Edwin asked, “How many is a handful?”
“Considering the defect rate, between seventy-five and one hundred fifty.”
“And when you say ‘the ends of the earth’—”
“There are 128 cities with populations of five million or greater. I would send my infected carriers to places like Tokyo, Delhi, Shanghai, S?o Paulo, Mexico City, Dhaka, Cairo, Beijing, Mumbai, Osaka, Istanbul, Moscow. I would know definitively the time frame for contagion, and I would thread that needle so, as my carriers were shedding this highly contagious virus, they’d be passing through airports, going to concerts, festivals, sporting events, protests.”
Edwin looked terrified.
“How do you find willing carriers? A challenge, no?”
A great question. And I already had a theory.
“For sure,” I said. “They have to know exactly what they’re doing. They have to know the 13.6 percent chance of death. They have to want to help Kara bring about this forced evolutionary event.”
“I’m just trying to imagine who would want—”
“Geneticists,” I said. “Disgraced, disgruntled, frustrated geneticists. People who think the Gene Protection Act was wrong. But also, and especially, those who believe the world is ending anyway, so why not throw a Hail Mary. In other words, geneticists who also identify as hard-line environmentalists. Believers.”
“You need access to MYSTIC,” Edwin said. “You think you can track them down.”
“Yes. And I want Nadine in on this. She’s one of the few people I trust not to shoot me in the back.”
“Done. Do you know where your sister is right now?”
“I have a theory.”
“I’ll help you find her. Whatever you need.”
I examined Edwin’s face. Observed his heartbeat. In this moment, he wasn’t lying to me, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t change his mind later, when he was out of imminent danger. Or allow other forces to turn him against me.
“Why come to me?” Edwin asked. “You took a huge risk.”
“Because I don’t think my sister will anticipate me returning to the people who betrayed me. And that might just give me an edge in finding her.”
“How do I know—”
“You can trust me?”
He nodded.
“You’ll look at the data for yourself. You’ll confirm the fatality rate. You’ll imagine what will happen if that sweeps the globe, and you’ll decide that if there’s even a chance I’m telling the truth, you have no choice but to help me.”
“Fair enough.”
“I injected you with a sleeper gene package, which I whipped up in Ty Feld’s lab. You aren’t in danger right now, but I can trigger it at any time. And if something were to happen to me, it will be activated by an environmental trigger.”
“What would it do?”
“Initiate a cascade of awful shit inside of you.”
“I have no desire to—”
“I know.”
I believed Edwin’s intentions. What I didn’t trust and couldn’t control were the people in power above him, specifically the DoD. The same bosses who wouldn’t allow Edwin to arrest and prosecute Ty Feld would be very interested in me if I were to fall back on their radar.
I stood. “Not to put too fine a point on it, but if I’m killed, or captured, or if you betray me again, you’ll die.”
“That’s not going to happen, Logan.”
I believed him.
He would try to protect me now. He might even sacrifice his life for it, because a bullet or a prison cell was a knowable horror. What I injected into orbit around his genome was the unknown stuff of nightmares.
* * *
—
We stood on a flat, featureless plain.
The sky was the same stark gray as the land, and there would’ve been no dimension to the space at all—no horizon, no sense of depth—if the ground wasn’t darker by the slightest degree.
Suddenly, it broke open between us.
A black chasm spreading wider.
Ava and Beth were screaming my name as the distance between us grew. Ava looked at her mom. She looked across at me. Then she took several steps back and started running toward the edge.
No! I screamed. You don’t want this!
But she continued running.
Faster, faster.
I watched as her foot touched the chasm’s edge, and she leaped—
Arms pumping, legs still running in midair.
Sailing toward me out over the abyss.
We locked eyes for a moment, and Ava was smiling.
I’m coming, Dad. I’m coming with you.
She crashed into the side of the cliff, clutching the edge with her arms, feet scrambling for purchase. I rushed toward her, but as I reached down to grasp Ava’s hand, she lost her grip, her fingers slipping through mine.
On my knees, I stared down into the black abyss as Ava fell away from me.
Plunging down into that endless dark.
I woke suddenly.
My heart was pounding in the darkness of the hotel room.
I was saying my daughter’s name, quietly, over and over.
Climbing out of bed, I went to the bathroom and filled my glass.
Drank it down, filled it, then drank it down again.
I was beginning to calm down, my heart rate falling through the 120s. Something had happened during the dream. My emotions had broken free from their Faraday cage, and I felt—for an agonizing moment—the time I had been away from my family.
I crumpled down onto the bathroom floor.
A sob burst out of me. And then another. A dam of grief exploding, and for sixty seconds, I let myself go to pieces, staring unblinking at all I had lost.
* * *
—
Edwin picked me up in front of the hotel at midnight. I climbed into his 911E, and we sped across town.
The Porsche was one of the new “throwback” extended-range electrics with a quad-motor chassis that could do 0 to 60 in .9 seconds and had a range of 1,000 miles on full charge. Edwin kept trying to engage with me, but I was mentally elsewhere, preparing for my time on MYSTIC.
He parked on the curb on D Street SW, and we hurried down the walkway to a door on the quiet side of Constitution Center, which was, incidentally, the same door I’d gone through trying to escape this building more than a year and two upgrades ago.
I didn’t think he’d be dumb enough to double-cross me this soon, a mere twenty-two hours after I’d shown up in his bedroom in the middle of the night, but I hoped I hadn’t misread him. There was always a chance he could subject me to virtual interrogation and torture, with some choice chemical adjuncts. Take a run at getting me to explain what I’d injected into his system.
As we drew near, the door opened. My old partner, Nadine Nettmann, stood on the threshold, smiling.
“She knows everything,” Edwin said.
As I stepped into the stairwell and the door swung shut behind me, Nadine threw her arms around my neck.
“You okay?”
There was a lot to unpack there. I just said, “Better now.”
I’d experienced so little by way of physical touch since being kidnapped from this building almost fourteen months ago, and I could feel the interaction trying to lockpick the door to my emotional triggers.
“What?” Nadine asked. “You don’t hug anymore?”