We took our coffees to a nearby bench.
“How are those busted ribs?” Edwin asked.
“Still tender. I see my doctor this afternoon.”
Edwin sipped his coffee. “And therapy? If you don’t mind my prying…”
“It’s helping.”
“Good. Important to make sure you’re processing what happened in Denver. Could’ve been so much worse.”
I drank my coffee.
Directly above us, I heard the cannon blast of a hyperjet smashing through the sound barrier on its ascent out of Reagan National.
“Where are we with Soren?” I asked.
“We filed attempted-murder charges. Judge denied bail. He’s still being held in Denver.”
“He doesn’t want to cut a deal?”
“Won’t even talk to us.”
“What do we have on him?”
“Not a lot. His computer was clean.”
“He told us where that house was. Admitted making a delivery to it. Walked us straight into a trap.”
“And after he asked for a lawyer, you responded by threatening him with illegal extradition to China.”
“Sir, I—”
“Logan. I’m on your side here.”
“What if we chipped him and kicked him loose?”
“You mean with one of DARPA’s experimental nano-thingies?”
“Why not? See where he goes.”
“They’re really only useful with cooperative informants. They dissolve after forty-eight hours. Also, you know, bit of a violation of his rights. Again.”
“So what happens next?”
“There’s a preliminary hearing in two weeks. That’ll be our face-the-music moment.” Edwin glanced at his watch and stood. “I have to go up to the Hill. I want you to report to the Intelligence Division. They know you’re coming. You’ll be riding a desk on analyst row until you’re cleared for fieldwork.”
As I watched Edwin walk across the courtyard, a familiar voice called my name. I turned to see my partner, Nadine, moving toward me, breaking into a smile.
“Hey, stranger,” she said, sitting down beside me. “How you feeling?”
“Better. The director put me on desk duty, so…fun times ahead.”
“Oh, come on, this is your dream. You hate fieldwork. It makes you all pukey.”
“True. I also hate being in a cubicle.”
Nadine laughed. “It’s almost like you can’t be made happy.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Lunch plans?” she asked.
“No.”
“There’s a new ramen place across the street. My treat.”
“What’s the occasion?”
“I don’t know. Can’t I be glad you didn’t die?”
“How long are you in town?” I asked.
“I’m taking the loop out to Minneapolis this evening.” She shrugged. “Apparently, someone set up a gene lab in the basement of an abandoned psychiatric hospital.”
“Sounds like the opening to a great horror film.”
“I’ll swing by analyst row to pick you up a little before noon.” Nadine stood, tapped her coffee cup against mine. “Good to have you back.”
And she set off across the courtyard.
* * *
—
Dr. Jeff Strand—my internist of almost a decade—sat across from me in the patient room, studying my chart.
“So I got your X-rays back.”
“Okay.” I girded myself. We’d been chatting for a few minutes, but this was all I could think about.
“There are some…irregularities.” He pulled two X-rays out of my file and placed them on the cushioned table I was perched on. They looked identical to me. He touched one of them. “This is an image of the right carpal bones and radius and ulna. Wrist and forearm. It’s normal.”
“That’s good, right?”
“This is from another patient of mine.”
“Oh.”
He pointed to the other X-ray. “This is the image of your right wrist and forearm.”
I went back and forth between the two.
“See the difference?” he asked.
“Not really. Just tell me, is it cancer?”
“No, nothing like that. Did you ever break a bone when you were younger?”
“My clavicle when I was thirteen.”
“And you just broke some ribs back in October in Denver.”
“Right.”
He took another X-ray from my file. “This is an image of your broken ribs taken at Denver Health. Other than the fractures and breaks, these bones are normal.” He pointed at the recent X-ray of my right arm. “These are not.”
“What’s wrong with them?”
“Nothing’s wrong per se. There’s a metric called the z-score, which measures bone mineral density. Anything between ?1 and 1 is within the range of normal. Your z-score is 2.75.”
“Is that high?”
He chuckled. “In my entire career, I’ve never seen bones this dense. This could explain the deep body pain you’ve been experiencing if they were undergoing a cycle of densification.”
“What would cause an uptick in bone density?”
“Bad things. Diffusely metastatic prostate cancer, Paget’s disease, pyknodysostosis, osteopetrosis…It’s a long, scary list. But here’s the thing. You don’t have any of those.”
“You’re sure?”
“I screened you for everything the AI could think of. You’re otherwise completely healthy. You just have superdense bones now. Far less prone to breaks and fractures.”
I felt a sudden rush of fear.
My heart was thudding in my chest.
I looked at Jeff, a slight man with a bushy beard and somber eyes.
“How much of my medical history are you sharing with my employer?” I asked.
“You signed a release allowing me to send over reports following your Denver incident. It’s so they know when to put you back on active duty. Why?”
“Have you shared these X-rays and your findings with them?”
“Not yet.”
“Don’t.”
Jeff looked uncertain.
“What’s the concern?” he asked.
“Could you do one more DNA work-up for me?”
“I thought your Denver test was negative for changes.”
“It was.”
“Why would it not have shown any changes if your genome had been altered?”
“Any number of reasons,” I said. “We know those ice bombs contained a gene-editing package. It may have only targeted cells in certain organs. Or the viral vector could have been programmed with a delay mechanism, allowing it to sit dormant and modify my genome later.”
Jeff came to his feet. “I’ll send your DNA off for a new round of genome sequencing. We’ll compare it to your last test.” He started putting the X-rays back into my chart. “If there is an anomaly,” he said, “I’m required by law to report it. Of course, you know this. But I will inform you first.”
Maybe I was just being paranoid, but if my genome had been altered in Denver, I wanted to know what other changes might be coming. The last thing I needed was the GPA thinking I’d done this to myself, or a story breaking in the New York Post or the Guardian, splashing out the headline that the disgraced son of Miriam Ramsay had been caught self-editing.