Flood Rising

56

The flight took six hours but to Jenna it felt like hardly any time had passed. Part of this was due to her anxiety about what would happen when they arrived. Time always seemed to drag when she was looking forward to something good — the last day of school or a birthday — and flew by when something bad loomed on the horizon.

She thought she would be able to spend at least some of the trip sleeping, but even though she felt dead on her feet, every time she closed her eyes, she had a vision of Mercy, flanked by Cort’s men, waving good-bye. She settled for a hot meal from the Gulfstream’s galley, washed down with several bottles of Pepsi, and she listened in as the rest of the group discussed strategy.

Cort had wasted no time asserting his authority, and Noah did not challenge him. Jenna sensed that her insistence on making the trip — and her decision to surrender to Cort at the cost of Mercy’s freedom — had taken the wind out of Noah’s sails. That, and the fact that he had been shot just eighteen hours earlier.

The wound wasn’t serious — the bullet had deflected off a rib, fracturing it and tearing up the surrounding tissue, but doing no damage to vital organs — but a gunshot was a gunshot. He bore the pain stoically, but Jenna saw how he winced a little whenever he changed position.

He had been taken to the hospital, along with the two deputies who — Jenna was pleased to learn — had also survived the shooting, thanks to their standard-issue body armor. Noah had managed to slip away but had arrived at Mercy’s trailer just as the police were showing up. With no way to track Jenna and Mercy, he had turned to his old handler at the Agency — Bill Cort — who had briefed him on the sanction and the reasons behind it. Noah had been as surprised as Cort when he learned of Jenna’s arrival at the safe house.

Jenna didn’t believe Cort’s assertion that he had been out of the loop on the decision to send the hit team, but they were well past the point where recriminations would make any difference.

Soter also seemed to have set aside his aversion toward the men who had killed his team and destroyed his lab fifteen years earlier. Jenna suspected that had more to do with the realization that he had been a pawn in the opening move in a war to destroy humanity. He spent nearly two full hours describing the history of the project. The account was more or less the same as what he had told Jenna during the flight from Miami, but the air of pride had faded. It was now a recitation of facts. When he was done, he gave what information he could concerning the whereabouts of more than a dozen clones — Jenna noted that he no longer referred to them as his children.

The conversation had come around to the transmission’s origin. Soter maintained that an extraterrestrial intelligence was the most plausible explanation, but Cort seemed reluctant to even speculate. “Let’s just deal with one thing at time,” he said.

It seemed to Jenna like textbook denial. An extraterrestrial explanation would not only mean a threat beyond comprehension, and possibly against which humanity would be powerless, but it would also invalidate a host of beliefs about the nature of life and the meaning of existence. It was no surprise that Cort shied away from the topic. Jenna had her own reasons for not wanting to discuss it. The entire conversation had been an excruciating ordeal, in which her very artificial origin was dissected and put on display. Her unique abilities — what her school teachers called ‘gifts’—had occasionally made her the target of ridicule from jealous classmates, but she had never felt the kind of embarrassment she now felt listening to this discussion.

She felt like a freak. No, worse than that: an illegitimate freak.

Noah sensed her discomfort, holding her hand, squeezing reassurance into her, but she endured without comment. The events surrounding her, past and future, were much more important than her hurt feelings.

The discussion turned to the question of how to proceed when they arrived at their destination. Cort tried to arrange for Agency assets from Texas and California to be sent in ahead of them, but the remote location confounded those efforts. He contacted the military, but was tight-lipped about the full results of that conversation, saying only that there would be no additional boots on the ground, meaning that the little group in the Gulfstream would be the sole defenders of the human race. If they failed, it would be game over.

“What should we expect?” Cort asked.

Soter turned to Jenna.

“How should I know?” she snapped, but then she realized why he had deferred to her. If anyone could predict what the clones would do, it would be her. Yet the truth was that she didn’t know. The door to the implanted memories remained shut. The only thing she really knew for sure was that the urge to go to the coordinates in the message was overpowering. Even now, with the memories ripped from her head, Jenna felt the irresistible urge. The other clones surely felt it, too. She wondered how many were on their way there? She did not share this insight with Cort, though, and he noticed the omission.

“I signed off on this little field trip because you insisted that only you could stop them,” he reminded her.

“I’ll understand it better when I get there,” she said.

They were nearly at their destination, and she still had no idea what was going to happen.

After landing, they headed out from Socorro on US Route 60. Noah was at the wheel of their rented Jeep Cherokee, maintaining a steady seventy-five miles per hour. Cort sat in the front passenger seat. Soter and Jenna were in the back. She could see distant mountain ranges on the horizon, but the foreground was flat and desolate. Florida was flat, but at least there were palm trees to break up the monotony. Here, there was nothing except the occasional herd of cattle, and — distant but growing ever larger — an irregular line of satellite dishes.

As they approached, Jenna began to appreciate just how extraordinary the Very Large Array was. Unlike the Arecibo Observatory, which made use of a single enormous dish, more or less fixed in place, the Very Large Array’s twenty-seven individual dishes — each more than eighty feet in diameter and arranged in a Y-shaped pattern with legs that extended more than thirteen miles in each direction — worked in unison to create a single antenna that could be extended to a maximum twenty-two miles across. A tourist brochure she had picked up in Socorro described how the 230-ton dishes could be moved as needed using a special transport vehicle running on railroad tracks that extended to the Y’s full limit.

As the full scope of the observatory came into view, Cort looked back at Jenna. “Why does it have to be here? Couldn’t this signal be sent from any radio telescope?”

Soter answered before Jenna could admit her ignorance. “We can only speculate about the reason, but my hypothesis is that the intelligence behind the message was very familiar with our capabilities and our potential. In 1977, when the Wow! Signal and the transmission I later received were sent, the VLA was the best radio telescope on Earth. The author of the transmission could expect that it would still be functioning thirty-seven years later. The same cannot be said for the Big Ear telescope, which received the Wow! Signal. It was dismantled in 1998 to make room for a golf course.”

“A golf course?” Noah echoed, glancing in the rear view mirror. “You’re kidding, right?”

Soter grimaced. “I wish I were. One would expect a better fate for the place that marks the first contact by an alien intelligence.”

Cort gave a sarcastic chuckle. “Maybe someday they’ll build a war memorial there.”

Nobody had a response to that.

57

The VLA dishes grew larger until they stretched across half the horizon like a picket line. A rough map on the tourist pamphlet revealed that the highway passed through the upper leg of the array. Just before they reached it, Noah turned off the main route and headed toward the cluster of administrative buildings near the junction of the three legs. He drove past the visitors center — the parking lot was empty — and continued to the control building, a two story concrete and stone structure.

Jenna was struck by the profound differences between the VLA facility and the Arecibo Observatory. The landscape was open and featureless, unlike the lushly forested limestone hills in Puerto Rico. The buildings reminded her more of the structures she’d glimpsed at the abandoned Aerojet facility in the Everglades — big, open and scattered across the landscape. The enormous dishes sprouted from the plain like surreal white mushrooms in a Lewis Carrroll story. Strangest of all was the profound quiet.

“Sure doesn’t look like anything is about to happen,” Cort remarked, taking out his cell phone and glancing at the display. “Less than half an hour to go. I’m guessing you don’t just walk into a place like this and say ‘I’d like to place a collect call to the Andromeda galaxy.’”

Soter shook his head. “Scientists have to schedule their research months, even years in advance. And this facility is primarily a receiving station.”

“You mean it can’t be used to call out?”

“It can. There’s no fundamental difference between a transmitter and a receiver in terms of hardware. A transmitter like the one at Arecibo, is built to sustain a high-power transmission over long periods. A transmission sent from here wouldn’t be very powerful at all, but the focusing ability of the array would compensate for that. However, making the changes would require some technical knowledge.”

“Do any of your clones have that knowledge?”

This wasn’t the first time the subject had been brought up, but Soter’s answer was the same. “To the best of my knowledge, no.”

“Well, we’re here. I guess we should go and make sure nobody snuck in the back door.”

As they headed in through the main entrance, Jenna hung back, allowing the three men to take the lead. The urge to make this journey, that she had first experienced in Puerto Rico, had not relented, but she felt no sense of familiarity or attunement with this place. No new implanted memories had been awakened in her. She couldn’t tell whether the door to those memories had been shut or there was simply nothing there in the first place.

Signs for the self-guided walking tour pointed the way to the control room. Like the Arecibo Observatory, the room looked more like an office than a portal for watching distant stars. More than a dozen computers and monitors, each one displaying a graph or lines of text, sat atop a long horse-shoe shaped desk wrapped around the room’s perimeter. Anyone hoping to see spectacular pictures of black holes or nebulae would have gone away disappointed.

Three men were working in the room, hunched over their workstations, busily entering data. One of them looked up and offered a friendly wave, then went back to his task. The others ignored them.

Cort cleared his throat. “I need to speak to whomever is in charge.”

All three men looked up, and Jenna heard one of them groan. She scanned the faces — all were middle-aged Caucasian men. None of them bore even a passing resemblance to her. The man who had waved rose from his seat and came over to speak with them. He eyed Cort’s crutches — Jenna could almost see him leaping to the conclusion that they were going to complain about the ‘walking’ part of the walking tour, but he kept his smile in place as he introduced himself.

“I’m Dr. Jon Miller. Is there something I can help you with?”

“Are you in charge?” Cort asked. Jenna noted that he was being aggressive to the point of rudeness, asserting his dominance to ensure cooperation. It was one of the techniques Noah had taught her, but not one that she had ever practiced. In her experience, subtlety produced better results.

The smile slipped a little but Miller remained diplomatic. “Well, I’m in charge of a few things. If you tell me your concerns, I’ll have a better idea where to direct you.”

“We’re federal officers, investigating a possible threat against this facility.”

The news hit Miller like a bomb. The other two men sat up straighter, appearing almost poised to flee. “A threat? I…uh, can’t imagine what kind of…uh…”

Cort allowed the tension to build a moment, then his demeanor changed completely. “It’s probably nothing, but I’d appreciate it if you could go over a couple of things with us. Just to be sure.”

Miller swallowed. “Sure.”

Soter stepped forward. “Would you please show us the scheduled activity for the next twenty-four hours?”

Miller nodded and gestured to a laptop computer that was already displaying a spreadsheet. Soter scanned the document, scrolling down, then looked back and shrugged.

Cort addressed Miller again. “How easy would it be to change the orientation of the array to send a transmission?”

Miller gave a surprised laugh, but then he became somber again when he realized Cort was not joking. “Not easy at all. In the first place, we’re a receiving station. And we don’t change the schedule for just anyone.”

“You’re not hearing me, doc.” A little of the earlier surliness was back. “If someone came in here, pointed a gun at your head and told you to do it, how tough would it be to make the changes?”

Miller went pale. “Uh…is that what you are—”

“No. Just answer the question.”

“We could do it from this room. It would take a few minutes.”

Cort turned away as if Miller no longer existed and addressed Noah and Jenna. “That’s it then. All we need to do is secure this room and there’s no way that signal is going out. Not from here at least.”

Jenna did not share Cort’s certitude, but before she could offer a rebuttal, she noticed Miller staring at her. She felt a sudden rush of apprehension and took a quick step forward. “Dr. Miller. You recognize me, don’t you?”

He shook his head, embarrassed at having been caught. “No. I’m sorry.”

“Dr. Miller, this is important. Do I look like someone that you know?”

He feigned ignorance a moment longer before admitting, “You could be her twin sister.”

Cort was quick to grasp the importance of this revelation. “Who? Someone that works here? One of the astronomers?”

“Sophie isn’t an astronomer. She’s with the track maintenance team.”

“Sophia Gallo?” Soter asked.

“I…ah, don’t know her last name.”

Soter turned to the others. “Sophia is from Generation Six, the same as Jarrod and Kelli.”

“Wonderful,” Cort growled. “Track maintenance. That explains how we missed her. We were looking for brainiacs. Is she here right now?”

Miller shrugged.

“We’re going to have to sweep the entire site,” Cort said, directing his words to Noah.

Jenna knew that was no small undertaking. There was a lot of ground to cover, half a dozen buildings, and if the array itself was included, twenty-seven antenna dishes sprawled out on nearly forty miles of railroad track.

Noah nodded then turned to Jenna. “Well, I guess it’s a good thing we brought you along after all.”

The words were barely out of his mouth when one of the other men called out. “Dr. Miller? Something is happening to the array.”

“What the hell?” Miller looked at the spreadsheet again. “There aren’t any adjustments scheduled.”

“Shut it down,” Cort ordered.

Miller and the other two men crowded around a different terminal and began tapping in commands, but after a few seconds, it was apparent that the array was not responding to their efforts. Jenna looked past them and out the large window, gazing out across the array. Even from a distance, she could see the inverted domes moving, swinging around and tilting toward a different part of the sky. It was beautiful to watch: a perfectly synchronized dance that ended only when all twenty-seven dishes were aimed at a group of stars known as Chi Sagittarii.

58

Jenna felt a hand on her shoulder and turned to find Noah, standing close. Protective. “You were right,” he whispered. “Is there anything you can do?”

She looked back, uncertain. A sense of satisfaction filled her. Everything was playing out according to the plan that had been written in her DNA. She didn’t need to do anything. Yet her rational mind knew that the feeling was a lie. It was wrong. She didn’t want the message to be sent. Didn’t want the world and everyone she loved to be swept away in a global apocalypse.

Cort was still trying to get a grasp on what was happening. “Can this be done remotely? Is there an alternate control room?”

Miller shook his head. “The computer controls the array, but we’re locked out.”

“It’s Chu,” Jenna whispered. “He’s taken over the network.”

Cort stared at her a moment, processing this, then turned to Miller. “Is that possible?”

Miller raised his hands in a gesture that indicated he was out of his depth. “I wouldn’t have thought any of this was possible, but yes. If somebody broke into our network, they could take control of the array.”

“So he could be anywhere. Timbuktu, for all we know.”

“He’s here,” Jenna said, still whispering, though she didn’t know why. “He’s with Sophia. They’re here somewhere. They have to be.”

One of the other technicians spoke up. “If you wanted to take over the network on site, the best way to do it would be to splice into one of the fiber optic lines.”

“Where are those?”

“Everywhere. But the antennas would be the ideal place. Or the pads. There are nodes at each one.”

Cort breathed a curse. “Can you pull the plug? Shut down everything?”

“We’re locked out,” Miller repeated.

“Then cut the damn cord with an axe!” The scientist looked aghast at the suggestion, so Cort continued, “I’ll do it. Show me where.”

“Too late,” Jenna murmured. She wasn’t sure how she knew this. It didn’t feel like an implanted memory. It might have been nothing more than a sense of imminent defeat, but she was certain that the message was already being transmitted. If it was as simple as the Wow! Signal, it might already be done. If it was something more complex, like the DNA transmission, it would take longer, but certainly no more than a few minutes. And then…?

Then Jarrod Chu would signal the rest of the clones scattered around the world to start tipping the dominos.

This is the way it’s supposed to happen.

This time, there was no mistaking the source of the thought. Her voice — the teacher’s voice — still with her.

No! I won’t do this. I won’t stand by and let everything be destroyed. I didn’t get this far by giving up.

She closed her eyes and tried to reach out with her mind. She had always heard that twins shared a strange, almost psychic bond. Maybe clones did, too. She envisioned Jarrod Chu, bent over a computer, watching as the message was uploaded. Was it a vision — was she seeing it through his eyes because of some psychic bond — or just her imagination? Either way, it didn’t help. She tried to picture Sophia Gallo, someone she had never even heard of until sixty seconds before, yet with whom she shared a unique blueprint. What was she doing right now?

Track maintenance.

After the antennas, the most critical component of the Very Large Array was the rail line, which made it possible to move the massive dishes to different positions along the legs of the Y. Ensuring that the two hundred ton dishes could be moved without incident required the forty miles of steel rail and over sixty thousand wooden railroad ties. Maintaining all that required specialized equipment and unique vehicles.

Cort dug into his pocket and pulled out a phone. He tapped a contact name and strolled a few feet away, his back to them, his voice hushed, but urgent.

With Cort distracted, Jenna whirled to face Noah. “I can find them. Give me the keys.”

She said it so forcefully that Noah dug into his pocket for the keys, but the gravity of her demand hit him before he could hand them over. He gave her a crooked smile. “Sorry. The rental agreement doesn’t allow that. But I’ll drive you.”

For just an instant, Jenna was grateful for his support. Then a chill, like a premonition of death, shot down her spine.

Just you.

She shook her head. “I can’t explain why, but I have to do this alone. You asked if there was anything I can do. This is it. Please trust me.”

His smile fell, replaced by an intense stare that cut right to her core. “Jenna…”

“Trust me,” she repeated, then added a word that seemed strange in her mouth. “Dad.”

“I trust you,” he said, barely louder than a whisper. He held out the keys, but as she took them, he said, “Remember, Jenna. Nurture is more powerful than nature. I raised you well.”

As she bolted from the room, she heard Cort shouting, “Where the hell is she going? In ten minutes, this place will be—” The door shut, cutting off his voice.

In ten minutes, what?

Doesn’t matter, she decided, and she ran faster.

59

Noah’s words haunted her as she sprinted toward the parked Jeep. He had seen through her. He had seen something that even she couldn’t see. She was being summoned — drawn by a siren song that rang out from every cell in her body — to a reckoning where she would discover whether he was right.

Stop it? Why?

She slid behind the wheel and started the SUV. The track maintenance yard was just three hundred feet away, easily identifiable by the collection of strange looking vehicles, many of which sat on rail sidings. Two men in hard hats and work clothes stood near one of the vehicles and she steered toward them, rolling down the window as she skidded to a stop.

“Where’s Sophia?”

One of the men glanced up, a perturbed expression on his face. “You shouldn’t be driving in here.”

“Sophia,” she repeated, more forcefully. “It’s an emergency.”

“She went to check the west track. But you shouldn’t—”

Jenna didn’t hear the rest. She angled the Jeep toward the rails directly ahead and punched the accelerator. She bounced over the rails without slowing and then steered onto the access road that ran parallel to the tracks. A cloud of dust rose behind her like some kind of biblical pillar of smoke, marking her presence. Cort would have no trouble tracking her. The speedometer ticked up — fifty miles per hour…sixty…seventy. It didn’t seem fast enough.

She passed an enormous hangar-like structure, easily as large as the Aerojet silo building in the Everglades. The side facing the rails was open. A massive antenna stood inside, undergoing some kind of maintenance. The dish was pointing straight up, like an enormous chalice waiting to be filled.

Beyond that building lay several empty pads, each with three concrete footings that rose up from the dusty ground like grave markers, then a dish, then more pads. She checked each without slowing, looking for the track maintenance vehicle that would indicate Sophia’s location. Three long minutes later, she spotted what she was looking for: a Chevrolet pickup truck that had been modified with flanged steel wheels to run on railroad tracks. It sat parked in front of a towering antenna dish. As she got closer, she saw movement high above, on the staircase that led up to the base of the massive dish.

Jenna stopped the Jeep and got out. A dark haired woman wearing blue coveralls, descended the staircase, taking several steps at a time with the agility of an experienced parkour athlete. Even from a distance, Jenna could see the resemblance; the woman — it had to be Sophia Gallo — looked just like her.

Sophia paused on the lowermost landing just above the concrete pillars upon which the antenna rested. There was an unmistakable look of excitement on her face, and Jenna found that she too had broken into a broad smile.

“Come on up.”

Without waiting for further prompting, Jenna mounted the short flight of stairs to the landing, where she found Sophia waiting with open arms. Jenna fell into the embrace without the slightest hesitation.

The sense of kinship — sisterhood — was overpowering. The bond she felt with Mercy was only a shadow of what she now experienced. This woman didn’t merely share the same DNA. Sophia and Jenna were the same person, only separated by age and experience.

Sophia released her and held her at arm’s length. “You’re new.”

It sounded a little strange, but Jenna understood. It wasn’t just that Jenna was young. Sophia was a connected part of a family that Jenna had only just learned about. “Yeah,” she replied. “It’s kind of a long story.”

“I’m Sophie.”

“Jenna.”

“Wonderful.” Sophia laughed with undisguised joy, “Well, you’re timing couldn’t be better. Come on up to the vertex room. You can tell us both.”

She gestured to the ascending stairs, which rose at least another forty feet above the landscape.

“Both?”

“Oh, sorry. I guess you really are new. Jarrod is up there.”

Jenna was not the least bit surprised that her intuition had been proven correct. Everything was happening according to plan. She started up the stairs behind Sophia, and with each step, she felt herself moving closer to a pivotal moment in history. The moment everything would change. She wondered if this was how the crew of the Enola Gay had felt one early August morning in 1945, as they took off from the Marianas Islands with a cargo of nuclear death in their bomb bay. The world was about to change, and Jenna would bear witness.

Sophia passed a gently chugging compressor and ducked under one of the large curving gears that allowed the dish to tilt. She continued up another flight of stairs that ended at an innocuous looking door right below the dish. She opened it and allowed Jenna to step inside first.

The room looked empty, like a disused storage closet. A small raised metal platform provided access to the upper reaches of the pyramid-shaped space. Several large cylindrical objects reached down from overhead. A man stood in front of a cylinder. She recognized him, both from the picture Cort had shown her at the safe house and from the uncanny resemblance to the face she saw in the mirror. Jarrod Chu. He held a laptop computer trailing a thick cable connected to the cylinder.

Jarrod showed only a trace of surprise at seeing her, and then his face broke into the same smile with which Sophia had welcomed Jenna. Sophia stepped in behind her and made the introduction. “Jarrod, meet Jenna. She’s new.”

“Very new,” Jarrod remarked. His voice was a deeper version of Jenna’s. “You must have slipped through the cracks. Last generation?”

Jenna risked a quick glance at the computer screen. It showed a download progress bar, about two-thirds green.

I’m not too late, she thought. And then, Too late for what?

“I think so,” she answered. “And I only learned about…all off this…a couple of days ago.” A small lie, but one she delivered without the slightest hint of dishonesty. Jarrod gave no indication of registering the falsehood, and Jenna realized that, despite his training as an FBI special agent, he wasn’t adept at reading people. She pointed at the laptop. “Is that it?”

“This is it,” he confirmed. “In about two minutes, give or take, it will be done.”

Two minutes. Jenna felt a tingle of anticipation. All I have to do is stand back, let it happen and the world will change.

I told Noah I could stop it.

Stop it? Why?

“What exactly is it?”

Jarrod cocked his head sideways in a look of mild surprise. He glanced at Sophia then back at Jenna. “You mean you don’t know?”

Jenna gave a helpless shrug. “Still catching up.”

Jarrod tapped the touch pad and then turned the screen so she could get a better look. The display was filled with ones and zeroes, a binary code. After just a moment’s scrutiny, Jenna recognized the pattern. It was identical to the DNA message Soter had received thirty-seven years earlier. But then an impossible detail leapt out. A change. Something in the code had been modified, added, but why?

She almost asked for an explanation, but before she could phrase the question, she came up with a possible answer on her own. The DNA message was a unique recognition code. Sending it back to the source would be a way of signaling that it had been read and understood. The addition revealed that the language could also be spoken by those on the receiving end.

“You must have talked to Soter,” Jarrod continued. “How is our dear father?”

“Uh, he seemed kind of confused actually. He didn’t think any of us understood the last part of the transmission.”

Sophia grinned. “He still thinks it’s from aliens.”

This time, Jenna made no effort to hide her ignorance. “It’s not?”

Jarrod laughed. “You do have some catching up to do.”

She waited for him to elaborate, but instead he returned his attention to the computer, closing the window with the message and checking the progress bar. Three-quarters done now. Ninety seconds? Less? And how much time was left on Cort’s ten minute countdown, to…what? Nothing good.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Jarrod continued.

“You do?” He does? I doubt it.

“You’re wondering if this is the right thing to do,” Sophia said.

“We’ve all thought it,” Jarrod said.

Jenna gave an involuntary gasp. Of course they know. We practically share a brain. “Is it?” she asked, abandoning all pretense. “Destroying the world?”

“Destroying?” Jarrod exchanged another meaningful glance with Sophia. “Jenna, we’re saving the world. Saving it from this slow death called humanity. I know it’s a lot to process, and I know you want to believe there’s a better way. We all did. We’ve spent years trying to find a better way, but the message…”

Sophia picked up the thread of his explanation. “You only need to look at a newspaper to see it. We — humans — either consume with no regard for the future, or hide our heads in denial while the problems multiply.”

“We’re omnivores,” Jarrod said. “In the truest sense of the word. We devour everything. And we congratulate ourselves on our ability to adapt when we exhaust one resource, even though our miracle solution drives thousands of species to extinction.

“Did you know that in the 1960s the human population was poised to exceed carrying capacity? The planet could not produce enough food to feed everyone. The population was about three billion, and one third of them were just a drought away from starvation. But then we discovered new ways to extend the food supply. New strains of wheat and rice, fertilizers made from petrochemicals, new farming methods, intensive factory fishing. And what has happened? Ninety percent of the world’s forests have been cleared for agriculture. The seas have been emptied of fish and are poisoned by fertilizer run-off. Worst of all, instead of stabilizing the food supply to feed three billion, the so-called Green Revolution fueled a population explosion. It took thousands of years for the population to reach three billion. In the last forty years, it has more than doubled. And by the middle of this century, there will be ten billion people.”

In the back of her mind, Jenna could see the seconds ticking away, but she knew that Jarrod wasn’t stalling. His intention was to educate her. To help her overcome her moral reservations about what they were doing…what they were destined to do.

“No one even realizes what a disaster it was,” he continued. “Human society congratulates itself on their ability to squeeze the Earth’s limited resources even harder, ravaging the natural world, heating the planet with our waste until the oceans turn to acid and the land becomes a barren desert. Only when we have killed every other living thing will humans admit to folly, and then they will say ‘Why didn’t we do something about it?’ Well, we are doing something.”

“We aren’t destroying the world,” Sophia said. “Humanity is doing that. We’re saving it. Treating the infection before it kills everything.”

Jenna felt the truth of the words. Humanity’s fatal flaw was the ability to ignore dire generational problems while focusing on short term gratification. It was written into the human genome as surely as this moment had been written into her own. And she knew, without a shred of uncertainty, that it would never stop. There would be no great awakening. The human species was a runaway train that would destroy all life on Earth with its inevitable crash.

All I need to do is let this happen, she thought.

There would be survivors. As if awakening to another implanted memory, she realized that the others had already made preparations for it, and once the ashes of World War III cooled, they would step forth and begin building a better human society, one in which the rapacious appetites of Humanity 1.0 would be bred out.

“A lot of people are going to suffer and die,” she replied in a small voice that didn’t feel like her own.

“They’ll suffer and die if we don’t take action,” Sophia countered. “We cannot afford to cling to the illusion of false hope.”

A faint chime sounded.

It was done. The signal had been sent. Jenna had failed to keep her promise, yet somehow, it didn’t feel like failure.

Sudden nausea swept through her, bending her vision, moving through her body, head to toe, like a wave of energy. It staggered her, but passed in a second and left her feeling…invigorated. Renewed. Stronger. Sharper.

What the—

She glanced up at Sophia and Jarrod. Neither seemed to have suffered the same effect, but they were different. The chestnut-brown hair they all shared was now black. And their eyes, once dark brown like Jenna’s, were now fiery brown, almost orange. There was no place to see her reflection, but Jenna’s hair was long enough to pull around and see. She did it casually, as though nervously playing with her hair, confirming that the fine, straight strands were now as black as theirs. Given their lack of reaction to her eyes, they matched as well, still doubles, but not in Jenna’s memory.

They didn’t notice the change, Jenna realized. The fact that it took place a moment after the signal was sent wasn’t lost on her. The modified DNA…

The answer to one of her many questions resolved in her mind. She knew where the 1977 Wow! Signal had come from — the future. Her future. Her present. Jarrod sent the signal. Just moments ago. And he had sent the signal before. Each time, it contained a modification. A refinement.

But they were past that point. If further refinements had been sent, they had already been sent. They were beyond that point in time. She was now who she would always be, but she had no idea what that meant. Had no idea how that had changed things, or how many times this scene had played out, subtly changing with each transmission. How many different versions of herself had stood here before, watching the signal be sent? How many had failed to get this far? She’d barely survived the journey this time. Maybe this is the first time I made it…

If Sophia and Jarrod were any indication, she would be the only one who remembered who she had been before. I’m new, she thought, perhaps different enough from the others that the final change was not lost in a stream of new memories.

“Now what?” she asked, even more curious than before.

Jarrod’s smile broadened. “Now, we go on the offensive.” He set the computer down on the edge of the platform and opened an e-mail server.

I trust you.

Noah’s parting words echoed in her head. She made a promise. She asked him to trust her, and he had. “Who sent the message?”

Jarrod didn’t look up. “You still haven’t figured it out?”

“I understand that you — that we — just sent the Wow! Signal, but where did it come from? Who modified it?”

“Nobody modified it,” Jarrod said with a chuckle. “It is how it was meant to be. And we are where we were meant to be. It’s that simple.”

He doesn’t know. How could he? He doesn’t remember any other version of history than the current. There may have been a past where he knew the source, but the necessity to receive direct orders has been erased by the compulsion built into his DNA over unknown numbers of revisions.

Sophia took a step toward her, opening her arms as if offering an earnest embrace. “Jenna, it’s the Earth that gains, and all life on it, even humanity.”

Part of Jenna agreed wholeheartedly, but she knew those feelings had been programmed. They were powerful — stronger than before — but the knowledge of her past self buoyed her, gave her the desire to not be a slave to some mysterious coder of human DNA. Someone who had also figured out how to send a signal back in time.

Nurture is more powerful than nature. I raised you well.

For all his fatherly wisdom, Noah had never anticipated that she would be faced with a choice of this magnitude.

Jarrod finished composing his e-mail — a very short message — and was populating the address list. Jenna saw eleven recipients, eleven of her brothers and sisters. She wondered if there were still others out there like her, just awakening to the knowledge, or some who had perhaps refused to embrace the apocalyptic prophecy of their teacher — their creator.

She wondered how many had been wiped out by the Agency’s purge.

Maybe it is better to simply wipe the slate clean.

But she had made a promise.

“If everything you say is true,” she persisted. “Why did we have to send this message back to space? It doesn’t make sense.”

While she now had some of the answers — though she still couldn’t conceive why the signal was being shot into space — she was hoping the two of them might question their actions. Might open their eyes to the truth.

Sophia reached out for her arm, gently, shaking her head like a disappointed parent. “Jenna—”

Their beliefs were unshakable. Without knowledge of their true pasts, they could never be convinced to fight the desires being shouted at them by their very DNA.

Without waiting for an answer, Jenna leaped forward and seized the computer from Jarrod’s hand before he could hit ‘Send.’

60

The move caught Jarrod off guard. Jenna snapped the screen down, and with a hard pull, she yanked it free of the connection to the receiver network. Then, she spun on her heel and bolted for the door.

Sophia moved to intercept her, but even with reflexes enhanced by superior DNA, her shock at this unexpected turn of events hampered her response. Jenna stiff-armed her into a wall, tore the door open and burst out onto the elevated landing.

Despite having the element of surprise on her side, Jenna was mired in guilt. She felt like a shoplifter, caught at the exit of a department store, hoping to outrun the security guards, while knowing full well that every detail of the crime had been recorded on video. She had just committed an unforgivable act of treason against her own kind. She was an apostate, reviling the creator’s message, clinging to the false gospel of human ingenuity and dooming the entire planet to extinction. Worse, what she had done would probably amount to nothing more than an inconvenience for Jarrod. She had failed the stop the really important part of the plan. The signal had gone out. She and those like her had been what…upgraded? What were they capable of now, that they weren’t before? And really, what had she accomplished aside from revealing her betrayal? Jarrod could send his message to the others from a cell phone. She had simply delayed the inevitable.

No, she thought. The computer had the names of all the clones. Cort could use that to track them down and—

Hunt them? Kill them?

— stop them from carrying out their planned terror attacks, or at the very least, use the information to prevent any successful terror attacks from setting the superpowers at each other’s throats.

The mental turmoil dulled her edges. Just as she extended a foot toward the first step, Sophia managed to reach out and snag a handful of her hair. Jenna’s head snapped back and her feet flew out from under her, causing her to slam down hard on the metal treads. The fall tore her loose from Sophia’s grasp, but that was about the only good thing to come out of it. The impact sent a jolt of pain through Jenna’s torso, driving the breath from her lungs. Worse, she started sliding down the flight, each step gouging into her skin as she scraped her way lower. Above her, the entire staircase trembled as Sophia descended.

Hugging the laptop to her chest, Jenna threw her free hand out, trying to snag the guardrail to arrest her slide, but before she could do so, her feet hit the landing near the elevation gears. Sophia seemed to be gliding down the steps, her feet barely touching as she made huge bounds. With an excruciating effort, Jenna hauled herself erect and started across the landing, but before she could take two steps, Sophia was there.

So fast.

She darted in front of Jenna, blocking her access to the descending stairs. “Jenna, don’t do this.” There was anger in the woman’s tone, but something else, too. Understanding. “We all had to deal with this. It will pass, and then you’ll see that this is what has to be done. Trust us. Trust yourself.”

Trust? She had asked Noah to trust her. Mercy had trusted her, surrendering herself to Cort’s custody just so Jenna could get this far. Right now, Jenna was putting her trust in that inner voice of reason that didn’t belong to the teacher speaking through her DNA. It was the ability Noah had instilled in her to detect falsehood, to know when something wasn’t right.

But what if she was wrong?

Jenna gripped the laptop in both hands, raising it as if preparing to swat a fly. “If you don’t move,” she said in a low menacing voice, “I’ll go through you.”

Sophia shook her head slowly. Jenna saw the other woman’s eyes dart back and forth, and then settle on the computer like a compass needle pointing true north. Sophia might have been older and more experienced with her gifts, but Jenna had been trained to look for the signs that would forecast an attack, and she had been taught how to fight back. As if catching a glimpse of the future, Jenna saw Sophia start to move and knew exactly what the woman was going to do. As Sophia reached for the computer, Jenna used the laptop like a shield, deflecting the grasping hands. She side-stepped, allowing Sophia’s momentum to carry her forward. As Sophia passed her, Jenna spun on her heel, one leg extended, to sweep Sophia’s legs out from under her.

Sophia went down hard. The landing shuddered with the impact. Jenna started for the descending stairs, but Sophia was back up in a heartbeat, and with a feral growl made more fierce by the mask of blood streaming from split lips, she charged again. The woman moved with inhuman speed, but Jenna, somehow, moved faster. She dodged back, a reflex drilled into her from hours spent at the dojo, and Sophia shot past again.

In a sickening premonition, Jenna saw what was about to happen. She was powerless to prevent it. Sophia hit the descending rail at an angle and flipped over it, out into empty space. Her head hit the hard metal floor on her way over and when Jenna saw the woman’s face again, her eyes were closed. Unconscious. Totally unaware that her life was about to end.

Jenna felt as if something had been ripped out of her.

The unconscious Sophia did not cry out as she fell, but a scream from above echoed the pain in Jenna’s heart.

“No!” Jarrod’s shout was punctuated by a dull thud.

Jenna tore her eyes away from the bloody stain on the immaculate white rail and looked up to see Jarrod on the upper landing. His face, so like her own, was twisted with grief and rage, but when he met Jenna’s eyes, the emotions hardened into deadly resolve. With agonizing deliberateness, he reached under his jacket and drew a gun.

The sight of the pistol broke Jenna out of her paralysis, and she lurched into motion. Passing the red streaks that marked the spot where her sister had fallen, she headed down the stairs. A bullet struck the rail in front of her, throwing up a shower of yellow sparks. Jenna kept going, one hand resting on the rail, the other clutching the computer. Her feet tapped out a quick staccato rhythm, but she took the steps cautiously, one at a time, resisting the urge to bound as Sophia had done. A fall now would be disastrous. Jarrod held his fire, and Jenna knew without looking that he was giving chase. Even if he didn’t need the laptop, he would want revenge.

Before she could reach the lower landing, she felt the vibrations of Jarrod’s feet on the flight above her.

“Jenna! Stop! I will shoot you!”

She ignored the threat, reached the landing and pivoted onto the final staircase. Sophia lay at the base of the stairs, unmoving, like so much roadkill. Jenna felt a pang of self-loathing as she leapt from the penultimate step, vaulting over the body. The welcome solidity of the desert floor beneath her feet gave her the impetus to push on.

The Jeep was just twenty yards away, but as she turned toward it, Jarrod’s pistol barked again. Bullets peppered the dirt in her path, too close for comfort, and she peeled off, seeking refuge beneath the dish.

Jarrod wasn’t going to let her reach the Jeep. But the track maintenance truck was a lot closer.

Jarrod fired again as soon as she broke from cover, but he had not yet divined her intention. The shot sent up a spray of dust that would have been directly in her path if she had run for the Jeep. Before he could correct his aim, she reached the truck and slid inside.

The keys were in the ignition. That was the good news. The bad news was that the truck was facing the base of the antenna and there was no way to turn it around. Jenna started the engine, threw the transmission into ‘reverse’ and glanced out the window toward Jarrod.

He strode toward her, eyes calculating, weapon aimed, ready to kill. Behind him, the dish loomed massive, blotting out the solid blue sky — but not all of it. What Jenna saw above the dish froze her in place and kept her from hitting the gas. Her eyes widened, tracking the object in the sky. “Ten minutes,” she said, realizing that Cort’s countdown had finished.

A single drone peeled away from a trail of smoke leading straight toward her and Jarrod, who must have seen the surprise in her eyes, and their direction.

Without missing a step, Jarrod looked back over his shoulder. The small missile streaked toward them. There was no engine roar as the projectile outpaced its own sound waves. It would arrive silently, leaving nothing alive to hear its power.

Jarrod raised his free hand toward the missile. His fingers twitched, and then he yanked his arm down, pulling the missile down with it as though he had reached out and plucked it from the sky.

The missile’s new trajectory brought it down into the far side of the massive dish. She felt the impact shake the ground beneath her. The telescope’s dish shattered and burst, metal panels spiraling away from a fiery explosion. And then the sound, a rattling roar, pulsed through her body. She responded to the concussion by going rigid and slamming her foot down on the gas pedal.

As the vehicle moved out into the open, Jenna watched the gigantic radio telescope crumble as a column of black smoke rose up from its core.

Rounds peppered the truck’s frame as Jarrod’s focus shifted back to Jenna. The passenger window shattered, showering Jenna with tiny particles, but Jarrod didn’t have a clear shot at her. In a few seconds, the truck was rolling backward. Jenna felt the steering wheel turn beneath her light grip, and she had to resist the urge to seize control. The truck was designed to follow the rails. If she tried to steer, it could jump the track.

It also meant there was nothing she could do to avoid the shards of metal debris now raining down around her. While many of the large metal panels that made up the telescope’s dish fluttered awkwardly down from above, just as many descended like giant throwing stars, impaling the desert floor alongside a cloud of screws, nuts, bolts and smaller, sheared bits of framing.

All around her, the desert became littered by debris. Several of the large panels fell alongside the backwards-speeding truck, while one tore into the tracks right in front of her, where the truck had been just a second before. The truck shook with a shriek of metal as a four-foot metal beam impaled the roof and slid into the passenger seat cushion. Jenna shouted in surprise, but never let off the gas, and soon, she was out of range of the still-falling debris.

The truck swung onto the mainline, its rear pointing back toward the hub. Jenna pushed the gas pedal a little harder. The engine revved loudly and the tachometer jumped into the red, but the speedometer refused to climb past thirty miles per hour. To her front, she saw Jarrod running for the Jeep, one hand raised up toward the deadly falling debris, which somehow steered clear of him.

How is he doing that? Jenna wondered, but even as the thought crossed her mind, a single word came to her: psychokinesis — the ability to affect the physical world without actual contact. Better known as telekinesis, she always thought the ability was the stuff of science fiction and crackpots. Yet Jarrod seemed to have mastered the ability.

But I can’t do that, she thought, and then she realized that she was no longer the same Jenna she remembered. Maybe she could? As she searched her memory, she gasped. Had she been using psychokinesis all along? It could explain her influence over people, the drone crash in the Everglades, the impossible wall jump in Miami and the way Cort’s men lowered their weapons against their will. She had this ability before, she realized, but was it stronger now?

Movement pulled Jenna from her thoughts. and she whispered, “Shit.” In her haste to reach the antenna, it had not occurred to her to take the Jeep’s keys. As the Jeep lurched into motion, she looked behind her at the miniscule buildings of the VLA headquarters. How far out was she? Three or four miles?

Plenty of time for Jarrod to intercept her, and there wasn’t a thing she could do to fight back.

61

Jarrod closed the distance in the first minute. Jenna could see the Jeep, trailing a monstrous dust cloud, racing toward her as if the track maintenance vehicle was standing still. He pulled alongside her and matched her speed, pacing her for another minute, as if trying to decide what to do next. Jenna hoped he would consider it a few minutes longer, putting her closer to the control building and safety.

The Jeep pulled away, moving several hundred feet ahead of the slower pickup, then it veered onto the rails, right in the path of the lumbering truck. Jenna grasped what Jarrod was attempting, but there was nothing she could do to counter the move.

The Jeep shuddered over the ties, shedding speed, growing large in the pickup’s rear view. Jenna kept her foot on the gas pedal, watching as the gap between the vehicles shrank to nothing. A sense of déjà vu swept through her. She was playing chicken yet again, only this time, swerving at the last second wasn’t an option. Neither was stopping. At the last instant, she turned forward and braced for the collision.

The pickup jolted with the impact. There was a dull thump, like an explosion, followed by the crunch of metal and fiberglass grinding together. The pickup’s engine strained against the added load, but the high gear ratio of ‘reverse’ was up to the challenge, and the truck pushed the SUV along, in spite of the locked brakes. The heavy steel undercarriage and metal wheels kept the truck on course, while the Jeep’s tires skipped and juddered over the ties. After just a few seconds of this punishing treatment, one of the SUV’s wheels snagged the ground and the entire vehicle spun sideways off the tracks, allowing the modified pickup to charge ahead once more.

Jarrod got the Jeep back under control and resumed the chase, but Jenna was nearly at her destination. Less than a quarter of a mile away stood the enormous hangar she had passed earlier. Beyond that was the rail maintenance yard, and just a little further past that was the control center. If she had to, she could run the rest of the way. Jarrod must have realized this, too. Instead of trying to get ahead of the pickup, he aimed the front end of the Jeep at the rail truck and punched the accelerator. Once again, there was nothing Jenna could do but watch the inevitable happen.

The world jumped sideways.

The broadside collision blasted the pickup off the tracks. Jenna was thrown around the interior like the beads in a baby’s rattle, but she held on to the steering wheel and kept the gas pedal pressed to floor. Despite being designed for use on metal rails, the steel wheels grabbed hold of the desert floor and the pickup kept moving under its own power. The Jeep tore free with another crunch, but Jarrod backed off only long enough to make another run at her.

Jenna stomped on the brakes and hauled the wheel to the side. The modified pickup couldn’t turn like a regular car, but it carved out a broad arc, avoiding another collision. The mangled Jeep shot past, missing by mere inches. Before Jarrod could come around for another pass, Jenna put the truck in ‘drive’ and hit the gas.

The truck’s wheels cut deep furrows into the hardpan and spun uselessly. After a few seconds, it broke free of inertia and rolled forward, picking up speed.

The engine revved through first gear and then the transmission shifted to the next gear and Jenna felt the truck gaining speed. The truck resisted her efforts to steer. The wheels, designed to run on long stretches of straight track, refused to turn more than a few degrees. The maintenance building lay just ahead and Jenna could see that she would never be able to steer around it.

I don’t need to get around it, she thought. Just a little closer, and then I can make a run for it.

The Jeep slammed into the truck again, spinning it sideways. For just an instant, Jenna saw the maintenance shed looming before her, and then it was all she could see.

With a bone-jarring shriek, the entangled vehicles tore through the sheet metal walls, snapping the metal support frame apart like a child’s toy. The two vehicles skidded forward another dozen feet, the pickup’s steel wheels throwing out a spray of yellow sparks as they scraped across the concrete floor. The combined momentum of the two vehicles hammered them against an immovable anvil, crushing metal and pummeling flesh.

62

Jenna’s first coherent thought was that she should get out of the truck and run, but as she reached for the door handle, she realized that the interior of the vehicle had been transformed into something from a claustrophobic nightmare.

The cab seemed to have been compressed, like an aluminum can squeezed in a fist. The driver’s side door had been driven inward, jamming up tight against the seat and the steering wheel. Beyond the side window opening — the glass had shattered, littering her with tiny fragments. Outside the window, she could see only the crumpled front end of the Jeep. The situation on the passenger’s side was even worse. The cab had accordioned inward, crushed against a wall of gray concrete.

She searched for an alternate escape route. The windshield was spider-webbed with cracks, but the laminated safety-coating still held it together. She might be able to punch her way through, but that would require time she wasn’t sure she had. She twisted around and saw that the small window at the back of the cab was broken out. The opening was just big enough — maybe — for her to squeeze through.

She started for it, but something held her back. The dashboard had collapsed over her legs, enfolding them. There was no pain and she could still feel her toes wiggling, but something hard pressed down just above her knees.

A crunching noise came from outside the truck, and through the driver’s side window, Jenna saw movement. It was Jarrod, disoriented, staggering from the wrecked Jeep. With a desperate effort, she tried to wrench her legs free.

An unseen jagged edge raked her leg through the fabric of her jeans, but she kept pulling, repositioning herself for the best angle. Outside, Jarrod shook off his daze. He looked around, taking in the scope of the damage. Then his eyes met Jenna’s.

She pulled again, holding nothing back, willing the dash to pull away, and suddenly she was free. One of her shoes came off, and as she started squirming through the window, the grains of broken glass dug into the sole of her unshod foot.

She was halfway through when she realized that she had lost the computer. It was still in the truck, probably in the footwell, hidden from view and inaccessible to both her and Jarrod. If she survived the next few minutes, she would know where to find it.

Another heave sent her crashing into the truck bed. She saw that the gray barrier she’d glimpsed from inside was actually one of the concrete piers used to support the antenna dish. The collision had smashed the pickup into the pier at the foot of the massive two-hundred-thirty ton structure. From this new perspective, she could see cracks radiating through the pillar.

Jarrod came out from behind the wreck, gun in hand, circling around toward the bed of the pickup, cutting off her best avenue of escape. Jenna could feel the rage — the primal fury — radiating from him, so it came as a shock when he called out to her.

“You don’t have to run.” His voice was tight, as if he had to fight to get every word out, but there was no menace in his tone. “We can get past this. What happened to Sophie was an accident. There’s still a place for you in our family. Just…come with me.”

He believed it. She could see it in his eyes. But she had made her decision.

Without giving an answer, she spun around and clambered onto the truck’s roof and launched herself sideways toward the lower landing of the antenna. The distance was further than she should have been able to jump, but she cleared it without trouble. Landing, on the other hand, hurt. Pain shot up through her foot as an embedded piece of glass slipped deeper into her flesh. Her legs throbbed where they’d been pinned in the truck. For a moment, every part of her body cried out in protest at this latest insult.

The report of a pistol shot filled the enclosure, and a round cracked against a metal surface right beside her. Fighting the pain, she yanked the glass from her foot and vaulted onto the rising staircase, ignoring the electric jolts of pain that rose up with each barefoot step.

A vibration shivered through the metal. Jarrod had climbed up into the truck and made the same leap.

She kept climbing, not wanting to fight a man who could redirect missiles in mid-flight.

Noah, I could really use some help right now.

The thought made her angry. She had survived too much to turn into a helpless little girl, waiting for daddy to come save her. Irritation turned to motivation, and she started leaping up the steps, three at a time, rising higher and higher.

Jarrod mounted the steps and started up after her.

The long climb ended at a landing right below the elevation gears. Jenna recognized where she was. Sophia had fallen to her death from an identical platform. There was only one more flight of stairs, ending at the door to the vertex room, and then there would be nowhere left to go.

Jarrod’s head came into view, rising above the landing’s lip. Jenna turned, ready to drive him back with a kick, but before she could, he raised his gun and fired. The bullet sizzled past her, striking something behind her with a metallic clang. Frigid white mist sprayed over the platform. The round had struck a tank of liquefied helium coolant. Jenna felt her exposed skin blister from the cold, and she leaped for the next flight of stairs before the freezing cloud reached out to engulf her.

Over the hiss of escaping gas, she heard the antenna creaking. Behind her, rivets and support beams made brittle by the arctic blast, began snapping apart.

But there was still only one way to go.

Up.

Jarrod burst out of the cloud, his face frosted white from the icy mist, lips frozen in a grimace of determination. He charged after her.

Jenna reached the uppermost landing a moment later. There were no more stairs to climb, but the crisscrossing metal support lattice beneath the dish was within reach.

Just like the monkey bars on a playground, she thought, and without hesitation, she swung out onto it.

The lattice might have posed no challenge for a nimble ten-year old Jenna, but it had been years since she’d been on a playground, and the last twenty-four hours had taken a toll. Or had they? Despite the pain in her foot and the breathlessness from her current situation, she didn’t feel like she’d spent the past 24 hours on the run. She looked down at her biceps. The knife wound was gone. She remembered a past that had never happened. What else about the past day was different? Her mind spun with the possibilities, but there wasn’t time to dwell. She entered the jungle gym, moving through the maze of metal beams as fast as she could.

It was like climbing the wrong side of a ladder, each rung taking her further out above a deadly drop. She glimpsed Jarrod on the landing, saw him hesitate for a moment and then take aim with the pistol.

A bullet sparked off the dish right above her, so close that she could feel the heat of the impact against her skin. She kept climbing and before Jarrod could get another shot off, she heaved herself up onto the rim of the dish and slid into the bowl. She lay there on her back, motionless, willing Jarrod to just give up and leave. Then she noticed a buzzing sound that she’d become familiar with in the Everglades. Cort’s drone had come around for a second strike. She pictured it above, flying in circles, its electronic eyes searching for targets.

Jenna searched for an escape route, but found nothing.

“You haven’t accomplished anything,” a voice rasped — Jarrod, from just above. Jenna looked up and saw him, perched on the rim of the dish, staring down at her. His expression shifted through a spectrum of emotions — anger, pain, disappointment…and triumph.

Jenna faced him. “The rest will never know if the signal went out. World War III isn’t going to happen.”

“It won’t matter. All the pieces are in place. When they don’t hear from me, they’ll go ahead with the plan. You haven’t stopped us.”

Jenna felt a coal of anger and defiance grow hot within her. “I stopped you.”

Jarrod spat out a derisive laugh. “Not really.” He hooked his left elbow over the edge of the dish and then reached back to draw his pistol from its holster.

Jenna looked about for cover. There were plenty of places that might shield her, but for how long?

Run toward a gun…

The coal flared into a wildfire of determination. Jenna hurled herself at Jarrod.

She saw his eyes — eyes that were new, but identical to her own — go wide in disbelief. He pulled the trigger, nearly point blank, but the bullet pinged off the dish to the left, a ninety degree angle from the direction he’d fired.

The pistol fell from his fingers as he threw his arms out to brace himself against her charge. An impact stopped her attack midair and flung her backwards. She landed on the dish’s incline and slid to the bottom.

When she looked up to where Jarrod had been, he was gone. She found him above her. In the air. He jumped!

Jenna rolled to the side as Jarrod landed, punching down hard and pushing some kind of psychokinetic force in front of his fist. The metal panel bent inward, leaving a basketball-sized impact crater. Had she still been lying there when…

Reflexes overcame Jenna’s surprise. She kicked out hard, swiping Jarrod’s legs out from under him. While he toppled backwards, she got back to her feet — and ran.

Every other footfall sent pain through her leg and left a bloody splotch on the metal beneath her, but she charged up the dish’s incline.

“You can’t get away,” Jarrod said, his voice close behind her, exactly where she hoped he’d be.

Jenna pushed off the dish, spinning around backwards and kicking out hard. Her heel connected with the side of Jarrod’s head, sending him sprawling. It was her turn to leap. While she didn’t know how to punch the way he could, she could sure as hell knock him unconscious.

But he saw her coming, and in midflight, he reached out and swatted her from the air without ever touching her. She rolled across the dish, more angry than wounded. She wanted to curse at him, to call him a coward, but her training did its job, stepping in and calming her down.

As Jarrod got to his feet, she thought, I’m the same as him. No, I’m better than him. An old playground phrase, uttered by the girls in her class after the drama teacher had them perform Annie Get Your Gun, came to mind. “Whatever you can do, I can do better.”

Before Jarrod could fully understand, Jenna swept her hand toward him, imagining an invisible extension of herself sweeping through the air. She had no idea how psychokinesis worked, but like her desire to reach the VLA, she hoped the knowledge had been built into her DNA.

Things went wrong, even before the arc of her swing reached Jarrod. Two of the four support beams holding up the telescope’s Volkswagen Bug-sized receiver bent and snapped as her arm swung past. With a groan, the remaining supports bowed to the lopsided tug and fell, tearing free from their mounts.

Jenna was forced to abort her attack, and she dove away from the falling supports. The entire dish shook as the receiver and all four supports, weighing several tons, crumpled inward. The dish shook like a struck gong, but Jenna rolled to her knees and turned toward Jarrod’s last position.

He wasn’t there. Instead, he was closer. While she had dived away from him, he had lunged forward. Jarrod dove over the fallen support, wrapped his fingers around Jenna’s neck and fell atop her. His fingers grew tighter, stopping the flow of blood to her brain. She’d be unconscious in seconds. Moving instinctually, she didn’t try to repel him with a psychokinetic attack. Instead, she clasped her hands together and drove them up between his arms like a wedge. His arms separated. The pressure on her neck reduced, but he remained locked in place, crushing the life out of her.

Her mind registered the high pitched buzz of a drone turning and flying away. She knew what was coming, and remembered Noah’s instructions when the boat exploded. She lowered her fighting hands, let her body go slack, closed her eyes and opened her mouth.

The pressure on her neck reduced, Jarrod no doubt thinking he’d killed her, that is, until she brought her hands to the sides of her head and covered her ears.

If Jarrod had reacted to her strange behavior, she didn’t see it. The missile finished it’s silent approach just a second after she covered her ears. The violent upheaval flung Jarrod away from her, and shook her body from below, knocking the wind from her lungs. Despite the lack of air, her blood reached her brain once again and her thoughts became clearer, even as the world around her fell apart.

She rolled over and was surprised to find the dish intact. Smoke rolled up over the sides, collecting beneath the hanger’s high ceiling. With a groan of metal, the dish tilted a few degrees. Nine stories below, the concrete base, struck by a missile, succumbed to the weight of the hundred-ton dish. It heeled over, lazily at first, but gravity pulled it faster with each passing second.

When the dish reached a forty-five degree angle, Jenna slid to a stop against a fallen receiver support beam. A moment later, Jarrod rolled to a stop, just feet away. She steeled herself for an attack, but when he looked at her, he said, “We can stop it!”

The antenna continued to fall. She didn’t reply.

“I can’t do it alone!” he shouted.

“We could both die,” she suggested.

He stared at her, no doubt weighing her sincerity. “Without you, they don’t stand a chance.”

He was manipulating her. She knew it. He knew it. But he was also right. To stop the other clones and a third world war, she had to survive this mess, and that meant working with Jarrod…so that they could try killing each other again once they reached the ground.

“Tell me what to do,” she said.

He pointed his hands down, toward the dish. “Just focus on the dish. See it slowing. There’s no way we can stop it completely. It’s too heavy. But we can slow it down.” He closed his eyes and ground his teeth. The structure shuddered, mashed against an unseen force, but it continued to fall.

Jenna closed her eyes and did as instructed. She immediately felt the dish’s weight pulling against her. It was agonizing, like muscles in her mind were being stretched and snapped.

She screamed.

And the dish slowed.

We’re doing it, she thought, and she opened her eyes.

That was when she saw the third missile and shouted.

Jarrod’s eyes snapped open. He saw the missile,too. “No!” He reached out a hand, deflecting the missile to detonate in the desert, but he lost control of the dish in the process. The strain became to much for Jenna to bear alone, and she lost her psychokinetic grip.

With a groan of rending metal, the dish plummeted. Jarrod fell from view. Jenna clung to the support beam as long as she could, but momentum pulled her free and flung her away. The world became a blurry spiral, and then, in a snap, became nothing.

63

“Jenna?”

The voice called to her out of the blackness.

“A few more minutes,” she murmured.

That’s all I need. I’ll sleep for a few more minutes. Then I’ll get up.

But unconsciousness had already released her back into the world of the living. Her eyelids fluttered open just in time to see a familiar shape kneel beside her.

“Jenna.” Noah sounded very concerned, and as she pondered possible reasons for this, the memory of the collapsing dish replayed in her head, but the final impact however was a blank spot in her memory.

She opened her eyes and couldn’t make sense of what she saw. Destruction lay all around her and above her, but a ten foot circle around her remained unscathed. It was as though the dish had slammed into a spherical force field, wrapping its hundred ton metal form around it. What happened?

She hurt, all over, but she decided that was a good sign. Serious injuries would have left her numb with shock. She tried to sit up.

“Lie still,” Noah told her, his voice soothing but still somehow ominous.

How bad is it? She wondered, and she decided that, sensible or not, she was going to get up. Noah didn’t try to stop her, and that, she decided, was probably a good sign, too.

As soon as she was partially upright, the world spun. There were two Noahs kneeling in front of her, and behind them, the flat desert landscape appeared strangely broken, like two transparent pictures imperfectly arranged on a desktop. Other than that, things looked pretty normal. After a few moments, the two images came together and she could see clearly again.

That was when she saw him at the edge of the untouched sphere of land.

A dark wave of grief crashed over Jenna, threatening to drag her back into unconsciousness. Jarrod — a part of Jarrod — lay a few feet away. When the edge of the dish had impacted the ground, it had sliced through his torso like a guillotine. He lay there, staring up, his too-familiar face frozen in a rictus of horror. The rest of him was buried in the rubble.

He tried to kill me, she thought. I should be glad he’s dead. But instead, it felt like a piece of her had been torn away.

Noah’s arms enfolded her. “It’s okay, Jenna. It’s over. You’re safe.”

Over? She shook her head, making no effort to hold back the tears. “No. I failed. I couldn’t stop him in time.”

“Shhh. Don’t worry about that now. You did what you could. You did more than anyone had the right to ask you to do. And I’m proud of you.”

Jenna was surprised by how much that mattered to her. Yet, she didn’t deserve his pride. When the chance to act had come, she had balked, torn between doing what she knew to be right — what Noah had raised her to believe in — and a preprogrammed sense of loyalty to a family she didn’t know.

If the world destroyed itself in the next few weeks, would it be her fault for not doing more? And if it destroyed itself gradually over the next fifty years, would that be her fault, too?

Soter appeared behind Noah, hobbling toward them as fast as he could manage. Jenna saw the look of relief mixed with wonderment in the old man’s eyes turn to hurt as he glimpsed Jarrod’s body and the state of the dish around her. Then he, too, was kneeling beside her.

Cort, on his crutches, was just a few seconds behind. “Did you do it? Did you stop him?” His eyes flicked back and forth between Jenna and the destroyed dish.

“Damn it, Cort,” Noah rasped. “Give her a minute.”

Jenna shrugged away from Noah, stood and got in Cort’s face. “You didn’t need to send in an airstrike! The signal was already sent! It was too late, you son of a bitch.”

Cort squinted at her. “Did you get there before or after the signal was sent?”

Noah stepped between them. “You almost killed her. She has a right to be pissed. Back off. Now.”

Jenna was angry, but she hadn’t forgotten the stakes. “I took his computer before he could e-mail the others.”

“Where is it?” Cort asked.

“It’s in the—” She trailed off when she realized that the truck and everything in it had been pulverized beneath the collapsing antenna. She turned toward the mass of destruction. “You destroyed it.”

Cort sagged against his crutches. “Well, there’s going to be hell to pay, but at least we can scratch that one off the list.” He jerked a thumb in Jarrod’s direction. “Hopefully this will mean the end of the cyber-terror attacks.”

Despite his coarse manner, Jenna found his statement strangely comforting. Something good had come out of it after all. Jarrod, and Sophia too, might have been only small parts in a grand design, but without them, the whole would be that much less effective.

Jarrod had warned her that the plan would go ahead, even if he was unable to contact the others, but maybe that wouldn’t happen right away. Maybe there was still time to stop the others — her brothers and sisters — from throwing the world into chaos.

And if she could accomplish that, maybe there would be time to save the world from itself.

Noah stood and held her. She savored Noah’s embrace a moment, then turned and faced Cort again.

“I got a look at his contact list. It’s not much, but it’s a place to start. We can find the others. Stop them.” Her eyes were drawn to Jarrod’s corpse. “Maybe even save them from themselves.”

Cort regarded her with an almost predatory curiosity. “We? There is no ‘we.’”

Noah stepped between them again, hands on hips in a fatherly posture. “Jenna, your part in this is done.”

She shook her head. “I know them. I know how they think, and I know why they’re doing it. I’m the only one who can stop them.”

Cort laughed. “How are you going to stop them?”

Jenna looked up at the bent dish above them. She could do more than even she knew. It filled her with confidence. “Try to stop me.”

Cort was more than willing. He reached for his pistol, drew it and pointed it toward Jenna. But instead of shooting the weapon, he tossed it — or at least, that’s what it looked like. Jenna caught the weapon and turned it around on Cort. “I promised that I would give myself up when this was finished. I’ve changed my mind. So we can either do this together — on my terms — or we can do it at odds. The choice is yours.”

Cort rocked back and forth on his crutches for a moment. He was doing a decent job of hiding his surprise, and his fear. “What are these terms of yours…exactly?”

“First, back off. This is going to be a partnership. I’m working with you, not for you. Get that straight.”

Cort shrugged, refusing to agree, but Jenna kept going.

“Second, I want Mercy released, right now. Make a call, put her on a plane back to Key West or wherever she wants to go.”

This request got a response from Cort. His brows furrowed. “Who is Mercy?”

“What?” Jenna looked around for the woman, but she was nowhere to be seen. She turned to Noah, who looked as confused as Cort. The world, and the events that had brought her to the Very Large Array had changed. Not only was Mercy not present, but she was also not a part of her life, or Noah’s. It felt like a death. It stung. But she hid it. “She’s a clone. Like me. One of the first. We need to find her. She’ll help.”

Cort shrugged again, indifferent, but not opposed.

Jenna turned to Soter. “We’re going to need your help, too.”

Soter’s face creased in alarm. “They’re my children. You can’t make me hunt them down.”

“Yes, they are your children, and you’re responsible for what they’re doing. If you really care about them, you’ll help stop them before they do something terrible.”

He leaned against his cane, as unwilling to make a commitment as Cort.

“There’s something else,” she continued. “The transmission didn’t come from extraterrestrials.”

That got Soter’s attention. “No? Then who?”

“From us. Today. The Wow! Signal was sent by Jarrod.”

“Impossible,” Soter said. “The signal came from deep space.”

“Which is exactly where he sent it,” Jenna said, motioning to the skyward pointing array dishes. “But we don’t know who created it, or why.” She left out the refining nature of the signal, deciding to tell her father once she was sure he was the same man who had raised her. “But we need you to help figure out who created the signal…and our genome.”

Soter’s eyes brightened a little at the prospect of an unsolved mystery. He nodded slowly.

“Anything else?” Cort asked, with more than a trace of sarcasm.

Jenna matched his tone, looking over the barrel of the man’s gun. “I’m sure I’ll think of something. Now do we have a deal or should I put a bullet in the other leg and be on my way?”

Cort winced. At least that part of the story hadn’t changed. He shook his head. “You have no idea what you’re in for, kid.”

“I think I’ve got a pretty good idea.” She turned back to Noah. “Still proud of me?”

Noah blinked as if trying to hold back tears and smiled. “You are still going to finish high school, and go to college…and get the job of your dreams.”

“After we stop World War III,” she said.

He chuckled. “Looks that way.”

She grinned back. “Deal.”

He hugged her again. “Yes. I’m proud of you. More than you can imagine.”

“Nurture wins over nature, right? You raised me well.”

“Yes. I did.”

Noah led her away, arm around her. As they walked, she leaned her head on his shoulder, and he leaned in close, but not to comfort her. In a serious, but quiet voice, he said, “How do you know about Mercy?”