Prototype

Twenty-Eight

Late December should have made a terrible time to travel cross-country by car, although Sarah found it perfect. The three of them shielded from hostile winds and ice in their steel cocoon, skimming over snowy plains, a scarred white earth as far as the eye could see and the imagination reach.

This is right, she thought. It shouldn’t end in a condo with him walking out one last time. It should finish out here, or wherever this road ends up taking us.

There had been no talking Clay out of this once he’d made up his mind. He was going to Boston, by way of Indianapolis, and that was final. He would drive and drive, and if his car fell to pieces along the way, he would walk, and if he froze, he would die where he fell.

There had been no talking Clay out of it, but Sarah didn’t think Adrienne had really tried. Perhaps because she recognized its futility and was now past doing things for the sake of obligation. Or perhaps because, by insisting she accompany him as he went to confront his mysterious mentor, she might wring a few extra final days out of their allotted time before bureaucracy slammed the door on them for good. She would thwart institutional callousness with one last act of defiance.

“You’ve really gone rogue now, haven’t you?” Sarah asked her, barely an hour out of Denver but already they were crossing chilly white plains, the mountains forgotten. Adrienne behind the wheel of her own car, no less — it was newer and more reliable than Sarah’s, and certainly Clay’s.

“I guess I have,” said Adrienne. “Do you think I’m wrong?”

“Well of course not, it’s not like you’ve kidnapped a minor, now, is it?”

“No, but… I’m not sure exactly what it is I’ve done.”

At the moment Clay lay sleeping across the backseat. He had looked very tired when they’d left; had looked that way each time Sarah had seen him during the past few days, as if he were slowly wearing away from some effort within that she could only imagine. Sleeping, he looked worse; fragile, even.

They weren’t so tough, men weren’t. She had met several women who had problems with men on the basis of gender alone, as if that XY chromosome pattern was in itself deserving of hatred. But Sarah had often caught wind of a strange underlying resentment in such attitudes, resentment of men’s heavier bodies, their denser bones, thicker muscles. She had always found it a shortsighted view: as if brute strength really equated with inner power, and precluded sensitivity entirely. It wasn’t necessarily so.

She had been intimate with a man only once in her life. Her sole heterosexual fling, it was memorable not only for its singularity, but for just how truly wrenching the experience had been… though not for the expected reasons.

It had come late in high school, before she had been certain who she really was. In this cliquish world, classmates were already talking about her behind her back, although she was finding that she cared less and less. She accepted a rare date, and when he later wanted to park she didn’t try to talk him out of it. This was something she should experience, just to know, even if she felt no genuine desire beyond curiosity, certainly not the more incendiary desires that sometimes arose when she talked with other girls or glimpsed their bodies in the showers after gym class. This was something about which she should be informed.

The night had been autumn cool, the backseat of her date’s car roomy. She would always remember the way his hands trembled as he touched her while pushing into her. She would always remember the endearing hesitancy of his kisses, and the pounding of his heart that she could feel against her own chest. He had wanted so much for everything to be perfect — this was obvious in retrospect — yet even before they were done, she lay there knowing it wasn’t for her. No repulsion, and while it would have been hard to deny that at least a few of the sensations were pleasurable, neither was there any real gratification. It was simply wrong; this was not her, not who she was, nor the person she was growing into. It was like trying to align two puzzle pieces with a hammer instead of relying on a natural fit.

Maybe she shouldn’t have been so honest afterward. She could have lied to spare his feelings. But likely he would have known anyway, sensed her remoteness. He was young and he was eager, but he was also shy enough to be terrified and considerate enough to ask how she felt rather than presume to tell her.

So Sarah hit him with the truth, and just as clearly as she would remember his hands and heart, so too would she remember the crushed expression he wore. And the way he cried, silently, turning away from her to face the nearest window as the glass fogged from his breath. She would always remember the immensity of the power she felt: a simple rejection could devastate, could shake people to their foundations and make them wonder if everything they had always believed about themselves hadn’t been wrong all along.

Never again, she had thought. I know now, and I never want to have to do this to anyone else ever again.

It’s not your fault, this is just the way I am, she tried to convince him, her hand on his bare shoulder until he pulled away. While eventually it seemed to sink in, how sad he looked all the same, when finally he could face her. Trying to smile, half-sick, through wet eyes, and only then did she realize it wasn’t just sex — the wound cut deeper. Maybe he loved her, or thought he had, or had attached hopes to her that she’d never anticipated. He was not an especially popular young man; few noticed him; he blended well into backgrounds. Maybe he had been thrilled just to be with her.

She could see it all in his eyes, those hopes. Only he seemed clearly unable to speak of them.

“I won’t tell anybody if you don’t want me to,” he said at last. “About you, I mean.”

How naïve this was. Surely he had heard rumors of her by now, but if not, then he had to know that rumors were sure to spread whether or not he contributed. Bless his aching heart. If he could not share with her any of his misbegotten hopes, at least he could grant her what he saw as one final gift: a vow of silence.

It was something men excelled at… even when it ate them alive.

So men weren’t so tough, no. But they could try to be noble. Noble was better by far.

As she turned toward the backseat, to watch over Clay’s sleeping form, disturbed only by the small twitches, she knew that the noblest endeavor of all was to attempt to conquer everything that was worst in yourself.

“I think you’re doing the right thing,” she finally said to Adrienne.

“Then why do I feel guilty of something?”

“Because the situation, and the people who led you into it, forced you to make decisions you never had to make before. If you’d been a team player all the way, their way, you wouldn’t be feeling any better. Different, but no better. You’d be feeling dirty, Adrienne. So how would you rather feel: like a fugitive, or dirty?”

Hands clenching on the wheel, she watched plains of filthy white wash past the car. “I’d rather not feel either way.”

“You couldn’t abandon him in two more days just because they cut your money. You couldn’t let him make this trip alone.” Sarah doodled in the film misted on her side window. “Maybe when we get back to Denver, he’ll feel like it’s time to close out what you’ve been doing — did you ever think of that? Look at it like cultures where the people don’t segregate their spiritual values from everyday life. Pilgrimages often mark the end of one phase of a person’s life and the beginning of the next. Maybe it’ll be that way with Clay. Maybe this is his way of putting the last few months behind him, so he can get on with the rest of his life.”

“Oh, my optimist.” Adrienne smiled at her, her lean face too thin, cheekbones sharper than before. She wore the recent strains as well, and made them her own. But she was so plaintively hopeful in that smile that all was softened. “I hope you’re right.”

They both turned to look once more at the slumbering Clay when he voiced some low and inarticulate cry from the heart of a nightmare at midmorning. One fist brushed spastically at the side of his face, fell still, curled open. Sarah reached over to drape him with a small blanket they had taken along, and it seemed to calm him. For the moment, at least.

“To dream,” she said, “perchance to sleep.”

The day ground onward and they lost it to driving, lost an hour in western Kansas when crossing time zones. Kansas would best be driven by night, they decided, when the darkness would conceal the fact that nothing was out there but barrenness, and let you imagine there was something more. Darkness was kind that way.

Six hundred miles brought them to Kansas City, where they stopped to pass the night. Tomorrow, five hundred more and another time zone would put them in Indianapolis, where Clay would have the next day to take care of business that belonged to him alone.

Adrienne used a credit card to get them motel rooms on the outskirts of Kansas City, in that urban perimeter all interstate cities seemed to possess, having evolved for the sole purpose of catering to wayfarers. The same chain motels and the same fast food emporiums, cars fueling up at the same gas stations staffed by the same bored attendants. The great national homogenization, as Sarah saw it — there was something blandly hideous about the trend. After checking in they motored off in search of someplace nearby to eat, but the pickings were merely functional. It would fill a belly and that was all. They should have been too tired and too hungry to care, yet still it seemed an affront.

“Remember I told you I didn’t touch an interstate when I went from Denver to Tempe?” Clay asked Adrienne, and she said she did. “This is why.”

Sarah looked in dismay at the neon, the plastic, the refuse that choked gutters and asphalt and could have blown from any trashcan within two thousand miles. “We’re cutting down every bit of diversity like weeds in a field.”

Clay nodded. “This whole country’s becoming one big putrid mall. Graham used to say that.” She watched him smile at the memory. Missing Graham, for all his spite, or maybe because of it. “I want African food,” he then said. “I want millet and beans and fried plantains. I want to eat it with my fingers. And what is there to choose from? Burger King and Taco Bell. I think I’d have a better meal if I could burn them to the fucking ground instead.”

“Clay,” said Adrienne. “Let’s be reasonable.”

“Okay,” he said. “Give me some matches.”

He was harmless at the moment, Sarah decided, but he had a point. He nearly always had a point. If somewhere deep within Clay really was touched with madness, it was a madness prone to blunt truth. And as they cruised along some boulevard whose name she did not know, colored by splashes of ugly lights, she wondered if Clay might not feel this descent into urban sameness even more acutely than she. To her it was sad, like the erosion of pure and isolated cultures when the world at last penetrates like a rapist to wreak its change… through disease, through missionaries, through the nouveau conceit of This is mine, I will no longer share it, I will hurt you if you touch it again.

But to Clay, seeing city after city, suburb after suburb, each wearing much the same face… wouldn’t that grind at him on a more fundamental level? For when it came to that most unique facet of anyone — the face — Clay would know that his was not his alone. It belonged first to a dozen others. And now hundreds.

How would it feel? That they had been born as standardized entities to fill interchangeable cities? In the light of that horrible meltdown, their visceral rage could be understandable, necessary even — a final straining by their human spirits to break free and reject the shackles of conformity.

Then again, maybe they were merely flukes and anomalies, with no futures.

This time of year, with this weather, interstate travel was safer, swifter, but how much more heartening it might have been to travel the lesser highways, as Clay had done months before, if only to prove to themselves that all was not surrendered out here. She wanted to walk roads peopled by those whose worlds ended two horizons over; to eat in shacks whose menus were painted on sheets of whitewashed plywood. She wanted the time to hang around gas stations owned by bony old men who knew engines better than their wives, to sniff the fumes and prowl the rest rooms when no one was looking, and stare at cigarette butts in the urinals as if they were runes of divination, thrown just so and full of meaning.

She would remain out in the hinterlands until she could read those omens, and know if the future they spoke of was hopeful, or barely worth the bother. Weave those threads into her thesis when she got back, maybe, explore the linkage between anthropology and prophesy.

It was a dream, anyway.

And then they gave up looking, and went for burgers.

Twenty-Nine

Outside of Minnesota’s twin cities, Clay had never been east of the Mississippi. It had been a great river of adventurous unknown in another era. Passing over it the day before, as it churned frigid and gray with slabs of ice, he wondered how Mark Twain had seen it in his time. How its primal pull had felt surging up through the deck of a steamboat; if its ancient muddy allure was anything like the one now compelling him to the East Coast.

The river was behind him now, a state and a half back, but its chilly currents lingered in imagination. It was how he may have traveled a century or more ago, poling himself along atop a raft, anticipating change around every bend. He would have known nothing of chromosomes then; genetics would have provided no scapegoat. Ignorance might really have been bliss.

No more, though. A little knowledge was a dangerous thing, it had been said, and Clay supposed that was true. It could leave you with an addict’s craving for more.

Here he was, living proof: Indianapolis, midday on New Year’s Eve, alone with the car for the first time since they had left Denver. He thought it was an encouraging vote in his favor that Adrienne had let him take her car.

Timothy Van der Leun lived in a tiny house on the southwest side, where I-70 slashed through a flatland of warehouses and grim smokestacks. Clay had phoned from last night’s motel, after consulting his illicit files for the number. He got a confused sort of hello, then hung up after a moment of listening to Van der Leun listening to him breathe. He knew of nothing to say. Better to just go.

He found the street on a local map, then in the car. The block was filled with houses just like one another, small and cramped, creeping toward decrepitude, as if they held dour secrets and were exhausted from the strain. No trees at all to speak of, just scrawny head-high twigs of things. Poisoned by the air, maybe, or by the snow whose last dregs stuck to the lawn like gray scum.

The narrow porch sagged beneath his weight, and Clay knocked. He did not trust the bell to function.

He had to knock again before the door opened, as slowly as if the person behind it were crippled, arthritic. An ever-widening slice of the house greeted him, dim as a cave, all the blinds and curtains drawn.

And then the master of the house.

The face was familiar.

He clung to the door with more weight than should have been borne by his gaunt frame; lost inside his clothes, long, loose sleeves flapping at his knobby wrists. He peered out with eyes that seemed to need moments to shift focus from wherever they had been before, and when they did, his gaze locked on with the fierce melancholy of someone staring at a shattered mirror while waiting for the pieces to meld again.

Yet still Clay could say nothing. What possible words would not be trivialized by their shared countenance? Mutation, huh? and then a lost grin. What a bitch.

“Are you a real one?” Timothy Van der Leun asked. Clay did not know what he meant. “Real. With scars. Let me see your scars if you’re real.”

Freezing wind behind him, the smelly heat of the house before him, Clay stood on the porch and took off his gloves. Turned his hands down to show the red slashes across their backs; skinned his hair away from his forehead to reveal the most recent one above his eye. His badges, all; his scarlet letters of admission.

“I have more,” he said, “but I’m not taking off my clothes for you.”

But Timothy Van der Leun was already nodding, “Okay, you’re real,” turning away, shuffling back inside the house and leaving the door open for him to follow.

Clay shut it behind him; waited for his eyes to adjust to the dim halls, dim rooms. It reeked of heat throughout, a thermostat allowed to go mad, but the air was worse, thick with the scent of things burned, then allowed to spoil. If he were offered food here, he would never accept.

“Which are you?” Timothy’s voice, from the shadows, and this time Clay knew the meaning.

“Denver.”

Timothy tilted his gaze, quizzical, a thin head on a bony stalk above the flapping sails of his shirt. “A new one.”

Clay realized what they were standing in must have been the living room, surrounded by overflowing junk-pile boxes and brittle old wrappings from convenience foods. They littered the floor like tiny shrouds, and when Timothy moved over to a chair they crackled underfoot. Down he sank, his arms wrapped protectively around his middle.

“When did they finger you?”

“This past fall.” Clay found another chair but beneath him it seemed to fit wrong, as if for skewed bones, or perhaps his own had begun to warp into other shapes, other forms. Anything might happen beneath this roof, far from the face of the sun. “It was an accident.”

“We were all by accident,” Timothy said. One hand dropped to the floor beside his chair, crabbed around, came up with a bottle. He put it to his mouth and took a ferociously long pull from it, then offered to share.

Clay looked at the bottleneck, the squared glass… dripping, dripping, amber blood that flies might die from if they lapped it up. He shook his head. “I can’t.”

Timothy nodded. “I heard that was a problem with some of us,” then the whiskey spilled down the front of his palpitating throat as he poured it again. “It never was with me.”

Clay watched him drink, silently, as the house hung as still around them as a rotting carcass, save for the televised murmur from another room, probably the bedroom. He found himself drawn again and again to that other face, so like his own, yet not. He had thought for days that this meeting might be like walking in upon a brother he had lost from birth, that the both of them would know enough not to speak, that what they shared beneath the skin would fill the silences.

But it was not like that at all — more the tearing of a membrane between himself and what might have been, or worse, might yet be. Not brothers at all, they went deeper: fibers unraveled from the same umbilical cord that might have strangled lesser babies. They could look at each other, and the small differences — black hair or blond, clean or encrusted — were made insignificant. Anything that varied in their lives they need neither ask nor tell about, for they had lived in all the same skins.

“Where,” said Clay, “did you learn about the others? Who told you?”

Timothy opened his mouth, then shut it while he prodded the question for veiled implication. “Where are you going now, where are you going?” He curled in on himself. “If you’re from Denver — you’re not going to Boston, are you?”

“I don’t have anyplace else left to go.”

“It’s where we all go last, I think,” and Timothy trembled, as if another thought might be torn free, then surged from the chair. Stray papers fluttered to join a hundred others on the floor. “I can’t sit here, come back here with me, okay, come back here,” leading down a narrow hall where tilted old pictures leered from the walls. “Seeing you here, it’s just… it’s just…” Repeating it over and over, a mantra.

Clay followed into what had been a kitchen, maybe not even all that long ago, but it had since been taken over by piles of newspapers and magazines spilling from cartons whose corners had ruptured. Unseen mice scurried under the cartons; their droppings speckled the counter. Timothy sat at the table, silhouetted against a window covered by a cataract of brittle, brownish paper.

And the smell was worse back here, in Timothy’s wake, that sweet black stink of burnt dinners left to spoil in a room of nicotine light.

Timothy swept an arm across half the table, cleared it to the floor so that Clay might have a place to rest his elbows when he sat. Apologizing when Clay was seated, “I’m sorry it’s such a mess around here, I’m on disability, I should pay someone…”

“You’ve been to Boston? Who is it that’s there? I really need to know before I get there, but he won’t tell me his name.”

“Not even on a name basis with him yet, huh?” Timothy drank, then went scraping through an assortment of electrical components scattered over his half of the table. Wires like snipped arteries, pieces of broken circuit boards. From a tangle of cords he brought out a soldering iron and turned it on, watched it begin to heat. Clay sat mesmerized as a single fleck of some dead fire burned off its tip, sent a wispy coil of smoke toward the ceiling.

“His name is Patrick Valentine. I was there in the summer. I think it was last summer.” When Timothy scratched at his forehead, his fingers came away flaked with dead skin. “You really didn’t know his name?”

Clay shook his head. No, I didn’t.

“Then what are you doing going there so soon? Don’t you think you should know a man’s name before you let him put you to stud like some horse?” When he raised his eyes from the table and noted the incomprehension in Clay’s, Timothy’s head sagged toward one shoulder, then he slapped Clay, once, with a stinking hand. It might once have been a strong blow. “You really are a virgin, then, aren’t you? You really don’t know about that girl he’s got up there, that he found somehow, you don’t know about her?”

Clay shook his head no, still no, and perhaps he should leave this table. Timothy Van der Leun began rocking back and forth as the soldering iron radiated a shimmer from its smooth beveled tip.

“I really wanted to do it,” he whispered, looking somewhere off to Clay’s right. “I did, I wanted to, and he wanted me to do it, and so did she —” Twisting like a junkie starting to sweat, wretched memories leavening the fix. “My father used to think he was a real holy man until he realized they couldn’t cure me. They used to feel sorry for him, I think, but he never… he never told them the way he used to whip me for those dreams I’d have, or where, the way he’d come in to check the sheets every morning.”

Clay felt a struggle in his own hands; wanting to reach out, grip Timothy by the shoulders and shake him until he got back on track. What girl, who are you talking about? Going so far as to raise one hand, but no further. There was something diseased about this man, exuding from every pore. He was as untouchable as a shadow.

“I really wanted to,” he said again, though from the deadness at the core of his eyes, desire had burned out long ago. “But I just couldn’t get past being there in her bed, looking at her face.”

Clay watched him tap the soldering iron against the tabletop the way normal people tapped pencils. More scars for the imitation wood, little furrows smoldering with the acrid reek of burnt plastic. Thinking, Two years between us, just two years — is this what my next two are going to be like? Because if they are, then maybe Graham saved a place for me.

How terribly sad it must be for people who meet brothers, sisters, about whom they have known nothing all their lives, only to find their siblings to be worse shambles than they themselves are. The conclusion would be inescapable: We’re congenital losers.

“I wanted to,” this time like a vow, “but her face, it was right there… it would’ve been like humping my own sister, and I just couldn’t… do anything.”

And Timothy went on, dissolving slowly in his chair, oily tears mingling with sweat that broke freely across his face. Clay sweating too, the house closing around them, warm as an oven. If they died here, the house would bake them into leathered mummies before they were found, brethren of a hideous dynasty.

my own sister

This was an even greater revelation than the name of Patrick Valentine.

Then she’s mine, too.

He was about to leave when Timothy smiled hopefully, with jittering thin lips, and pointed across the table, saying, “Give me that jar of Vaseline.” Clay slid it over, wiped the film on his pants before it could absorb into his fingers.

Timothy Van der Leun rolled up one sleeve like a junkie ready to plunge the needle, an eager light gleaming in his eyes. All the way up to the bicep, the forearm bared — Clay’s face went slack when he saw the sores, the scabs, the thickened blisters. They covered the inner arm like an oozing crust.

“I don’t usually start this until night,” Timothy told him, “but since you’re here…”

He dipped the tip of the soldering iron into the Vaseline — “So it doesn’t stick as bad,” he said — and as it began to bubble on the tip, he found a clear spot on his arm. Held it there until it began to smoke. The sizzle wasn’t as bad as Clay thought it would be. The mice were louder, in their way. But the burnt pork smell was in his nose before he could do anything.

“I know how we went wrong — just look at the way we start out growing from the sperm and the egg,” said Timothy. “One cell, two cells, four, eight…” The soldering iron dipped back to the Vaseline. “That’s the way we grow. This thing in our cells, I can fix it the same way, I know that now.”

Back to his arm, contact, with a soft incinerating hiss and a curl of smoke.

“A few cells at a time,” he said, as if he had never known such rationed bliss. “A few cells at a time.”

Clay did not leave until Timothy resumed where, the night before, he had left off on his chest.

Thirty

Listening for his return was ostensibly a passive task, but it seemed she was getting little else done. Adrienne sat at the motel room’s table while the cursor of the laptop computer blinked hypnotically — final evaluations of Clay, they might yet be of use.

She paced to the window a fourth time and found the parking lot still barren of her car.

“Gee Mom, do you think Clay stayed late after the prom?” asked Sarah from across the room. She was sprawled facedown on the bed, bare feet kicked up over her bottom as she pored through one of her thesis books.

It came so easy to her, waiting did. Life. Everything. Had Sarah ever failed at a single endeavor? Probably she had — she was not, after all, inhuman — but she never once gave the impression that failure was within her range of possibilities. She lived and breathed and ate and slept and made love as if the world would fall naturally into place around her. To lesser mortals she could be intimidating that way.

“He’ll be back when he’s ready,” she said. “You’ll know.”

Adrienne crossed the room, sank onto the bed beside her, let Sarah play with her hair because she knew Adrienne liked that, the way it unknotted her body, her mind, her soul.

“I wasn’t ready for all this,” Adrienne said, a confession. “When I agreed to leave Tempe, I didn’t think of the way I’d be letting them take all my other patients away from me.” Both of Sarah’s hands went slowly swirling across Adrienne’s scalp. “Clay’s been all I’ve had left in the world to validate me. He’s been it. I should have known better than to put myself in that situation.”

A position dangerous to them both. Perhaps, subconsciously, it had been too much like a shift into private practice, where there was no profit incentive in a cure, only the continual hope of one.

“I don’t validate you?”

“Sure you do. But he validates a part of me you’d never be able to. A part I wouldn’t want you to.”

Sarah pushed the book aside and slowly lay across her, like a widow flung over the broken body of a mate claimed by war. “If someone told you that in a session, you’d tell her she was compartmentalizing her life, and relying too much on people who might let her down.”

“So I’m notoriously blind to my own faults.”

“Just so long as you know.”

Sarah held to her, and she to Sarah, asymmetric but fitting together nevertheless. Sarah’s cheek was pressed along her thigh, hip near her head. Adrienne nuzzled harder against Sarah’s hip, breathing deeply to drag the musky scent of her within. A smell could take you anywhere, to any time. Sarah was the one real thing she had on this trip that reminded her of home; even the rainstick had been left in Denver. Holding Sarah so, breathing her in, she could touch Tempe better than if she’d brought a jar of dirt from the desert. We’ll be there again, soon, in our own home, in our own bed… and I will be wiser.

They stayed this way until she heard her car pull up outside, heard the slam of its door. Footsteps, aimless and undecided, then a quick knock. Halfway to answering, Adrienne heard the clunk of the neighboring door through the thin walls. When she opened her own, Clay was not there — only her keyring, lying on the threshold.

She picked them up, held them in the open doorway while a frozen wind flooded past.

Sarah watched from the bed, eyes big and incisive, now her largest feature with her hair still hanging in its curtain of braids. “I know what your first impulse is. But give him some time alone. He needs that respect.” A smile. “And close the door. My feet are freezing.”

“Put some socks on for a change.”

She gave Clay a half hour, then another fifteen minutes just to test herself. And when at last she knocked and he let her in, she saw that he looked more pale than he had late this morning, when borrowing her keys. He sat diminished, as if his bones had shrunk, rocking himself in place with tiny, controlled movements. His staring eyes possessed the frightful wisdom of one who has seen something terrible; with some people, you could just tell. She found his room preternaturally still, none of the vitality here that she felt next door. Without Sarah’s presence, how cheerless and arid this place really seemed.

“You found him at home,” she said.

He would not look at her, sitting on the edge of the bed, his army field jacket crushed beneath him. “Yeah.”

“And he wasn’t quite what you’d hoped for?”

“I don’t know what I was hoping for. But I don’t think I could have hoped for… for this.”

She had never been clear on why he had sought out Timothy Van der Leun, what he had hoped to accomplish; all along Clay had been reticent to discuss it. A Boston destination she could understand, but in Van der Leun’s case, there had been no tantalizing prior contact. She supposed, simply enough, that it was crucial for Clay to at last come face-to-face with another like himself.

Even if that other self proved hopelessly lost.

“He’s destroying himself,” Clay said. “Destroying himself and thinking it’ll cure him. But maybe… maybe he’s right, in a way.”

He said he’d rather go for a walk than sit, so she retrieved her coat and met him outside. They headed for the sidewalk along the street, downtown Indianapolis rising in the distance. A few yards away, heavy traffic ground through old slush as clouds of exhaust fogged past them. Here they strolled, upon the urban moors. New Year’s Eve — she had almost forgotten — and was there not a hint of frivolity in the petroleum air?

A block had gone by before he told her what Timothy Van der Leun had been doing to himself. She thought of Clay’s own bent toward self-mutilation. Likely this now struck him as an inherited tendency, a mad passion buried deep in the genes to which they all might be prone, as vulnerable as the members of some doomed family in the most grotesque Southern Gothic imaginable.

“I don’t imagine seeing him that way left you feeling any too reassured,” she said.

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it’s the kind of thing I expected all along, and didn’t realize it.” A crooked smile, thrown up in hurried self-defense. “He had his agenda and he was sticking to it. Same self-immolation agenda as mine, isn’t it? Only he’s going at it a little more directly.”

Damn his cynical hide, anyway. It was her last official day on the job and even if it took until midnight she vowed to get beneath it.

“Agenda,” she said, and began to quicken her stride. Her legs were nearly as long as his — let him work to keep up. “So where does this agenda come from?”

“Remember chromosome twelve? I’d say we’re looking like a stronger case for biological determinism all the time. If that’s the way it is, then I’m prepared to accept that.”

“Maybe, but you don’t want to have to, do you? You may never admit it to yourself, but you’re looking for a way to avoid that conclusion, and you’re desperate to find it.” When he said nothing she forged ahead. “You don’t share the same fate as Timothy Van der Leun unless you allow it. I still maintain you’re in control.” A deep breath, let’s try something. “Nobody knows just yet, but for the sake of argument, let’s say that all of chromosome twelve is involved, all three copies. You’ve done some homework. How many chromosomes do you have left?”

“Twenty-two pairs.”

“Forty-four chromosomes to three. Even if you’re given over to biological determinism, you still have to account for a lot of genetic encoding in those other forty-four that doesn’t have a thing to do, directly or indirectly, with chromosome twelve. It should speak as loud, if not louder. So let it have its say.”

Clay grunted, staring at the sidewalk as they glided along. “Are you forgetting what my father and mother were like? I think I’d rather take chromosome twelve.”

She rolled her eyes. He was good. Oh, he was good. “But maybe a lot of what was dominant in their genes turned out to be recessive in yours. And vice versa.”

“And maybe not.”

“But maybe so. A congenital soldier and a passive alcoholic? Neither one sounds very much like you.”

He nodded, working his tongue inside his cheek; backed into a corner at last and he knew it. “Well, we could debate this all day and never really be sure of anything, other than that Helverson’s syndrome isn’t a good thing to have,” he finally said. “Just a few cracked eggs in the genetic omelet. They’ll have us figured out eventually.”

“To a degree. Probably never completely.”

“They’re reading those DNA codes right this minute, you know. They’ll have their map. They’ll know us inside and out.”

The Human Genome Project — such lofty goals propelled it, but it made her nervous as well. In full-bloom, the power of genetic knowledge would eclipse even that of nuclear fusion, yet thus far no one was even regulating it. Historically, great power was often wielded by clumsy hands at best; at worst, savage ones. For their owners understood only the mechanics of what they manipulated, never the grand underlying mysteries.

“And suppose they do have that map someday,” she said. “You can look at a map of the Grand Canyon, but you can never get any true sense of what it’s like until you stand at its rim. You can look at the full orchestral score of Beethoven’s Fifth, laid out right in front of you, every note… but it’s only the bare frame. You can’t hear the music in it.”

“And what do you think might happen,” Clay said, “if you took a page or two from that score, and repeated it at random? It’d wreck the whole symmetry, wouldn’t it?”

“It could. But depending on the skill of the musicians, they might just make it work.”

He weighed this, kicked idly at a chunk of ice to send it skittering ahead of them along the sidewalk. “Well… Beethoven’d probably still be pissed.”

It felt as if they had arrived at a friendly stalemate. She the proponent of self-determination, he the unwilling proselyte still waiting to be convinced. It was an existential dilemma, all right, and she began to wonder if her victory might not come about only in his living of it. That realization on Clay’s part could lie years ahead, and she might never hear of it.

Clay frowned, a little bitter, a little bemused. “You know what the genetics labs are finding, now that they’re starting to really get into the DNA codes? I read this not long ago.”

“What’s that?”

“Down on the level of those three billion base pairs that make up the DNA chains? A lot of it, all it is, is junk. Whole long strings of those pairs… they don’t make up amino acids, they don’t do anything, they’re just there. It’s all junk, it’s static, it’s waste. It means nothing.”

“I didn’t know that.” Leave it to him to have found a wrinkle she’d missed.

“Don’t you see? It’s like life, broken down to the ultimate fractal: a few points of significance, and a lot of filler.” He appeared oddly pleased with this conclusion; not triumphant, more worn down with the weight of it, as he walked with shoulders rounded.

They slowed, forced to stop at a corner by a red light as the traffic shifted, flowing before them in automated currents, like a school of minnows — many fish, one mind. The two of them had gone far enough, it seemed, and turned to retrace their steps.

“It’s the ultimate joke on us,” Clay said. “It has to be. It took so many thousands of years to get to the place where we could finally read it.”

“So who told the joke?”

“Ask that and you’re getting into a whole new area,” he said. “That’s the riddle.”

They went their separate ways back at the motel, she to her room and Clay to his. He professed need of a shower, a long one, that he had left Timothy Van der Leun’s feeling very unclean. It could take quite some time, she knew. There were residues that could defile a person in places where water could never flow.

Sarah asked how it had gone and Adrienne covered most of the highlights. Briefing Sarah had become second nature by now, had even begun to feel like the proper thing to do.

“Is he okay?” she wondered.

“He’s a survivor.” Adrienne hung up her coat, pried the calf-high boots from her legs. “It’s what he does. For all I know it may even be what he’s programmed for.” Stopping then, “I shouldn’t have said that, listen to me, he’s winning me over to his point of view.”

“Maybe he’s programmed to do that, too.”

“No, I think that’s general human nature,” she said. “You’ve obviously not spent enough time in meat markets listening to the male of the species convince you that his other car really is a Porsche.”

“You make it sound so inviting. But anyway,” said Sarah, in that dismissive, wheedling way she adopted sometimes, a sign she was readying for a radical turn of thought. “As long as you’re being so open-minded this afternoon…”

Adrienne greeted this the way a bull greets the flapping of the cape.

“How do you feel lately about taking Clay to see Kendra Madigan?”

Ah. The hypno-regressionist once more rears her controversial head. Clay’s collective unconscious waiting like an oil well for Kendra Madigan’s drill? She should have guessed.

“Haven’t we had this conversation before?”

“I think we agreed to disagree, but then it was more or less academic, wasn’t it? Because we expected to be staying in Denver until we went home.”

Adrienne began shaking her head. “I don’t see that going to Boston changes anything.”

“It changes everything. Kendra Madigan’s along the way.”

“Like hell she is. She’s where? South Carolina?”

“North.” Sarah scowled mildly: You knew that. “It can be on the way if we want it to be. We are blessed with maps of this side of the country.”

And it seemed absurd to be arguing about this once more. It was a battle of entrenchment rather than resolution. Not even a squabble worth having; it was boring. Go ahead, she might as well say, if we’re going to fight then why don’t you up the ante so we at least have something worthy of a good argument.

And then Sarah did precisely that.

“Adrienne,” she said. “Please don’t get angry —”

Oh?

“— but I’ve already been in touch with her. Before we left Denver. She thought she remembered me from the reception after her lecture at ASU.”

Why, of course. Of course she would. This was Sarah; Sarah made an impression on people. The anger and resentment built from there: How could you? How could you think of doing such a thing without consulting me first? But of course that answered itself. The word bitch was employed; possibly underhanded. Such heat, such fuss, but in a perverse way it did feel divine, an excuse to vent steam that had nowhere else to go.

She was interested, was Kendra Madigan. According to Sarah, she wanted her crack at Helverson’s syndrome as well. Didn’t they all.

“Explain something to me,” Adrienne said, “Now that you’re finally getting decisive about something, why does it have to be my patient?”

“In about eight hours, Clay’s not your patient anymore. So you can either be his friend, or you can be someone who wants to exploit him… or you can be someone who looks to be developing a very unhealthy obsession over keeping him to herself. So which is it going to be?”

None of the above, was that an option? Sarah was stabbing at her with the truth; unkind cuts, all. This is the way we fight — not with bludgeons, but with scalpels. Come midnight, Clay was a psychologically free man. This was something she would have to get used to, and promptly. Therapist no more, at best a consultant.

Before they’d left Denver, it had taken her two days to work up the nerve to tell Clay that her funding had been cut. It hadn’t even taken him two minutes to accept it, passively, as if it were expected, unavoidable. For once she might have welcomed a minor tantrum. It would have at least united them against a common foe opposed to continuing whatever progress they had made.

“At the very least,” Sarah said, softening, “whether we go there or not, don’t you think the decision should be Clay’s?”

Adrienne crossed her arms. “You know what he’ll say.”

“Uh huh,” Sarah nodded. “So do you. That’s why you’re mad.”

Tapping her foot — there was nothing else to argue with. “Well it is my car,” she said, as petulantly as she could, and then there was nothing to do but laugh with the terrible gallows humor of surrender.

An old year waned, a new year took its place.

They greeted it quietly, privately. In motels, there were no holidays, there was only waiting. They watched the television and drank a few bottles as midnight came and went — ginger ale only, so Clay could share in the flow.

She was back on speaking terms with Sarah; the silence hadn’t lasted long. It had seemed pointless to begin the new year on opposing sides of contention. If carried into the car tomorrow, mile after mile, it would feel intolerable.

She noticed that Clay spent time doodling on the notepad beside the phone, leaving the sheet behind when he retired to his room. She inspected it, found a simple drawing of a bottle blowing a cork through a blizzard of confetti, with the mutant phrase, Wring out the old, wring in the new.

And he was gone, in a sense, a part of him. Symbolic though that midnight deadline may have been, the pendulum slice of the clock had severed… something.

With midnight’s chime she had been discharged, as surely as a soldier returning from foreign lands. A soldier come home to hear someone tell him, You’re a civilian once more. Maybe you committed some questionable acts in the name of duty, but we’ll not speak of that again. Your responsibility is over. Oh, and one more thing…

Try to blend in, would you?

Thirty-One

They rode into the new year, taking turns driving.

The drone of the car became lulling, Sarah’s mortal enemy; she hated to risk a nap. It felt crucial to be awake and alert, lest something slide past the window during her slumber, something she might never have occasion to see again.

Civilization seemed to grow denser the farther east they traveled, more and more land sacrificed to bland gods forged from steel and asphalt and reflecting glass. They rolled through the clotted express lanes of cities whose buildings stood like vast tombs, glowing from dead light within, and hermetically sealed against the cold and snow and rain, against voices that dared raise doubts, sealed against thought itself. These hives bred conformists by the millions.

But much of the countryside was hardly more reassuring, its fields lying fallow, stark as skeletons bleached by time. These, the graves of rusting, sharp-boned hulks that used to be tractors and combines, bogged down in mud or mired in financial tar pits.

And Chapel Hill, North Carolina, waited — for Clay, mostly, but Sarah couldn’t deny her own curiosity. Clay’s had been piqued as soon as she had suggested this detour. She’d had to be the one to do it. Adrienne had refused to actively involve herself in advancing such a scheme, going along only for the skeptical ride, as it were.

Clay had seemed to relish this new control over his destiny — at last, a choice. His mysterious mentor in Boston would keep for another few days, now that a newer obsession burned: the chance to incise deeper into his brain than any scalpel could reach. Perhaps they could peel back the layers and see what lay beneath, underlying his entire existence. He had spoken of such possibilities with fevered hope, while Sarah prayed the odyssey might prove worthwhile.

She feared that, come one place or another, Clay was hurtling toward some ultimate confrontation; if only he could be ready when it arrived.

They made it a two-day trip to Chapel Hill, and it was rife with stops along the way. Most anywhere served to shatter the monotony of the interstate. Sarah began to see the importance of seeking out whatever human oddities she could find during these brief sojourns, the people who stumbled to the cadence of their different drummers.

In convenience stores she browsed racks of postcards, in Tennessee buying a dozen of the ugliest she could find to send to their friends back home. Clay helped her choose while Adrienne pumped unleaded, and as Sarah paid for the cards he pointed at the nametag worn by the plump checkout clerk. Kathleen — August Employee of the Month, it read.

“Quit living in the past,” he told her, and she began to cry. Fifteen miles down the road Sarah wondered if the girl would quit her job instead. It might do the trick.

She laid out the postcards the next morning over breakfast, writing one long sequential letter that flowed over all twelve. On each she gave instructions as to who was receiving the next card.

“What are you doing?” Adrienne asked, on her third cup of coffee and only now coming alive.

“I’m manipulating our friends from across the country,” she said. “They’ll have to get together for a party and everyone brings a postcard just to make sense of anything. It’ll be in our honor and we won’t even be there. I’ll let you know when it’s time for you to sign the last card.”

Through the steaming scents of pancakes and bacon and eggs she noticed Clay’s unwavering gaze, locked from across the table upon the postcards. “You can sign it too,” Sarah told him.

“What’s it like,” he said quietly, “having a dozen people to write to? When I first left Minneapolis, I tried sending a few letters to people from high school, but no one answered.”

Perhaps it was too early in the morning, her every essence exposed and unprotected, but the question bit, and bit hard. It came perilously close to drawing tears, for as she saw him stare at the postcards, ugly things though they were, she realized that he would view them as something far more. Seeing them as people he would never meet, never know, lives he could never touch even if he had the skills.

“It’s like… being part of a tribe,” Sarah said. Having noticed that Adrienne had paused with bitten lip, her coffee cup halfway between table and tongue.

He looked across the diner, at the menagerie of travelers and locals, nothing in common but the morning and four greasy walls. “The modern tribal character, I don’t think it’s defined by its members. You know who really defines it?”

“Who?”

“Its outcasts,” he said, then got up, and said he would wait in the car, that to wait in the cold would do him good, and she understood.

One could shiver only if one was alive.

Sarah continued to dwell upon tribes along the road, as they crossed into North Carolina. Clay had given driving a whirl this morning, giving it up when a headache sent him to the backseat. He moaned and wondered aloud if the bones of the skull did not at times loosen just enough to crash into one another for the sake of the pain it would cause, plate tectonics between parietal and occipital, temporal and sphenoid.

“I need a tribe, a primitive tribe, where everything is so elemental,” he said, rising up to gaze out the window. “Science failed me, pretty much, I think. Psychology’s just held its own — no offense. Maybe what I really need is a shaman.”

Adrienne looked at Sarah from behind the wheel, and it seemed friendly enough. They had been peaceable but had kept their hands to themselves for the past couple of days, and the primary thing she’d felt for Adrienne — though the last she would admit to her face — was pity. Every mile driven, to Chapel Hill and to Boston, was just another step toward the altar of her obsolescence in the mystery of Helverson’s syndrome.

“Isn’t this more your field?” Adrienne spoke with an air of deference. If there was resentment she hid it well. “Tell us a story.”

Sarah blanked for a moment, all the tales she had absorbed over her lifetime dissipating into dust, forgotten like cultures buried by aeons. Then she found one, a new tale, perhaps the one to bridge all the gaps inside this car.

“Once upon a time, not very long ago at all,” Sarah said, and they grew as still as children, “there was a budding — and some would say exasperating — anthropologist. She’d just traveled from the desert land of her birth to the land of the mountain people, so she could be with someone she loved very much, who in turn was off trying to help a mountain man she cared a lot about. It wasn’t long before the anthropologist and her lover got into a teensy argument, and the lover said something about the anthropologist finding a lost tribe in the mountains. And the anthropologist said all the lost tribes were gone, just about, that the next time one was found, that’d probably be it, there wouldn’t be any more.

“Now, although she didn’t much let on, the thought of that made her more sad than she even would have expected, because she knew just who she was thinking about, a tribe she’d only heard rumors about, so she decided she never wanted them to be found, because the possibility of them being out there was a lot more important than the confirmation. The living mystery was more important than having it solved. And because if they were found, they wouldn’t get to remain who they were anymore, it just never seems to happen that way. People who’re found when they don’t know they’re lost seem to lose an awful lot in the finding. So maybe it’d be better for them, and for us, if they stayed lost.”

Sarah paused to sip at a bottle of grapefruit juice. She was the only one moving, the other two poised and tuned in, waiting. She felt embarrassingly in control; she really had them.

“The people the anthropologist was thinking about, they were mountain people too, but way at the frontiers at the edge of the world, almost, in the mountains of the Gobi desert in Mongolia. Mountains and deserts… it wasn’t until she was talking with her lover that the anthropologist came to truly appreciate the allure and the power of both places, because lies have a harder time living in them. So it seemed to her that this last lost tribe must have the best of both worlds where they were.

“The local Mongols called these people almas, and knew enough about them to describe them, and said they were short and stocky, and hairy, with broad features. Very crude clothes, made of animal skins, mostly. But not even the Mongols who’d lived around there nearly forever could talk with them, because their words were so different, and the almas were very shy people, too. But the Mongols did find the almas would trade with them, so they’d leave a parcel of skins or something on the ground, in the open, or on a big rock, where the almas could find it, and when they’d come back later it’d be gone, with something else in its place. Some other skins or tools or food that had been gathered… obviously things that the almas thought had enough value to represent them to the people they were too shy to meet, and whose words they could never understand.”

Sarah took another drink of her juice, and teased her tiny audience with more silence.

“So word got out, even from a region as remote as the Gobi Desert, and everyone who made it a point to pay attention to such things wondered who and what the almas really were. Obviously they were there, and not imaginary. The Mongols didn’t have any reason to be making anything up. Finally, what a lot of people decided the almas might be was a surviving tribe of Neanderthals… still alive in one of the wildest places on earth, where there wasn’t even a rain forest to draw in outsiders just so it could be cut down. The kind of place that was valuable only to the people who lived there… even the ones supposed to have been gone for forty thousand years. So it made the anthropologist wonder something: Do the almas still know something the rest of us have forgotten?”

She heard Adrienne give a satisfied, throaty chuckle.

“And that’s where the story ends, I guess,” she said, with a soft and hopeful smile toward the highway, toward the east, toward the other side of the world. “As far as the anthropologist knows, the almas are still there, still trading with their neighbors, and no one can say for sure who they are. Which is the way it should stay. So the story ends with the mystery and the wonder intact… just the way all good tribal legends should end. Because shamans know that’s the part of the story that teaches the lesson.”

She listened to the hum of the highway beneath them, shut her eyes, and felt Adrienne’s hand sliding tender across the seat to rub her knee. Listened until she heard Clay stir in the back, and speak up for more.

“And what’s the lesson of this one, do you think?” he asked.

“That the almas found a place in the world where they could still live in peace, even if it was the only place on earth left for them. So the almas aren’t really lost at all, not to anybody who bothers to understand. And if they can survive, in a time that’s completely wrong for them… maybe so can a few others who feel as lost as the almas must appear to the rest of the world.”

She smiled back at Clay, who briefly met her eyes before looking away. She waited for more questions but none came, and she thought, for a change, that this was probably for the best.

They reached Chapel Hill in mid-afternoon and found a motel. Toward dusk, Sarah phoned Kendra Madigan to let her know they were in town, and ask when she would prefer they come to her home.

“Let’s make it no later than ten-thirty tomorrow morning, all right? We’ll have a long, long day ahead of us. And you’ll promise me something? That each of you, you’ll get a good long night’s sleep tonight?”

“Promise,” Sarah said.

“Let me ask you something about this subject of yours,” and Ms. Madigan’s voice had dimmed, quieted. “Is he prone to violence when he learns things he might consider unpleasant?”

Sarah’s hand wrapped harder around the phone. “If it’s about himself… he’d more than likely turn his distress inward. What are you expecting?”

“I don’t expect anything specific, Ms. McGuire. We’ll just have to wait and see. And be ready. Because when someone’s under a hypnosis this deep…? It really is impossible to expect what might come bubbling up from so far down.”

Thirty-Two

Maximum efficiency depended on isolation; of this Valentine was convinced. The greatest movers among humanity — the Alexanders, the Saladins, the Stalins — might be the ones who commanded armies, but even they would remain forever vulnerable. The machinery of their power could grind to a halt by the designs of a single, well-placed individual. The mind, the will, that toiled in perfect isolation could never be betrayed by another.

Only by itself.

And so Patrick Valentine wondered if he might not soon find himself slipping. Opening his house to another this way, he was bound to feel the impact, his focus diluted. Come tomorrow, Daniel Ironwood would be here a week. The impact did not go unnoticed.

Even now, his bedroom was no refuge. Daniel’s voice, from the first floor: “Patrick! Get down here! Right now!”

Scowling, he rose. He tossed aside the inventory lists he’d been scanning, supplied by Teddy this afternoon, a grocery list of the ordnance in a Maryland armory that soon would donate to the cause.

Downstairs he found Daniel on the floor, wound tight and coiled before the TV, an arm extended, bird-dog still. The face on the screen they knew well; they woke up with it every morning, and still he could never quite surmount that initial vertigo when seeing it worn by someone else.

Valentine watched, listened. The story was half-over, but the rest was not difficult to fill in. News from Texas: Lawyers for Mark Alan Nance had exhausted their final appeal, and no one was cutting him any slack for the Helverson’s defense. Execution was on for the middle of next week. In the grimmest room in Huntsville, a table waited with straps and tubes, needles and plungers.

Valentine could picture that table as clearly as if it were waiting for him, too. Perhaps it someday would.

“They’re really going to stick him this time. Aren’t they?” Daniel spoke with rare reverence. Behind his thick amber lenses his eyes may have been awestruck.

“Turn that thing off.” Valentine heard the pause before the click, Daniel assessing bullshit tolerance and deciding tonight there was none. He collapsed into his favored chair, frowned at Daniel; the remote control still dangled from the kid’s hand. “Don’t you ever read a newspaper?”

“What can I say?” Daniel shrugged. Those damned glasses; too hard to tell where his eyes were most of the time. “I like sound bites. It makes the news go down like a protein shake.”

“Probably want your food prechewed before you get it, too.”

“No, I lied,” he said, backtracking. “I hate getting my hands all inky. Women like clean hands. Speaking of… when the hell am I going to get laid, here, Patrick?”

“In a few nights. The middle of this week.”

“Why not tonight?”

“Because I say so.”

It was a parent’s answer, a peculiar thing to hear slipping from his own lips. But coupled with glowering eyes it was sufficient. There came no more argument.

He could have explained himself further but decided against it. The truth? It wasn’t the proper time to start letting him pass his nights in the penthouse with Ellie. Everything was cold, hard function here — Valentine never lost sight of this, even if he spared his protégés the worst of it — and letting Daniel sleep in her bed would have served none. Yet.

Timing was everything. The world was a vast machine, and if one looked beneath the veneer of chaos that it wore as a disguise, one could see how so many components were geared to their own clockwork mechanisms.

Ellie Pratt, a single cog, kept track of her monthly cycles at his insistence. If she was accurate, she would be fertile again beginning the middle of this week. An ovum would once more slide down its fallopian conduit, and that egg was his, bought and paid for. If he chose to reserve it for the sperm of another, that was his right.

Only then would he allow Daniel Ironwood to lie with her, like a father giving his blessing to an incestuous union between two offspring separated at birth, whose hormones overruled social taboo. Only when she lay ripe would he turn Daniel free of his leash, and only then could nature take its course. The moment had to be optimal, equal halves lust and fertility.

This could have been the problem with Timothy Van der Leun — Valentine had miscalculated timing. Brought him in, let the two of them get acquainted, allowed Van der Leun free access from almost the moment his flight had touched down. They had first gone to bed days before her window of ovulation, which Valentine recognized as his own libertarian mistake. Familiarity breeds contempt, or in this case, impotence. Timothy Van der Leun had been useless.

Fortunately, he had also been replaceable.

They were interchangeable, for Valentine’s purposes. And even Timothy hadn’t been his first choice. That honor had befallen the one in Los Angeles, a twenty-four-year-old scavenger and sometimes grifter named Bryce. Valentine had already been in contact with Bryce for two years, had supplied him with more information on his anomaly than he ever would have received from orthodox science.

“I’ve got a job for you,” Valentine had told him over the phone one night. He’d been blunter with his metaphorical offspring at the time, believing they might naturally defer to him because of his age, his experience, his success at survival. “I want you to impregnate a very special young woman.”

While there was no indication yet that the Helverson’s males had inherited their mutation from a parent, it wasn’t known what characteristics they might pass along to their own children. Only Mark Alan Nance had conclusively sired a child, but it had been the kid’s death that had led to Nance’s genetic testing in the first place. The family had later refused to allow an exhumation; leave the baby dead and buried.

Imagine the possibilities: a child conceived by not one but two Helverson’s carriers. Would two such genetic dominants distill Helverson’s into an even more potent manifestation? Valentine had a need to know, and it might take conventional science years to come up with an answer.

He had ordered, he’d threatened, and still Bryce had refused to cooperate. Valentine’s fury had been great: What, after all I’ve done for you? But it had been a valuable learning experience. He could not expect them all to share his thirst for knowledge, nor count on indiscriminate sex drives to ensure their cooperation, and above all he couldn’t bully them. They had to be seduced, teased along.

So he’d written off Bryce, moved on to Timothy Van der Leun precisely because his will had seemed less formidable. Another abortive attempt, though he’d at least secured cooperation first.

He was working his way down the list, Valentine supposed, and it was looking as if number three might work out just fine.

As a physical specimen, Daniel Ironwood was splendid, trim and hard, and while he smoked much, he rarely coughed, even on rising in the morning. His perspective on whatever didn’t directly concern him, however, seemed blithely indifferent. Last week it had taken him three days to ask the obvious question: Where had Ellie come from? How had Patrick Valentine managed to acquire a Helverson’s female about whom the genetics databanks were unaware?

It had been a simple process, at least conceptually; far more time-consuming in the execution. More than two years ago he had tired of the slow pace with which Helverson’s subjects were being uncovered. At that point the Cassandra Study was merely a proposal, though even if it had been implemented the next day it still wouldn’t identify the subjects already out there. It found babies. He didn’t want babies. He wanted adults, and thus far the adults were being found by accident, and all of them could be counted on a pair of six-fingered hands. So Valentine took matters into his own.

On the hypothesis that those who had yet to be found would be as socially maladaptive as those who had, and prone to scuttling along subterranean currents of society, he decided to advertise in the classifieds. He composed Researcher seeks-type ads that went on to describe the general psychological profile that had been emerging. Please send letter of introduction, date and place of birth, and photo. Qualified applicants would be paid for their time. He blanketed the country with them, in the personals columns of every major daily and underground paper, liberal weekly, and psychotic fish-wrap he could find. It was not cheap, but it was effective.

He had rented a central post-office box, and replies came by the thousands. The letters he ignored, which sped up the process immeasurably; the pictures were all he was interested in. The pictures told the true story, even if the tale was rarely heard.

Three. He turned up three…

One of whom he tried to contact and was never able to reach. The other two he courted slowly, eventually verifying them as genuine Helverson’s subjects through Stanley Wyzkall at MacNealy Biotech. Of those, however, another turned rabbit after being informed of the diagnosis, and wanted nothing further to do with him. Only Ellie Pratt, formerly of an Atlanta suburb, hung in with him for the duration, although she more than compensated for the loss of the other two.

She was, after all, a rarity.

She was just that: a she.

In Ellie’s picture had been the first page of the story: an unmistakable resemblance. Valentine had long since gotten used to the idea that Helverson’s traits transcended ethnic boundaries, but it was dizzying to see them borne by a young woman. Softened by femininity somewhat, but there they were: the same streamlined contours of her bone structure, and eyes wolflike in their bright awareness. Her razored violet hair made her features all the more striking, angular.

In contrast to the males, Ellie had never exhibited much of a pattern of overt violence, although if she was ever truly angered, Valentine didn’t think it would be wise to turn an unguarded back on her. Where the males lacked impulse control, she did not, reserving her anger for maximum impact, and forgetting nothing, ever. The first time Teddy met her, he’d chuckled heartily at her choice of hair dye. She waited four months, until overhearing him consider plugs to combat his own receding hairline, then sliced out two quick handfuls of what he had left. She then held the tip of the knife to Teddy’s eye until he apologized for an insult he didn’t even remember making.

Valentine supposed there would be ample Helverson’s females to monitor, in time, once the dozens of infant girls found in the past two years had grown older. For now, though, there was but one identified Helverson’s woman. And I found her.

Valentine had neither the training nor inclination to understand the intricacies of the genetic dance, but it had never seemed reasonable to him that Helverson’s would exclusively target males. Wyzkall had, years ago, speculated that the trisome of number twelve might be interactive in some way, yet to be spotted, with the male Y-chromosome. Valentine accepted this on purely hypothetical terms, never believing it to be the actuality.

He could not have been more pleased to prove Wyzkall wrong.

Nor could he have been more pleased to find Ellie Pratt amenable to the proposal of motherhood-for-hire that spirited her from her dead-end life in Georgia.

Valentine found the irony irresistible: Money he made from the sale of mass destruction was now being funneled toward the propagation of the species — more to the point, the newest variant of the species.

Truly, science made for strange bedfellows.

“Listen, Patrick?” said Daniel. “I want to get something cleared up.”

Valentine looked at him with expectation. He nodded once, yielding the floor.

“If I do get her pregnant" — all stone-cold business behind dark lenses — “I want a guarantee that I don’t have any obligations to the kid. None. Okay?”

“I already told you, you never even have to hear about it if you don’t want to.”

“Not good enough.” Daniel smiled from across the living room, a thin and simmering smile. “I want something more binding than your word. This goes wrong somehow, bam, and I get hit with a paternity suit, I’m fucked, I’ve got no way out of that. They’ll prove it with one test and there I am stuck owing child support.”

He did have a point. Were their positions reversed, Valentine liked to think he would have enough presence of mind to cover his backside for just this possibility. This was good thinking.

“So you want a contract freeing you from all obligations and responsibilities, then.”

Daniel nodded. “Absolutely.”

“I know a lawyer I can call tomorrow. We should be able to get it taken care of quickly, just have him change the gender bias in a standard surrogate-motherhood contract.”

“Good. Good. I’m just the cum donor.” Daniel stretched one leg out upon the floor, hung an elbow off the other propped knee, and seemed to regard him with fresh curiosity. “I’m wondering one thing, though. Why aren’t you? Save you a lot of trouble with me.”

Valentine sat frozen in his chair, even the mere mention of the subject enough to bring on a dull, hollow pounding in his groin, like the beat of an empty heart. He’d thought he might avoid this with Daniel, thought him incurious enough to never bring it up.

“I would if I could,” was all he said.

Daniel grinned, pointed down below. “Shooting blanks, huh?”

He should have been angry, furious even, should have clouted Daniel across the jaw for making a mockery of what malignancy had stolen. But fury was far away, and he supposed he had the TV to thank for that — seeing the face of the one condemned to death, without having had a chance to meet him. The lost sheep. And contemplating, too, what might have become of the newest lamb, who had promised nearly a week ago to find his way here.

As Daniel sat on the floor, tiring of no response to his prod, Valentine stared at him and had to wonder if this was how fathers felt, real fathers, who looked into the faces of their sons and saw not only themselves, but that one final chance to vicariously achieve those precious goals that had exceeded their grasp. Fathers could be sad that way, and stoic.

He supposed it had always been that way.

He supposed that, whatever else changed in the world, it always would.

Thirty-Three

Adrienne was proud of herself. Up before nine, a shower and a hurried breakfast in the room, twenty minutes on the road to Kendra Madigan’s home, and not a single derisive comment the whole time. She was either growing up or becoming inured to this odyssey of Clay’s. Certainly her stake in it had dwindled with each day and passing mile, until there were moments when she felt like little more than a concerned bystander.

“It’s after ten,” she said along the way. “What do you want to bet there’s a supervisor or two in Tempe who’ll be wondering where I am before the day’s out?”

“It’s Monday morning,” Sarah chimed. “Do you know where your job is?”

Kendra Madigan lived in a quiet neighborhood with a great many trees. The homes were modern but tried not to be. A screened porch here, a row of columns there, a backyard gazebo visible up the block… small touches of an elder South that appeared stapled onto the new, rather than serving as parts of a genuine whole.

She answered her own door, which briefly took Adrienne by surprise. Subconsciously awed, perhaps, that the woman had thrice published controversial — and best-selling — books on the shadowy layers of the human mind. Didn’t people of her ilk employ assistants to dispose of such trivialities as doorbells? Kendra Madigan didn’t, and that made her somehow more real, more — dare she entertain the thought? — potentially likable. But even charlatans had their charms, did they not?

She looked much as Adrienne recalled from her appearance in Tempe, if sporting a touch more gray in her closely trimmed hair. At the moment she wore light yellow sweat-clothes that fit her impeccably. Her skin was richly black and she was in her late forties, given to posture and a gait that Adrienne persisted in seeing as statuesque. She did not so much walk as glide, would not so much sit as levitate.

“I do remember your face now,” she told Sarah while leading them in. “Those occasional letters you wrote? I never could quite put a definite face with them, but let me tell you, you’re who I hoped you would be.”

“Letters?” Adrienne said.

Sarah blushed, caught in the act. “I bought my own stamps.”

Kendra Madigan turned to Clay, even before introductions were formally made. Very smooth, Adrienne observed. Drawing him in at the first possible opportunity.

“When I lectured at the ASU campus,” she told Clay, “they gave a reception that afternoon. Boring things, horrible things, most everyone standing around engaged in intellectual pissing contests, but if they’re meeting your fee you do feel an obligation. At this one, one of the grad students was… well, let’s describe him as very vocal in his condemnation of me, on theoretical grounds.”

“He was being an asshole,” Sarah translated.

Kendra bestowed a luminous smile. “And you’re the one who doused his flame by managing to spill two brimful glasses of champagne into his lap. I remember well, it was the highlight of the afternoon. I never complimented you as I should’ve, though. You almost made it appear accidental.”

“Looks like I left too early that day,” Adrienne said, and it felt as one of those rare bittersweet moments in which you glimpse a lover in a light all her own — Sarah, wholly apart from Adrienne, as if there might not have been an Adrienne, ever. Just Sarah alone, acting on impulse and later neglecting to recount the story. She wished she could have seen it, Sarah delivering comeuppance, sophomoric though it was. She should have been there.

Kendra led them through the house, charming, disarming, a weaver of spells. From a distant room a grandfather clock intoned a solemn half-hour stroke — ten-thirty. As they passed a broad, open stairway that led to the second floor, Adrienne grew curious to see her bedroom, her private bath; see the real mistress of the house. Was she a closet sloven?

A rec room ran along the back of the house, and here Kendra took their coats, hanging them in a closet. She sat for a moment to unfasten strangely hooked collars from around her ankles, then pointed to a metallic framework in one corner that Adrienne had assumed was used for chin-ups.

“I was doing my morning gravity inversion when you rang,” she said. “Fifteen minutes per day. Wonderful for facial skin, they say, and I’ll vouch for that. But now I hear it puts dangerous blood pressure on the eyes. They never cease finding the ghastly side effects, do they? Beautiful or blind, why does it have to be such a choice?”

Clay shrugged. “Either way, your back should hold out fine.”

“Yes. Yes,” she said, as if never having considered this. “In life there are few constants, but that must be one of them. You’re absolutely right.”

She maintained the small talk for several minutes, and to Adrienne it was apparent that she was attempting to set them all at ease, especially Clay. Had they slept soundly? Where were they staying? Some fierce weather they must have come through farther north. Obviously their situation deviated from the norm she would be used to, with no time to work leisurely around to a protracted session. Now and again, to Clay alone she would direct a question or two, fairly innocuous, subtle in its probing; gaining a feel for the way he answered, how he responded to her.

Adrienne focused primarily on Clay during such exchanges, her first occasion to watch him relating to another therapist. She began to wonder if she’d not been too hard on herself, too preoccupied with her failure to deliver grand miracles to see evidence of the smaller ones that had been wrought over their months of effort. For this was not the same Clay she had first encountered, who tested his therapist as an adversary. This was not the Clay who had suggested she compensate for his inability to masturbate.

This was a Clay Palmer who was open to trust.

And if he could trust, he had hope.

Kendra requested they follow her down a hall to her office, and what a far cry it was from those Adrienne was used to. Sarah had grown wide-eyed and loose-necked, shuffling a slow pirouette, staring with a naked and grasping wonder at the masks that lined the walls. Here were faces of ritual that, Kendra told them, predated all texts, all histories, faces dipped from wellsprings of myth. Masks from the Old World and the New, from both hemispheres; from Mexican village to Borneo rain forest, from Inuit ice field to African bush. Faces for death and for life, faces for healing, for the supplication of implacable nature, faces for the appeasement of gods whose names she would never hear. And while Adrienne rationally knew that behind those empty eye sockets lay nothing but walls, she still felt watched.

The eyes of the world were on them, and the eyes of time, as well.

“Let’s sit down,” Kendra said.

There were just enough chairs. Her attention now fell squarely on Clay. She asked if he had ever been hypnotized before. He had, a few years ago, by a psychologist in Minneapolis, and had gone under with ease. This was no surprise — highly intelligent people usually did.

She explained the underlying principles of what they would be doing throughout the day, the procedures used. Some of the background he’d already heard from Adrienne and Sarah — the notion of the collective unconscious, a deep pool of archetypal images and fundamental human knowledge, transcendent of culture and unfathomably ancient, that resided in the evolved mind the same as a history of function resided in other organs. A fellow Jungian, Kendra could not believe that the human psyche was blank at birth.

Clay listened without impatience, as if he had heard none of it before. Just a sharp crease of expectation across his contoured face, the face of someone poised on a windswept brink, awaiting signs and sigils that would mean something to him at last.

And if at times it sounded ludicrous, that the collective unconscious could be tapped by hypnosis, even conversed with, there was no doubt that Kendra Madigan passionately believed in what she was doing, to the extent that she was willing to risk arrest. She had no license to possess or dispense psychoactives.

It was this willingness to put her neck on the line that made Adrienne’s reservations harder to voice. Still, she could not remain compliantly silent. Someone should play the devil’s advocate, so Clay could make as fully informed a choice as possible.

“If you’ve already accessed the collective unconscious,” Adrienne said, “and it’s what it’s theorized to be — an aggregate species knowledge — then what’s the point of putting anyone else through the process? Aren’t you going to get the same basic results every time?”

Kendra smiled as if enjoying the challenge — ah, a worthy opponent. “I did, at first, until I started to refine techniques. Regardless of the commonalities we carry around inside us, each of us is still an individual. We can relate to universals through an individual perspective. I’ve found that, by the time subjects can speak of what’s being confronted, by the time the information is routed through the verbal areas of the brain, they’re usually imprinting it with their own uniqueness. Their deepest self-knowledge that most are never even aware of.”

“They can see their purpose in an overall scheme, then?” concluded Sarah.

Kendra nodded. “I believe many can, yes.”

“And suppose a subject is in a fragile state of mind,” said Adrienne, “and may not be equipped to handle the knowledge. Do you bear the responsibility for what happens to him?”

“Yes,” she said, quite firm. “But just so we know where each of us stands… what kind of responsibility do you have in mind?”

“I know your methods. They can’t be free of danger.” Adrienne drew her composure and fingertips together in one calm movement. “If you harm him in any way… I’ll have you up for review.”

Kendra nodded once more, and Adrienne had to give her this: You could not ruffle this woman. “You’ll do what you must.”

Clay stirred in his chair. “Adrienne, how old am I?”

She started, not expecting this. “Twenty-five.”

“An adult, right? Now let me get this straight: Back in Tempe, you told a group of researchers that I was sane, that I was competent to make my own decisions, and that you’d testify to it in court, if it came to that. Is that right?”

Her mouth was going dry. “Yes.”

“Then butt out.”

It was so brusque, Adrienne wasn’t even sure she’d heard him correctly, until Kendra spoke up, an unlikely ally.

“Clay,” she said sharply, sternly, eyes piqued with a hint of what must have been a fierce demeanor underlying her calm grace. “This woman is concerned enough about you to accompany you more than halfway across the country. If she and I have a professional disagreement, that’s fine, I’m accustomed to them. But I would appreciate your respect for her concern. She’s earned that.”

Well, blow me down, Adrienne thought, fairly astounded. She watched Clay lower his gaze, chastised. He turned to her, a crease showing between his eyes.

“Sorry,” he said softly. “But this is important to me. So trust me. I want to do this. I have to.”

Adrienne nodded, resigned. It did not imply her blessings.

Kendra had him swallow a pair of tablets — psilocybin derived from Psilocybe mexicana mushrooms, she explained, one of nature’s numerous keys to unlocking psychological doors. In general, her best results had come from using psilocybin, although some subjects seemed to react more favorably to mescaline.

She sent him to the bathroom to sheathe his penis in a Texas catheter. The tube coiled out of his jeans, down to a urine bag that he hung from a special hook on the chair. This would be no brief hypnosis, she cautioned, and subjects often voided their bladders — sometimes from simple prolonged need, other times from loss of sphincter control while plunging deep into more turbulent regions.

Blinds drawn, the room was dimmed until the masks seemed to float around them like ancient nobles peering through the dusk. Clay sat in his chair, a voyager breathing deeply to calm himself. Kendra set before him a small portable table, on which stood a pyramid of black plastic and metal, as tall as a hardback book tented spine-up. When she toggled a switch recessed into its back, a socket in front began to pulse with soft light. Adrienne could not see the bulb itself — probably a good thing — only the languid strobing across Clay’s face, shadow/light/shadow/light, his impassive features in continual alternation.

“I want you to stare into the light, Clay, the center of the light." Kendra’s voice was cultivated and practiced, as smooth as a perfect lullaby. “There’s only the light… and the sound of my voice…”

For minutes she lulled him onward, the set of Clay’s eyes — frequently so hard and wary — softening with glazed surrender. Don’t go, Adrienne almost said, an inexplicable sorrow coursing through her, as if he were leaving the room, the country, the year, with a risk that he might never return whole.

Kendra gradually took him through his life in reverse, leapfrogging a year or two at a time. “Where are you now?” she would ask, and he would answer in small, soft syllables: at home… at school… looking at my baby sister who forgot how to breathe. Days of pain and sorrow, yet they rarely disturbed the serenity of his countenance. He knew peace in this inner realm.

Adrienne felt an elbow nudging her side; Sarah nodded toward the door, the hallway, a question in her eyes. They stepped out as quietly as possible, pulling the door closed.

“I know you’re here as a prisoner of circumstances,” Sarah said, “but can you at least entertain a slightly open mind?”

“I don’t know. I’m… I am trying.” She tried to step away for a moment, gather her thoughts. “It’s easy to be seduced by the novelty of it… but I don’t know.” She spun on her heel to plant herself before Sarah again. “Don’t you think I want to believe in what she says she can achieve? I do. I do. But I’m concerned about what it could do to Clay. And a part of me still thinks no, this is too simplistic. The collective unconscious? There isn’t even agreement that there is such a thing.”

“But you believe it exists.”

“Yes.”

“And you believe it can emerge in dreams, right?”

Again she agreed, recalling what had, above all, convinced her. A case documented by Jung in Man and His Symbols, in which a fellow psychiatrist had brought him a booklet handwritten by the man’s daughter, given to her father as a Christmas present. She was but ten, the vignettes she had written a series of a dozen dreams she’d had while eight years old. The dreams were filled with imagery and symbolism she could never have been aware of on any level but intuitive: dreams of death and regeneration, of beasts devouring creation, of dancing pagans storming heaven. She had dreamt the myths of the world.

A year after committing them to paper, she had died. In her dreams, so unlike those of a child, it was as if some hidden cleft of her mind had known what was imminent.

“Yes,” said Adrienne. “I believe it does.”

“Then it’s there. For you, it’s there.” Sarah clasped both of Adrienne’s hands between her own, rubbing. “And if it emerges in dreams, it’s because it has a need to. And if that need is there, well… who’s to say it might not flow toward another outlet if it’s made available?”

“Maybe you’re right. I want you to be right.” She stepped forward, into the safer harbor of Sarah’s waiting arms. I want you to be right, I want it there, waiting for us on the other side of consciousness, saying, I was here all along — you just never asked me until now.

Perhaps she was not nearly so opposed to Kendra Madigan and her techniques as she was to the idea of turning Clay over to someone who could offer him something she could not. It could have been anyone and she would have found a reason. We healers, what a territorial breed we are. Like the missionaries of different faiths who vie for the privilege of being first to convert the savages.

“Let’s go back in,” Sarah said, then gave Adrienne’s hands a kiss and, holding firm, led the way.

The regression continued, Kendra Madigan taking Clay back to a loose and liquid awareness of prenatal existence, for which he seemed to have few words, although body language spoke with its own eloquence. He folded into a fetal position while scooting deeper into the curve of the chair, gently rocking himself back and forth, as if cresting the buoyant waves of a warm ocean.

“Now I want you to go back even farther, Clay,” Kendra said, “back before there ever was a Clay. You’ll remember if you let yourself. But you can’t go straight back, because there’s only so far you can go in that direction… only so much Clay can remember on his own because there wasn’t always a Clay. But you’re part of something much older. So you have to find a new thread to follow. You still have to keep going back… but sideways this time. Do you understand what I mean by that?”

His head raised a fraction. “Yes…”

“That’s glorious, Clay, that’s wonderful. Now… I’m going to leave you for a while, but I’ll be back. I’m going to leave you to find your own way. I want you to follow the paths that open up, and listen to the drums. Go where the drums lead. Deeper, and deeper… and deeper…”

Kendra pulled away and reached for a remote control. With a few pecks of her finger there came from hidden speakers a low and steady rhythm, hypnotic in its own right. It thumped like echoes off a canopy of green, woven with the brown of ancient boughs. Adrienne found herself drifting with it, a timeless resonance taking root in heart, in bones, in soul.

She watched as Clay slowly uncoiled from his fetal position, lowering both feet to the floor again, and his hands to his sides, rolling his head limply back until he appeared to stare into the ceiling, beyond the ceiling. His jaw drooped, slack, then he came forward again, slumping while his head nodded toward his chest. It took several moments before she realized the rise and fall of his breathing was synchronizing itself to the drums.

Nearly ninety minutes had passed since Clay had first gone under. Kendra murmured parting reassurance to him, then shooed them from the room.

“He’s responding,” Adrienne said in the rec room, “he’s responding to something in there, in that state. And even I could feel… something.”

“Oh yes.” Kendra settled luxuriantly into a nearby lounger, raised her feet. “Powerful stimuli, aren’t they?” Suppressing a warm laugh at the expense of, Adrienne surmised, the intrigued skeptic.

“How long will you leave him alone?”

“I’ll check on him from time to time, but I won’t resume any real contact for two to three hours.”

Sarah had found her way to the inversion bar, hanging upside down by bent knees. The tips of her long braids whisked at the mat beneath. “It’s not really new, Adrienne, what she’s doing in there, you know? It’s pretty damn ancient.”

Kendra nodded. “Simple shamanic techniques, mostly. And those go back thirty, forty thousand years, it’s believed. The drumming, the use of natural hallucinogens? You’ll find them in nearly every primitive society the world over. They all came up with the same methods, independently, and the reason they’ve been around so long is because they work, girl. My main contribution is to put a more modern slant on the way they’re applied. I give someone a pill or two so he doesn’t have to gobble a handful of mushrooms or peyote that might make him sick. Instead of a live drummer to maintain a trance beat, I have it on compact disc, set to repeat until I turn it off. The main reason I start the hypnosis before the psychoactives have a chance to take effect is that when they do, I want the subjects carrying in as little baggage from the outside world as possible. Then after someone’s under? It’s just a matter of investing enough time to pick around the way any trained shrink might.” She spread her hands. “Who’s ready for lunch?”

They ate, they talked, they spoke of how some of the most effective techniques for healing the body and plumbing the mind came from ancient traditions. Only recently had modern medicine begun to turn its head around to the past, taking fresh looks at methodology long since dismissed as superstition and folklore, and recognizing their legitimacy.

Throughout, Kendra was never far from another trip into her office to check on Clay. He maintained a stable condition: sitting comfortably, with deep, even breathing. Later in the afternoon she decided it should be time to proceed, and again they gathered before him.

As it went on, Adrienne felt her hands grow cold even though the house was warm; felt herself prickle every time she considered that it was not really Clay’s voice she was hearing. It was something else, speaking through his throat. Something that filled each of them and surrounded them every day of their lives, that predated them, and would survive them and everyone they would ever know and never meet.

He spoke with the voice of millennia.

Adrienne listened, clutching Sarah’s hand and thinking, no, it just couldn’t go this far, Clay could not be regressed to a level of cellular and genetic and evolutionary awareness, yet he was, he was, and she began to bite her lip, for that which he had sought all along might be coming loose, buried like an ancient vase that desert winds were scouring free. Please… let him be strong…

And what a coward she was — she would never have had courage enough to look this in the face and ask the question that demanded an answer that would have to be lived with forever:

“What is it inside you, Clay, and the others like you, that makes you different from everyone else?”

He was Clay, and he was Not.

In oceans of salt and aeons, where the coils of serpents gave birth to worlds, he floated — cell and zygote, embryo and fetus, past and future. He was in the plankton that fed the fish that fed the bird that fed the wolf that fed the man that fed the soil. In the mud that silted along ancient rivers, in the dust that fell to earth from a billion skies beyond.

He was all.

He was nothing.

He was aware.

for i am not like others

not like others

not like others

Yet all things were but strands of the same woven thread.

Following, then, where timeless rhythms led, he stood upon a plain where grasses flowed like green seas, where distant acacia trees grew tall as knowledge… here on the savannah, where the earliest men and women learned to stand tall, to stride, to see beyond an old horizon.

It lived, this land. It breathed. It took no notice.

Yet into him it flowed, and he knew.

The beasts of the land were driven by compulsions bred into them by spans of time that saw the birth and life and death of stars: to expand their territories, to consume, to squeeze their progeny from gaping wet wombs, and this they did until they met their limits. For nature abhors imbalance even more than a vacuum.

The lion feeds upon the gazelle, for if it does not, the land cannot support the gazelles to come.

And he knew that it was systemic perfection this way, plants and predators and prey alike fueled by a singular sun. Then he witnessed the coming of that which did not belong, borne by the Age of Man and Machine, and he understood that an organism fueled by petroleum will crush any and all fueled by the sun, for what is petroleum but millions of years of sunshine stored?

Thus the balance becomes paradise lost.

Kill the lions, the gazelles are doomed to breed themselves to extinction. Prey need predators, it is the nature of the beast. For unchecked growth leads to far worse than tumors.

He watched, then, the death of the savannah, as grass burned into fields of gray ash, and the trees shed an exodus of leaves that left them blackened skeletons curling stark against a sky gone yellow-brown with haze. His skin sloughed in layers of molt and decay, flesh uncoiling to ribbons to strands of the double helix, where all things were written, the most ancient of texts, yet could not revisions be part of the plan?

For what are mutations but defense mechanisms to ensure survival by resistance.

Survival? And he — Clay, yet Not — wondered: But whose?

He saw it crawl over a horizon that burned with the imminence of gangrene and graves, where living twitched to the teeth of starving scavengers, where forsaken prayers flowed, corrosive as bile steaming beneath a dying star.

It was immense, black as shadows and gossamer thin. It was a living night, far from the reach of the sun.

what’s wrong with me? he screamed to whatever might listen. for i am not like others

not like others

not like others

biological override, he thought it told him, and he began to cry, for he thought he understood his part now, a role he never wanted to play in any god’s creation, no matter what the name of the god, when the worst impulses of a species become a written imperative

And as the savannah shriveled to a blackened crisp around him, as he heard the death wails of distant cities, he began to piece together the simple logic that had eluded him long enough:

with no natural enemies, it is inevitable that we become our own

It would make a fine epitaph.

Clay was sobbing even before Kendra brought him back over the brink of consciousness, mid-evening by now, and Adrienne watched him cross the threshold from the inner worlds to the outer. Thinking, Welcome back, and oh, poor Clay, what did you learn there at the end, and can you ever see things out here the same way again?

One look into his newly opened eyes and she knew she need not ask to know the answer; only wondering, with her own heart feeling so suddenly sunk, how would his feel?

I’ve lost him. God damn her, I have lost him forever.

They began to converge upon him, reaching with hands gone tender with concern, but he would have none of it. Backing away, lurching out of his chair and dropping to one knee with muscles gone stiff from hours of disuse, Clay screamed at them not to touch him. He was dragging the half-full urinary bag behind him like a distended organ. He ripped the tube free and hurled the bag across the room, where it slammed into the wall with a splash of liquid. A gray ceramic mask with black-rimmed eyes and a grotesque stitched-over mouth was jarred loose from the impact, and fell to crack into fragments on the floor.

“Are you satisfied now?” Adrienne snapped at Kendra, the woman’s eyes grave, but what an awful time for I-told-you-so’s.

Clay pushed past them, dropped to the floor amid cold urine and broken shards to find the biggest piece, as if his violently trembling hand was made for it.

He managed to carve two jagged lacerations down his face, from temple to jaw, before they stopped him. It was much longer before they were able to stop the bleeding.

The tears might go on indefinitely.

Back at the motel she and Sarah got him settled in for the night, slipping him two tranquilizers from a bottle she had no legal right to, technically, but what hospital did not bend pharmaceutical law so long as privileges were not abused?

She considered taking one, too, but didn’t, in case Clay would later need her alert. If she did not understand in full what he’d haltingly told her, told Sarah, it had been enough to convey agonizing generalities: what Clay was, or believed he was, or hallucinated himself to be — one of a vanguard of intraspecies self-destruction, spewed out by a world under the gun.

She and Sarah slept back-to-back, as if the reality of their own drawn faces was too much for one night. Sarah rose before her to a blood-sky dawn, drawing sustenance from air like ice, and went to check on their baleful companion of the road and vision quests. Through sleight of hand, Sarah had kept his key last night, just in case.

“He’s gone,” Sarah came back to report, quietly, with a grinding finality. Quick to laugh and quick to love, she had never been one to cry for no good reason. But when she found one, tears could come in a deluge.

Adrienne sat up, drawing the covers around her to the neck, as tight as a shroud, and shut her eyes when Sarah said it again, this time like an accusation aimed at herself.

“He’s gone.”

Thirty-Four

The world was the same one he had seen throughout this trip — throughout each of his wanderings — yet it was different in all the worst ways. Imbued with new significances now that he was able to see things as they really were.

Ignorance was bliss and he had never even realized. Too much fundamental knowledge cast all possibility for beauty and wonder to the furnace. His smiles, his laughter… these had been rare enough, as his life had gone, but he had dared hope that one day he might look back on these years as growing pains, and know that he had come through that fire to be a better man who could smile and laugh with ease, maybe even love, and know that these pleasures had been earned.

But now? He would never again know such simple graces; he knew himself instead. For anyone and anything, forevermore, he was ruined.

Hitchhiking north away from Chapel Hill, Clay did not sleep, in neither car nor truck cab, certainly not during the spells when transportation dried up for a mile or two, to leave him walking beside a highway, shrugged deeply into his field jacket like a displaced veteran, one small bag of belongings to call his own.

He spoke little with those who gave him rides, sharing the miles in silence and paranoia. Wondering if they regretted stopping for him once they got a look at the two narrow scabs raked down the side of his face, and went ahead with their offer out of fear of what vengeance he might inflict for their change of mind. He supposed he did look ghastly enough, close up.

From winter’s mild remission in North Carolina he journeyed straight up into its frozen and cancerous heart, where the winds grew more savage with every state north, and the snows more cruel. Past Washington it was all snarled traffic and insanity, and he scanned the car wrecks for blood and mangled lives. He watched distant smokestacks vomit evil clouds into a sky already engorged, and grimy urban lowlands felt like the most fitting realms through which to pass, teeming with addictions and excrements and neon claustrophobia.

And from time to time he could not help but look out over these bleak valleys that not even snow could beautify, as even the snow smelled of chemotherapy, and think, You made me what I am. So live with the consequences, whatever they are.

Soon he amended: You made us what we are. He was not in this entirely alone.

He would gaze across ruined buildings collapsing of their own weight, on rusted bones of structures never completed — they seemed the fate of all vain tinkerings. He had to laugh in spite of himself, with signs of such grandiose rot all about him, that the final end might come about through something as minuscule as a chromosome. With a species in genetic decline, how long would it take? And why so protracted a fall, when they had built weapons enough to get it over with so much quicker? Something biblical, that would be nice, heaps of rubble that fumed with incessant, sulphurous clouds, where mangy dogs licked the sores of malignant old men. There’s drama for you.

Near New York, he recalled the painting on Adrienne’s office wall, The White Veil, its tranquil glimpse into the first few years of this century. If only he could see it again, just once more, he might not even scoff. Of this century, he was closer to its finale than Metcalf had been to its opening. Would that he had talent enough to do justice to what the century had brought to bear, the potentials it had squandered.

Graham would have understood.

If artists were the prophets of their times, no wonder so many had gone mad. And though he’d never been an artist, and never would, he still had his own excuse.

It just ran deeper than most.

Clay arrived in Boston late the next morning after leaving North Carolina, more than twenty-four hours and eight hundred miles on the road. He hit the asphalt of the unfamiliar city when a trucker hauling a load of sportswear stopped with a hydraulic hiss to let him out along the eastern, uptown edge. Here the streets radiated like crooked spokes from a central hub.

He headed inland a number of blocks and realized he was on a stretch that appeared to be part of some walking historical tour, demarked by a red stripe on the sidewalk. Here and there a small, well-preserved building with its foundation in colonialism stood in anachronistic contrast to everything that had grown up around it.

He commandeered the next pay phone he saw and dialed the only number he had left to call. Though their sole conversation a week past had been brief, he remembered the voice that answered.

“It’s Clay Palmer,” he said. “I’m here.”

Silence, long and reasoned. From the background came a muddle of voices and cheer and warm meals, as if Patrick Valentine were eating lunch in a pub and had answered by cell phone. Finally, “I was expecting you’d be making this call days ago.”

“There were detours.” He pressed a gloved palm over his ear to muffle the din of traffic. “I couldn’t help that. What do I do next, you’re not going to run me from phone booth to phone booth, are you?”

“Where are you, exactly?”

“Congress Street, near State.”

“You’re on the Freedom Trail?”

“Is that what this is called?” He found a nice mellow irony in that.

“Keep following it north, and I’ll pick you up in front of the Paul Revere House, on North Street. I’ll be coming down from Charlestown, so you should beat me there.”

And that was it, nothing about how they would recognize each other at first sight. There was no need. Surely this was an advantage, one of few. They had their own visual shorthand. An implicit history would unfold the moment the eyes of any two met.

Clay pushed away from the phone, into the glut of uptown workers in midday flux. North, following the Trail.

Now, more so than at any time during the last eight hundred miles, he wondered why he had still come. It could no longer be to seek answers; he had all he needed, all he could bear and more. He had gone where no Helverson’s subject ever had: so deep inside himself that he knew what an apocalyptic creature he really was, a living testament to chaos theory. What else was left but to live it out? He possessed more insight into their aggregate nature than Patrick Valentine could dream of.

Maybe he had come to set the man’s thinking straight, if that was what it needed. Which sounded suspiciously altruistic; he must keep that a secret, naturally.

Clay staked out the curb on North Street, before the colonial simplicity of the Revere House, now and again pacing or jittering in place to keep up his body warmth. Like a junkie waiting for his connection. He felt half-frozen when at last a car glided to the curb. Through a tinted window they appraised each other. Similar eyes set in the same sockets. More lines on Valentine’s face and a bit less hair on his head, but Clay figured if he lived long enough, he too would have the lines, at the very least.

Valentine said nothing, nor did he gesture. Clay circled around to the passenger door, dropped his bag to the floorboard, and settled into the most comfortable seat he had been in for eight hundred miles. He supposed that fabled German craftsmanship was no idle myth. It wasted no time in whipping back into traffic.

“You look terrible,” Valentine told him.

“That figures.”

“Are you hungry?”

“I should be. I don’t know. No.” Perhaps he would be later, when the low-grade flow of adrenaline had pumped its way through his system, once Patrick Valentine and whatever he was had become just more facts of life, digested and assimilated. “Do you plan on telling me who you are, ever?”

“I don’t guess there’s any more reason not to.”

“Well, don’t bother if it’s going to put a strain on you,” pausing a beat, then: “Patrick.”

Valentine scowled at him from behind the wheel, then his brow smoothed with a mirthful tic of his mouth. “How long have you known?”

“A few days is all. You’re not the only one who can exploit information sources.” He measured Valentine for annoyance but saw the man was holding calm; just a look in his eyes, Go on, who was it? “I went to see Timothy Van der Leun.”

“Well, that’s one for you. Resourceful.” His traffic gaze seemed to darken; he might run over children or kittens if it was more convenient than swerving. “How is Tim?”

Clay shrugged. “Terminal,” and that seemed to say it all, to the satisfaction of them both.

As the car carried them north, across the Charlestown Bridge, they spoke of recent pasts and contributions to society. What do you do, my last job I was a garbage man, oh yeah? I sell guns to garbage so they can create more — see the symmetry there? Clay felt the exhaustion of the past two days beginning to drag him down, as if he were wearing a suit of lead, yet still he burned inside with a cold arc. Here he was, at journey’s end, at the side of the world’s oldest unknown Helverson’s subject. The father of them all? It felt that way, in a sense. Patrick Valentine had gone through life with nineteen years of seniority over him, and was neither dead nor imprisoned nor institutionalized, and that made him a creature of some awe.

Clay took discreet care to study him, the way every move seemed so deliberate, and the way his eyes soaked up his surroundings as if evaluating them for ever more opportunism. He was obviously a very hard man, who had risen from the wreckage of his worst impulses and mastered them, given them the deadly cutting focus of a laser.

Could it be he had actually beaten Helverson’s? No, more impressive still: made it work for him? The mere thought of such a feat had seemed ludicrous before.

They arrived at Valentine’s house — here again, another show of what had always seemed beyond him, anything more than three rooms on a top floor. He told Clay he had company at present, although this would be changing tonight, and this afternoon this company was out of the way with a business associate, so Clay need not worry about being disturbed.

He was ushered to a guest room, supplied with towels, shown the bathroom, where he showered away the film of road grime that greased his body. He wiped steam from the mirror and hoped to see something better than what he had taken into the shower, but it was not so. His eyes still drooped and his bones looked more prominent than ever, as if his skeleton were trying to burst free.

When dry, Clay trudged to the bed, the latest port in the latest storm. He sank into it, hoping he would not dream, that exhaustion would claim even those fissures of the brain they said never slept.

But dream he did, tossing through murky visions of a desolate factory whose boilers churned late into the night, as he walked through steam and corridors to emerge in an industrial cavern lit by a suffusing red glow. Gears whined and magnetos spun, and he stood on the edge of a concrete pit filled not with solvent but with naked human bodies that writhed like worms in a can. How it beckoned, take a plunge into the gene pool, and as he stared into its fleshy depths every now and again something would churn up through the mass to differentiate itself — an arm here, a leg there, a face elsewhere, endless recombinations of each — until a threatened overflow was shunted off down a pipeline. He wondered where it would eventually empty out, and if they would all walk away from the spill or crawl like amphibians, and no telling what would be wrong with them by the time they splashed into the world, but then the world was always waiting for another new disease.

They would have their place in it after all.

He awoke after dark. Along mid-evening, Valentine told Clay there was somebody he wanted him to meet, so they ventured out in the car again. Valentine would explain himself no further, seeming to retreat into a cold, hard shell of purpose. Clay recalled the cryptic ramblings of Timothy Van der Leun: You really don’t know about that girl he’s got up there? It would’ve been like humping my own sister. He decided to play along, act surprised. Knowing Valentine’s name was one thing. Knowing incomplete details about his peculiar fetishes or missions was something better kept quiet.

They picked up Beacon Street and he peered into the snowy wooded depths of the Common as they passed, wondering if it was anything like New York’s Central Park: quaint by day, but after dark a hunting preserve for nocturnal predators and naïve nocturnal prey. Several blocks later they dropped down through the Back Bay, rolled along the downtown canyons.

The tower to which Valentine escorted him seemed to pierce clouds, yet was still made diminutive by the nearby Prudential Building. They took the elevator to the nineteenth floor and were admitted into an apartment by someone who seized the whole of his attention the instant he saw her.

Valentine made introductions but Clay heard them as if at a distance. Ellie, he said her name was. By now Clay had grown oddly accustomed to seeing his face on other males. Even that new one, Daniel, was no great surprise as he slouched in a lounger across the room, seeming to glare from behind inscrutably dark lenses.

But here was new overload… a new gender. The first of her kind? As far as he was concerned, she was. He need not pretend to be captivated. What a postmodern Eve she made, arms folded across her chest, wearing black tights and a shapeless gray sweater, appraising him with eyes that had never learned to turn away in coy aversion. Graham would have loved her, her smile with its near-mystic potential for cruelty. Nina would desperately want to be her friend, learn where she had her hair razored and dyed.

“Welcome to God’s Little Cesspool,” she said, and smartly arched her eyebrows at Valentine before returning to a cross-legged perch on the floor.

“She’s beautiful, isn’t she, Clay? In her way. Don’t you think so?” asked Valentine.

Clay found it such an unlikely remark from the man he wasn’t sure it hadn’t been sarcastic. Although Valentine seemed more interested in how Daniel Ironwood reacted to it than in Clay’s response. Jealous? Was he trying to make Daniel jealous?

Whatever the intention, it appeared to provoke some rise out of him.

“What the hell’s he doing here tonight, Patrick?” Daniel slid forward in his chair, muting down the TV with a remote. “You too for that matter. You know what night this is.”

Valentine squared himself, going to stone. “Just a friendly social call. You have a problem with that?”

But Daniel was not backing down. “What is it you’re running up here, some kind of winter camp for chromo mutes? I was hoping for a little privacy tonight, or are you forgetting?”

“Oh you, you’re so cute when you can’t adapt to change,” said Ellie, and she actually sounded lighthearted, an amused mediator. She looked up at Clay. “This is purgatory, is what this is. This is where we come after a life of unrequited sex.”

“Then where do you go after here?” he asked.

“For me, a convent, I think that’s all that’s left. The rest of you, you’re on your own.” Ellie rocked back and forth on the floor with a bark of feral laughter. “I was made to wear a wimple and rosaries.”

“That isn’t what I was told,” said Daniel. He had retreated a few inches into his chair, coiled and sullen.

“Oh, slutty insinuations now, is it?” She rubbed her temples with the slightest air of theatricality. “Strangest thing, I’m starting to feel a headache coming on, it could last all night. I might have to ask you all to leave.” She leveled a glance at Daniel, just shy of ferocious. “Alphabetical order by last name.”

Valentine stepped forward to smooth them out, telling them to knock it off, while Clay was struck by the immense rarity of this summit. Four of them, Helverson’s progeny all, two on the books and the other two off. Had this many ever been in one place at one time? Bickering already, though, and whereas he had been overcome by a disgusted pity for Timothy Van der Leun, for Daniel Ironwood he wasted no time fomenting a razored dislike. Entirely reactionary, of course — Don’t want me here? Fine, asshole, I’m not crazy about your company either.

Four of them. How many would it take in a room before they hit critical mass and began the bloody scramble for territory and dominion?

As Valentine gesticulated to the seated Daniel, Clay sank onto the couch, leaned forward to run a finger through the dust on the heavy black and gray marble-top table. Did he know any symbols for disillusion that he could draw? No. Pity. It would have felt proper, commemorating the moment when he realized that even among his own genetic kind he really did not belong, not in any familial sense. There was no feeling of unity, nor even gallows humor — Hey, sorry about your DNA, I’d donate you mine if I thought it would help — but rather a pervading sense of a struggle for leverage. Double their numbers in here and they might well begin killing each other.

Valentine left the other two, came over to bid him step onto the smallish balcony. Clay frowned but followed; the man would not have brought him all this way to throw him nineteen floors to the street. The sliding glass door slammed behind him and the warmth of the apartment was forsaken. The winds up here were frigid but bracing, oddly welcome, cleaner than at ground level. The sound of traffic became a long-distance echo.

“They’ll work it out,” Valentine said. He went to the very edge of the balcony, fearless despite the snow and ice underfoot, and leaned against the railing. In his long topcoat and contoured skull he looked ready to fly. “Arguments are important. A sign of passion. All the bodily systems are primed then.”

Clay turned to the glass, the curtain open on the other side. Beyond, Ellie and Daniel squabbled, silently to Clay… but, if body language was any indication, with waning vehemence. He had no doubt that if pressed, she would hold her own with ease. Wondering, too, what it would be like to be with a woman so akin to himself they could be joined halves of the same damaged egg, a broken yin to a shattered yang. Such a genetically incestuous union could be glorious, or terrifying. Maybe they would immolate themselves in the flames of taboo and leave nothing but smoldering ash.

“Somehow I can’t believe your only purpose here is to run a matchmaking service for us,” Clay said. “There has to be more on your mind than that.”

Valentine faced him, now leaning back against the railing. What trust, or what confidence in his own authority; one shove and he could plunge to an icy death. “I have the world on my mind. And our place in it. I’ve lived years you never have. That makes me a valuable resource to you. It makes you a legacy to me.”

“Why do you even care? I wouldn’t.”

“Because I’m the one that job falls to.” Valentine pulled his hands from his pockets, scooped snow from the railing and began to pack it into a tight ball. “Have you ever killed anyone?”

“No. But there were doctors who said it was just a matter of time.”

Valentine kneaded the snowball, smoother and rounder, veins popping out all across his muscular hands. “Sometimes you’ll hear people say the first kill is always the hardest, and after that it gets easier. But they’re ignorant on the subject. You can discount everything they say. It’s the second that’s the hardest. Because you’ve done it once, and this time you know what to expect and you know how messy it can be. How long it can take some people to die. That’s when you have to look inside yourself and ask if you have what it takes to do it all over again. Nothing can be very hard when you’re ignorant… only when you’re fully informed.”

He lifted the snowball, a perfect sphere of dense white ice. “From this height, the right angle? It just might kill.” He lobbed it over the railing toward the sidewalk below. “That’s the beauty of random chance. All you have to do is be willing to take the gamble.”

Clay strolled to the edge, peered over and down. He saw the occasional pedestrian trudging through this winter’s night, but no signs of calamity, of death from above. “You lost this one.”

“And somebody won and never knew it. And all’s right with the world. I could drop another tomorrow during rush hour and win, and all would still be right with the world.” Valentine dusted his hands of melting snow and pocketed them. “I hope you understand that, Clay. Of the rest of them down there, not one in a hundred thousand would understand. But I think we should appreciate that element of life, because even though we may be new beings, I think what they consider wrong with us has instead unlocked something that’s been buried for a very long time. The propensity for assuming a natural mastery — because we’re not weighed down by the same petty little sentiments.”

Clay began to pack his own snowball. “The noble savage?”

“Even better: a corrupted savage with cunning sharpened by reason instead of five acute senses. Nietzsche would’ve understood. He wrote, ‘What a time experiences as evil is usually an untimely echo of what was formerly experienced as good — the atavism of a more ancient ideal.’”

Clay nodded but said nothing, packing his snowball in silence because there was no point to continuing. Patrick Valentine made an unlikely optimist — imagine that — actually seeing a future in Helverson’s syndrome. He could share with the man what he had seen in himself, out on the burnt savannahs of human existence, even though Valentine would almost certainly refuse to believe.

“Human beings eat the world, bit by bit, but most of all we just eat one another,” Clay said, and held up his little globe of snow. “All we are is a new model designed to take bigger bites and get it over with.” He crunched his teeth into the snowball, as he would an apple, then crumbled the remainder in his fist and sprinkled it over the side.

Valentine watched the object lesson with eyes gone grave, an inquisitor listening to the errors in a heretic’s logic.

“You need to kill,” he said. “Blood awakens. Blood changes everything.”

Thirty-Five

Adrienne was at a loss as to how to proceed, but maybe this was only because she had sacrificed so much sleep the past two days. Perish the thought it was because she had extended herself so far beyond responsibility and reason that any decision seemed destined to be the wrong one.

“Let’s examine the facts,” Sarah said. How patient she had been throughout this odyssey, how splendid a lover, friend, voice of calm. “It doesn’t look like there’s a car over there, nothing’s moving, the afternoon’s getting darker and no lights are coming on. These are the unmistakable signs of an empty house.”

“Maybe I should just go see and get it over with.”

“Not alone, you’re not. You don’t have any idea what this man might be capable of, and I’ve got a feeling he’s not someone you should be alone with. Not even for two minutes, Adrienne. Especially if he’s the kind of guy who sits around in the dark.”

Poised behind the wheel — it felt as if she’d grown here — she might have smiled had she had the energy to spare. Sarah’s concern was touching. Moreover, it was unsettling. Little in the world caused Sarah to really worry, to admit that it was beyond her skills and smarts, her charmed existence altogether.

Idling at curbside in the quiet Charlestown neighborhood, a few homes down from the house of Patrick Valentine, the car heater blowing precious warmth, she tallied what little she did know and decided Sarah’s concern was far from unwarranted.

Valentine obviously knew how to circumvent channels. Older by around a decade than the oldest confirmed Helverson’s subject, he had gotten himself diagnosed without betraying his anonymity. He exercised what appeared to be unlimited access to medical and research records, and on his own had managed to uncover an adult Helverson’s female and shield her from identification as well. By use of the mail, he toyed with the psyches of volatile people, exhibiting the aloof disregard of a sociopath.

These were obvious. Then there were the unconfirmable rumors: the guns, the missiles, and most repugnant, his planned foray into eugenics. God help any child conceived under his procurement.

And Clay, you knew at least some of this, you had to know to want to get this far in the first place, you knew and you lied to me about it.

Two days ago, after awakening to the news of his vanishing, she and Sarah had sat in their motel room and, over coffee, tried to choose a next move that would be best for everyone. They could, of course, return to Denver, then Tempe, resuming their lives and never knowing what had become of Clay. But neither had any doubt that he would continue on to Boston. The only issue was whether or not they should follow.

He had left no note, no reason for his abandoning them, and while it hurt, she had to remind herself he would have meant no malice by it. Likely he had been driven by pain, by shame, she and Sarah continual reminders of what he’d faced in himself at Kendra Madigan’s. If they continued together, Adrienne surmised, he would look at them and fear they now saw him as something truly lost, whose irredeemable nature was a genetic mandate, with no more hope of a cure than a malignancy whose tendrils were braided through the brainstem.

On his own, at least no one need suspect that but himself.

They would follow, they decided. They would follow and at least let him know that their opinion of him had not changed, not on the basis of a psilocybin vision that may or may not have been valid. That Clay understand she would never, could never, give up on him was crucial, and if it was her final gift, then let him at least be the one to tell her so. She demanded little for herself when it came to patients — and Clay had become so much more — but he owed her this much.

But they could not follow without at least some idea of his destination, and her only key was Timothy Van der Leun. His phone number was unlisted with Indiana Bell information, but her notebook computer still had access to the mainframe at Arizona Associated Labs, and she found it on file there. Timothy’s voice, once he consented to answer his phone early that afternoon, had come from the bottom of a dead soul’s gorge.

“I need your help. You’re the only one who can help me,” she had explained. “I brought Clay Palmer to Indianapolis and now I need to find him again because he needs help…”

“Who?” He’d sounded confused, feverish, so she had to tell him again, Clay Palmer, the one who came to see you last Friday, New Year’s Eve. “Oh. Him. Right,” Timothy had said. “I remember now.” Then, in a thickened voice that nearly caused her to shudder, “Good scars. He had good scars.”

She had pleaded and prodded and cajoled, on the theory that having been diagnosed years before Clay, Timothy might already have been contacted by the mysterious mentor in Boston. So long as she could keep him focused, he’d had ample tales to tell, information to share. In his more lucid moments he sounded more forsaken than insane, full of desperate gratitude for a woman to talk with, who valued his opinion on anything, and she tried not to think of what he must look like, smell like, his skin a burnt patchwork of self-made sores.

She tried not to think of his inevitable fate.

So through the ragged clouds of snow and hostility they had driven to Boston, had gotten a hotel room, had acquired maps and charted out what was where. And if Clay wasn’t with Patrick Valentine after all, if he had instead disappeared into the frozen mists like the misbegotten outcast of Mary Shelley’s most famous novel, well… perhaps it really would be time to pack in their best intentions and head for home. For the mountains, then the desert.

“Five more minutes,” Adrienne said. “Then we’ll check.”

“Okay.”

“Maybe they’re asleep. You know the kind of hours he keeps, sometimes.”

“I know,” said Sarah. “I know.”

She reached across to massage the back of Adrienne’s neck. In her lap was paper and pen, resting upon the flat of a book, with which she had whiled away their forty-five-minute stakeout. Sarah had filled it with experimental addresses for herself, seeing the way her name looked conjoined with cities and states all over the country: Sarah Lynn McGuire, 123 Fogbound St., Eugene, OR. Sarah Lynn McGuire, 456 Potato Lane, Boise, ID. She did this sometimes, in coffeehouses and comedy clubs, did it the way others doodled stick figures or hearts or future fortunes, Sarah indulging basic wanderlust. “You never know,” Adrienne once heard her tell someone who didn’t understand, “maybe I’ll write one and it’ll be like a talisman. I’ll look at it and the match will be so perfect, I’ll just know it’s a place I have to be.”

I want to go to these places, too, Adrienne thought now. However many may seize you, I want to try them on with you and see how they fit us both. She really hoped she meant that, would mean it tomorrow and next week and a year from now, and that it wasn’t just the wintry miles of failure and desolation talking.

“Okay,” Adrienne said. “Time’s up.”

She put the car into gear, rolled ahead and down the street, to the house that Valentine built. They got out and picked their way along the front walk, up to the dark-windowed, two-story Cape Cod. Beneath its snowy blanket it looked sinister, she decided, as if it had something to hide.

“I had an optimistic thought,” she said quietly, watchful. “If Clay’s been here, now that he’s made the trip and confronted his unknown, maybe it satisfied something in him and he’ll be ready to leave.”

Sarah nodded and raised one hand, pulling off her mitten so Adrienne could see her crossed fingers.

They mounted the porch. Rang the doorbell, and when that failed to rouse anyone, began to pound until she realized, no, no one was here, and selfishly, this brought relief. They retraced their steps, and she wondered if Valentine — or Clay — might later notice their prints and wonder like paranoiacs about what mysterious pair had come knocking.

“Well, there’s always the other place downtown,” Sarah said. “We could see if that’s still going.” She tossed a hasty snowball at Adrienne before she could regain the shelter of the car. “If we time it right, maybe they’ll even invite us to stay for dinner.”

Thirty-Six

The world was full of asylums, all kinds: those into which you were committed, those you carried around inside, those you let others build for you. Clay watched the first flakes of late afternoon snow drifting past the nineteenth floor and wondered if Valentine even realized what he had created here: just another asylum.

Though it was not without its appeal. At the moment the woody resin scent of marijuana smoke hazed the air. In this asylum they prescribed their own drugs and Valentine didn’t seem to mind. A chromo mute could surrender here, trudge out onto the balcony like a beaten pontiff and tell the world, Enough, you win, I’ll never be what you want, only what you deserve, then come back inside and wait to age another day.

He and Valentine had dropped by two hours ago, a follow-up to last night’s visit, and this time Ellie’s gaze lingered on his eyes instead of looking him up and down as a whole specimen. Just beyond her, Daniel Ironwood was taking in every move, and had wandered up even before Clay got his field jacket off, taller by a couple of inches and making sure Clay knew it.

“I meant to ask last night, what happened to your face?” Daniel pointed to the raggedly parallel scabs.

“I cut myself eating,” Clay told him.

Ellie appeared borderline sympathetic. “Those look painful as hell,” then she shot a sporting glance at Daniel that he missed seeing. “I could kiss it to make it better, but Patrick says you don’t like to be touched.”

Daniel straightened, striving for still more height, crossed his arms before his chest. “Why don’t you get it over with and kiss his ass instead?”

“Well that’s half-profound.” She scruffed both hands across the cropped sidewalls of her hair and up through the length, as if she were about to pull it out. “Look, Jeopardy! should be on TV in a few minutes. If you want, I’ll be happy to spend some more quality time with you, and if you’re really really nice between now and then, this time I promise not to count how many times your lips move and no sound comes out.”

“Fuck you,” and Daniel stalked off down the hall toward the bathroom.

“Yeah, that’s what you’re being paid for, isn’t it?” Ellie called over his shoulder. “Maybe I should tell Patrick I’m not quite getting his money’s worth.”

The bathroom door slammed and Valentine stood gloating, as if everything were some grand joke that he had told with perfect timing, and then Ellie turned to him and began to complain of how brutal Daniel had been last night, and she had no reason to believe he would alter his tactics.

“It’s only for tonight and tomorrow night,” Valentine said, “and after that you don’t have to see him if you don’t want to. You can put up with him for two more nights.”

Clay supposed it was at this point that he began to think, Wait, there’s something going on here I don’t know about, something he’s not telling me, and then Ellie said that when they first met she’d actually thought Daniel was fairly sedate and even-tempered for a Helverson’s guy, and Valentine smiled his tightest control-freak smile.

“If you need somebody to blame,” he said, “blame Clay. Daniel just thought he was coming in for the same casual sex he’s always had. But now? Now he’s taking a lot more personal interest in sowing that seed. He can’t help it, it’s sperm competition.”

“Could you be a little more manipulative, is that possible?” Ellie twirled one finger around a strand of hair and plucked it out. “Anyway, I’m not looking to blame anybody, all I want is for Daniel to quit acting like he’s trying to crack my pelvis in two.”

“Then go back and start being nice to him. Get him to quit sulking in the bathroom.”

She barked another of her strange, incredulous laughs. “He went in by himself, let him decide when he wants to come out. Why should I have to coax him?”

Valentine took a step forward and leaned into Ellie’s face. “Because if you don’t, I’ll blacken your eye,” then he reached beneath his cable-knit sweater to draw out a gun that Clay hadn’t realized he’d been carrying, a heavy revolver that captivated by sheer presence and oiled, black sheen. He spun the cylinder and let the gun dangle errantly from his fist. “And if that doesn’t move you, then we’ll play the game again, like we did that one time.”

Ellie drew herself together, very cool, very aloof, her lips compressing into an expression almost prim as she regarded him for a few moments. “Okay, Patrick. You can have it your way.” She began to scoot toward the hall. “You always do.”

And when Clay followed Valentine over to sit with him in the living room it wasn’t so much that he wanted to, as that he hoped for some explanation that would shed full light on this nineteenth floor cuckoo’s nest. Certainly he didn’t belong here, and probably he would have left by now if he had anywhere to go, anything to do… any reason to leave and live for. He was beginning to get a distinct feeling of being used, rather than educated.

“What is this all about, here?” Clay asked. “What is it you want out of those two?”

And when Valentine began to rhapsodize about conception, and breeding stock, and what might the offspring be like parented by not one but two Helverson’s subjects, it seized Clay’s imagination with a dread so palpable he really feared he might be ill.

Helverson’s times two? Helverson’s squared? Or might the result be a mutation fouler still, never before seen, never anticipated, grotesque potency distilled through the generations.

“You’d do that to some kid deliberately?” he whispered.

What a horrible thing, what a perfectly horrible thing, and he recalled those times with Erin when they had lain in bed and the thought of siring a child was the worst act he could think of, the worst crime he could commit upon innocence, even upon a world as corrupt as he knew theirs to be.

“You’re a monster. You’re a complete monster.” It might have stung the man, for while he didn’t flinch, he cocked his head to one side almost as if he didn’t comprehend. It might have hurt him… but it was so hard to tell.

Clay stood to turn his back on the man, nearly stumbling on his way to the sliding balcony door, where he leaned against the glass and stared at the snow beginning to fall. When he heard Valentine behind him he knew if the guy so much as rested a hand on his shoulder, that would be it, he would go for his eyes.

“No. I’m not,” was all the man said, all he did. “I’m just the first.”

But there Clay stayed, Valentine leaving him be, an hour or more passing as life went on too slowly, as Ellie and Daniel came back and seemed at truce, and one of them asked, “So what’s wrong with him?” but went unanswered. They began to smoke from her stash, peace pipe maybe, and Clay watched the leaden sky go darker with the first gloom of dusk.

Then he heard something he had never expected to hear, not in this place, with all four of them as isolated from one another as they were from the world at large:

He heard the doorbell.

Adrienne’s gaze fell naturally upon Clay as soon as they were let in. Fifteen feet away, across this penthouse apartment, there was true pain in what she saw: Oh, he’s worse, he’d not weathered the trip north well at all. Only three days had passed since she’d seen him, but he appeared thinner, paler, his eyes burning gray hollows. The only genuine color in him came from the savaging he had given the side of his face: the red badge of desperation.

Only then did she truly notice the others.

She thought, oddly, of their brief discussion about Salvador Dali, wondering if Sarah did likewise, for here was surrealism: encountering four faces so wholly similar, staring back. It was academic to see pictures; visceral to enter a home and see a quartet in which individuality appeared sacrificed to a prevailing stigma.

She caught her breath. See them, and one could find it too easy to believe in a purpose underlying their births. Given the suspicion and hostility in at least some of those eyes, perhaps it was precisely as Clay had said. There was something eerily more than human in all those streamlined faces turned her way, like lizards catching sound of a threat.

“Are you sure you’re in the right place?” the girl asked. Ellie. Her name, Timothy had said, was Ellie.

“No doubt.” Sarah took another step, hands fisted into the slash pockets of her down vest. “There’s no other place like this, is there?”

Across the room, their elder rose from the chair in which he seemed to have been brooding for a while. Patrick Valentine had a glare that could cause ulcers.

“Who are you?” he asked.

Adrienne lifted her hand toward Clay, framed against a glass door, a skyline, a thickening snowfall. “I’ve been Clay’s doctor since September.”

“Rand. Oh, right.” Valentine spared Clay a perfunctory glance, then regarded her with dismissal. “How proud you must be. He looks wonderful.”

She ignored him, or tried, because he was obviously the sort of man who would miss nothing, who understood what would hurt and how to exploit it, a man who knew where all the nerves lay. Don’t listen to him. There was only Clay here, she decided, and spoke his name but nothing more, for everything had abandoned her. All logic, all persuasion… gone.

But maybe it was better this way. Maybe she belonged mute. She needed to say nothing for Clay to see how far she had come, how low she had fallen. He would realize why they had come — that no matter what he did, she still refused to let hope die.

It should have been a simple decision for him. He obviously had come here and found more unhappiness than answers.

And yet…

He hesitated.

“Do we need to talk,” she said, finding resolve, “or would that even do any good any more?”

“It’s not that simple,” said Clay, and why did he insist on making it so difficult for himself? Couldn’t he for once just admit the mistake and redress it by taking the quick way out? But no, he couldn’t bring himself to make it that easy.

Sarah caught her eye then, Sarah sad and emptying right there beside her. It’s us, Adrienne realized. It’s the way he sees us, to him we must seem so complete together, that to be with us magnifies every bit of stability and unity he’s lacking. He’s reminded of it every moment he’s with us, and he doesn’t see the disagreements or the squabbles, but even if he did it might make everything even more genuine, because he’d realize they never last long…

It’s us. We’re as much at fault as anyone.

Sarah fumbled blindly for her hand, ever intuitive, sensing that sudden failure in her. She took a step forward to pick up the slack.

“As long as you never see the sun,” she said, with a smile — if anyone could turn his awful pallor into a gentle joke it was Sarah — “would you like to come back with us as a consultant? I’ve got this wild idea for part of my thesis, I want to go looking for cave paintings in old shut-down factories, and you’re the only expert I know.”

Clay’s face softened, wistful, transported to another day. He looked almost hopeful. “Where are you going to start?”

Sarah shrugged. “South Dakota, maybe? If you think it’s worth the trip. I figure it’s worth a look.”

Adrienne didn’t immediately catch on. South Dakota? Then the memory fired: Where Erin went home to, and if Sarah was the one to talk Clay down from here instead of her, fine, more power to her, whatever worked. And it appeared that she really might, for he looked upon Sarah with as much trust as she had ever seen him grant.

None of which was lost on Valentine. He would look for these weaknesses as a rule. Soft underbellies were made to be torn.

“And what then, Clay, a week from now, a month?” he said. “Is she going to marry you? You think you’re going to set up some happy home in the mountains? Raise normal babies?”

Adrienne stared. Whatever’s passed between the two of them… Valentine doesn’t understand it at all. He can’t read it right because he’s probably never had a friend in his life.

“If you think anything even remotely like that is going to happen for you,” Valentine said, “you’re living in a fantasy world that’ll destroy you when you get burned out of it.”

Bristling, Sarah appeared to have had about enough. “You’re the last man on earth to lecture anyone on fantasy worlds,” she told him. “You’re the little man behind the curtain in Oz.”

Against the near wall, Ellie stuttered into laughter, and the other man — Adrienne wasn’t even sure which one this was — turned on her with alarm, Shut up, shut UP! in his taut features. Adrienne had almost made a similar observation, but to Sarah alone, discreetly. How ironic: All day Sarah had been the one to preach caution, to fret about Adrienne angering this Machiavellian tyrant.

“I’ll take my chances,” said Clay, and moved toward his coat.

Valentine nodded, muscles bunching in his jaw. “Chance is the stuff of life.”

It happened very abruptly.

Clay was halfway to his coat when Valentine went kinetic, empty hand plunging beneath his sweater and emerging full, mighty as Thor with a hammer. He swung out the revolver’s cylinder, and no one could have missed hearing the clicking metallic whir as he spun it. Pivoting then, slapping the cylinder back into place and raising his hand, he thrust the pistol forward as if he were launching a javelin, every motion so smooth and fluid that Adrienne was not so much frightened as insanely curious to know how often he had practiced this.

“Snake in the grass!” he shouted as the gun reached its apex, which made no sense to her at all. She met his eyes, and no one could have looked more surprised than Valentine when the gun blasted out a single devastating shot. At once he erupted with a triumphant whoop.

With every sense raw, unguarded, sensation became immense. The sound of bullet striking skin was orchestral; the blood that splashed her felt scalding. The hand clutching her arm was a fearsome claw, and she looked over, looked down, to see the side of Sarah’s throat.

Gone. Just gone.

Together they fell, Sarah’s weight dragging her down. Sarah began to choke before they hit the floor, her eyes gaping and glazed in disbelief. An anemic cry warbled past Adrienne’s lips as her hands trembled, then groped in a frantic attempt to staunch the flood from Sarah’s throat. It sprayed, it flowed. It pulsed and gushed.

Adrienne scrabbled to her knees beside Sarah, cradled her as the mad clawing desperation in Sarah’s fingers resigned to a tender stroking. They could say nothing to each other now. Words took time, and were imprecise at best, never enough to hold everything that must be said when they are needed most.

A falling shadow: Adrienne looked up in reflex — to defend Sarah’s last ragged breath? — but it was Clay falling along her other side. Coming not to steal this terminal moment but to share it. He reached, an arm sliding beneath Sarah as he helped bear the weight that had grown so slack. With his other hand he touched her face. Through the chill of shock she was aware of it, aggrieved eyes crinkling for a moment, and with a blood-slicked hand she reached for Clay’s cheekbone. He did not flinch.

He’s touching, Adrienne thought, the only lucid flicker in awareness that otherwise wailed. Then: Why does it take a catastrophe before it happens…?

Adrienne embraced Sarah, clutched her, felt the blood wash down her front and tried to impart her will even though it never work: Live, you, just another moment, just another lifetime, just long enough to hear me say I loved you. Live.

Adrienne raised her head, sacrificing a precious second to look about the room — could anything be done, could anyone help? — but there was nothing for her beyond the sight of three others, immobile, doppelgangers all, watching someone die.

A moment that came too soon. By decades.

The silence was total, its own world as she clung to Sarah’s last bubbling breath, the final tremulous beat of her heart, the last pulse of blood. If anyone took these from her, she would show no mercy.

Ellie was first to break the silence, with a sickened cry that ripped free as if it had been trapped for minutes. She shook her head in denial, then lurched back to the bedroom, bathroom. It sounded as if she picked up speed as she went, and whether she retched or sobbed once there, it was not clear.

Like a broken appendage, her companion followed, backing out of the room while pulling off a pair of dark round lenses. Gone, then, and nothing else moved but Adrienne’s lowering head.

So it had come to this.

Clay fell aside, sitting heavily on his rump with elbows on knees, head in hands. His breath came swift and shallow, about to hyperventilate.

Is this what it’s like to be you? she wondered. With nothing left inside or out to go on?

How did he do it? How ever had he done it all these years?

Valentine had sat again, on the edge of his chair, so wholly absorbed in the moment that he appeared transported. His face bore the look of artists who have achieved the breakthrough to aesthetic perfection, who have transcended themselves and ride a moment that felt eternal. Adrienne knew that he would never again feel this alive.

Hate him? He was too alien to truly hate.

She fell inward again, the first real sob working its way up, scarcely aware that Clay had risen and walked from the room. He barely touched the floor, gliding, may have been gone a moment, maybe an hour, and when she glimpsed him again he had returned from the kitchen, flowing with smooth even purpose, a mongoose to the cobra.

She opened her mouth, mute, and what a mistake to think that she had no heart left to break.

His first slashing blow with the butcher knife caught Patrick Valentine across the forehead, opening a deep split that rained a sheet of blood across his eyes, blinding him. Two-handed, Clay plunged it down into the meat of one shoulder, then the other. The gun went thumping to the floor, and a moment later Valentine fell atop it, as Clay bore after him with a brutality primordial and relentless. His face was gone, replaced by the visage of carnivores that rolled in the spoor of their prey.

“No, no, stop, don’t do that,” she murmured, crawling over Sarah and slipping along on all fours until, midway there, her strength giving way to shock, she sprawled upon the floor while Clay swung the knife, and plunged it, and gouged it, and twisted it, never once looking up from the task at hand —

— until it was finished, forever and ever.

So here the journey ended. He could see it now, unspooled behind him. From Denver through the deserts to Tempe, then back again. To the brink of mountains and down once more, through the mounting losses, then across frozen wastes. To the savannahs within and, finally, north. All the while, sliding down the coil of the double helix, until here he was, a new being. No, not new — complete, the killer he had always been destined to be.

The inevitable quit trying so hard to impose itself, once it was accepted.

And if there were regrets, they were only for the innocent. For Sarah, and for Adrienne too, because she had dared believe he was redeemable. She had deserved better.

She had never had a chance.

Dripping, he rose from the corpse of Patrick Valentine, got as far as his knees before he saw Adrienne’s eyes. In shock, she was, trembling and chilled. He knew the look, but had not realized just how horrible a creature he must truly be until he saw the judgment on her face.

He fetched a silken comforter from the sofa and draped it over her, so she might stay warmer. Stripped away his shirt, his pants and the rest, for he, conversely, was burning alive.

Knife in hand, he trod down the hall.

Their existence was intolerable, of course. He had known this all along, had tried to fight it, had tried to see it as another of nature’s simple ways that were indifferent to the outcome. Much less deserving life forms than they had met with extinction; he would do his part.

Daniel Ironwood he found in the bathroom, trying with nervous hands to light more to smoke. He dropped his paraphernalia when he saw Clay, naked and bloodied, and the knife was swift to fall. They grappled down along a peach-hued wall, a towel bar coming free, with which Daniel managed to strike a bruising blow along Clay’s collarbone. He sank the knife through Daniel’s lower abdomen and hung on despite the sudden burst of fetid odor. Knife grated bone, and together they twitched, and Daniel wept as his struggles grew feeble. Then nonexistent.

Oh, how he had wanted to live.

Ellie he found in the bedroom, sitting on her bed and drawn into a tight ball. He’d thought she might be the fiercest of the three, yet here she had all but surrendered, and he supposed no one was really as tough as they let on.

And Ellie knew him, knew his heart as well as he did.

“I can’t help what I am,” she whispered, and would neither tremble nor cry. Nor beg.

“None of us can,” he said, and proved to himself just how wrong Valentine had been last night on the balcony, on the theory and practice of killing.

The third one is by far the hardest.

He made his way back to the living room, where Adrienne had not moved. He was spent by now. All the days, all the miles, too little sleep and precious little food — he was consuming himself from the inside. He had glimpsed his body in a mirror back there and it had looked wasted.

He fell into Valentine’s chair, one foot on the man himself, and used the remote to turn on the television. Flipped around but found nothing of redemption so he turned it off. The silence left a yawning void.

Adrienne was watching him from the floor, not so certain that her own turn wasn’t coming next — or so her gaze struck him — and he knew he had done far worse than kill her already. The thought made him cry and he hurled the knife away, down the hall.

Clay slid to the floor, crawled to her, and from beneath the comforter one arm extended. She raised herself enough so that they were able to fit together, her head resting against his shoulder, sticky though it now was. An arm around him next, and a hand upon his knee.

But it was no good. Despite everything, the old sour repugnance had returned already, his skin crawling beneath her hands. What is it, he wondered, they’ve got to be dead first?

Adrienne seemed to sense it, perhaps a stiffening across his shoulders, and she pulled away with a single downcast nod. Content to brush two fingertips against his chest, as much as he was able to tolerate.

“So many scars,” she said. “It’s too late. Isn’t it?”

“We tried. So the scars won anyway. We tried.” As if that were supposed to be some consolation.

He crawled away from her, rubbing the scar on his forehead, from early November. Twelve stitches, it had taken? What an amateur. He could do better than that, and crawled toward the marble table.

I want to live in a different world, he had told Adrienne weeks ago, and if he had seen only the worst of worlds, it did not mean he had abandoned hope entirely.

There would be a better world, somewhere, there must be. He would find it, that world where he could touch Erin’s face and whisper her name as many times as she wished to hear it, and know that he could love her without reservation. That world where she could touch him lavishly and his skin would not reject any hand that was not brutal enough to bruise. This place, it had to exist — this could not be all there was.

Anything but that.

He knelt before marble, its smooth rock edge become the ledge upon the precipice. Eyes gone blurry, he stared down until he was one with the stone, its mottled gray and black a universe. It beckoned.

He answered.

He whipped his head down, let his brow crack across marble, and the inside of his skull went white and vast. Skin split; he was as blind as Valentine at the end. Clay reeled, rising up onto both knees, face tipped to an unseen sky, Icarus flying too high. He whipped his head down again, harder than before, all his strength this time, and forever he fell… from the eye of the sun, from the pain of a frozen moon…

Falling from grace.

And she was alone.

Clay’s head had twice hit with a sound like a bursting melon, and the second time he crumpled to the floor, bleeding from a forehead gone sickly concave. In his boneless heap he twitched with convulsive spasms until they shorted themselves out, then fell still but for shallow breaths.

Adrienne found a phone and punched out 911, let the receiver tumble to the floor when it became obvious she had no voice for the task. They would trace it; they would come.

But she couldn’t wait until then, could no longer breathe the air of this slaughterhouse, so with the last of her ebbing strength she dragged Sarah across to the glass door. Dragged her onto the balcony, to huddle with her beneath the comforter in the farthest corner, under the chilly kiss of falling snow.

Sightless eyes, she closed them. Silent lips, she kissed them. Braided hair, she stroked it. She raised Sarah’s sweater and caressed her navel, still healing from the ring that pierced it, and she kissed that as well.

And then? Just held her, until rougher hands would inevitably pry them apart.

Her face running with melting snowflakes, she thought of the rainstick left far behind. If she had it here, she would slam it upon the railing, break it open and let its pebbles and bone chips cascade to the street below.

Sarah would approve, at least, and understand.

Nineteen floors up, while down in the street they all walked past at the end of their workday, and none of them had a clue what went on above. So Adrienne settled back and began to shiver, waiting for the sirens but never quite sure when they arrived.

That was the trouble. There were always sirens.