stop, hoping the door was open, because the extra second I would burn fumbling with the lock would probably cost me my life.
I wrenched the door open and launched across the threshold as a gunshot rang out behind me.
Sprinted down the steps.
Out of the sphere of the exterior chandelier’s illumination, accelerating into the freezing rain, the remote switch still clutched in my hand.
Don’t fall, don’t fall, don’t fall.
More gunshots ricocheted off the surrounding mountains, my bare feet holding a tenuous traction in the mud.
I didn’t look back, didn’t stop.
Racing downhill across the glade, just needing to reach the darker shelter of the woods, my pulse slamming along at 195 bpm, and between the bass drum of my heart and the drenching rainfall, I had no idea if my sister was in pursuit.
I entered the burned forest, the terrain steepening, my night vision pulling every available thread of light, dodging trees, leaping over logs, and I could feel gravity threatening to send me careening down the mountain.
I slowed down, finally coming to a stop behind a boulder.
Strained to listen.
Nothing.
I was beginning to shiver. My feet had been shredded, and they burned with cold. I heard something. Not a footstep. Some distant, mechanical noise. It was a garage door opening.
Twelve seconds later, two cones of light swept briefly through the forest, brilliantly illuminating the pouring rain. I heard tires rolling over pavement.
I only saw it for a second: the flash of headlights streaking down the driveway.
Kara was leaving. She didn’t need this fight. She’d already won.
With my left hand, I pulled the disperser out of my pocket and manually powered it down. Only when I was sure the coupling motors had stopped running did I let my thumb slide off the remote switch.
As I shivered uncontrollably, black thoughts sailed through my mind.
You failed.
The war is lost.
Somehow, she had ramped up her abilities so far beyond mine that she was now capable of dodging bullets. Yes, I had survived, but to what end? I didn’t stand a chance.