Books

Prologue

IN THE YEAR 2198, nuclear war and economic failure devastated the population in a horrific event later known as Breakdown. Twenty years later, the CORE (Commonwealth Objective for Reform and Efficiency) was born, and six welfare colonies were created to help the poor and displaced. The formation of these colonies was first hailed as the best and most compassionate act of humankind, but what they eventually became was enslavement.

For sixty years, three hundred thousand people were kept behind the walls. They, their children, and their grandchildren believed the lies about eventual integration with society, not knowing that the system created by the Elite depended on their continued slavery.

When a secret experiment carried out upon the unwitting citizens of Colony 6 resulted in amazing abilities that always ended in violent madness, ten thousand people were exterminated. Only a few gifted—sixers—survived. Six of these were childhood friends. As a young crew, they protected each other in their struggle to live. Now reunited as adults, their unusual abilities and their unfailing loyalty is the CORE’s last hope for freedom.

Chapter 1

Location: Amarillo City, Dallastar
Year: 2278, 80 years after Breakdown

LYSSA SLOAN PEEKED into the alleyway next to the sauce bar that was already doing a steady business, even this early in the day. The December air was mild compared to past years, but she felt cold inside. Dead. Following Ty Bissett was not something she’d planned to do on this day off, but here she was trailing him.

Again.

And hoping today wasn’t the day he was destined to die.

She’d met Ty for lunch, as they sometimes did during her days away from division. He’d been complaining about not seeing her enough, and she’d put him off because as much as she was beginning to like him, she couldn’t tell him the truth. Not about her ability, her underground activities, and certainly not about the illegal existence of her daughter. She understood that her secrets required her to draw the line, and if they couldn’t have truth between them, she didn’t have much hope that they could overcome something as important as his impending death.

Still, she’d followed him, because she did care about him. Enough to regret that she couldn’t move in with him away from her twin and her brother-in-law, Kansas, the only father her child would ever know. Lyssa wished she’d never have to see Kansas again, but even if she could admit to being Tamsin’s mother, she wouldn’t take her from her beloved father.

Instead of returning to the enforcer division where they both worked, her in dispatch and him in personnel, Ty had hopped a sky train and come to this northwest part of town. Not exactly a rundown part of Amarillo City but definitely not the nicest. Not a place they’d ever gone together.

Teev surveillance was apparent in the cameras mounted on the building next to her, but none faced the alleyway where Ty had disappeared. Which meant whatever he was doing, he didn’t want a record of it. This wasn’t just handing a few cash credits to a sauced man outside a bar, as she’d witnessed him doing on other times she’d followed him. Ty had to know this alley didn’t connect to the feed that watched everyone in the CORE, and she’d worked in the darkness far too long to believe the choice in location was an accident.

Fear shot through her, tingling to her toes and making it hard to breathe. What if this was it? What if this was the moment Jaxon had seen in his visions, the moment Ty died? Those visions were the reason she’d started following Ty in the first place, worrying that her work with the underground had put him in danger. But her secrets weren’t why he was here today.

Another emotion crowded in on the first. Anger that he hadn’t shared his own secrets with her. He had no right to want more from her when he wasn’t willing to tell her why he had been skulking all around town.

Squelching her reaction, Lyssa moved closer to the tall building where she wouldn’t be as visible to the camera. There, she removed her iTeev from her bag, unfolded the screen, and pretended to study the display, which was currently off. Her back was against the wall now, the solid feel of it comforting. She wished she’d taken a camera disrupter from the underground conference room, but she would have needed permission, and she hadn’t told any of the others about Ty’s mysterious movements, or how he’d sometimes vanish when she was following him.

Almost as if he knew he was being followed.

Glancing up and down the street, she saw nothing out of the ordinary. Several groups of people headed toward the sky train station at the end of the block, a pair of men were getting into two different public shuttles, and a woman came from the bar and went into the readymeal store next door. It appeared to be an ordinary Tuesday afternoon in Amarillo City.

Lyssa peeked casually around the corner of the building, every muscle tensed as she anticipated having to draw back quickly. Instead, a huge recycling bin blocked most of the space in the alleyway. If Ty was there, it hid him completely.

Grimacing, Lyssa slipped her iTeev into her bag, made a show of fastening her long coat against a nonexistent breeze, and turned into the alleyway. Once there, she sprinted to the end of the bin. A rotten smell wafted out at her, and her stomach clenched. Their pre-Breakdown ancestors hadn’t been able to get rid of the need for trash bins, and in the sixty years since its formation, the CORE hadn’t either.

Taking a shallow breath through her nose, she touched the bin and peered around the side. She was rewarded by a side view of Ty’s narrow face, his black hair reaching halfway down his neck, grown longer just for her. He was talking animatedly to someone out of Lyssa’s view behind the metal bin. His excitement alone was unusual, as he was generally more reserved.

Cold bit into her fingers, and she pulled them back from the metal and tucked them under her arms without moving her head. Ty had turned a bit, and now she could partially see his companion. The stranger was a good head taller than Ty, and his dark brown hair was longer. He didn’t look like one of the punks Ty usually passed cash credits to, and the longer hair meant he wasn’t Special Forces.

Lyssa didn’t know whether to be relieved or worried at this knowledge. Special Forces were enforcers under the direct order of the Controller, and he was after the sixers—those born in Colony 6 with unusual abilities—so it was good Ty wasn’t meeting with them. But an unknown could be just as dangerous.

Maybe Ty was helping people who had refused to be implanted with the new CivIDs. The underground had seen a lot of those people in the five weeks since the implants became mandatory in Dallastar—as they had been in Estlantic for years. Most of those people hadn’t been ready to drop their lives, however, and go into hiding, so El Cerebro, leader of the underground, had turned them away. It was just as well. As Special Forces cleaned out the empty zones in Estlantic and refugees fled to Dallastar, the underground was experiencing a severe overcrowding in the pre-Breakdown subway tunnels.

This vein of thought was getting her nowhere. She couldn’t hear what they were saying unless she exposed herself, and she couldn’t save Ty if the man turned violent—if it was even possible for anyone to save him from his destiny. She and the rest of her Colony 6 crew had theorized that millions of choices could affect the outcome in any situation, and what Jaxon experienced in each of his visions was the most likely occurrence, the most likely average of every possible outcome. Which meant there might be a lesser number of other possible alternatives. But so far his visions always came true, or with a slight variation, and no one marked with such certain death had ever been saved.

Despair threatened to fill Lyssa’s chest, but she pushed it back with the skill of long practice. Tamsin, her daughter, was the most important thing in her life. The loss of anything else could—and would—be endured.

Lyssa considered her options. Short of sneaking down the side of the bin, or climbing on top of it, which wasn’t possible without equipment, she couldn’t hear the conversation. Her ability of projecting her conscious thoughts to another location allowed her to travel incorporeally, but to date she’d only been able to travel to where her twin sister Lyra was physically. Lyra could do the same with Lyssa. That meant one of them already had to be present, and if the situation was dangerous, as it could be today, that wasn’t a good thing.

The underground doctor they worked with couldn’t find any reason for the limit, or even why they could only visit each other. He thought it would be possible to eventually “travel” to anyone they were close to—and that should include Ty. Clenching her jaw, Lyssa concentrated on the side of his face. She remembered his kisses and the way his warm hands felt on her skin. How for those moments he made her forget the other man she wished she didn’t love.

The air around Lyssa seemed to convulse. She felt a surge of triumph. She could feel herself starting to travel. She crouched down to make sure she wouldn’t become disoriented and fall.

The next minute, Lyssa was standing in school next to her daughter. Ten-year-old Tamsin sat at a table with three other children in her technology class, examining a holographic representation of a building the children were putting together like a puzzle. Tamsin’s small face was eager, her forehead wrinkling in concentration as she dragged each of the pieces across the holo screen with a finger.

Lyssa gasped at the impossibility. She’d never been able to visit her daughter unless Lyra was with the child—and not for lack of trying. Lyssa craned her neck, scanning the room, but Lyra was nowhere in sight.

Tamsin’s gaze on the holograph faltered as she glanced in the direction where Lyssa stood. Her eyes squinted as if trying to focus on something just beyond her sight. Lyssa swallowed, wavering in indecision. This was a huge breakthrough in her ability, and she longed to speak to her daughter, to see if she could hear her as Lyra could, but even being there put Tamsin in danger, especially if she started talking about people who weren’t there.

The girl shook her head and went back to her schoolwork, removing a piece that a classmate had placed during her distraction. “No,” she said firmly. “We tried that last time and it fell in the earthquake. Remember?”

Lyssa came back to her body with a start, her hand automatically going to the Enforce .380 she carried in a waistband holster. Working for division, she had clearance for it, even if she wasn’t an enforcer like most of her crew. But Ty hadn’t moved, and she anticipated that her trip had taken mere seconds.

Even as she watched, Ty’s body language changed. He edged away from his companion in clear indication their meeting was concluding. Lyssa pulled her head back behind the bin, jumped to her feet, and hurried back to the main street. There wasn’t time to call the private shuttle that her brother-in-law’s job at the transportation department allowed her, or to get far enough down the road that Ty wouldn’t recognize her, so she ducked inside the bar.

Seconds later, through the glass at the top part of the door, she saw Ty pass, his head bent as he hurried down the street in the direction of the sky train. He’d be on his way back to division now, already late. It wasn’t likely he’d be in danger on the sky train, not with all the cameras and people around. She could relax. Maybe she’d give him a call and tell him she’d changed her mind about not seeing him tonight.

She was about to leave the bar when the door swung open and a man filled the doorway. He reminded Lyssa of El Cerebro’s underground guards—not big, but definitely strong. It took only a heartbeat to recognize the man Ty had been with moments before. She started toward the counter, barely flicking a glance at him.

“Chotks,” she told the bartender, slipping onto one of the transparent seats that instantly molded to her backside.

The heavyset man behind the bar gave her a real smile, a testament that chotks was a lot more expensive compared to the synthesized sauce that most came here to drink in this part of town. Asking for it made her stand out, but not enough to endure the sauce.

He poured her a glass as she pulled out her iTeev to transfer the credits with a couple taps of her finger on the screen. She pretended to focus on her glass as the strange man sat on another stool.

“Double chotks,” he said, not glancing at her or any of the other customers and barely acknowledging the bartender. His voice held a hint of a New York accent.

She let her eyes wander in his direction. He wore a long black coat that covered all of his clothing except his black boots, which glistened as if they’d been shined recently. The coat and boats looked like rare leather rather than synthetic, and the way he downed his chotks told her he was accustomed to the good stuff. He was tall, with a powerful neck and a broad face. His hands were big, useful. His eyes held intelligence, but he was definitely not a man who called the shots. Rather, he was a trusted underling. She’d worked at the Amarillo Enforcer Division and with the underground long enough to recognize the type. Whatever information this man had received or given to Ty Bissett, it hadn’t been initiated by him.

Did that mean he worked for Ty? Lyssa was unable to wrap her mind around that. Ty was intelligent, to be sure, and shyly witty and doggedly determined. If he was capable of owning a man like this, what was he doing in a relatively low-level job like personnel?

Before Lyssa had time to consider, the man finished his drink and headed for the door. Lyssa drank the rest of her chotks, welcoming the pleasant buzz that gave her courage, and followed him to the door. He didn’t go toward the sky train station, and she hesitated only a minute before falling in after him. If she couldn’t get answers from Ty, she’d get answers from him.

Maybe.

She’d only gone a block when the man turned a corner and disappeared. The only place he could have gone into was a restaurant, but when she went inside, he was nowhere to be seen. Obviously, he suspected something, or maybe he routinely practiced ditching people behind him. She was nearly back to the door when an arm snaked around her neck, and she was dragged into a large dark alcove off the entryway. She tried to scream, but the arm around her neck was too tight. Her toes barely skimmed the floor as he pulled her along.

“What do you want?” her attacker growled in her ear. “Who are you?”

“Let me go,” she managed to gasp. Black dots began to pepper her vision. Her lungs screamed for oxygen. She had to do something—and fast. There was no way to reach the gun in her back holster, or even the iTeev in her bag.

She willed herself to her sister. It was as easy as a step, as if the thirty kilometers between them didn’t exist. Lyssa appeared in dispatch, near Lyra, whose fingers played with menus on the TAD-Alert’s holoscreen that made up the entire walls of dispatch. The Teev Aided Dispatch Alert System was a super Teev that aided them in sending the right enforcers for each emergency call. The system was also linked to other TADs in various dispatch offices across the CORE. Lyra looked up and saw her, a smile beginning on her face.

“Activate my iTeev with the TAD,” Lyssa ordered, surprised that her mental voice showed none of the strain she’d felt when her physical body tried to talk. She wondered fleetingly what would happen if she died while out of her body. “Hurry! There’s a guy. He’s choking me.”

“What?” Lyra blurted, drawing the attention of the other employee who was working dispatch.

“Activate my iTeev!” Lyssa shouted, but her sister was already pulling up the correct menu.

Despite community belief that CORE authorities could only monitor personal iTeevs or Teevs that were connected to the feed, the TAD could also activate any device unless it was disconnected from the feed completely. How often citizens were monitored without their knowledge, Lyssa could only guess, but given what she’d learned in the past few months, her iTeev spent more and more time off the feed.

She jumped back to her body as her iTeev, still in her bag, squawked a warning sound. “This is the TAD-Alert,” boomed an authoritative voice that had been patterned from the CORE’s first Controller. “What is the nature of your emergency?”

Lyssa felt the man’s grip relax slightly, and she sucked in desperately needed air. As she did, a Teev built into the alcove where they were standing activated a holoscreen in the middle of the space, depicting Lyra’s face framed by long ebony hair. Which meant her sister had not only tracked her down but also searched for onsite Teevs to get eyes on the situation.

“What is the nature of your emergency?” Lyra echoed the original question from the iTeev. Her voice was calm but her face radiated fury.

“Saca!” cursed the man. He reached for something in his pocket and the image of Lyra vanished, the holoscreen showing only a brilliant light that made Lyssa squint.

“Don’t follow me,” the man snarled. Then Lyssa was falling to the hard floor, made of some kind of pre-Breakdown rock substitute. She hit hard, rolling to mitigate the impact. By the time she recovered, Lyra’s face hovered over her again on the holoscreen.

“You okay?” Lyra asked, the corners of her slanted eyes creased with worry.

Lyssa nodded.

“What happened?” This husky question came from their co-worker Gemma Drexel, whose round face appeared in the holo behind Lyra. The woman’s curvy figure belied the masculine sound of her voice.

Lyssa shook her head, knowing Lyra would understand that she couldn’t explain, not over the feed and not in front of Gemma. “Must have wanted my credits,” she said. “Or my iTeev. Can you track him?”

Lyra consulted a display Lyssa couldn’t see. “The TAD’s lost him,” she said. “I’ll track his CivID. We got a glimpse of that. It’s probably counterfeit, though.”

Gemma nodded, her medium brown hair falling over her shoulder. “Maybe he’s one of those fringers like the ones they’ve been catching in Estlantic.” She shivered. “In my opinion, Special Forces can’t get here fast enough to clear out our empty zones. They’re getting too bold.”

Lyra exchanged a meaningful glance with Lyssa. The sisters were fighting to protect fringers—and to free the three hundred thousand people imprisoned in the six welfare colonies. But admitting to that over the feed was as good as asking for medical enhancement.

“Thanks for your help,” Lyra said pointedly to Gemma. “I can take it from here.” The other woman smiled and backed away until she vanished from the holo. When she was gone, Lyra asked, “Are you sure you’re all right?” Worry remained apparent in her brown eyes. Lyssa knew because it was the same expression she saw in her own every morning when she looked in the mirror.

“Yeah. I’m good.” Lyssa climbed to her feet. She’d expected that the restaurant personnel would have heard the commotion, but so far no one had ventured in.

“I’m sending Eagle to your location,” Lyra continued. “Meanwhile, you’d better check your messages. There’s a meeting, and he’s been trying to reach you.”

A meeting meant she was supposed to go to the underground conference room where there was no chance of being overheard by someone who could report to the Elite. Lyssa nodded. “Okay, thanks.”

Lyra studied her, obviously alert to some subtle nuance in her face. “Is there something else?”

There was something, of course. Lyra needed to know that she’d traveled to Tamsin today and also the rest Lyssa hadn’t yet told her about her daughter. Lyra was Tamsin’s registered mother, just as Kansas, Lyra’s husband, was Tamsin’s registered father—a fact that indebted Lyssa to them forever. They were the only reason Tamsin had legal status and Lyssa hadn’t been condemned to a colony for an illegal birth. Even more than that, they’d helped raise Tamsin, and were as much her parents as Lyssa herself. As such, they deserved to know. But not over the feed.

“We’ll talk tonight,” Lyssa said.

“Tonight then. Eagle’s almost there. Look for the enforcer shuttle.”

As Lyssa left the alcove, a restaurant employee came into the entry from a back room. She wore her dark hair in an impossibly high bun, covered with a net of rainbow lights that matched the lights on her very short white dress.

“Only one for lunch?” she trilled.

“I’ve changed my mind.”

“Very well. Have a nice day.” Shrugging, the employee removed her iTeev from her pocket, unfolding it to fit over her eyes. The plastic molded comfortably onto her face. “Resume program,” she said, unlatching the built-in earbuds and pushing them into her ears.

No wonder the woman had heard nothing of the man’s attack. Shaking her head, Lyssa went into the street, grateful that the man who’d attacked her was nowhere to be seen. Would he report the incident to Ty—or to whoever else might employ him?

Minutes later, a silver, tetrahedron-shaped enforcer shuttle raced down the street, the black and red stripes on the side flashing emergency. For once, Lyssa didn’t mind the resentful stares that followed her as the panel doors slid opened and she dived into the passenger seat.

“There you are,” Eagle said from the other front seat, his mouth twisting into a hint of a grin on his narrow face. His registered name was Randal Jensen, but he’d been Eagle Eyes Jensen to her all their growing up years in Colony 6. As usual, he wore his special dark glasses that contained iTeev tech, but also so much more. Without them, he was nearly blind. With them, he saw more than she could ever dream to see, as they enhanced his special sixer ability. Instead of enforcer blues, the division weapons expert sported black linen pants and a thick matching jacket without a collar.

“When you didn’t answer your iTeev, we started worrying,” he added.

“Sorry. It was silenced.”

“What happened?” The shuttle started forward on automatic drive as he spoke, and Lyssa knew he’d used eye movements to communicate with the onboard Teev.

Lyssa didn’t answer, debating how much she should say. “We’ll need to track him down,” she said finally. “Did my sister get a good visual?”

“No. He must have been wearing an identity blocker, though it was apparently programmed to let his fake Civ-ID be recorded by cameras so the warning program wasn’t alerted.”

“Of course he did. I’ll have to ask Reese to draw him.”

“Why don’t you tell me what happened?” Eagle prompted. “He didn’t just attack you out of the blue. And tell me the truth.” He leaned his lanky form back in the driver’s seat. “You’re better than most at lying, but not even you can hide changes in your body temperature from me.”

She sighed. “I was following him, and he got the jump on me.”

“And why were you following him?” Eagle cupped a hand between them, wiggling his fingers in encouragement for her to spill more details.

“I was following Ty first, and they had a meeting in an alleyway. It was the first meeting I’ve witnessed that I can’t write off to helping derelicts and punks.”

Eagle frowned. “That doesn’t sound good. Maybe we should put him under official surveillance.”

Lyssa felt happier at that. “You think Captain Brogan would go for it?”

“The man attacked you, so that endangers everyone.” Eagle paused for a moment, raising his hands and swiping invisible screens in a way that told her he’d activated the iTeev holo features built into his glasses and was searching for something. He didn’t need to use his hands, as initiating the shuttle had proven, but it was easier as well as polite to give her warning that his attention was elsewhere. Otherwise, it was impossible to tell what he was doing under those dark glasses.

“Well, Ty’s back at division now, safe and sound,” he said after a moment.

“Yes, but for how long?” Lyssa couldn’t help the bitter words. “I shouldn’t have gotten involved with him. Jaxon warned me.” She’d just been so lonely, living with Kansas and Lyra. Lonely in knowing that even if Kansas had wanted her, Lyssa would never cross that line with him. He was her sister’s husband and the best father a child could have. That is where it started and ended. Period. Unfortunately, her heart hadn’t seemed to get the message.

Eagle’s hands dropped to his lap. “Even if you weren’t involved, he’d still die. So from his point-of-view, it’s good you got involved. You’ve made him happy, and maybe finding out who that man is will help.” But they both knew it was a long shot. Ty Bissett would die of a broken neck, and given the usual timeline of Jaxon’s visions, Ty was already on borrowed time.

“Speaking of Brogan,” Eagle said. “He’s called a meeting in the underground. That’s why I’ve been trying to contact you. He sounds worried.”

Lyssa pulled out her iTeev, turned on the screen, and disconnected her link from the feed. There were signal blockers in the ancient subway tunnels that were home to the underground, and those were always activated during their meetings, but all of them were extra careful when approaching or while in the tunnels. Especially these days when so many fringers were fleeing Special Forces in the eastern empty zones. Eagle would even take the shuttle off feed before they arrived at their destination.

Like the others in her crew, Lyssa had fought to survive her youth in Colony 6 and had grown into a responsible citizen—but the Elite who ruled the CORE still wanted her dead. She was a sixer, a person who had developed a special ability from the experimental viribus drug placed in their water. Now only Captain Brogan’s rewriting of her past prevented her capture by Special Forces. If they knew she was working with the underground, she’d be doubly wanted. It paid to be careful—and to suspect everyone.

“It’s got to be about Nova,” she said. “Maybe she’s back from Newcali.”

Eagle gave his customary uneven shrug, his right shoulder lifting slightly before the left. “I guess we’re about to find out.”

“If you ask me, using Brogan’s niece as a security deposit for use of Newcali’s hovercraft was a mistake, even if it did save Jaxon’s life. They’ve had the shuttle back for more than a month now, and we still don’t have Nova.”

The edge of Eagle’s mouth twitched as if he found her response amusing. “Hopefully, she’s just been gathering information.”

Lyssa knew what he wasn’t saying—that every day Newcali didn’t return the child was one day closer to trouble. Nova’s father had died from radiation exposure sustained while retrieving tech from the desolation zones in exchange for his daughter’s release from the colony where she’d been born. Brogan had taken care of Nova in the four years since, and he wouldn’t sit idly by if he discovered she was in danger.

They left the shuttle in a public parking lot near the edge of town and made their way down a blind alley to a derelict apartment building in the adjoining empty zone. In the basement, they found a well-hidden staircase that led into the subway.

Before she’d started working for the underground—first by coercion and then under her own will—Lyssa hadn’t known of the existence of an ancient underground train system, much less heard rumors of tunnels still existing. The solar-powered sky train had crisscrossed the territory before Breakdown, and one of the CORE’s first activities after its formation had been to restore as many main lines as possible. With the addition of the blue public shuttles, nothing else had been needed. The centuries-old tunnels were now home to hundreds of undergrounders, who had fled CORE society for one reason or another.

Lyssa knew her way to the underground conference room, but she was glad to have Eagle with her. His ability to recreate a mental 3D rendition of anything he experienced or could imagine made it impossible for him to lose his way from any of the several entrances, even without his glasses that transmitted all kinds of information directly to his brain. If the tunnels had new cave-ins, he’d simply circumvent and find a new path that would get them where they needed to go.

“Here.” Eagle pressed something into her hand, and she realized it was a light. She put the strap over her head, adjusting its position until it hung heavy and reassuring on her upper chest, bathing the tunnels with illumination. She knew he didn’t need the light, so he’d brought it for her.

“Thanks.” She adjusted her coat under the light, making sure the magnetic fasteners were locked tightly. Since it was December, the tunnels would be frigid until they arrived at the inhabited stations.

“We’d better hurry. Reese and Jaxon left division before I did.” Eagle grinned before adding, “And if you aren’t there, Lyra can’t fly over. She’s too busy to leave division physically.”

“Traveling isn’t flying,” she said, but the comment lightened her spirits. Truth be told, sometimes it was a little like flying.

They had gone a half kilometer when Eagle raised his hand in a signal for her to stop, his head turned attentively toward a tunnel they were passing. Lyssa was about to ask if he’d detected a cave-in when he motioned her forward past the intersection. Then he stopped again, unzipped his jacket, and drew a gun from his shoulder holster.

“What is it?” she whispered.

“About a dozen people are down that tunnel, and they can’t be undergrounders. No one sets up this side of the guards. It’s too dangerous.”

The underground had an elaborate warning system that Lyssa hadn’t bothered to research, but Eagle would know what he was talking about. “Okay,” she said. “But be careful.”

“They won’t turn on their lights for a while. I’ll get the drop on them. I’ll shout when I need you.”

He retraced their steps, quickly disappearing from view as Lyssa watched, careful to aim her light forward and not back at him. Minutes ticked by as she waited. Her body felt hot despite the cold in the tunnels. She should have gone with Eagle. She was trained in marksmanship and hand-to-hand combat—Captain Brogan had insisted on that for both her and Lyra. Reese and Jaxon would never have let Eagle face a dozen people alone. If her ability worked properly, she could have at least traveled mentally with Eagle, but here she remained, useless. She didn’t know if he needed backup. He could die, and she’d still be waiting here like a target with this light on her chest.

She waited a minute more. Still nothing. What if he’d run into Special Forces? Or fringers who weren’t numbered among their allies? Worse, the heat signatures he’d seen could belong to a group of radiation-crazed monsters that typically roamed the desolation zones.

Taking a deep breath, she whisked the light from her chest and put it down on the rocky floor of the tunnel. She started back the way they’d come. She’d only gone a few steps when she changed her mind and went back for the light.

Switching it off, she began to feel her way along the wall. Hold on, Eagle, she thought. I’m coming.

Prologue

Location: Welfare Colony 6, Dallastar
Year: 2258, 60 years after Breakdown

THE BOYS CAME running, laughing as they sped through the hallway on the way to lunch. Ten-year-old Reese Parker couldn’t see them yet from her spot near the back door of their school wing, where she sat with her jean-covered legs stretched out in the sunlight that filtered through the glass, but she could hear their pounding footsteps as they came to meet her.

Here in this isolated place, they would never attract the attention of a more powerful crew, because doing so was only asking for trouble, even if most of the older kids were in a different wing and had other lunch periods. In a year or two, they might be strong enough to hold their own anywhere, especially with Dani around. For now, they were comparatively strong on their own in level ten.

Reese heard one of the boys trip—probably Jaxon, though it was Eagle who was practically blind. Eagle Eyes Jenson could remember each turn and navigated the hallways and classrooms at their school better than any of their crew. She set aside her precious sketchbook and looked up expectantly.

More laughter and an urgent shout. “Get up! Before he finds us!” Eagle’s voice, not Jaxon’s.

Sure enough, it was Eagle who turned the corner first and slid in beside her. His thin, freckled face held a wide smile, and his brown eyes under the heavy glasses were huge, magnified impossibly by the thick lenses. His brown hair was damp from exertion and hung limply in his eyes.

“What happened?” Reese asked, tossing him one of the readymeals she’d already snagged from the dispenser using his code. There were rumors about implanted codes that would force each child to collect their own meal, but adults talked about a lot of things that never happened. Reese figured by the time they got around to implanting IDs, she and her crew would be leveled out of school and away from the nightmare of living in the Coop.

Eagle caught the thin box with his scrawny arms and ripped off the plastic-coated carton top, grinning at the small bag of pretzels nestled in one of the small compartments. Reese was glad to see him so happy with his favorite snack. She had planned to give him hers if he didn’t get any, because though the meals ran in cycles, you never really had a choice about what popped out.

He poked his finger in the thick sauce that covered chunks of what passed as meat but was really protein cubes of some sort. No one really knew. “Nice. Still hot.”

Reese sighed impatiently. “You still haven’t told me what happened. Why are you so late?” The boys always got out after she did when they had their physical education class, which was why she picked up their meals for them, but today they were even later than normal.

“Oh, you should have been there,” Eagle said. “It was so fu—”

Whatever else Eagle tried to say was lost as Jaxon Crowley plowed around the corner and collapsed beside Reese. Part of his dark hair was wet with perspiration like Eagle’s, and his blue eyes were dancing with the same amusement, but his face had an added gray tinge to it. A wide, red welt stood out on his neck.

“Did that pus licker zap you again?” Reese demanded, studying Jaxon’s neck. He was her best friend, and she couldn’t help the anger boiling up inside.

“Yeah.” He swiped the back of his hand across his eyes, making his thick eyelashes stick together with moisture. “But this time we deserved it.”

“Yep.” Eagle nodded vigorously. “He caught us cutting out the soles of his shoes.”

As Eagle spoke, a flash of an image came to Reese’s mind. She saw the substitute teacher’s florid face and shaved head, his heavy body rigid. Wrinkles gathered under his eyes, and an even deeper one ran down the bridge of his nose. A circle of dark, gray-flecked hair bordered his mouth, a mouth pursed as it screamed something that started with “You” as his finger jabbed out accusingly. His big ears were quickly turning red, along with his nose and the top of his head. That was a man ready to blow, and blow big.

Instinctively, Reese reached for her drawing pad, her fingers itching to get the image on paper. Instead, she brushed up against the two remaining readymeals. Taking a breath, she passed one to Jaxon, looking carefully to make sure he wasn’t shaking. Stunners hurt bad, and though it was supposed to be illegal for anyone but enforcers to have them, there were more than a few at the school for secret use on recalcitrant students. But Jaxon’s hand was steady, so whatever blast the teacher had managed to give him, it hadn’t been all that powerful.

“He’s going to kill you tomorrow.” She hadn’t seen the teacher except in her mind, but his angry face scared her. Maybe tomorrow the stunner wouldn’t be on the lowest setting.

“Nope.” Jaxon shook his head as he unhooked the plastic fork embedded in the side of the meal and dug in. “He was only here two days, and maybe wherever he goes next, he’ll think twice about using a stunner to make boys run faster.”

“Right!” Eagle licked off a bit of sauce that had fallen on his hand. “As if any of us are going to ever use what we learn in a physical education class.”

“Running is important,” Reese retorted.

Jaxon reached over to tug on one of her dark locks. “Yeah, but he can’t teach us what we already know. We’ve been running from older crews since before we left nursery school.”

“I guess.” Reese scooped up her own readymeal. She wanted her drawing pad instead—her fingers tingled to draw the image in her mind. But she didn’t like being compelled, as if something outside her had control, forcing her to record the images that had begun popping randomly into her mind. Images that were always one-hundred percent accurate. Jaxon knew about it, of course. She told him everything. He’d been born in the small house next to hers, six by seven meters like all the other houses in their district, and they’d been inseparable in nursery school, even before they’d formed a crew with Eagle and the others. A crew that kept them safe. But though he knew her secrets, she tried not to remind him of her weakness. Of the way she had to draw. Jaxon was the only halfway normal kid in their small crew of misfits, and he would be accepted into any other crew, but he’d chosen them. Because of her.

Pushing away the urge to draw, she leaned back against the metal door behind her that opened to stairs leading down into the bowels of the school. Eagle had once hacked into the handprint lock, of course, and that was how they’d learned what the door hid—water pipes, electrical wiring, and furnaces. Furnaces that school officials rarely thought they needed in Welfare Colony 6, even though Reese remembered too many days when the inside of the school was colder than outside, and everyone wore extra sweaters and all the pants they owned and some of their parents’ as well, if they were lucky enough to have them—both parents and pants, that is.

She moved her legs to catch more of the sunlight, refusing to think about that now. This was April and winter was too far away to worry about.

“So where are the girls?” Jaxon asked.

Reese shook her head. “Don’t know.” It worried her too that they were late, though it could have been the long lines at the readymeal dispensers. She hadn’t seen them there as she normally did. She’d thought they’d already gone through, but they hadn’t been waiting here for her.

“They’ll be here soon,” Eagle assured them.

Sure enough, they were still eating their meals when Dani Balak and the twins, Lyssa and Lyra Sloan, showed up. More freaks. The twins because they were twins and Dani because of her short spiky white hair and her very black skin. They carried readymeals but were running, Dani a good head taller than the petite twins.

“It’s the Jammers!” Lyssa huffed.

Reese set aside her meal and jumped to her feet, her heart hammering inside her chest. The two Jammer brothers—Witt, an older boy, and Keag, who was their age—lived near them and were the meanest boys they knew. Their crew was mostly made up of the biggest kids in level twelve, some as big as Reese’s father and as angry as him after he’d downed a skin of sauce. Witt was their leader, and the boys followed him around like dogs, swaggering and tormenting anyone who happened to be in their way.

“Saca!” Jaxon swore, fear making his voice tight. “What happened?”

“It’s just Keag and some of their crew,” Dani said, pushing her readymeal at Lyra and turning to face the bend where Reese could hear someone coming down the hallway. “Witt ain’t with ’em. I can take care of it.” She raised her fists into a ready position, an expression of gleeful anticipation on her square, rugged face. Her black skin glistened under the harsh hallway light. She looked fierce and more than a little unbalanced.

No doubt Dani could take Keag and a couple others at the same time, but Reese needed to be ready. She slipped her left hand into the pocket of her jeans and grasped the metal fork she’d stolen from the hospital last year after someone at the school had discovered her taking an important test with her non-dominant arm and realized her left was broken. Since the break thirteen months ago, she’d worked on using both hands, just in case. Both for school work and for fighting. Nothing was going to prevent her from leveling out of school and getting released from Colony 6. No way would she die working in the factories like her mother. She wanted to be out in the real world with the rest of the citizens in the CORE, instead of locked in with the poor trash that depended on charity to survive.

Next to Reese, Jaxon was also taking something from his pocket. She knew what it was without looking—a spoon he’d shaped to go over his knuckles. He hit almost as well as Dani. Even the twins and Eagle knew how to throw a punch. Well, with Eagle it was only if he managed to see where to land the punch, but he had a pretty good right hook, and his skinny arm was long and tough.

“If we fight, they’ll know who we are!” Lyssa protested, her long ebony hair tied in braids on either side of her face. “If we hurt one of ’em, Witt will come after us.”

“Then we fight!” Dani motioned for Lyssa to give her space.

“Why are they after you?” Reese switched her fork to her right hand, wiped her left on her pant leg and then switched the fork back to the left.

Lyra’s slightly slanted dark eyes looked huge in her delicate face, a mirror image of her sister’s. “They wanted my pretzels.”

“You should have let them take the bag!” Lyssa growled at her. “It’s not like they wanted your whole meal.”

“But . . .” Lyra’s eyes went to Eagle, who was standing behind Reese near the wooden door leading down into the basement. “I was saving them in case Eagle didn’t get any.”

Reese felt a little tug in her chest, but it didn’t surprise her that Lyra would refuse a dominant crew something meant for Eagle. Their crew was as close as family. Or closer in her case.

“I just started running,” Lyra continued. “I thought I’d lost them for a while, but they followed me here. They aren’t very fast, so I caught up with Dani and Lyssa and told them to run.”

“You did right to refuse them,” Dani said through gritted teeth. “We can’t let them take anything that’s ours. That will make them target us more. We can fight them.”

“Or we could disappear,” Eagle said.

Glancing over her shoulder, Reese saw that Eagle had the combination pad to the door dismantled and the door to the basement was open. Eagle shrugged as he clicked the panel over the wires. “It’s easy after you do it the first time. I remembered how.”

Of course he did. Just as he knew how many steps were in each hallway and classroom. It was his version of using both hands. His mind, or maybe his memory, was his ticket to leveling out of school, despite the poor vision that might ordinarily cause him to fail.

“Yes, let’s go!” Lyssa urged, focusing her attention primarily on Dani. “If we fight, they’ll remember us. But if we hide, maybe they won’t. We weren’t with Lyra when it happened. They might not know she’s a twin. And if they see you now, they’ll never forget you. You’re the only one with that skin color and hair. They won’t rest until they kill us all.”

“We can take them,” Dani insisted.

“Yeah, but Witt and the others too?” Eagle asked. “And for how long? What if they catch some of us alone?”

The six kids stared at each other for a moment, all the while listening to the approaching footsteps that had slowed as the opposing crew obviously checked classrooms and other hallways. Not for the first time, Reese wondered if their choices would be different if they weren’t all freaks.

“Eagle and Lyssa are right,” Reese said, so everyone knew where she stood. She wasn’t afraid to fight when she had to, but fighting when there was a safer option, especially for the twins and Eagle, was pure stupidity.

Jaxon met Dani’s eyes. He was officially their leader and normally influenced their final decisions, but Dani was a wild card. If she wanted to fight, they’d fight. Not one of them would leave her.

Dani heaved a sigh. “Fine. But only because the twins have too many classes without me. I swear on the head of my grandmother, one of these days, I’m going to teach those pus-licking, warthog-faced, punk buckets all a lesson.”

Reese shuddered at the threat. She didn’t envy the Jammers. In the past two years, Dani had gone from a regular girl to a fighting machine. She moved faster than seemed possible, and her punches had already laid out more than a few older kids. In a year or two, no other crew would be able to mess with them, not even those in the eighteenth level.

Dani stood guard while they gathered up their readymeals and darted inside. A dim glow shone in the stairwell far below, and Reese was glad for the light. The door locked behind them with an automated click. Eagle sat on the first stair and the others followed. Only Dani remained standing by the closed door, ready for anything.

Almost immediately, taunting voices filled the hallway, and someone banged on the door to the basement when they realized it was locked.

“That just goes to the basement,” came a voice. “No one can get down there but the janitor.”

“They must have gone outside,” said someone else. “Come on. We’ll get them out there.” Shuffled steps moved away.

“They’ll be opening the door right . . . about . . . now,” Eagle whispered. Sure enough, they heard a loud thwack! as someone roughly pushed on the outside door.

“They’ll have to be in class soon,” Lyssa said. “They can’t lurk around our hallways much longer.” Lyra nodded in agreement.

“We’ve got time to finish eating,” Jaxon lifted the carton top covering his meal.

Now that they were no longer in immediate danger, Reese’s hands itched to draw again. She had to draw the face of the substitute teacher. Her stomach ached with the need.

“You going to eat those?” Eagle pointed at her pretzels.

“No. Go ahead.” She tossed them at him. Lyra tossed hers at him too, followed by Lyssa and Jaxon.

Dani aimed her bag at Eagle’s head, laughing and shaking her head, the white strands of her hair poking out crazily. “You deserve them,” she said, hitting him on the forehead.

Ten minutes later they were heading to math class, the one class they all had together. By then Reese was sweating and shaking.

She had to draw the image of the teacher she’d seen from Eagle’s mind, but it wasn’t as though she could mask what she was doing. They used Teevs embedded in their desks, and all schoolwork was submitted electronically. The only exception was art class. In math class, the teacher would notice her scribbling, maybe even take away her precious pad and drawing pencils, the only things of value she owned, a gift from her father’s aunt on the outside. She’d filled the other pads already, and this one still had so many fresh white pages.

Jaxon nudged up against her as they entered the room. “Whatever you need to draw, do it,” he whispered. “Sit behind me. I’ll get Old Geyser talking. He won’t even notice you sketching.”

Reese nodded, unable to speak. If she didn’t get it out, she’d be shaking the rest of the day, and that wasn’t good. She couldn’t afford to fail.

She slid into a seat behind Jaxon and pulled her drawing pad out of her ragged sack. In minutes, the sketch of the substitute teacher appeared under her hand, as if of its own volition. She was aware of each line, each curve, each bit of shading, as if it were a part of her—and yet somehow coming from outside. She didn’t need her eraser once. She wished she could use some of the colored pencils she’d permanently “borrowed” from her art class, but those were at home, tucked under her CORE-issued mattress. She shaded the redness of the man’s face with her pencil instead.

Relief filled her as the urge to sketch drained away. The result wasn’t her best drawing ever, but close. Someone tapped her on the shoulder, and she turned to see a scrawny boy she didn’t know well sitting next to her, his head craned to see her drawing. “You got his face exactly right,” he whispered. “So glad that pus bag was only here for two days.”

Nodding in agreement, she gave the boy a smile and shut her drawing pad, tucking it under her. At the front of the classroom, the math teacher paced back and forth, waving his hands animatedly in the air to emphasize his story about the usefulness of math in every profession. Jaxon glanced back at her and winked. He wouldn’t ask about the picture later, and she wouldn’t remind him. This was why he was her best friend.

He would always be. Nothing could separate them. Not even leaving the Coop.

Except in the end, it didn’t work out that way. Not even a little.

Chapter 1

Location: Amarillo City, Dallastar
Year: 2278, 80 years after Breakdown

THE MAN’S LARGER than life face on the holo screen was ordinary, typical of most of the two million CORE residents, whose features had blended together over hundreds of years. Brown eyes, medium brown skin, narrow face, and average weight. Brown hair long enough to cover most of his ears but short enough to be professional. Only the position of his eyes was notable, rolled upward as if searching the ceiling for answers.

“This is Dr. Sam Kentley,” said Vic Brogan, captain of the Amarillo City Enforcer Division, commonly known as the AED. “He is your next assignment.” His heavy-lidded eyes scanned those gathered in the Underground conference room where they met instead of at division where their conversation might be monitored. His body was all chest and arms like a boxer.

Enforcer Jaxon Tennant was still uncomfortable being part of the underground. He’d trained for so many years to serve and protect the CORE he’d once believed in—and now knew to be a lie. How deep the lie, he didn’t yet know, but like Captain Brogan and the others, he was determined to find out.

And not only because someone had murdered his mother.

“You are to travel to Santoni,” Brogan continued, “and accompany the doctor back here.”

“I’m assuming he’s like us?” Across the table, Reese Parker, Jaxon’s partner in the Violent Crimes Unit and also the division’s sketch artist, looked up from her drawing pad, her pencil poised in the air.

“Like us” meant people from Colony 6 who had developed unusual abilities after generations of imprisonment and experimentation by the people who had pretended to save them—and who now wanted them dead.

Jaxon and Reese had grown up in the colony with most of the others in the room: Eagle Jensen, Dani Balak, and the twins, Lyssa and Lyra Sloan. As children they had fought to survive in the harsh environment and had been among the miraculous few who had been released from its confines. They had been a crew as children at Colony 6, and now on the outside, each had been found and hired by Captain Brogan to work at AED. Reuniting them as a team was an action meant both to protect and to use them.

Jaxon could never let himself forget that last part. They were here willingly, but if they chose not to be, they would conveniently disappear. They as individuals didn’t matter in the long run—not when many thousands of lives weighed in the balance. They mattered only by how they could help free the citizens of the CORE.

“Yes,” Brogan said. “He’s like the six of you. If my intelligence is correct, Dr. Kentley is a healer unlike the CORE has ever seen. He has a near perfect record with his patients that can’t be explained even by any pre-Breakdown medicines he might have rediscovered. None of his patients die while in his care, even those with severe radiation damage caused by exposure in the desolation zones.”

“Unless he somehow has access to an alias, he’s not anyone we knew,” Jaxon said.

Brogan shook his head. “He’s not from your same district in Colony 6, but he did grow up in the colony. Kentley brings our total to twenty people we’ve identified all together. Of all those allowed to leave the colony, we’re nearly certain they’re the only ones left alive. At least those still living in the CORE Territories.”

“That’s more than I hoped for,” Reese said. She hadn’t gone back to drawing, and her face looked haunted. Jaxon understood why. His mother wasn’t the only victim. At least fifteen hundred children had leveled out of Colony 6 schools and left the colony over the ten years of limited integration with society, and Brogan had found only these twenty besides the six of them. That was a miniscule number when compared with the ten thousand children who grew up, remained in Welfare Colony 6, and were now registered as dead or completely missing from the population database.

“There may be more living under assumed identities, but these twenty who are still out in the open need to be our priority. Like Sam Kentley.” Brogan waved two fingers in the air and the holo image of Kentley was replaced by the front of a short building. “This is where he works in Santoni. We are still tracing a home address. I’m not sure how much time we have left or why Special Forces hasn’t detained him yet, but we’ve picked up increased enforcer activity in the area, which indicates impending action.”

“No!” Dani Balak slapped her hand on the table, speaking for the first time at the meeting. “We don’t have time for this. What about Tauri?” Controlled anger threatened behind the measured words. Her unusual black skin masked any telltale emotion and her wiry blond hair jutted from her head at all angles as it normally did, but her splayed hand on the table trembled. Dani wasn’t beautiful by any standard, but her features were well-formed, and the way she carried herself, exuding strength and confidence, made her a person who demanded attention.

Unlike the rest of the crew, Dani hadn’t left Colony 6 to live in Estlantic or Dallastar, the two main territories of the CORE. Instead, she’d become a fringer, those who lived outside the CORE’s influence and protection. Common belief taught that fringers were radiation-crazed killers, but like so many things, Jaxon had learned it wasn’t true. While working with fringers in a territory they had named Newcali, Dani had saved people targeted for extermination by Special Forces, and her entire life’s goal was to free all the colonies. She’d only recently agreed to take an undercover job at the division as Brogan’s assistant in exchange for a promise, a promise Brogan hadn’t yet fulfilled.

“You said you’d help me rescue my brother,” she added, her words sharp and staccato. “That’s the only reason I’m here.”

Brogan let her words hang in the air for a moment without responding. Did he hear the threat? Jaxon wondered.

“I know this isn’t what you hoped for,” Brogan said finally, “but Sam Kentley is in immediate danger of being killed or taken by Special Forces. We can’t stand by and allow that to happen. We need a healer in the underground, especially if what you tell us—and what others have confirmed—is true about those having abilities going insane. You are all at risk until we figure out why that’s happening. The last thing we want is to be putting down our own people. Special Forces has done quite enough of that.”

“Just so you remember that my priority and the only reason I’m here is to free my brother.” Dani’s hand was no longer trembling. Had Jaxon imagined it?

Brogan’s eyes narrowed. “I am very aware of your priorities. But you also agreed to help us in our joint mission to save the colonies, starting with the gifted who were permitted to leave. We’re well into preparations to free Tauri, but a general location isn’t good enough. We need more intel, and I won’t risk the team—or you—going in early. You are all too valuable. The minute I think we can be successful, we’ll go for him. Until then, we’ll save as many others as we can. We’ll need all of them if we are to beat the Elite.” He held Dani’s stare, the tension in the room thick enough that no one dared speak.

Finally, Dani gave a curt nod and lowered her gaze. Jaxon knew her well enough—from growing up together in Colony 6 and these past six weeks after the crew’s reunion—to understand that she wasn’t beaten. Dani was never beaten. She’d push them to Breakdown and back to get her brother out of Estlantic and the hands of Special Forces. If they didn’t do it soon, they’d all better watch their backs. He rubbed the side of his temples to ease the building pressure there.

“And if Sam Kentley won’t come with us?” Reese asked. She was drawing again, but with her right hand now instead of her left.

Brogan’s heavy stare transferred in her direction. “Then you don’t give him a choice.”

“Of course,” Reese said.

Jaxon felt her scrutiny, and when he met her gaze, a thousand words stared back at him from her green eyes. She knew every bit as much as he did that they skirted the law now, and there was no going back, not if they didn’t want to end up dead. They probably would anyway. Watching her like this and wanting so much more for them both was an ache that never went away.

“We’ll need to communicate,” Brogan continued. “Off Teev feed, of course. Any communication there will be monitored. We’ll have to use the hardware Dani provided from her people.”

Jaxon wanted to protest his wording. He and Reese and the others were supposed to be Dani’s people, her crew, but Brogan was right that the fringers came first with Dani now. And her brother.

The CORE controlled access to the Teev and monitored all its feeds continuously, but the fringers had created their own separate version of the Teev, called the T-link, which also contained back doors into the CORE Teev system. Their mobile unit was nearly indistinguishable from the CORE’s iTeev, except the companion earbud was unconnected to the T-link itself by any wire. Dani had intended her contribution to aid in the rescuing of her brother, but the tech would also be useful to extract Kentley.

Brogan glanced at Eagle Jensen. “That means you’re sitting this one out unless you’ve been able to refit your alternate pair of glasses with the fringer tech.”

Eagle looked up from a piece of tech he was examining, his face as impassive as the dark glasses covering his eyes. Without them he was blind, or nearly so. “Needs more tweaks to be perfect, but it’ll work well enough for this.” He unfolded his tall frame and arose, taking the device in his hands to the tech-filled table that sat against the far wall of the conference room. “We leave in the morning?”

“Tonight.” Brogan killed the holo screen with a downward sweep of a hand. “Santoni is over five hundred and fifty kilometers away, so the sky train will have you there in about three hours. Santoni’s not much of a town, though, and you’ll be noticed if you aren’t careful. That means I want you to take civilian clothing and go incognito. By the time you arrive, Hammer will have sent Jaxon and Reese an encrypted file with everything you’ll need, including the location of where you’ll be staying. He suggests you leave on the seven o’clock train.”

Eagle began packing items from the table into his bag.

“What about Lyra and me?” Lyssa asked. She glanced at her sister as she spoke.

Twin births were not permitted, at least outside the colonies, and the likeness in their thin faces was unsettling for most people. The women’s familial features had blended over generations in the CORE melting pot, leaving only a tilt to their eyes and their ebony hair to firmly mark their Asian heritage.

“If this will involve our ability, we’ll have to go,” Lyssa added.

Brogan considered a moment. “How far is your projecting range?”

“Not five hundred and fifty kilometers,” Lyra answered.

“Then I think the others can handle this one alone.”

Lyssa looked disappointed. “Just when I finally learn to hit something when I shoot.” She patted the gun on her hip. Working in dispatch, neither she nor Lyra wore enforcer blues, but she still worked for a division, and enforcement was the only CORE profession that allowed weapon privileges.

“This should not involve shooting.” A slight smile tugged on one corner of Brogan’s mouth. “We hope. But they’ll need some tools.” He opened a metal box and withdrew a short stack of thin cards. “With the Teev codes Dani has provided from the fringers, we’ve managed to hack into the CORE citizen database and omit the fact that any of you came from Colony 6, though it won’t stand up to more than a cursory search, especially if, as we assume, they have a real database that lists everyone, including those they’ve made disappear altogether. Someone was responsible for sending that pus bag Bensell Summers after you six weeks ago, and that someone knows he failed. So you will need to use these identities during this operation.” He pushed the box to Jaxon.

Jaxon removed a short bundle with his name written on the band holding the cards together. The false IDs looked like cash credits, but when activated, the IDs would override their implanted CivIDs and broadcast another identity. Placing the pad of a finger on the back would activate or deactivate them.

“You each have three to begin with,” Brogan went on. “Make sure you take the stack meant for you and read the information we’ve programmed into them. Jaxon, I have included an alternate identity for Dr. Kentley with your cards. We’ve also included real cash credits for each of you, in case you need to make a purchase we don’t want the CORE to track.”

Jaxon passed the box to Dani, who took hers without comment. She’d had her CivID removed years ago by the fringers, of course, and the fake ID she used now was on a similar card that Brogan had also provided. She wasn’t in the population database. For all the CORE knew, the real Dani Balak had never existed. Unless she was on some secret database.

“What about the cameras?” Jaxon asked.

Brogan chuckled. “I believe Dani can help us there.”

She removed a small package from the pocket of her gray blouse, setting it on the table. From this she extracted a circular patch of indeterminate color and held it up so they could see. “My friends in Newcali have created these. We call them skin tags.” She peeled something from the back of hers and slapped it slightly off-centered onto her throat. Within a few seconds, Jaxon couldn’t see where she’d put it.

“They will immediately take on your skin color,” Dani continued, “and once activated will distort your face on any electronic recording. Activate with one long press of your finger. Use a two-fingered long press to both distort your appearance and to mask any of your CivIDs, including your implanted one. Turn it off with three short taps with one finger. You will experience a tingle on your skin as it changes. Drones won’t pick up the emissions because its function is to depress all emissions. Only detailed prison scanners might pick up their presence, at least ours do. Each tag will last up to two months and is nearly imperceptible to the naked eye.”

“Nice,” Eagle murmured. Jaxon was equally impressed, and he put his on immediately.

“Well, let’s get to it.” Brogan stood, signaling the end of the meeting.

Jaxon glanced at his iTeev secured to the sleeve of his enforcer uniform. The time on it read after five already. They needed to hurry.

Eagle shouldered his bag. “We should grab a little more firepower at division. Just in case.” As the weapons expert, he had access to everything, including weapons Jaxon didn’t want to know about. Eagle didn’t much like guns, but he loved explosions.

“Good idea,” Brogan said. “But first, I need a private word with Detective Tennant.”

Jaxon hung back as the others left the room, where he knew they’d wait for him out in the old subway tunnels. He closed the space between him and the captain.

“I know I said that we omitted the Colony 6 origin reference in everyone’s file, but Hammer had a problem with yours,” Brogan said as the door shut. “Bottom line is he hasn’t been able to do it, even with the codes from the fringers. There seems to be an extra layer of protocol attached to your file.”

An eerie sense of unease teased at Jaxon’s consciousness. That was often the sense he had before one of his premonitions, but when no vision came, he asked, “Any idea what it means?”

“I can’t say, except that you’re still a target for Special Forces. As long as you’re from Colony 6, they’ll suspect you have an ability. I can protect you here in Amarillo City, but you need to watch yourself in Santoni.”

“You think it has something to do with Bensell Summers?” Summers was the man Jaxon suspected of murdering his mother, but in the end when Jaxon had killed him, he wasn’t quite sure.

“It crossed my mind. But if it was that important to someone in the CORE Elite, it might also mean that they don’t want you dead. Yet.”

Small comfort, especially if there was any substance to the odd hints Summers had made about Jaxon’s parentage. All his life Jaxon had wanted to know who his father was, but not if it meant being the son of a lying whore wrangler. Even if the whore had been his mother. He didn’t blame her. She’d survived in the colony anyway she could, and that was more than many had done.

“I’ll be careful,” he said.

“Good.” Brogan picked up a skin-like substance lying in a mass on the table and pulled it over his head. In the few seconds it took for him to settle the mask, he changed from the well-respected AED captain to El Cerebro, feared leader of the underground in Amarillo City. The thin, faintly reddish mask concealed his identity with success, but the smoothness of the fake skin made him resemble a Nuface addict. The evenness of his guise was marred only by the C-shaped tattoo on his fake cheek, easily recognizable, even by CORE residents who didn’t deal with the black market. Fake brown hair followed the mask, covering his normal black. The whole ensemble was topped by a black knit cap, pulled low over Brogan’s brow, that flattened the hair against his neck. The transformation was eerie. Only El Cerebro’s top people knew his real identity, and he had to keep it that way if they had any chance of changing what was happening in the CORE.

“Keep me in the loop,” Brogan said to Jaxon as they walked to the door together. “And keep an eye on Dani. We still need her.”

So the captain—or was it the El Cerebro part of him?—had picked up on Dani’s threat. Somehow Jaxon needed to hold it together for all their sakes.

Outside the door, two of El Cerebro’s soldiers stood guard with assault rifles at the ready. The conference room was deep in the heart of an ancient, pre-Breakdown underground train system and also close to the undergrounders’ main lair. Every time Jaxon had been below, at least two guards were standing watch.

The rest of Jaxon’s crew waited with the guards, but they weren’t alone. Nova, El Cerebro’s niece, also stood outside, her eyes eager. “I volunteer to help, whatever it is you’re doing.” The child looked dirty as usual, her dark curls matted down her back, and she was so thin she looked younger than fourteen. Jaxon knew both the dirt and the innocence were fake. This was a child who’d once used pre-Breakdown tech to break into Reese’s apartment and who tripped through the streets after curfew like she owned them.

“Not this time, Nova,” El Cerebro said, his voice altered by a nearly invisible box on his throat.

“But it’s been over a month since we did anything, except that one bitty raid on that electronics warehouse.”

El Cerebro snorted. “The sales from that bitty raid are going to keep us in food down here for a year.”

Nova was about to say more, but a look from her uncle froze the protest on her lips. Giving Jaxon an evil stare as if her exclusion were all his doing, she started down the dark tunnel, her heavy pack swaying and appearing close to toppling her over.

Jaxon shrugged toward Reese, and she hid a smile as they left El Cerebro with his guards and followed the others in the opposite direction from the one Nova had taken. “Looks like she’s no longer pining after you,” Reese said.

Jaxon snorted. “That’s a good thing. I was beginning to worry she’d lock me in some abandoned room down here until I gave into her demands. Whatever those might be.”

Reese laughed and engaged the projection light on her iTeev. “Sounds about her style.”

The maze of tunnels was tricky, and they’d both gotten lost in them before, but Eagle could retrace his steps now even without his glasses, so they were in no danger of misdirection with him around. Jaxon could feel his suit’s heat volume kicking up to account for the colder temperature in the tunnels.

They walked for a few minutes, and then Reese said, “This doctor, how far do you think his ability goes?”

“Grow back limbs? Raise the dead? Who knows?” He laughed as she snorted. For that moment, the conversation between them was easy, like in the old days, but it wasn’t always that way now.

“Anyway, Brogan’s right that we need him.”

“You’re having more symptoms?” he asked her.

She hesitated. “Alex gave me a neural suppressant and it did make the sketches come less frequently, but it’s a little like seeing through a cloud, so I stopped taking them.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because it wasn’t necessary.” She sounded angry, but he knew it wasn’t directed toward him. “I just want to be able to control this thing like the others can.”

On that he agreed. The rest of the crew could control their abilities far better than he or Reese, even the twins who sometimes “traveled” unintentionally in their sleep. Reese had no choice but to sketch images she saw from people’s minds, including those she didn’t want to see, and he had equally little control over the frequency or subject of his premonitions.

“It’ll come.” He hadn’t told her everything either, and he didn’t plan on it. Besides, the premonition he’d had of them together was so far off that he was beginning to wonder if it had stemmed more from his desire than from an actual vision.

The darkness in the tunnels seemed heavy and ominous. It was dangerous business, living this secret life. If they were discovered down here, working with El Cerebro, the punishment would be psychological reconditioning at the least and more likely surgical enhancement and permanent banishment to one of the welfare colonies.

Ahead, the twins were talking with Eagle, their lights moving as they walked, but Dani fell back with them. “We can use more healers in Newcali,” she said.

Why was she so one-sighted? “You can’t have him,” Jaxon told her. “They need him here.”

More than one undergrounder had died from a disease they were ineligible to obtain help for as long as they weren’t valid citizens of the CORE. Others died from infection after digging out their implanted CivIDs or while giving birth to a non-authorized baby.

“I know.” Dani didn’t sound convinced. “Let’s just get this done. I need to get to my brother.”

The moment “brother” came from her lips, the pressure that had been building in Jaxon’s head exploded in a flash of blinding light.

A man in enforcer blues stands over Dani, who is sprawled on the ground, an assault rifle aimed at her heart. “You can’t dodge this many bullets,” he says with a smirk. To his comrades, he adds, “She’s from Colony 6, guys. No doubt about it. Cuff her and toss her into the shuttle. The Controller is going to enjoy this extra little gift.”

Jaxon jerked from the vision, finding himself on the rocky ground and everyone staring at him, their lights shining in his direction. His arm went up to cover his eyes. If Reese thought her ability was out of control, his was impossible. Lately, even the mildest premonition caused that pressure at his temples and sent him scrambling to the ground. The more he tried to resist, the worse it became, but when he didn’t fight them, he’d sometimes lose hours where he remembered nothing but the premonition. Only the hunches, gut feelings really, didn’t cause a physical reaction, and those came less often now as the full-blown visions had taken over.

“Lights,” Reese said, lowering her beam to the ground in front of him. The others did the same.

“Was it the doctor?” Lyssa asked. “Do we get him?”

Jaxon shook his head and gazed at Dani, finding her staring back at him, her black face blending in with the darkness around her, making the whites of her eyes that much more prominent. “You’re going to be captured by Special Forces. They’re going to take you to the controller.”

“No,” Reese said, her voice hard as she offered him a hand up. “We’re going to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

But they all knew his visions came true. Always.

Prologue

Location: Welfare Colony 6, Dallastar
Year: 2258, 60 years after Breakdown

JAXON CAME THROUGH the doorway of Reese’s house without knocking, his steps dragging, his body hunched as if coming from a beating, though there wasn’t a mark on him. One glance at the slump of her best friend’s shoulders and the tightness in his face told her that his mother had a visitor next door.

Her fingers froze on the pencil poised over her sketchbook. “Hey, Jaxon.”

“Hey,” came the strangled reply.

She arose from the small table in her living room, clutching her notebook to her chest. He’d almost reached her when the flash came, a mental image of the visitor’s face. For that single, bright instant, Reese could see the man as Jaxon had seen him inside his house only moments before. The vision was like a sketch in her mind, but burning vivid and real and in full color. Then it was gone, leaving her hands itching to draw the face of the stranger, to record him in her sketchbook.

Even at only ten years old, Reese wasn’t too young to understand what the visitor meant. Everyone living in Welfare Colony 6, or the Coop as its residents referred to it, knew the facts of life and what people were willing to do for money. Or what they had to do if they wanted to do more than barely survive in this place that was as jam-packed with human life as any chicken coop.

“Forget him,” she said.

Jaxon nodded, the tension in his face receding slightly.

Reese knew it bothered him that the man was with his mother, probably because he was still hoping his father would show up one day to claim him. As if that would ever happen. Jaxon’s father was long gone like all the other visitors, leaving only his son as the lone signal of his passing.

“I’ll just put this away.” As she walked to her tiny room, she hastily outlined the visitor’s face on a blank page in her sketchbook, hoping the quick drawing might be enough to stop the compulsion she always felt after seeing a “sketch.” She could fill more in later.

After carefully storing her sketchbook under her thin, CORE-issued mattress, Reese led Jaxon outside. The two children hurried past the fancy car that filled the entire narrow street in front of Jaxon’s house. The unmarked vehicle was a clear sign of the visitor’s wealth. Only people from outside the Coop had cars and the money to come here. Regular people used the public sky train and walked from the closest station.

Sweat trickled down the back of Reese’s neck under her long hair, but she increased her speed as they wound through the maze of houses. Despite their slightly different shapes and styles, the buildings were really all the same. Laminate exteriors bleached by the sun, miniscule yards largely untended, trash everywhere, and each house wedged so tightly against the others you could almost hear your neighbor snoring at night. Reese didn’t mind the crush of humanity, but lately the smell seemed to be getting worse.

The cement wall ahead signaled their arrival at the transfer station. Pipes from the station ran throughout the Coop, supplying the rows of houses with water according to the whim of those in control of the main station located outside the colony. Reese still remembered the year the water had turned to sludge and people had died by the hundreds. If she was ever lucky enough to get one of her dad’s empty sauce skins, she always filled it with water and stored it under her bed. She had eight stashed there now.

Angling around to the back, they climbed over the wall using the knotted rope they’d managed to loop over one of the intermittent posts. The wall was twice her father’s height, but short in comparison with the outer wall that encircled the entire colony. Reese was glad she’d worn her one pair of jeans instead of cutoffs because she invariably scraped her knees against the rough cement. The other kids from their crew were nowhere in sight, but they’d arrive soon.

Reese and Jaxon sprinted across the short open space, passed the huge metal grate that covered the opening between the entombed canal and the transfer station, and began scaling to the top of the station using the metal rungs embedded in the cement.

Anticipation rolled through Reese. Unless they were standing directly on top of the grate, the roof of the transfer station was the only place they could glimpse the water as it rushed into the cement structure.

Settling on the hot roof, Jaxon tossed a small pebble down, and it pinged off the grate, bouncing once before falling through into the swirling water. Reese imagined the hard, heat-soaked pebble diving into blissful coolness and longed to do the same, but the metal grate was a barrier they hadn’t yet been able to breach.

Jaxon tossed another pebble, then lay back suddenly despite the heat of the cement rooftop. He put his hands under his head, not quite touching the ground, bare elbows curled up so they didn’t graze the blistering rooftop. “I just want to get out of here. I need to get out of here.”

“And leave your mom?” Reese really meant “And leave me?” but she couldn’t say it aloud. Overhead, the blue sky was clear and painfully beautiful, a perfection that somehow made her insides ache. Her legs dangled over the edge of the roof, but now she pulled them up and hugged her knees tightly to her chest.

Jaxon turned burning blue eyes in her direction, the color brighter than the overhead sky. They always startled her with their brightness, a glaring contrast to his dark coloring that was common in the Coop. Three generations of being confined to this colony had resulted in a blending of the races. The few pale faces, or those much darker than the norm, always stood out. “We’ll both get out of here, Reese. You have to believe it. Anything is possible.”

Obviously, her casual statement hadn’t fooled him for a second. She wasn’t surprised. They’d been friends long before they started school. He knew about her father and his addictions, her obsession with drawing, and her ability to glimpse people she’d never seen. He understood about the water under her bed and her fear of dying. And most of all, how she longed for the mother she’d never known.

She smiled, relieved that he wasn’t planning anything drastic because there was really no place to go. If they leveled out of school, they could get jobs at eighteen and work hard to prove they were valuable enough to leave the Coop. That meant a real life outside in society with the support and protection of the CORE. If they didn’t graduate, they’d work jobs here until they died in the same houses they’d lived in all their lives.

She’d only been outside the Coop twice to visit her great-aunt, who was an art teacher for kids whose parents cared about that sort of thing. The woman was brusque and outspoken, and it was apparent she didn’t hold much love for her nephew, Reese’s father. But those brief visits, and her gift of the sketchbooks, were what kept Reese going to school month after month, and year after year. She hated the rigidness and confinement, and most of all the noise, but the only way out of the Coop was school. They were told daily how most of them would fail, that they would end up working all their lives in one of the Coop’s factories. But Reese didn’t intend to be one of those failures, and she didn’t plan for Jaxon to become one either.

As if reading her mind, Jaxon threw off his gloom and sat up. “They’re coming. Just wait till you see what Eagle and I have to show you.” Now his eyes sparkled.

Reese jumped to her feet, spurred by the excitement in his voice. “There you go again with that super hearing.”

He always knew when the others were arriving. He also guessed when their teachers were going to be absent, or the times Reese’s father would be coming home so sauced that it was safer to sleep outside.

Jaxon laughed. “Just a hunch.”

Sure enough, Eagle Jensen’s head poked over the concrete wall, and he began scrabbling over. More heads appeared after him. By the time she and Jaxon half fell, half slid down the metal rungs to the ground, good old Eagle Eyes was already across the open space, his brown eyes hidden behind thick glasses that still left him almost blind. He did odd jobs all around the colony to save up for surgery, but the price tag on his dream seemed impossible to Reese. Kids from the Coop never had surgery, or at least she’d never known anyone who had.

Lyssa and Lyra Sloan were with Eagle, and Dani Balak brought up the rear. All six crew members were present and accounted for. Lyssa and Lyra were an oddity in the Coop, not just for their obvious Asian heritage, but because they were identical twins. Dani was equally odd, with nearly black skin and her short, stiff hair a strange off-white, as if someone had dumped bleach over it.

Reese’s green eyes and pale skin made her almost as unusual as the others. At school in level ten, the six of them were considered the smart oddballs, and their very peculiarities were the reason they’d banded together after leaving the nursery levels when they were barely five.

Only Jaxon was mostly normal—at least in Reese’s estimation—but their longtime friendship meant he belonged in their crew all the same. Together they were strong enough to ward off other kids who tried to take advantage of them. There was safety in numbers, especially when one of those numbers was Dani, who could outfight anyone, even those twice her size.

Jaxon sat on the thick, two-foot-high cement base that held the huge grate. The water wasn’t visible from where they stood now, but Reese could hear it gurgling below. Beckoning, taunting in the summer heat.

“You got it?” Jaxon asked Eagle.

Eagle hefted a battered cloth backpack in his hands. “You know it.”

Jaxon’s grin grew wide. “Yeah, but you think it’s going to work?”

Eagle shrugged unevenly, his right shoulder lifting slightly before the other. “Don’t see why not. You should have thought of this at the beginning of summer.”

“Will someone tell me what’s going on?” Reese looked at the other girls, but they shook their heads.

Dani put her hands on her hips. “Someone better start talking. It’s hot as Breakdown out here, and my show’s on the Teev.”

Jaxon turned eyes on her. “Oh, it’s so gonna be worth it. I promise. Took us long enough to gather the parts. But this is something you can’t share with anyone outside the crew, or we’ll lose it.”

Lyssa and Lyra both rolled their eyes as if they were an extension of one another rather than separate people. Reese shuddered internally, slightly spooked by it, though she’d known them since nursery school and liked them almost as much as she did Jaxon.

“Like we’d ever say anything to those jukeheads,” Lyssa said. Lyra nodded, her sister’s words apparently enough for her.

“Come on, then.” Jaxon took a step onto the cement ring and looked over the grate.

“I think we ought to do it over there.” Eagle pointed to the middle. “Less noticeable if someone comes.”

Jaxon frowned. “Yeah, but kids could fall in if we do it there. Some still sneak in even though they know we’ve claimed it. Let’s do it closer to the edge, near the building. At least they’d have a chance to grab that slanted cement edge under the grate if they fell.”

Eagle rolled his eyes, and Dani smirked. Only Jaxon would think about other kids, and it made Reese proud of him. He was like their conscience or something.

“Anyway, it’d be less tricky for us to get down,” he added.

“Right.” Apparently convinced, Eagle jumped up on the grate and started across it, staggering slightly under the weight of his backpack. Reese followed with the others, curious now. The rush of the water grew louder.

The grate was significantly larger than the opening it covered. Underneath the grate, a layer of cement angled down on all sides until it formed a small, open rectangle where they could glimpse the water. The rectangle was small only in comparison to the grate, however, because the opening had about the same footprint as a house in the Coop. Every now and then white pipes poked up a few inches on the angled cement, like the roof vents on the Coop houses. Reese didn’t know why whoever built the transfer station had installed the grate instead of covering the entire thing with cement, but she was glad they had. Even if they couldn’t get to it, the water was entertaining.

She stopped and peered down at the water, wondering at the sheer volume. So much liquid, all moving forward at a clipped pace, though not so fast as to be frightening. She’d heard about oceans and people swimming in them, and lakes in the mountains, but no one she ever knew had personally seen them. The only water she’d seen that even came close was the chemical-filled pool at school where they did endless laps under a teacher’s watchful eye.

Reese pulled her attention from the water and hurried across the grate, her toes slipping off her too-small sandals, the hot metal searing the skin slightly. By the time she reached the others, Eagle was cutting into the grate a few feet from the station.

“I thought this had an alarm.” Reese glanced around, feeling strangely exposed, though she’d been on the grate a thousand times.

Eagle grinned up at her. “That’s what this is for.” He gestured to a heap of wiring that he’d apparently attached to the grate on each side of the parts they were cutting. “They have detectors in the metal, but this’ll fool them. Got the laser cutter from the lab. The science teacher’s out at a funeral, but I gotta have it back by tomorrow.”

With a few swift cuts, the piece of grate was free, and Eagle carefully pulled it away from the rest. “It’ll never seal like before, but I got some magglue to make it look right,” he said. “It should hold if no one walks on it. Mr. Day will never miss the glue, and there’s enough to reseal it a bunch of times before we’ll have to steal more.”

“Okay, now what?” Dani asked.

Jaxon began pulling out what looked like coils of clothing from Eagle’s backpack. A small, battered sack of pretzels came out with the clothes, and Eagle opened it to share. They were his favorite treat, and he’d been known to scour the school garbage bins in search of them whenever they were served in the lunchtime readymeals.

Reese took a pretzel as she eyed the mishmash of clothing. “Wait, is that my old sweater?”

Jaxon laughed. “Oh, yeah. Eagle and I’ve been working on this for a while.” He shook out the coils to reveal a makeshift ladder. “Ladies, we’re going swimming.” No wonder the backpack had looked so heavy.

Jaxon threw the ladder down the hole, the metal hooks on the end clipping easily to a part of the grate. “I’ll go first.”

“Let me.” Dani had already stripped to her underwear and tank top. “I’m tougher than you.” Without waiting for a response, she grabbed hold of the rope and started her descent.

Six feet down, she reached the place where the cement angled steeply from the side. From there she stepped off the ladder and walked down, using only her hands on the ladder to slow her progress. Finally, she reached the edge of the cement.

“Punk bucket,” she called. “Way more water than I thought. At least five times as big as the pool. Maybe more.” Grabbing onto one of the strange white pipes, she knelt on the sloped cement and peered over. “It’s hardly moving on the sides, though, so I think we’re good.”

She balanced again on the ladder where it dropped over the water, and Reese backtracked to the middle of the grate to keep Dani in view for a few more seconds as her body sank below the slanted cement. If there wasn’t enough ladder to reach the water, they were all going to be disappointed.

A loud splash sent terror through Reese’s chest, but a second later, Dani’s voice echoed up to them from the deep. “It’s great! Come on down! The ladder almost reaches the water. No worries about getting back up.”

The rest of the crew needed no further invitation. Jaxon was next, and Reese followed, first shucking off her jeans and sandals, her heart pounding with equal parts fear and anticipation. The lower she climbed the cooler it was. She could almost forget that seconds before she’d been melting under the hot sun.

As Reese stepped off the ladder and onto the sloping cement, she brushed one of the protruding white pipes. Air was coming out of it, emitting a smell she couldn’t identify, and the aroma intensified as she climbed over the last bit of cement, stepped back onto the ladder, and swung unsteadily into the air.

Below her, Jaxon jumped the rest of the way, landing with a splash into the water. He was immediately caught up in the current, but with a few strong strokes he made it to the calmer water at the edges where Dani was swimming lazily on her back.

The sloping cement was open underneath, where huge iron bars jutted from the walls, supporting it. It puzzled Reese that the builders had included the extra cement at all. What was its purpose? Going down the rest of the ladder felt like entering a huge cavern that she’d once seen on the Teev.

She was getting ready to jump into the water when she noticed the cylinders—dozens of them, each a foot long with the circumference of a dinner plate. The cylinders were secured to the underside of the cement, directly under the pipes that jutted out on top. What is that about?

Above Reese, Lyssa was already climbing down, her bare feet approaching quickly, so Reese jumped, careful to angle her fall toward the calmer outer edges of the water. She hit and went under, her body tingling all over at the sudden change of temperature. The water was cool, but not icy, and for a moment of pure bliss, she floated on her back, moving her arms lazily to keep in place.

No one had ever done this before. No one but them.

Eagle was the last one down, and he paused for longer than Reese had on the ladder, studying the cylinders. He reached over and put a hand on one. “These things are some kind of membrane,” he called down. He sniffed his hand and then shrugged before carefully climbing down to the end of the rope and sliding into the water. Even then, he held onto his glasses with one hand as he swam awkwardly in Reese’s direction.

“Anything dripping from those canisters?” he asked. “I can’t see well enough to tell.”

Reese studied them for a moment before nodding. “Yeah. Clear stuff. Just every now and then. A drop or two. Must be chemicals. They have to treat the water to make it safe to drink.” Now the sloping cement seemed to make more sense.

Jaxon closed the few feet separating him from Reese. “But they treat the water inside the station before it goes into the pumps. This must be something else.”

“Maybe.” Reese glanced over at Dani, who had swum to the far wall, peering into what they could see of the opening where the rush of water entered the transfer station. “Anyway, I always wondered why they put in a grate at all.”

“Leaving it open to the air helps the flavor.” Eagle accidently splashed a little water on his glasses and scowled in frustration. “Least that’s what they said in science class when we studied water filtration.”

Reese didn’t remember that, but she trusted Eagle to have been paying attention. She glanced back up at the green canisters. “You think the chemicals will hurt us?”

Eagle considered her question. “I doubt it. They’re very tiny drops. It’s probably just something else to make it taste better.”

“Hey, come look at this!” Dani shouted at them.

Reese let herself drift partially into the main current, gliding along toward Dani. Jaxon reached out and pushed her to the side of the opening as they neared. “Careful,” he warned. “The current’s stronger here.”

Reese pointed her feet forward, landing against the cement wall with a jolt.

A fine wire mesh covered the six-meter hole where the water entered the transfer station. Reese vaguely remembered hearing something in school about a series of filtration grates as the water came down the manmade canal from the closest river. Even so, slippery bits of debris had gathered along the mesh.

“Fish, here?” Jaxon said.

Sure enough, small fish about the length of Reese’s longest finger lay pinned against the wire mesh by the rush of water. She peered closer to see them nibbling at the debris.

“Look at this one!” Dani exclaimed, pointing. Just below the water level, a fish had broken away from the mesh. It was almost transparent but glowing with some kind of light.

Apparently even Eagle could see it. “Weird,” he said. “I wouldn’t have thought it was big enough to fight the current.”

“What do you mean? It shouldn’t be here at all.” Dani reached toward the glowing fish, which didn’t seem in the least bothered by their presence.

“Could have been tiny eggs when they came down the canal,” Jaxon said. “Then they grew here.”

“They’re not like any fish I ever seen on the Teev.” Eagle stared so intently that the bottom rims of his glasses skimmed the water.

“You even seeing them?” Dani teased. She touched the fish and immediately pulled back. “Saca!” she cursed.

“It bite you?” Reese asked.

“No. It tingles all over like some kind of smeg flush.”

Reese had never tried smeg, but her dad used the drug every time his new girlfriend came over. The way he zoned out before hustling Cecelia into his bedroom frightened her.

Lyssa started to touch the fish, but Jaxon grabbed her hand. “Better not,” he said, jerking his head at Dani. “We should wait to make sure there aren’t any side effects.”

He glanced up at the cylinders as he spoke, and goosebumps rippled across Reese’s shoulders.

“Gee, thanks,” Dani muttered.

Suddenly, Reese wanted more than anything to climb out of the water and get away from the transfer station completely. But Lyra started a water fight, and in the ensuing fun, Reese forgot the feeling. They swam the length of the cavern, reveling in their secret and the accomplishment of being there.

All too soon, Eagle was telling them it was time to go, and Reese climbed up the ladder first. She was glad Dani volunteered to be the last one out.

The heat of the sun felt good after being in the cool water. The grate was warm against Reese’s skin now instead of searing as it had been earlier, which meant the sun would soon set and she’d need to get home in case her father wanted her. She spread out over the grate to soak in the warmth as Eagle and Jaxon used the magglue to temporarily secure the cut piece of metal. By the time the boys finished with the glue, she was dry enough to pull on her jeans.

Thankfully, the car that had been parked outside Jaxon’s house was gone when they arrived on their street. Jaxon waved at her and headed inside, walking tall and grinning wide, as if there hadn’t been a visitor at all. Reese opened the door to her own house, and the smell of nuked food—a sure sign she wouldn’t be home alone tonight—made her stomach growl.

As she walked into the room that served as both living room and kitchen, her dad’s girlfriend, Cecelia, looked away from the three-dimensional Teev figures moving above the table. “Hey, Reese, where you been? Why’s your hair wet?”

Reese shrugged. “We were playing a game. Is my dad home?”

“In the shower. You hungry? I got some chicken. Your favorite.”

“Thanks.” Reese grabbed one of the flat readymeal containers from the sack on the counter, slid it into the narrow opening of the microwave, and punched start. As she waited for the food, she turned her eyes to the holographic Teev projection. From her vantage point, she could only see the sides of the characters, but they looked real. The only apparent difference between the Teev feed and real life was the smaller size. At school they had Teevs that projected life-sized characters, and teachers constantly used these to present their lessons. She’d grown used to seeing the teacher talking at the front of the class while simultaneously working on grades in the back of the room.

Cecelia loved to watch romances, and two characters were kissing passionately on the screen. Reese couldn’t understand why that was interesting, but she couldn’t help thinking about Jaxon and wondering if some day they might want to kiss like that.

Leaving the meal to cook, Reese grabbed her sketchbook and pencils from her room, returning as the readymeal glided out of its slot. It wasn’t really chicken, according to her science teacher, but Reese had never tasted real chicken, so it made no difference to her. She cleared a spot in the weeks of discarded food wrappers on the table and sat in the chair opposite Cecelia. Her eyes avoided the Teev as she ate with one hand and drew with the other. First, she wanted to capture the underside of the grate and the strange canisters. She was glad she’d “borrowed” the colored pencils from school because they made her drawings much more realistic. She was about to fill in the water when she felt her dad enter the room.

“Hey,” he said. “You guys better not have eaten everything. I’m starved.”

The knot Reese hadn’t even realized existed in her stomach relaxed. He hadn’t been drinking. Not yet. As Cecilia jumped up to cook his food, he paused at Reese’s shoulder. For a moment, she was terrified he would recognize the transfer station and forbid her to go there, but his attention locked on the kissing couple. With a scowl, he barked a command, and the Teev feed changed from romance to the news, which was almost as bad, but not quite. Grownups were so boring.

Carefully, Reese turned the page of her sketchbook, hiding the transfer station. She concentrated on eating for a while, but before she could finish, the drawing she’d begun earlier that afternoon beckoned like a promise she had to keep. Before she could help herself, her fork lay discarded as she turned the pages to the quick sketch of the man who’d visited Jaxon’s house.

She frowned at it. No, it wasn’t quite right. The face had been wider and more square. She erased the old lines and new ones began to form under her pencil. That was better—just as she had “sketched” him in her mind. She shaded in the too-smooth forehead that hinted at Nuface therapy. Next, she enhanced the deep-set blue eyes under the thick brows, followed by thinning the lips slightly and adding an oddly pointed chin that made him seem cruel. The nose wasn’t right either, but flattening it added the distinct toughness she remembered. To finish, she shaded in the shock of medium gray hair with a prominent widow’s peak.

Perfect. The most telling thing about the man was the fleshy cheeks, rounded with rich foods, which meant he didn’t belong in the Coop. He was slumming. He wasn’t ugly, but something about him made her feel upset. Maybe it was because she knew how much his visit had bothered Jaxon.

Cecelia brought her father’s meal and squeezed in between them at the table, cuddling up to her father as he began forking down his food. Feeling crowded, Reese arose to go to the other side, and as she did, her eyes were drawn by what was streaming on the Teev.

She gasped. It was him! The man she was drawing. No mistaking those eyes.

Both her dad and Cecelia looked in her direction. “What?” barked her dad, his tone annoyed.

Reese tried to clasp the sketchbook to her chest, but he was already reaching for it. His strong fingers pulled the book from her. He stared at the picture and then back up at the Teev. “Where did you see him?”

“I-I didn’t.” She pointed to the man on the Teev. “I mean, just now.”

Her father’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Reese.”

She shrugged. “It’s just a picture.” Even as she spoke, the man disappeared from the Teev.

“Tell me. Now.” Her father’s voice was slow but sharp, reminding her of nails and broken glass. “Where did you see that clud-faced pus bag?”

Pus bag? That meant he was an Elite who held an important job in the CORE, and that Reese was right about him slumming. She’d have to answer her father or spend the night regretting it. And what harm could there be in telling him anyway? “He was at Jaxon’s today.”

“Did you actually see him?”

Reese shook her head.

“But he was there.” His words weren’t a question but demanded confirmation.

“Jaxon saw him.”

A smile curving his lips, her father tore the drawing from her precious sketchbook, and Reese almost felt that he tore out a piece of her soul. She had three other books, but they were crammed full of drawings already.

“Will someone please tell me what’s going on?” Cecelia looked from Reese to her father. She didn’t know about Reese’s flashes or sketches or whatever they were, and Reese had hoped she’d never know. She wanted Cecelia to like her, not consider her a freak.

“Later.” Her dad went back to eating, his eyes no longer on the Teev but fixed on her drawing. The intensity of his stare made Reese uncomfortable.

Abandoning the rest of her dinner, she slipped away to her bedroom, the door barely clearing the bed as she pushed it open. Sinking to her mattress, she waited until her heartbeat slowed before carefully redrawing the man, this time adding better shading.

Once it was finished, she relaxed. Good. Now she could rest and forget him. Eventually, the drawing would fade from her mind. She hoped it was the last time he’d visit the Coop.

REESE’S RELIEF WAS short-lived. Barely a week later, she and Jaxon were swimming at the transfer station when he abruptly insisted that he had to go home. He’d done the same thing for the past two days, and Reese was a little annoyed, but she left the other kids and went with him because he was acting strange, and it worried her. Arriving on their street, they discovered a silver enforcer shuttle and an ambulance jammed into the space in front of his house. Two EMTs carried a sheet-covered form on a stretcher to the ambulance.

“What’s going on?” Jaxon asked the nearest enforcer. Panic made his voice rise at the end, sending needles of fear into Reese’s gut.

“Beat it, kid. Take your nose somewhere else.”

Outrage filled Reese, overcoming her fear of the clipper. “He lives here.” She wanted to add some of her dad’s more colorful adjectives, but enforcers—or clippers as most disrespectfully called them—on the Coop beat were known to tag kids with their mood-altering temper lasers just for fun.

“Not anymore, you don’t.” The man gave them an unpleasant smirk.

“Leave him alone.” This from another enforcer, a wide-shouldered man with red hair, a freckled complexion, and a slight accent Reese couldn’t place. Obviously, he wasn’t from around here. He thumbed toward the shuttle, and the other cop left.

“I’m Enforcer Tennant,” he said to Jaxon. “Look, I’m really sorry, kid, but your mom’s dead.”

Jaxon’s mouth opened. “No, no . . . she can’t . . .” He looked as if someone had punched him in the gut, the color bleeding from his tanned face.

“We think it was a robbery.” The clipper laid a comforting hand on Jaxon’s shoulder. “We’ll find the guy who did this. For now, you need to come with me. We’ll get you fixed up with a place to stay.”

As the man led him away, tears ran unchecked down Jaxon’s face. Reese wanted to run after him, to put her arms around him and tell him it was going to be okay. But it wasn’t okay. Not for him or for her. His mom was gone. That meant he’d be taken away, and Reese would lose Jaxon. Kids whose parents died always left and never came back.

Reese couldn’t find her breath. She couldn’t call out. She couldn’t even cry. She couldn’t do anything but watch as the enforcer closed the door of his shuttle with Jaxon inside and drove down the street.

Blindly, Reese headed for home. Jaxon is gone, gone, gone. He promised we’d leave together, but now I’ll never see him again. She wept for him and for herself. Now that they’d finally come, she couldn’t stop the flood of tears. Why hadn’t she at least told Jaxon how sorry she was that his mom was dead?

No one was home at her house. She sank onto a chair next to the table, staring at nothing. Her wet hair dried, but not her eyes. She was still sitting there in the dark when her father stumbled into the room and flipped on a light. She could smell the stench of sauce on his breath.

He took one look at her, sneering a little as he said, “What’s wrong with you?”

Inwardly, she cringed. “Jaxon,” she whispered. “They took him away. His mom’s dead.”

For a full three seconds her father didn’t speak, but his eyes seemed to grow two sizes. “When?” he choked out.

“A few hours ago. She was okay before we went to play. I think someone killed her.”

“Get your stuff. We’re leaving.” Just that fast, her dad wasn’t drunk anymore. He grabbed a large duffel from the closet and began shoving in food.

Reese jumped to her feet. “What? No! Jaxon might come back. I have to wait for him.”

“Now!” He slammed a cupboard just as Cecelia walked into the kitchen.

“Gerry,” she said, running to him, “what’s wrong?”

For a moment Reese saw panic in her father’s face, but it was followed quickly with a hardening of his jaw. “Bethany’s dead. They killed her. We’ll be next.”

Cecelia gasped. “I told you to leave it alone. You should have ripped up that picture!”

Reese’s stomach dropped. Her picture? It had to be. She was the only one who drew around here. And the picture of the man at Jaxon’s house was the only one her father had shown interest in. What had her father done?

“Leave the stuff.” Cecelia’s high, breathy voice sounded nothing like her usual self. “Let’s go.”

Her father gave a curt nod. “Just gotta get something from the bedroom. We’ll need all the cash I’ve saved. Yours too.”

“When are we coming back?” Reese hated the wobbling in her voice. She’d meant to sound determined.

“Never.” His finger stabbed at her. “With or without you, I’m leaving. Your choice.”

“Of course she’s coming! It won’t be safe here.” Cecelia gave her a sympathetic glance. “Get whatever you can carry, honey. Hurry!”

This was insane. Where did they plan to go? There was no place but the Coop, not for people like them. Leaving a colony, even temporarily, was impossible without preapproval. And if they managed to sneak out using one of the breaches in the outer wall, how would they survive? They’d be picked up before long without the right kind of ID.

Reese ran to her bedroom and shoved her three used sketchbooks into a bag, followed by her current one and a few clothes. The bag was only half full when she remembered the water skins under the bed. Those went in next, followed by her two spare pairs of underwear and a pair of sneakers that were missing parts of the soles.

Had the world gone crazy?

Jaxon! She wished she could talk to him, explain to him how much she wanted to take back her picture. To unsketch the man. Somehow she knew her picture had caused his mother’s death, that she was responsible for the devastation in his face.

Before Reese realized she was making a decision, she was out the front door and running over the square of dying lawn to Jaxon’s house. But his door was locked, and all the enforcers were gone. No answers here—and of course no Jaxon.

She heard a door slam and Cecelia calling her name. Then her dad, his voice loud and angry. She crouched by the edge of Jaxon’s house where an overgrown bush somehow thrived in a foot of dirt. Her father was cursing now, and Cecelia pleaded with him to wait, but their voices faded, floating down the street in the direction of the sky train.

They’d really left her. Reese didn’t care. She had to see Jaxon. To make him understand that she hadn’t meant to hurt him.

But Jaxon didn’t return, and neither did her father. After two days of hiding out at the transfer station, spying on her house and Jaxon’s, the endless hunger in her stomach forced her to break in and raid both houses for food. Packing all she could carry, she left the colony through the breach in the outer wall that she and the other kids had found during their explorations.

Outside, barren land stretched as far as she could see, broken only by an occasional plant and a ribbon of road that cut like a scar across the terrain. She’d have to wait until dark to start down the road or the cameras mounted on the wall would catch her. At night, there were patches of darkness between the flood lights that might be enough to hide her escape. If she ran fast, she’d only be visible to the guards for a few seconds before she was beyond the reach of the brightest beams—if they were even paying attention.

Her plan succeeded maybe too well. Days of walking and hitching several rides from kind strangers followed, bringing Reese into first one CORE city and then another. She moved on the edges, avoiding cameras and enforcers—or anyone who looked official. Finally driven to desperation and the hunger in her stomach, she dared use her CivID to ride the sky train, which miraculously didn’t bring enforcers down on her. By dusk of the seventh day, she arrived at her great-aunt’s place in Big Horn, where she collapsed on the beautifully manicured lawn. The gardener found her the next morning, chilled despite the heat of August, and brought her inside, where her great-aunt fed her mounds of the most delicious food in a kitchen so large that Reese felt she was still outside.

It was then she learned her father and Cecelia were dead. A fall from a sky train platform—an accident, the report said. But Reese knew better. Her picture had killed them too.

CHAPTER 1

LINDON STEPPED OFF THE FIVE o’clock shuttle with that look in his eyes, as he had every so often since their marriage nine years ago, but Maddy wasn’t putting up with it. “No,” she said before he could speak. “The answer is no. I won’t do it.”

His gray eyes glinted like fluid steel, and his beard-shadowed face hardened. He shrugged off the long white jacket he wore to work at the lab each day, tossed it into the cleaning unit embedded in the wall inside the front closet, and put his arms around her rigid body. Maddy watched over his shoulder as the shuttle flew away into the warm California night air and the automatic door on their private port slid shut.

“You know I can’t,” her voice was softer this time but still resolute. “Why bring it up again?” It had been a year since his last plea, and she’d hoped he had resigned himself to her decision. Each request stole another slice of her determination.

“Hear me out. It’s different this time.”

The suppressed excitement in his voice made her stare. He seriously expected her to change her mind. “We’ve been through this,” she said. “You knew about it before we married. How many times are we going to revisit the issue? Besides, you always accepted Stewart as your son. Why do you need another child?”

Lindon sighed as he released her, a hand running through his longish brown hair. His unruly, casual look was one of the things that had most attract her to him when they’d met at an earth preservation rally over a decade ago. “I guess I thought you’d change your mind, or that your so-called biological clock would convince you to try again.”

“Well, I’m thirty-eight and it hasn’t ticked once.” The words were a lie. She wanted Lindon’s child, had dreamed about it for years. But always looming in opposition was the terrifying memory of how her body had reacted when she was carrying Stewart.

She’d been a young twenty-two and in her first marriage, an ill-fated one to Phil Jacobs, Stewart’s father. After a brief week of happiness following conception, she learned the rare genetic deviation that caused her to be allergic to almost everything was also rebelling at the baby’s presence. She spent the next six months in bed—in violent, agonizing pain. Fearing for her life and having little hope for the baby, the doctors urged abortion from the third month, but Phil cajoled, begged, and even threatened her with a court order to make her continue the pregnancy. In the end, after seeing her son on the ultrasound, Maddy knew that ending the pregnancy would break her heart far more than Phil ever had, but she also knew that choosing not to abort would cost her life.

So she prepared to die. In her darkest moments, she cursed Phil for wanting a child more than he wanted her.

When her body went into cardiac arrest almost three months before term, no one was more surprised than she was when a team of physicians were able to save both her and her son.

There was no saving her marriage. She couldn’t forgive Phil for his indifference and lack of support, and he couldn’t forgive the fact that she loved Stewart more than she had ever loved him. They were divorced within the year.

Her nose twitched. I must look at the air filter, she thought with a remote part of her brain. Something must be caught in it. I don’t want to have a reaction.

“Let’s adopt,” she said to Lindon. “What about the orphans from the Moon colony? I saw them on the vidscreen yesterday. We could petition to—” She broke off at Lindon’s impatient grunt.

“I don’t want to adopt,” Lindon said. “Not yet anyway. I love you, and I want a child who looks like you—like us.”

“You want to pass along your genes you mean.” The words would hurt him, but she was feeling too wounded herself to care. Maybe if Lindon hadn’t been one of the most renowned research gynecologists in the world, he wouldn’t be so obsessed with making her body do what he wanted. “Well, he’d have my genes too—do you want to condemn him to that?” She turned from his stare and gazed through the transparent wall that looked out over the ocean behind their house. She loved the location, and she walked on the beach at least once a week, even if it meant wearing a film of Protect-a-Skin. The Skin was thin enough that she could feel the sand between her toes.

“You know we can make sure our child doesn’t get that gene. Besides, Stewart doesn’t have allergies.”

She whirled on him. “Leave Stewart out of it! The real issue is me, and you know it. This time I could die. The doctors said there was a ninety-nine percent chance of recurrence—your own testing confirmed that. And don’t give me another spiel about medical advancements. You and I both know they won’t make a difference. Not enough of one anyway.” She turned away again, walking toward her office with long, angry strides.

“Maddy, just listen!”

But she couldn’t. Would he finally dissolve their marriage now that she couldn’t give him what he wanted? The thought distressed her, yet there was also relief. The sword that had hung constantly above her head would fall and pierce her heart, but she would live on. And there was always Stewart.

He caught up to her and put his hands on her shoulders. Strong, warm hands that were usually comforting. Today they felt cold.

“Maddy, honey, I know how pregnancy was for you. I also know you want another child as much as I do. That’s one of the reasons I’ve been working so much overtime the past couple of years.”

Maddy turned slowly, drawing her brows together tightly as she studied her husband. What did his work have to do with their having a baby?

His hands dropped to his side. “A month. Only a month,” he said into the silence. “It won’t take nine.”

She smirked. “Only a month? To have a baby? Well then by all means, let’s have two. Or maybe six.”

He ignored her flippancy. “I’ve done it, Maddy. It’s taken me a decade of hard work and a hundred false starts, but I’ve done it! Dan and I have tested it over and over and it works. We can have a baby in one month.”

The laughter died in Maddy’s throat. “That’s what you’ve been working on?” She felt a level of betrayal that she couldn’t even name. Before their marriage, Lindon and his team of talented specialists had been given a government grant to study the issues of aging and metabolism. But neither subject was related to pregnancy—or so she had thought. Lately he had been more involved in his work, and it bothered her that he’d stopped talking about new discoveries that he’d once been so eager to share.

“Well, it wasn’t the idea we started with,” Lindon said, “but about eight years ago, we realized that our research into metabolism could have other implications.” He paused, his face flushing a dark red that told her more than words how much this meant to him. “At first I didn’t want to hope. But I’m sure now.”

Maddy’s sense of betrayal was fading, but she couldn’t find her voice. Stewart had been her miracle; she had never expected another.

Lindon’s smile was hesitant. “One month is different than nine. For one month we’ll be able to control your symptoms.”

She hated the way his heart seemed to be in his eyes. Or was that her heart? “Only one month? How is that possible?”

He dared to touch her again, his hand closing around hers. “We’ve come up with a drug that increases the metabolism. During the early twenty-first century similar drugs were used for weight loss. They achieved quite a bit of success, despite the side effects.”

“Side effects?” Maddy stiffened. “I have a deadline. I don’t have time for nonsense.” Pulling from him, she stalked down the corridor to her study where her computer waited blankly.

“Maddy!” Lindon called, but she didn’t falter.

She sat on her high-backed chair made of the finest black synthetic leather, the kind that cost ten times more than the real thing and that wore even better. Seven years old now and it still looked new.

One month? Side effects? She knew Lindon wanted a son, but that he might ask her to risk her health with an experimental drug was beyond belief. He wasn’t like Phil—or so she had thought.

“On, computer,” she said tersely. The oversized screen on the wall sprang to life exactly where she had left off a short time before, but she didn’t begin speaking the code that would eventually become part of a new architectural program she was designing. Her expression reflected from the dark glass, pursed lips and narrowed eyes full of—fear?

Lindon drew up another chair and sat close, resting a hand on her knee. “Don’t be angry, honey. Listen to what I’m saying. There are no serious side effects with Nonomine—that’s what we call the drug. Absolutely none. We’ve done the tests on animals, and we’ve had no lung failure, brain hemorrhaging, or any of the other problems that marked our experiments with other drugs. Nonomine has mild side effects, to be sure, but nothing we can’t easily handle. And this isn’t the only application. We believe low dosages will extend quality of life, if not add years to life expectancy. It’s really two sides of the same coin. Enough helps the body remain stronger for longer. More speeds it up, spending the years faster. It’s a matter of dosage for the purpose we intend.”

A compartment in the wall opened, triggered by her sitting in the chair, and a tray with her favorite foamleaf tea, one of the prime exports of the Zeppay Moon Colony, came within reach. From habit she took the steaming mug and set it on the side table next to her chair, the aroma of rich earth filling her nose. Her mouth watered, but the action did nothing for the sudden dryness in her throat.

“Three years ago we got permission to start limited testing on humans,” Lindon continue. “We now have thirty-four babies whose gestation period was slightly less than one month. In each of the test cases, the mother’s metabolism returned to normal after the births. Four of the mothers had twins, born three to five days early, and in five cases, the mothers actually went through the drug program twice and had two pregnancies within an eight-month period. There is no abnormality in any of the children, and according to Dan, they are developing as well as or better than children who are gestated normally. I’m not on that end of it, but Dan assures me it’s true. The point is we now have thirty-four children, each born in one month with next to no complications during or after pregnancy.”

The dryness in Maddy’s mouth deepened. Her heart pounded in her ears. Hope was sometimes a deadly thing. “Isn’t the speeded up rate of growth dangerous for the baby? And the mother?”

“Actually, our data indicates that it’s less risky for both fetus and the mother. You see, the mother actually is nine months older. She has aged just as she would have in any other nine months, but with less danger of falling, of being exposed to diseases, stress, etc. And the baby is less likely to be strangled by the cord or be damaged by a host of other internal accidents simply because he’s in the womb a shorter time. In the end, it’s actually safer to have your baby with Nonomine.”

“Yet the woman is still nine months older. She’s lost eight months of her life. Most women I know don’t want to lose a day, much less months.”

“But her body hasn’t been through all of the stress it would have in those extra eight months. She feels the entire strain of pregnancy, of course, but not all of the outside influences she would normally endure during those nine months—heat, tension, gravity, even cosmetics use—that add to the aging process. With these things out of the picture, we figure that it won’t really shorten a woman’s life all that much, and when it’s over she’ll have her baby.” Lindon fell silent, his eyes holding hers, compelling, pleading.

She sighed. “Why didn’t you tell me about this before? Why today? Why not three years ago?”

“Next week Stewart is going to stay with his father for the summer. And we have an opening for a potential mother. I’ve wanted to tell you, even at the risk of losing my grant, but not until I was absolutely sure it was right for us. I didn’t want to get your hopes up, and every time we talked about it before, I really didn’t have all the answers. I feel I do now. Please, just think about it.”

She looked away. He had been preoccupied of late, but she hadn’t questioned him, fearing that he would bring up the possibility of having a baby and that she would have to say no.

“You said there were mild side effects,” she said, staring not at him but at the foamleaf tea. How did it get in her hand? She couldn’t remember picking it up. “What kind?”

Lindon leaned back in his chair, slipping into what Maddy recognized as his teaching mode. “Swelling mostly, and some leakage of amniotic fluid because of the rapid increase in volume, but we’ve found a way to counter both problems. For safety, the women have to live at the clinic during the month so they can be monitored. That’s why I thought it’d be good to do it when Stewart is with his dad, though he can certainly visit. I—I’ve even had special air filters installed, like those we have here, and the women aren’t allowed to use any sprays or perfume that might cause allergic reactions.”

Because of me, Maddy thought. Lindon might not be aware of it himself, but she understood that the direction his research had taken was entirely because of her. “What about people with my condition?” She saw the hot flare of hope in his eyes and the look seared her.

“Ten of the women have had previous difficult pregnancies similar to yours, though only two cases were as severe. It was hard to find even that many, but I insisted on including them. There was no use in discovering something that wouldn’t also help those who really need it.”

“And?”

His smile grew large. “Each came through well. One of the mothers with allergies like yours gave birth last week and the other one today. It was incredible!”

So that was why he’d approached her now. Two women like her were new mothers because of his work. He wants it to be us. “But the sickness—”

He leaned forward again, his eyes bright. “It seems Nonomine has the good side effect of stifling the normal sickness in pregnancy, and it works for cases like yours that are normally resistant to medicines. In fact, those two particular mothers only had difficulties with sickness during the last week of the pregnancy.” He shook a finger. “One week!”

One week of agony. Would it be worth it? In her mind Maddy saw Stewart as he had been when they had finally placed him in her arms, so tiny, helpless, and all hers. An unexpected rush of warmth overwhelmed her.

There were tears in her eyes as she looked up at Lindon. “What’s a week?” she said softly.

He smiled in triumph and held her face between his hands. His touch was gentle. “You won’t regret it, you’ll see,” he said.

But Maddy already knew. Heaven help her, it had been worth it before. Almost dying had been worth Stewart. She couldn’t explain it, not even to herself, but it was true.

THE CLICK OF MY RED stilettos echoed faintly in the long hallway. The ridiculous shoes were completely unnecessary, in my opinion, but Stella was in charge of disguises, and she’d insisted.

“We want the guards looking at you, Erin, not at your credentials,” she’d said, grinning as I tried to balance on what felt like stilts. I comforted myself with the very real possibility of using the pointed heels as a weapon.

Stella was right. The guards’ eyes had been too busy with the curves of my legs under my tight skirt to do more than barely glance at my Homeland Security ID. A good thing, since the identification wasn’t real. They should have called to verify, even though the main office had advised them of our upcoming arrival. Just in case they did check, Stella had tapped into their communications network and was ready to give them the fake approval code she’d provided when she’d set up the meeting yesterday.

I was more worried about running into an Emporium hit team than dealing with Homeland Security. Compared to the Emporium, getting the best of the US government was child’s play.

We’d known we would have to pass through a full-body scanner when we’d entered this secret facility outside Dallas, so the weapons and communication devices we carried were disguised as ordinary items.

Not to mention my shoes.

If the Emporium showed up, Ritter, Dimitri, and I might need everything we’d brought to break Shadrach Azima out of here. He was a traitor to us, but leaving him in captivity any longer, now that he was finally out of Islamic hands, wasn’t an option. He was still a Renegade, and we wouldn’t leave him for the Emporium or the American government to experiment on.

Dimitri, our healer, was dressed as an aging, gray-haired doctor, complete with a white lab coat, a stethoscope, and a medical bag in hand. I didn’t personally know any medical employees who wore white coats into a facility, rather than donning them there, but again Stella had insisted. The broad, normally dark-haired man fit easily into the role, and the guards had given even less attention to his forged credentials as a world-renowned geneticist than mine. At over a thousand years old, Dimitri had forgotten more about medicine than mortal doctors had time to learn.

Only Ritter, unconvincing in his nerdy, Clark Kent glasses and his long-sleeved, white dress shirt buttoned far too high, caused the Homeland Security agents nervousness. He towered over everyone, moving with an animal-like stealth. His longish dark hair was hidden under a light brown wig that slicked back behind his ears, and his black eyes were now blue with special contacts, all of which was supposed to hide his real identity but still couldn’t mask the killer inside. This was probably why the guard accompanying us down the hallway tracked Ritter with an alert expression and his hand close to his weapon.

“Their ability to heal is miraculous,” said our guide, Dr. Tina Hartley, a middle-aged woman in a white lab coat similar to Dimitri’s. Her rich, brown hair was pulled into a thick bun at the base of her neck and was her one great beauty. Nothing else about her stood out—except her thoughts. In the mass of whirling emotions that filled her brain, she wondered if our visit would set her schedule back far enough that she would be allowed to work overtime. If so, she’d use the extra money to put toward her dream trip to Paris, where she’d meet a sexy man who wouldn’t scorn her three college degrees and would write her poetry and run his fingers through her hair. The man in her thoughts looked a lot like Ritter, minus the shirt and glasses. Her imagination of him shirtless didn’t begin to approach reality.

“I’ve read the reports,” I said, though I hadn’t—not the real ones. Despite Stella’s technopathic abilities, we hadn’t been able to hack into the reports, which weren’t kept on any network connecting to the outside. Our Renegade cell’s alliance with the US president had allowed us access to the official reports he’d received, but a note smuggled out of this facility had proven our suspicions that the president wasn’t being told the entire story.

Either that or we were being set up—which could very well be the case. Our enemy, the Emporium, was as eager to get their hands on us as they would be to retrieve the so-called “patients” who were detained at this facility. Three months ago in mid-January, the president’s announcement of Unbounded existence rocked the world, and things had been heating up ever since. We’d need to work harder to make sure the Emporium didn’t end up on top when the dust finally settled. Succeeding was the only way Renegades could save mortals and humanity.

The doctor arched a brow, nothing of her scattered thoughts showing in her face. “The reports are not exaggerated. In the two weeks they’ve been here, they’ve pretty much decimated everything any of us know about medicine.” Her voice took on a note of excitement. “They might even be the key to the problem of aging.”

I glanced at Dimitri, whose only reaction was a slight pursing of his lips. His centuries-long study of the Unbounded gene had yielded no result in making mortals Unbounded. Theoretically, mortals who were direct descendants of Unbounded and had enough of the unique code in their genes could Change with scientific manipulation. But the theory had thus far remained unrealized, and other Unbounded researchers, also gifted in healing, agreed that mortals would remain just that—mortal.

“Good thing they live so long,” I said, making my voice cold. “Plenty of time to figure it out.”

“Yes. Two thousand years, and they age only two years for every century. It really is amazing.” Hartley paused before a set of double doors in the hallway, swiping a card through a reader. “We have you scheduled with the Iranian, as requested. We’ve turned off the sound recordings, but we will, of course, leave video on during your interrogation.” She pushed open one of the doors and motioned us into yet another generic corridor.

“Of course.” I didn’t for a minute believe they weren’t recording, not after faking the reports to the president. At least Stella’s faked request from Homeland Security to interview the Iranian could not be ignored. This facility was maintained by Homeland Security, and Homeland supposedly had oversight of the work these doctors had conducted this past month since retrieving the Unbounded detainees from the Moroccan government.

“Iranian, American, Russian,” Dimitri said with indifference. “Doesn’t matter to me. I’m just interested in examining any of them.”

Hartley’s eyes strayed to Dimitri. “With all your research into human mutation, I expect you are especially interested in their limb regrowth and how we might transfer that ability to the general population.”

Dimitri nodded and smiled. “Yes, indeed. I understand that all of them fully regenerated after the explosion in Morocco.”

“They did regenerate beautifully. However, we have seen the need to experiment further.”

A rush of silent emotion from Ritter caught me by surprise. His control was generally tight, even with our usual mental connection, but I understood the lapse because I shared his anger. We were accustomed to the Emporium Unbounded experimenting on other Unbounded, but this was the first time mortals were involved. Previously, Hunters, castoff descendants of the Emporium, were the only mortals aware of us, and they tended toward brief torture followed by hasty execution rather than experimentation and prolonged agony.

“Oh?” Dimitri’s excitement sounded real. “Do you have a regrowth in progress now?”

Dr. Hartley shook her head. “Not at present. However, while you interview the Iranian for whatever information you feel he is withholding, I will talk to my supervisor. He might be able to arrange something for today.” She gave him a smile that made her face slightly more attractive, but her mind registered guilt. Hartley may believe experimentation was necessary, but the morality behind it was another story.

“I don’t believe I read about any regeneration experiments,” I said.

“Some of our regenerations may not have been adequately detailed in the current reports,” Hartley explained. “We have to be sure what we’re seeing isn’t just a fluke. So, naturally, we’re repeating some experiments before we report our findings.”

Someone was obviously keeping secrets about what was going on in this facility. No wonder Shadrach had been desperate enough to contact us. I only hoped the additional information he’d hinted about in his message was real and not a lie he’d concocted to make us come for him faster.

The doctor regarded me with expectant eyes, so I said, “I’m sure our superiors at Homeland Security would be grateful for a firsthand account of regeneration.” Our superiors, meaning hers and mine. “That’s why we employed Dr. Jude”—I dipped my head toward Dimitri—“to conduct his own brief examination of the patient and to give his opinion on the progress here. Anything you can do to facilitate that will be appreciated. Even if it takes us all evening.”

Hartley’s smile widened, and I didn’t have to push to see the dollar signs in her mind. She thought her trip to Paris was almost a done deal, but after today, I could at least guarantee that she wouldn’t be fantasizing about Ritter. She might even lose her job.

Pausing before the single door, Hartley swiped her key card again and pushed down on the handle, this time preceding us but stopping just inside the room, blocking our entry and our view of the occupant. “Hello, Mr. Azima,” she called. “I hope now is a good time for the interview. The visitors I told you about yesterday have arrived.”

Interview not interrogation—apparently the doctor knew how to spin a story.

“Would it matter if I said no?” Shadrach’s English held more than a hint of accent, which told me he was under great stress. After four hundred years, he spoke many languages flawlessly.

My mind reached out to Shadrach’s, but his barriers were in place, and much stronger than any I’d seen in a non-sensing Unbounded except for Ritter and Dimitri. No use expending energy to get through it—not yet.

“Now, now, Mr. Azima.” Dr. Hartley gave an amused chuckle, and I felt irritated more by her patronizing tone than I had by her fantasies of Ritter. “You know what we’re doing here is for the good of all.”

“The same has been said throughout history by all those who use human suffering to their advantage,” Shadrach replied without emotion.

Hartley stiffened and more guilt filled her mind, but Shadrach’s tone became conciliatory. “Never mind, dear. Of course I’ll see them. I know you are just doing your job.”

Dr. Hartley turned to us, her smile now fake, her eyes narrowed and upset. “Please, come in.” She stepped farther into the room, holding the door open with one hand as we filed inside. The guard waited in the hallway. Ritter placed his hand next to Hartley’s, giving her a smile to indicate that he’d hold the door. Hartley was so entranced, she didn’t glance twice at his hand or see what looked like a piece of gray eraser that he pressed under the control pad outside the door.

Shadrach stood in front of a new-looking leather couch, his feet shoulder length apart, his arms hanging loosely at his sides. I’d expected to find him abused and underweight. But he was much as we’d seen him last—physically in his late thirties, more beautiful than handsome, and elegant with straight dark hair, deep brown eyes, and a sensuous mouth. His dark skin had a healthy glow that stood out clearly from the drab green scrubs he was wearing. Only in his eyes did I see a hardness that hadn’t existed before, a hardness that four centuries hadn’t succeeded in placing there before now. How much of his suffering came from witnessing his mortal son’s murder by the Emporium in Morocco and how much derived from his internment here, I might never know.

He showed no signs of recognition, except for meeting Dimitri’s eyes a fraction of a second longer than a stranger might. Shadrach was also a healer, and the two men had worked together in Africa years ago. Shadrach was one of the best, Dimitri had told me. Being a guinea pig for procedures that were far behind Unbounded advancements must have been particularly trying for the Iranian.

“Hello, Mr. Azima,” I said for Dr. Hartley’s benefit. “Thank you for meeting with us. I hope this won’t take long, but the government does have a few questions about your involvement with the events in Morocco.”

He sighed without meeting my gaze. “I don’t suppose they’ll ever get tired of asking, but my answers won’t change. I had nothing to do with the attempt to sell plutonium to insurgents in my country.”

That wasn’t exactly true because Shadrach had tried to trade the recovered plutonium to the Emporium for his son’s life. In true Emporium fashion, they’d murdered the son anyway. No thanks to Shadrach, we’d still managed to retrieve the package and save millions of lives.

“Well, enjoy your visit,” Hartley chirped. “I’ll come back when you give the signal to the camera.” She indicated the guard. “Let Murphy know if you need any help. He’ll be waiting in the corridor.” She nodded at us, her eyes lingering too long on Ritter before escaping into the hallway.

For a brief moment, as the door closed between us, I felt a surge of unease, knowing that we were locked inside that room every bit as much as Shadrach had been for the past month.

Ritter went right to work, opening the laptop he carried. The device was supposed to record our interrogation but would actually connect wirelessly to the camera in the corner of the room. This would allow Stella, who was at our safe house in San Diego, to remotely follow the wires back to the computer and access not only that camera but the entire security system located on their internal network. Fortunately, this was the US government we were infiltrating, not the more advanced Emporium, so we’d been able to ascertain what technology they were using and didn’t need to plug one of Stella’s devices physically into their network. The laptop would suffice, but it would take some time.

Dimitri had already approached Shadrach, and both men were now seated on the couch, Dimitri listening to Shadrach’s heart with his stethoscope. In reality, it was the hand on Shadrach’s back that was doing the real work. Dimitri would be using his ability to see into Shadrach’s body, to trace every vein and feel every organ.

I allowed my gaze to wander over the room, or suite, actually. On the wall was a flat screen television, and past this a bed sat next to a set of weights. A small kitchenette nestled in the far back corner, and the single door there must lead to a bathroom. Everything appeared clean and new.

Shadrach followed my gaze. “They let us into a common area twice a day to interact with each other.”

“You mean the other patients?” I wanted to say Emporium agents, but I was sure the doctors were still recording.

“Prisoners,” Shadrach corrected, distaste radiating from the word. He didn’t say more, yet as he met my gaze, I saw recognition there. He knew me underneath the putty, the brunette wig, and the shiny red lipstick. He’d helped me once, healing my exhaustion when I’d needed rest, and despite his betrayal, I cared for Shadrach Azima. Trying to save his mortal son was a goal I understood, even if he’d let his desperation endanger us all. He should have known the Emporium better, that they wouldn’t reward him as promised. Then there was the whole argument of whether or not the life of his son balanced out eight million lives being targeted in Israel. Or far, far more lives. Because the Emporium would not rest until they had complete control, no matter how many mortals died. Like Shadrach’s son, mortals were only a subspecies to them. Expendable.

“Okay.” Ritter stepped closer to the couch, placing the laptop on the coffee table. “It’s working. You can talk freely now. Stella has control over the cameras and the sound.”

Apparently satisfied with his examination of Shadrach, Dimitri shook out earbuds from a container in his medical bag and handed one to each of us. They looked like replacement tips for his stethoscope but in reality would connect us to Oliver, who was outside waiting for us in the van. I didn’t actually need the earbud because I could use my ability to communicate directly to his mind, but Oliver hated me in his head, and I had to admit that his self-centered mental world was not one I had the least interest in visiting. Besides, if the Emporium happened to be near, it paid to keep our mental shields in place.

“This is the plan,” Ritter continued for Shadrach’s benefit. “There’s a ventilation shaft in the hallway off the kitchen here, so we just have to make it there and follow the path to the roof. We’ve already dropped equipment there that will allow us to rappel down the building. Then it’s only a matter of making it to the breach in the fence that we prepared last night. With Stella controlling the cameras, it should be easy to avoid being spotted. Your door lock is completely self-contained, but we have plans for that.”

There was a touch of frustration in Ritter’s manner at the simplicity of the plan, though he’d been responsible for the details. The Unbounded gene in our bodies made it so we preferred a head-on confrontation, and for someone with the combat ability like Ritter, skulking around in ventilation shafts went against all instinct. But he’d stick to the plan. Because getting Shadrach to safety and finding out what he knew was the most important thing. We might still run into problems, even with Ritter’s close attention to detail, and that’s why there were three of us—in case something went wrong.

“No,” Shadrach said, his sharp tone stopping Ritter in mid-stride to the locked door. “We can’t. Not yet.”

I arched a brow. “Hey, you’re the one who contacted us. Remember that cryptic email sent to our bogus chat group?”

“I meant we can’t leave without the others,” he said, coming to his feet.

We all stared. “You mean the Emporium agents? The people who tried to kill us in Morocco?” The people who murdered your son. But I didn’t say that last part aloud.

“We can’t leave them.” Shadrach shook his head, his face looking suddenly ill. “You don’t know what it’s like here. They cut off my arm last week just to see how long it took to grow back. They put out one guy’s eye. Oh, they’re kind enough to give us morphine. Except for the guy they electrocuted to death. Yes, electrocuted. The guy they froze also didn’t have any painkillers. They wanted to test his tolerance for cold.” Shadrach swallowed noisily in the abrupt silence. “Those are only the highlights. They’re far worse than the Moroccans—and they were nasty enough.”

“Their people will come for them.” Ritter’s jaw clenched and unclenched like his fists.

“That’s right. They will—and they’ll murder every mortal here. But the doctors and staff are only under orders, for the most part, and they don’t deserve that.” Shadrach’s dark eyes went to Dimitri in appeal. “In the past three months since the explosion on that rooftop, I’ve done what I can to help the Emporium agents heal, to ease their pain. They trust me, and since the announcement, they’re different. They want to live in peace. They don’t want to return to the Emporium.”

“I find that hard to believe,” Ritter said. “Maybe you have some other reason to want us to help them.”

Shadrach grimaced. “I know what you think of me, and maybe I was wrong in Morocco—”

“You almost got us killed!” Ritter didn’t take a step toward him, but the fury in his face made Shadrach step back until his calves hit the couch.

“I know,” Shadrach said, his voice strangled. “But you’re going to have to trust me on this one. Because you’re not going to leave me here, so either you drag me kicking and screaming or you take them too.”

The veins in Ritter’s neck bulged. “Believe me, I won’t have to take you screaming.” For an instant, I thought Ritter was going to punch the healer out and throw him over his shoulder. I’d probably help him.

Dimitri stepped in. “Let’s hear him out.”

“Okay,” I answered for Ritter, giving him time to calm down. “We’ll listen. But we’re going to make the final decision, Shadrach. Not you.”

“Agreed,” he said.

Ritter’s fists relaxed. “This could be a plan on their part. Did you think of that?”

Shadrach scrubbed a hand over his face and into his black hair, causing it to fall out of place. “If so, it’s an elaborate plan that started back in Morocco. Two of these agents hate the Emporium as much as I do, and the other has listened to us. I won’t pretend that their courage doesn’t come mostly from knowing Delia Vesey is dead. The fact that she can’t hurt them or their families anymore if they don’t do what she orders was a huge factor in their decision.” He paused before adding, “Vesey caused some damages—perhaps permanent—in one man’s mind, the one who took convincing. I fixed what I could, but he’s not all there in the logic department. Reality is hard for him to understand. But the others, I’m sure of.”

Now he made a direct appeal to Ritter. “They know where the Emporium strongholds are, at least five of them. The major ones. They’re willing to share that information with us.”

Ritter’s head swung toward Dimitri and they shared a long, silent stare. I knew what it would mean to locate Emporium headquarters. They’d recently relocated many of their safe houses after we’d obtained intel on the locations from a thumb drive recovered in Mexico, and since then we’d made little headway on tracking their whereabouts. This intel could prove invaluable.

Shadrach’s eyes fixed on me. “Erin can see that I’m telling the truth.” The shield around his mind dropped—an invitation I immediately accepted. In the representation I created of his conscious mind, I stood on a sort of stage, and his thoughts fell from the darkness above me in a stream of what looked like sand, curving downward and disappearing again into the darkness at hip level. Each grain of sand represented a thought or memory, past or present. I would only see thoughts he was currently pondering or memories he recalled as I studied him, but it would be enough to get a feel about his truthfulness.

I stared deeper, more interested in searching for Emporium traps—the mental constructs Delia Vesey, a former Emporium Triad leader, had been so good at placing in people’s minds. Mental traps could be fatal for the person carrying them and for any sensing Unbounded attempting to repair the damage. Delia’s assistant had survived the encounter in Morocco, so he could have planted something in Shadrach’s mind, and the Emporium had at least a few other sensing Unbounded, if the rumors were true. But Shadrach’s mind was clean. Not a hint of Emporium meddling—or prefabrication on Shadrach’s part. He believed what he was saying.

“He’s telling the truth,” I said, “and I don’t see any Emporium constructs in his mind.”

Ritter nodded once, his face grim. “Then we’ll do it.” His surface emotions radiated determination, but his mental shield was otherwise strong.

“Wait, wait, wait!” Oliver said in my earbud. “Are you guys sure about this? Because that’s going to take longer, and I kind of feel like a sitting duck all alone out here in the van.”

“Aren’t you masking it?” I asked. His ability of illusion was the reason we’d let him come with us at all. Because while Oliver was a genius, his arrogance made us all pretty much want to kill him.

“Well, it was a fruit stand for a while, but people stopped and tried to buy some.” He groaned. “I had to make the fruit appear moldy to get them to leave.”

I bit my lip “So put up a closed sign!”

“Right.”

Trust Oliver to take such pride in his illusions that his fake fruits looked and smelled great enough to make people stop to buy them even in this manufacturing area.

I caught a glimpse of irritation on Ritter’s face before he said to Oliver, “We may need a distraction at the front of the building. Something with a lot of fireworks. Be prepared. And have Stella extend her satellite surveillance to a radius of three streets in case the Emporium decides to join our party. I want to know if there’s anything unusual.”

“Will do,” Oliver said, sounding chastised. He didn’t have a lot of respect for the rest of us, but his admiration of Ritter was almost as irritating as his know-it-all attitude. “The satellite we tasked here did go down for a few minutes. Could have been someone hacking our feed, but it’s back up and running perfectly now, and we’ve detected no unusual activity so far.”

“No other fruit stands?” Dimitri asked, a hint of a smile in his voice.

Oliver took offense at his gentle jibe. “As a matter of fact, there is a defunct one. That’s what gave me the idea. There’s an orchard only two miles from here, so it’s completely logical for a fruit stand to be in this area.”

“I was sure you had a reason, but that’s good to know.” Dimitri had more patience with Oliver than the rest of us. Probably because he considered himself the father of our cell.

Biologically speaking, Dimitri was my father, but I’d only known him since my Change just over seven months ago. I’d come to terms with my uncertain beginning, and while I still considered the man who raised me to be my real father, Dimitri and I were closer in many ways.

Shadrach shifted nervously, his eyes going to the door. “So what now?”

Ritter’s eyes narrowed at the healer. “Now we try not to get killed.”

Chapter 1

“HELLO, MY NAME is Finley.”

Her name was all she’d been asked to share, and why she didn’t stop there, she couldn’t say for sure. Maybe it was the fact that she’d been forced into coming here today. Or possibly because somewhere in the uncharted regions of her soul, she knew she needed this. Whatever the reason, uninvited words continued to march across her lips.

“Well, most people just call me Finnie, except I hate that. I was named after my granny Opaline Finley-Taylor. I loved her very much.” A tear pricked the corner of Finley’s eye, her gaze sweeping the circle of questioning looks. “God rest her soul.”

The woman sitting across from Finley—Burlie-Jean, the paper tag adhered to her lapel read—lifted one palm to the air, the hand of the other pressing to the center of her generous bosom. “Lord bless her poor, wretched soul,” she echoed, eyes closed, face turned toward heaven.

Finley mustered a half smile in response. “So, Finley . . . My name is Finley.”

“Hello, Finley!” chorused the group of three women and one man in return.

The echo of their greeting bounced from the rafters of the tired YMCA basketball court, falling in rivulets to shake Finley’s tattered nerves. “Lord a’mighty,” she said, pressing both palms against her chest to still the vibrations, “y’all give quite the welcome.”

Careen, their group leader, shook back the curtain of strawberry-blonde hair that draped around her heart-shaped face, then settled her pebble-eyed gaze on Finley. “Now, just tell us why you’re here?”

Dragging her fingertips nervously through the first traces of gray arching up from her widow’s peak, Finley stalled, “Oh right,” as she struggled against the memory, attempting to keep all the details, the sordid ones at least, corralled to the far corners of her mind. “Well, like I said before, I’m Finley,” she repeated, knowing the blush reddening her cheeks would not go unnoticed. With raven hair, light blue eyes, and rosy cheeks and lips, it had never been a stretch for her to dress as Snow White on Halloween, and in situations such as this, next to impossible to hide even the smallest trace of embarrassment. “I’m forty. Just turned last week. Labor Day, as a matter of fact.” She smiled as if sharing her birthday with a national holiday this year had been an exciting twist of events. It hadn’t been. “They say forty is the new thirty, but with both my babies off to college and my home so quiet all of a sudden, it doesn’t feel like . . .” If only she could define how she felt. “Well, someone should tell my mirror. Because somehow my reflection didn’t get the memo,” she said a little too brightly. “If you know what I mean,” she added and then snorted. Snorted!

A subtle throat clearing, and then Careen leaned forward. “Yes, I think we all know what you mean, so why don’t we get back to you telling us why you’re here.”

Finley crushed the folly from her voice. “Of course, I’m so sorry.” She shared a brief apologetic smile with each of her fellow therapy victims—um, members. “I’ve forgotten my manners. My momma would hate that,” she added on the trail of a sigh. “Momma. She’s the real reason I’m here. Because she decided I needed help. That I wasn’t handling my,” she pursed her lips, searching for the right words, “my situation properly.” In other words, the way she thought Finley should. “So here I am, in group therapy.”

Careen’s tiny bowed mouth pulled into a thin, condescending line. “That’s right, Finley, and in group therapy we work as a group to help each other process and take steps to improve our lives. And, in group therapy, the very first step is for each member to admit, out loud, to the rest of the group, why he or she is here,” she explained, carefully measuring each word. “So why don’t you take a deep breath, start again, and tell us exactly why you’re here today.” She gave Finley a pointed look. “Okay?”

Finley gulped back on her chagrin. “All right.” Threading her fingers through the thick layers of her hair, she re-deposited the bulk of it over her shoulders. Her hesitation had everyone leaning slightly forward, though she couldn’t imagine why. They were all here for the same reason. “I’m divorced.”

A quiet hush of relief that she’d finally said the d-word advanced around the small circle. The group members settled back in their seats.

Then Careen made a rolling motion with her miniature hand. “How long?” she prompted.

“Two weeks.” Finley held up coinciding fingers. “It’s been two weeks since I signed the papers, ending my twenty-one-year marriage.” There, she’d said it—aloud. She was divorced. A divorcée. Single. Completely on her own. Alone.

Finley’s heart rolled into a ball and beat against her throat.

For the first time since she’d signed the papers, the divorce felt real.

Final.

“Very good, Finley,” Careen said, forcing the sort of smile that told Finley the worst was yet to come. “And here at ‘Divorce Is Not an End But a New Beginning’ we work to move forward by taking steps that will move us beyond the hurt where we can begin the healing.” She flourished her delicate hands out to the group in an earnest plea. “Now, would you like to share with everyone why it is your momma insisted you come here today?”

Finley feigned thought for a moment. “It was nothing, really.” She waved her hand, clearing the air of any notion to the contrary. “Just a minor altercation at last week’s garden club luncheon.”

“Small?” Careen pursed her lips, disbelieving. “Altercation?”

Finley rolled a shoulder in a nonchalant fashion. “Yes well, there may have been some name calling, a few deep, dark secrets revealed, and,” she glanced around to see that everyone was leaning closer again, “a slap or two. But really, no one was hurt. Not seriously, at least.”

“Hm-hmm,” Burlie-Jean hummed with a sway of her head, her gaze sending a critical stare at Finley—a stare eerily similar to the one Macy Wallace had lobbed at Finley not five days ago. More specifically, the proverbial falling shoe that had sent Finley over the edge she hadn’t even realized she’d been teetering on.

“It’s okay, Finley,” Careen said in a soothing voice. “Like I stated earlier, this is a safe zone.” She made a sweeping motion with her hands, indicating the corner of the gymnasium they’d laid claim to. “Nothing said within this group is ever repeated or judged. We’re all here to support one another.”

Finley had known before coming here, she’d likely be asked to recount the incident. But as the particulars of that day crowded their way to the forefront of her mind, she suddenly had the sensation she was falling, disappearing into an oblivion, only to reemerge and find herself, dreamlike, in a different time and place she’d wanted never to visit again . . .

The sunroom where her garden club held their meetings had been stuffed to capacity that day with tables full of warm-breathed women. Even with the wicker-paddled fans moving at high speed, and the air conditioning blowing incessantly, the room had felt stuffy. The ice in Finley’s sweet tea had begun to melt, fanning a wet ring out onto the ivory tablecloth beneath. Conjectural whispers accosted her from all directions, circling her body like a python, squeezing until she could hardly draw a breath.

“When you’re ready, Finley,” Careen encouraged. “Just take your time.”

Closing her eyes, Finley sunk deeper into her latest nightmare. “It was my garden club’s monthly luncheon, and from the podium, Macy Wallace was talking about decorations for the autumn festival at Cheekwood gardens,” she began, her voice vacant as if playing from a recording in her head. “Then, Macy glanced over at me with her trademark sympathetic look. You know, the kind that seems sincere though it’s anything but, and said, ‘Finnie, I’m so sorry you’ve been too preoccupied to be of much help this year, but we understand. Divorce proceedings can sometimes be such an emotional drain. And though we all know, and believe, that our Lord and Savior does not look kindly on the dissolution of any marriage, we want you to know that not one of your garden club sisters is judging you. Our hearts go out to you Finnie. And to your poor, broken-homed children . . .”

“She said that?” the woman next to Finley scoffed. “She said, ‘your poor, broken-homed children’?”

Finley’s eyes fluttered, the here-and-now abruptly dropping around her like the changing backdrop of a play. “Well, those may not have been her exact words, but as I looked around at everyone, and the faked sympathy on their faces, I don’t know—that was how it sounded to me,” she admitted, then pressed her parched lips together. Taking a quick look around, she searched for a refreshment table, but saw none. Didn’t these types of meetings generally include coffee and doughnuts? Ice water?

“And then?” Careen gently prompted, reminding Finley that she was nowhere near the end of her story.

Finley turned her attention back to the circle and all the eyes fixated on her with a weary interest. She hated herself for even considering the fact, but—how could she put this without sounding catty?—she and her fellow group members didn’t exactly run in the same social circles. Normally, she wasn’t one to air her laundry, especially that of the soiled variety, but it wasn’t like she’d ever see any of these people outside of this smelly gym. So what could it hurt to simply go ahead and spill the rest?

Pulling in a breath tainted with the hint of sweaty socks, she pressed on. “Before I knew what was happening, my napkin was flying from my lap as I stood and hollered, ‘Oh cut the crap, Macy, or should I say Kittlylou? You’re one to talk! We all know about your past life and that pimp of a first husband who ran a gentleman’s club outta that doublewide you crawled out from under. Or doesn’t God consider a common-law marriage sinful to abandon?’”

Finley’s fellow group members shared a hushed gasp, but she hastened on, desperate all of a sudden, to let it all out. “Then Macy smoothed a hand over that tacky yellow dye-job of hers and said, ‘Why, Finnie, what on earth has gotten into you?’ Momma was yanking on my skirt, telling me to sit down and shut my ‘feral trap,’ but I ignored her. ‘Oh, I see how this is gonna go,’ I said to Macy. ‘And since we’re not talkin’ ’bout past transgressions, I guess we’re just gonna pretend like I didn’t catch you doing the white-trash two-step with my husband on my brand new Bernhardt sofa?’

“Macy’s mouth fell open, and she covered the hole with her tawdry pink nails, and Suzanna, her minion-in-chief, got to her feet and said, ‘Finnie Harrison, this is not the time or place for such talk!’ She should have stayed out of it. ‘Don’t you ‘Finnie Harrison’ me, Suzanna! We all know the UPS man is delivering more than packages to your house every day. I mean, honestly, not even Molly does that much online shopping . . . Molly spends more hours watching the shopping channel than her husband does on that porn site he’s addicted to, and an attic brimming over with the hidden evidence to prove it. But then who can blame her when her husband spends every free moment on that Internet porn site—Fifty Shades of Laid?”

Muffled snickers shook the shoulders of the woman sitting next to Finley, but she hardly noticed as she finished the rest.

“And then like Julia Roberts in the movie, Something to Talk About, more secrets came spilling from my mouth, and consequently the mouths of others. And by the time Momma and Cathyanne had drug me out, the skeletons of nearly every woman in that room had been exposed . . .” Finley let her words and the rest fade with what was left of her denial.

Though more than seventy-five women had witnessed her little hissy fit that day, up until this moment, Finley had worked hard to convince herself the incident had been nothing more than a bad dream—the kind you wake from, pinching yourself, thankful it wasn’t real. Only now did she truly realize there would be no waking from this dream. It had been real—all too real—and she wasn’t proud of her behavior or the lives turned on end by her outburst. But she hoped, in the very least, that releasing those women’s secrets had somehow made them free. If what we kept hidden didn’t fade from reality just because we refused to speak of it, why did Finley, like everybody else, try so hard to hide from who she really was?

Maybe if she didn’t work so hard trying to be someone she wasn’t, finding her true self wouldn’t feel so impossible . . .

“Finley?” Careen was saying. “Are you all right?”

The group leader’s question severed Finley from her musing. “Yes, fine,” she whispered before reclaiming her voice. “Suffice it to say, I may have ruined a few marriages, not to mention friendships, that day.”

“So this ‘altercation,’ as you called it, was about confronting the woman your husband was having an affair with?” Careen restated.

Finley shrugged. Truthfully, she’d been more concerned by Macy’s insinuation that she’d ruined her life, shamed her family, and was headed straight for hell, than with provoking the woman she’d caught her husband with. “Yeah, I guess,” she agreed, because doing so was easier than delving any further into the true cause behind her outburst. “But he and Macy were just a one-time fling. There were other affairs.”

“Let’s start with this business regarding Macy,” Careen said. “How did it make you feel, walking in on your husband with another woman?”

Finley knew what Careen expected her to say. And sure, over the years she had struggled with the why-wasn’t-I-good-enough question more times than she could count. Then one day, like a squeaky hinge or a picture frame that refused to hang straight, the vexation had grown insignificant with time and frequency until the “why” simply didn’t matter anymore.

As for Careen’s specific question, Finley thought back to the end of May. It was the day she’d dropped her daughter, Royanne (named for Finley’s husband and best friend—and yes, her daughter hated her name too), off at the Vanderbilt University dorms to attend a summer program, preparatory to her fall semester’s classes. She’d planned to help Royanne settle in and then buy her a quick farewell lunch, but her daughter had circled Finley in a half-hearted hug and said: “Thanks, Momma. Love you. I can take it from here.”

Finley had been dismissed. Rendered unnecessary.

Sniffing back a mounting wave of loss, she’d serpentined her way through parents and students, back the way she’d come, all while trying, unsuccessfully, to ignore a surging need for comfort in the form of red velvet cake balls. When her cravings only grew stronger, the closer she came to home, she’d dropped in at the market to pick up a few missing ingredients and headed for her big, empty kitchen.

Her mouth watering with anticipation of a little guilty pleasure, the very last thing she’d expected to see upon entering her family room was Roy’s bare backside arching into view over the sofa, followed by a high-pitched squeak that was uncannily female. As Finley’s grocery bag had floated in slow motion to the floor, she vaguely remembered a fleeting pinch of humiliation. But now that she was thinking back, she realized what had bothered her the most was not the sight of her husband tangled up with another woman, but how they were defiling her beloved new sofa.

“I felt . . . relieved,” slipped from Finley’s lips before she could come up with a more appropriate answer. Until that day, she’d obediently carried the burden of undeclared consent, drowning under the weight of an unfulfilling marriage. But this time, Roy’s act of betrayal had been too blatant for even the most devout Christian to ignore, a clean slice through the tether that had bound her tongue, her first gasp of sweet breath upon breaching the water’s surface.

Burlie-Jean pointed a curled acrylic nail in Finley’s direction. “Girl, you done lost you’re ever-lovin’ mind,” she called out with a tremor in her incredulous voice. “If I’d caught my Henry with his two-bit hussy, I-like-ta wrung both their necks right then and there. My man was just too darn sneaky is all.”

The woman next to Burlie-Jean, the one who’d been chewing her nails the entire session, pulled her pinky finger out of her mouth long enough to say, “He abuse you?” then resumed her assault, but on her thumbnail this time. Painfully thin with stringy hair and big brown eyes that shifted anxiously around the room, the name on her tag read Sue.

Philandering behavior aside, and unless you counted never standing up to his mother whenever that spiteful woman spoke all manner of ill against Finley, Roy was a good man. “No,” she answered, deciding that verbal abuse by proxy probably didn’t count.

Sue tucked her now bleeding thumbnail into her palm and curled her fingers into a fist. “He a gambler?” she asked. “Lost all y’all’s money?”

“No,” Finley said. Money had always been Roy’s number-one focus. He would never do anything to jeopardize his precious millions, or the social status his wealth had bought him. “He worked a lot though. He owns a car dealership down in Nashville. Three, actually.”

The woman next to Finley piped up with, “A drinker then?” Finley had felt this woman’s stare burning into her throughout the meeting, but hadn’t yet addressed her directly. She turned to her now. If she looked past her surly expression, spiky jet-black hair, and pierced lip, she was actually quite pretty. From what was left of the nametag the young woman was painstakingly shredding, one impossibly thin strip at a time, her name was Nora. “He addicted to drugs?”

Roy was obsessed with having the biggest and the best of everything, but could his thirst to one-up the world be considered an addiction? “No.” Finley shook her head and turned away.

Careen said, “Finley, then can you explain why it was you felt relief at catching your husband in the act of being unfaithful?”

Finley glanced around at the glum expressions of the women looking back at her and felt a twinge of guilt. These ladies had obviously fallen victim to heartache and possibly some terrible atrocities at the hands of their estranged husbands, and all she could come up with was that her husband had worked too much—which in all honesty, he hadn’t. Not really. But does a woman have to have been a victim of the unthinkable to want out of her marriage?

“People always talk like it’s such a tragedy when a twenty-year marriage falls apart, like if it had lasted that long then, surely, it should have lasted forever,” said Finley. “Personally, I’m more surprised when couples who have only been married a little while split up.”

“Statistics show the majority of marriages that end in demise do so within the first three years,” Careen threw out. “So what makes you believe the opposite?”

Finley rolled her shoulders back and down, giving herself a moment to think, to look back to when she and Roy were barely more than teenagers. “Things were great—blissful even—between Roy and me at first, but then as we grew older and the years wore on, it became evident we had separate goals . . . always had, I suppose. Then, one day, I realized I couldn’t remember what it was I’d ever loved about him,” she said, though she knew full well what had driven her to marry at age nineteen. Her mother had deemed Roy a dangerous “loser” from the wrong side of town, and thus had forbidden her daughter to associate with him.

“Then as the anniversaries and birthdays came and went, he would repeatedly come home with milk chocolates when I prefer dark. Roses when daisies have always been my favorite . . . when I was mad, frustrated, sad, he never acted like he had a clue why. He ignored my tears. Finally, I realized that after all these years he didn’t even know me.” Finley swallowed back an uprising of acrid emotion. “I hear divorced couples say that they simply grew apart. But we never grew together in the first place.”

Nora sucked in a spurt of air in detest. “You divorced your husband because he brought you the wrong flowers?”

Finley felt the sting of her teeth digging into her bottom lip. She’d entertained these thoughts in her head a thousand times before, but never had she felt her true feelings actually sliding over her tongue. The taste was bitter, the resonance petty, offensive even. No wonder she’d needed to use Roy’s affair as an excuse for their divorce.

“Nora . . .” Careen warned in a stern voice. Then she softened her gaze and shifted it back to Finley. “So what are your plans for the future?” she asked. “What are you going to do now that you’re single again?”

Finley rubbed a nonexistent chill from her shoulders. “I’m not entirely sure, but recently, I joined a gym with my friend, Cathyanne. I work out with a trainer twice a week.” Her cheeks began to redden with a fresh blush at the mere mention of the hunky man who, bi-weekly, twisted her into more kinky positions under the guise of exercise than Roy had in two decades of marital relations. “His name is Josh,” she added, like his name could possibly matter to the group.

“Is that a fact?” Burlie-Jean said, sending her gaze for an obvious once-over of Finley’s fitted yoga pants. “Sounds like that tight little butt of yours ain’t all he’s had his hands on.”

Fire leapt from Finley’s cheeks, burning a trail down her neck. “Oh, no, it’s not like that,” she said, though there was no denying she’d indulged in a fantasy or two—nightly.

Nora cocked a skeptical brow. “What’s it like then?”

Suddenly, Finley couldn’t breathe. “I . . . Well, he’s . . .” Or speak.

“He’s?” Nora persisted.

“He’s at least ten years my junior,” Finley choked out. “We’re not . . .”

“Not what?” Burlie-Jean jumped in with a purse of her dark, fully lined lips.

Finley gave her head a good shake. “Not anything,” she said, taking a firm mental hold on reality. “Josh is young and athletic. And I’m forty!—and the mother of two grown children. Good heavens. I’m not that kind of woman. I would never—”

“Date a man you’re obviously attracted to?” Nora sneered. “I bet your husband wouldn’t think twice ’bout screwin’ a woman half his age.”

Sue let out a soft yelp, her eyes seesawing between Nora and Finley.

Silence stretched thin between them, affording the only man in the group the opportunity to speak for the first time. “But then again, an eye for an eye”—Finley shifted her attention across the circle to the man with close-cropped hair and the steel-eyed look of a cop. Ford was his name—“a tooth for a tooth eventually just leaves folks blind and unable to chew properly,” he said in a slow unaffected drawl.

Finley stared back at him. What was he saying? That just because it was acceptable for a man to date someone younger didn’t mean that a woman had the right to do so as well? Or did he mean that we could never truly get back what had been taken from us? “I’m not like my ex, and I never want to be,” she said. “And besides, Josh is not the least bit interested in the likes of me.”

“How do you know unless you tell him how you feel?” Nora countered.

“Look, y’all, if I was going to date anyone it would be Quinton,” Finley said before she had time to realize she’d wanted to say it.

“Who’s Quinton?” Nora asked.

Finley waved the idea away. “No one,” she said with a gulp. “He’s just my neighbor. We’re friends. I don’t even know why I said that.” Quinton was a country singer who had been living next door to Finley for a little over eight years now. He was sweet and sexy, and habitually single, but there had never been the slightest hint of romantic feelings between them.

“Maybe because you want to be more than just Quinton’s friend,” Ford suggested.

Did she? Finley didn’t know for sure. She’d never thought of Quinton that way. Well, not seriously, and she’d certainly never say as much out loud. “Um, I don’t . . . know.” Finley looked to Careen for help, and thankfully the group leader came to her rescue.

“All right, I think we’ve given Finley enough food for thought on her first day.” Careen waved her arms in a settle-down motion. “As I explained earlier, each week we focus on one step, and then at the following meeting report on the progress we’ve made toward completing that step,” she explained. “So for the benefit of our newest member, how ’bout we recite the ‘Five Steps to a New Beginning’ before moving on.” She pointed to a rolling chalkboard. “All together now.”

“Number one: Subjugate fear,” she started, and the rest of the group joined in. “Take chances. Learn from and consent to the unexpected.”

“Number two: Defy the rules, embrace the guidelines. Rules emphasize the result. Guidelines focus on the journey.

“Number three: Smash the box. Look outside your comfort zone for the best answers and the greatest opportunity for growth.

“Number four: Brimful heart. If one’s heart is hollow, one’s actions are hollow.

Number five: Letitgo. Leave the past, live the future.”

Following along with the words scrawled onto the powder-smeared chalkboard, Finley felt a cool sweat breaking out on her forehead. Only five goals, but each one felt like one gaping pit of quicksand after another.

Take chances and defy rules? Smash the box? Letitgo? What did any of that even mean? Brimful heart. Finley pressed the heel of her palm to the center of her chest and felt nothing, nothing but an empty hole where her heart should be. Just because she hadn’t been particularly sad to see Roy pack his things and go, didn’t mean his absence hadn’t left a gap in her life. His leaving had been like pulling a random peg from a Jenga tower, only to find that it was the last piece still holding the structure together.

Careen said, “I know these goals can seem overwhelming at first, but taking the first step is the hardest part.”

“Amen to that,” Burlie-Jean agreed.

“Though some of us are further along than others, we’re all on the same path,” Careen went on. “Everyone progresses at his or her own pace. One step at a time, one week at a time until we find our new normal,” she said, then zeroed in on Finley. “So start with number one, only number one . . .”

Finley watched Careen’s lips spill words of hope and encouragement. If only she could bathe in the completeness each syllable offered until the possibility adhered to her skin, remolding her, body and soul, into the kind of woman who knew what it meant to be happy, one who refused to settle for anything less—

“Finley?” Careen said, causing Finley to start. “This coming week, your first task is to identify a fear and then make an attempt to overcome that fear. Do you think you can do that?”

Having already put too much of herself on display for these strangers’ entertainment, what Finley really wanted to do was leave and never set foot inside this circle again. “I’ll surely give it a try,” she promised, though, obviously, she had no intention of doing any such thing.

“Good.” Careen appeared cautiously optimistic. “Okay, who wants to share next?”

THE IN BETWEEN WAS NEITHER warm nor cold, and I didn’t experience the confusion or discomfort shifters had reported in past centuries. If anything, I felt hyperaware and secure. I was supposedly nowhere, but I had to be somewhere. Or perhaps I ceased to exist in the nanosecond it took me to shift from one place to the next.

There was no color in the in between, but numbers spun through my head, logical and safe. Numbers didn’t lie. They didn’t pretend to love you and then give you up to be murdered.

Finishing the shift, I appeared in the conference room located on the main floor of our San Diego Fortress. Those already in the conference room looked in my direction as I appeared, and I knew it was because of the soft pop and slight suction of air that accompanied my shifts. Ava O’Hare, the leader of our Renegade cell, was seated in her usual place at the head of the conference table. Dimitri Sidorov, our healer and second-in-command, was also present and seated on Ava’s right. My fifth great-aunt Stella sat next to him. No one else had yet arrived.

Stella smiled and glanced my way, her neural headset blinking like an electric crown as she continued to work. She was half Japanese and half Irish, the most beautiful woman I’d ever met, even if that was partly because of the nanites she, as a technopath, controlled in her body.

Despite her smile, I saw the worry in her eyes, and something inside me stirred. When Stella looked at me that way, excitement lurked in my immediate future. And excitement in our line of business always meant trouble.

My gaze returned to Ava O’Hare. Since yesterday, she’d been holed up in this conference room with some of the others, namely Dimitri and Stella, and also Ritter, who was our ops leader. Now it appeared that whatever plans they’d been hatching involved me. I was more than ready. The past months of doing nothing here in this mansion-turned-Fortress while the world clamored for our blood had me on edge.

I started toward my customary seat beside Stella, but Ava indicated the chair to her left. I glanced at Stella again, for the first time experiencing a bit of unease. Perhaps we weren’t waiting for the rest of our cell. Maybe I was the only one invited.

“Thank you for coming, Mari,” Ava began, almost formally.

I could read nothing in her gray eyes, unyielding as steel. She looked as calm as ever, from her smooth blond hair to the crisp black suit. “Did something happen to the president?” I asked. “Or his son?”

Two months had passed since the president had announced the existence of the Unbounded to the world, a declaration forced upon him by our near-fatal prevention of an Emporium plan to embroil the world in nuclear warfare. Since then, we Unbounded Renegades had waited to see which way public opinion would swing and if the president would be able to enact laws to safeguard humanity. Not from Renegades, sworn to protect all humans, but from the Emporium Unbounded, our enemy, who believed they should rule over mortals as they would cattle.

“A situation is threatening our future,” Ava said, “and we’re hoping you can help.”

“Hunters?” I plastered on a smile to hide the helpless rage that came with my question. Hunters were a group of people originally descended from Emporium Unbounded, and their sole purpose was to eliminate all Unbounded, regardless of their loyalties. But I had a better reason to hate them.

“Yes and no,” Ava said.

As she spoke, Keene McIntyre and Cort Bagley came into the room, their gait hurried. Relief waved through me that I wasn’t the only one on today’s agenda. The half brothers were an integral part of our Renegade cell and apparently part of this upcoming op—whatever it was. Keene sat next to me, and I purposely didn’t meet his eyes. He’d been different since the fire in Venezuela when we’d been sent to gather intel, and I didn’t know him well enough to pinpoint why. We’d survived, and he joked around with me like before, but it wasn’t the same between us. Maybe because as one of the few mortal Renegades he’d been in real danger there, no matter how good he was in combat. I knew too well that facing death could change you. But he’d been fighting this battle for years, so what was different about Venezuela?

Cort nodded at me as he passed my chair and settled next to Keene. He would have been nerdy if he hadn’t been Unbounded; instead, he was arresting in a scientific sort of way, with startling blue eyes that radiated intelligence. He’d lived half a millennium, but his physical age was closer to forty. I was too old for crushes, but if I hadn’t been, he would be a good choice.

“I’m sure it can’t help our situation that Hunters are spreading rumors about Unbounded having abilities,” I said. “Makes it harder for everyone to accept us.”

“Rumors?” Keene’s eyes riveted on my face as he settled further into his high-backed leather chair, their disquieting green capturing mine against my will. His brown hair had grown several inches and added carelessness to his narrow face, currently shadowed by several days’ beard growth. His long-sleeved T-shirt did nothing to hide his leanness or the corded muscles running along his arms. “Mortals are going to find out the truth about the abilities eventually.” He spat the word mortal as if mocking the rest of us.

“Great. Then they’ll be at our throats just like the Hunters.” I matched his mocking tone.

Cort peered around his brother to address me. “Maybe things have to get worse before they get better, but we’ll need to tell the mortals everything if we’re going to work with them and plan a future together.”

“I agree.” Keene shifted his gaze to include Ava and the others. “We need everyone working together to beat the Emporium—and all those greedy politicians lining up to court them. It’s time humanity contributed to their own protection.”

He was right, of course, but I also wanted the Hunters to pay. To pay for what they’d done to our Renegade Unbounded, for how they were influencing the other mortals.

For what Trevor had done to me.

Swallowing hard, I pushed the thoughts away, especially the memories of Trevor staring up with vacant, unseeing eyes. My hand went instinctively to the knife strapped to my inner forearm under my sleeve. I wore a matching one on the other side, the knives an extension of me now. The Hunters would never see me coming.

Keene grinned, his eyes tracking my movements knowingly, and I couldn’t help but grin back. The moment made me feel close to him like in Venezuela when we’d hidden from the Emporium. If those agents hadn’t started the fire, maybe things would be different between us now. But the fire had happened, had raged quickly, almost unnaturally, out of control. I could have shifted out, of course, but I hadn’t wanted to leave Keene. Together we’d managed to hide and finally escape.

I’d wanted to talk to Keene about what happened that day, but whenever he’d been here at the Fortress during the past two months, we were either with others or he’d shut himself inside Cort’s office. I had no idea what the brothers were working on.

“We’ll have time to deal with rumors later,” Dimitri said, speaking for the first time. His words slid over me like a balm to my nerves. That was Dimitri, the calmest, most reasonable, and wisest member of our cell, perhaps because he’d lived a thousand years. The healer was also able to kill or heal with a touch. The short, broad man had once saved my life, and I loved him like the father I’d never known.

As Dimitri said, time was on our side. Unbounded aged two years for every hundred they lived. Most of us underwent the Change around thirty or thirty-one, but a few Changed at twenty-eight, like Stella, and others as late as thirty-five. As Unbounded, our life span was about two thousand years—if the Emporium or the Hunters didn’t kill us first. Even with that happy little cloud hanging over me, I was amazed that I, Mari Jorgenson, former boring accountant, was now a semi-immortal Unbounded shifter. No way would I ever choose to go back.

Not to remove the target from my back.

Not even for Trevor.

“The Emporium is our real enemy. Don’t ever forget that,” Ava said almost absently. “Now, as you may have surmised, we have a mission for you, and it’s of the utmost importance. President Mann has had his hands full dealing with the announcement he was forced to make regarding our existence. It’s been rather ugly, helped along, as Mari mentioned, by our old friends the Hunters.” She nodded at Stella, and a holographic image appeared over the table, the increased blinking on Stella’s headset the only sign that she was controlling it. As a technopath, Stella could use her headset to connect with multiple computers at once, internalizing and processing more information in a few minutes than a roomful of pencil pushers on a computer network.

I stared, fascinated at the scene that appeared more realistic than looking out a window. Stella had recently installed the new technology, and this was my first real look at it. This holo presented a public rally featuring Hunters, who were once again preaching their gospel of hate and racism. Sound came through the conference room speakers as a man yelled, spittle flying from his mouth with his zeal. He claimed Unbounded were evil and had to be stopped before their progeny contaminated the entire world. The crowd cheered. When he proceeded to detail how to dismember Unbounded so they would remain dead, the roar of approval grew to a wild crescendo.

Abruptly, the sound died, disappearing with the image. “Hunters publicizing how to permanently kill Unbounded complicates things on many levels,” Ava said, “especially where the president’s Unbounded son is concerned.” She nodded again at Stella, and a new hologram appeared.

More shouting and confusion resounded through the speakers embedded in the walls. Women, young and old, clogged the sidewalks and streets for miles outside the White House chanting, “Give us babies! We want Unbounded babies!” They carried signs that read I Will Carry Your Unbounded Baby and My Ancestors Were Unbounded, My Child Might Be Too—Choose Me. And, Willing to Sleep with Any Unbounded. The variations went on, each more bizarre than the last.

“Wait,” I said. “Are they out there for Patrick Mann?” Patrick was the president’s grown son. Or, more aptly, the president’s adopted son, who the Emporium had planted as a baby and tried to turn against the president. Patrick’s refusal to succumb, even after a year in a squalid prison, ranked him way up there on my list of people to admire.

Ava gestured for Stella to kill the sound. “That’s right. They’re all volunteering to bear his child.”

Keene laughed. “Who would have guessed that would be a problem when he became the face of the Unbounded.”

“It’s every man’s dream, isn’t it?” I said, laughing with Keene. “A horde of adoring women. But I bet Patrick’s not happy about it. My impression of him was that he’s rather conservative.”

A smile teased Ava’s face. “Whatever his feelings on the matter, it’s making his security rather difficult. There have been two serious attempts on his life. The first was a shot from a crowd outside the White House that killed a Secret Service agent. A man with Hunter affiliation was arrested. The attempt last week was by an eighteen-year-old woman, and it resulted in her death.” Before Ava finished speaking, a picture of a young blonde took the place of the chanting women.

“Her name was Annabella Fredricks,” Ava continued, “Somehow she got into the White House where she was found naked in Patrick’s bed. He wasn’t home, but Secret Service found her while doing their regular rounds, and she jumped off a balcony trying to get away. They’ve kept it from the media so far, but she had a knife on her.”

I decided not to ask where she’d kept it.

“Someone on the staff had to let her in,” Stella said, making the image disappear, “but they really don’t know who.”

Ava nodded. “Patrick has moved to a different location in DC with a smaller, handpicked staff, but there are no guarantees that it won’t happen again. Or something like it.”

Cort cleared his throat, a habit he often used before saying something unpleasant. “He can’t go back into hiding in Europe. We need him out there talking to people. He’s the only way we’ll get the support of the people and restore sanity to the government. We need him to show that we’re normal.” Catching Keene’s stare, he added, “I mean, normal in every way that counts.”

Keene usually took the bait on something like that, especially from his brother, but this time he didn’t respond. When I cocked a teasing brow at him, he only gave me a wistful smile. My stomach did an odd little flop, and for no reason at all, I recalled that closet in Venezuela when we’d been crammed in so tightly that his heart had beat out a pattern with mine.

It was a relief when Ava began speaking again. “We do need Patrick, and that’s where this op comes in. Patrick needs a fiancée.”

I couldn’t help laughing at that. “You mean to get rid of all those women?” I motioned to where the holographs had been.

“I thought we’d advised him not to reconnect with the woman he was dating before he was abducted,” Cort said. “I distinctly remember someone explaining the danger he’d be to her.”

Ava shrugged. “Since when do the young ever listen?”

A chuckle ran through the conference room, all except for Keene and me, who were, of course, babies compared to the other three. He caught my gaze again and winked. I knew he was thinking that Unbounded sometimes took themselves far too seriously. I thought that all the time, and I was Unbounded.

“Well, the world is changing,” Ava said. “We hope that soon we’ll no longer have to abandon our families for their own safety. But, yes, Patrick did hook back up with his girlfriend, and things are going well enough between them that if he had his way, he’d be announcing his real engagement.” Her gravestone eyes rested on me. “However, his girlfriend isn’t going to work for us, and that’s where you come in, Mari. We want you to pose as Patrick’s fiancée until the threat is over.”

“Why me if he practically has a fiancée already? We could just go in as bodyguards.”

“First, the girlfriend won’t agree to her engagement, at least not publicly.” Stella adjusted her neural headset with one hand, giving me a brief glimpse of the tiny metal wires that nestled against her scalp and provided the connection between her brain and her computer network. “Lucinda Ririe puts a whole new spin on the word shy. Truthfully, it might have been every bit as much for her as for himself that Patrick gave up politics when he Changed. Being a technopath just gave him a way to leave successfully. But Lucinda—Luce for short—isn’t ready for that kind of attention. At least not yet.”

I understood only too well. In my old life any kind of attention that didn’t involve numbers made me blush and shy away from people. But I wasn’t like that anymore, and those days mostly seemed foggy and unreal. Now I felt strong and alive. Awake. Changed.

“Besides,” Keene drawled, “I bet she doesn’t have your fascination with knives.”

“Exactly,” Ava said. “Lucinda can’t defend him the way you can. At any rate, the Secret Service wouldn’t be pleased to have us send in bodyguards—that’s the job they’re supposed to be doing. As Patrick’s fiancée, you can accompany him everywhere and keep an eye out for any threat, especially internal ones. Your unique ability gives you the advantage in just about every encounter Stella has simulated.”

She had a point there. Short of a special, electrically-generated containment field, nothing could keep me from shifting.

“Since we know you’re in the Hunter database as an Unbounded descendent,” Ava continued, “and we can’t be sure we’ve eliminated or altered every photograph there might be of you online, you’ll have to go in disguise and use a fake name. Stella has already created your new identity and begun posting photographs of you in various places where Patrick has been. The media will soon find them. You’ll become an overnight sensation.”

I grinned. “New identity, cameras flashing, cute guy to romance. Sounds great! When do I start? But can I drive a Jaguar? Gotta keep up appearances if I’m dating the president’s son, don’t I?”

“Oh, really?” Keene rolled his eyes. “Is that all it takes? A new identity and a car? What about a Ferrari? Would you go out with a guy just because he had a Ferrari?”

I leaned over and elbowed him. “Only if he’s really hot. Otherwise, I’ll save up and buy my own.” We received good pay for our ops, aside from our regular stipend allotted us at our Change, so I wasn’t just talking.

Ava’s next words wiped the smile from my face. “I want you to understand that your life will be in danger every minute. We know the Emporium has plans to take over the country despite everything we are doing to stop them, and Patrick may be a part of their long term goals. If we don’t learn what they’re up to, this war to save humanity may be lost before it’s truly begun.”

Chapter 1

For three weeks, while her husband was at work, Charlene had been secretly emailing her friend Judy, hoping he wouldn’t find out. Opening Judy’s return emails to discover what her friend had to say had been the highlight of her day. As long as Brad didn’t learn she was doing it, she figured there was no harm in having an innocent friendship. It kept her connected to something besides drooling babies, loaded diapers, and burned dinners. But recently, Charlene hadn’t felt as excited about pressing the open button. Maybe because Judy had started to pry, asking questions people weren’t supposed to ask, like about her husband’s temper. Charlene knew she had a good husband and didn’t see any reason for her new friend to cast doubt.

Granted, Brad did get touchy about silly things, like when he saw Charlene eating anything with sugar in it. “Now, Charlene,” he’d say, “You know I have your best welfare in mind by stopping you. You’d be miserable if you got fat. Chocolate really isn’t worth it, is it?”

Charlene wanted to scream, “Yes! It is!” but after ten years of marriage, she knew better. She kept her protests to herself and hid the chocolates she wanted to eat. Every person had a few weaknesses, didn’t they? Brad often searched the house for her hidden stash, and if he found it, there would be hell to pay. But sometimes, when the rich taste melted in her mouth, sending comfort and pure joy through her, Charlene thought it was worth the price of hell.

Another subject that tested Brad’s patience was when she bought things without his permission. He insisted they stay on a budget—his budget. She agreed with him, of course. She didn’t want to be like the many couples who ended up spending themselves into a huge pit of debt. After all, they had children to raise. A responsible, involved husband was a gift. Charlene did wonder if it was reasonable to get livid over buying a package of gum at the store, especially when the groceries got loaded into his new sports car. Not everything made sense, but she was sure his temper was no worse than any other man’s.

It bothered Charlene that her husband’s qualifications were being called into question. She decided to focus on the parts of her friend’s emails that she liked—the walks along the beach and how idyllic Seattle sounded. Charlene dreamed about flying up to Washington to visit Judy. She wanted to enjoy the white clouds hovering over the wild ocean, and she longed to take those strolls and let the tension of motherhood ease away as the sand squished between her toes and the sun warmed her skin. That might just be the perfect escape from her humdrum existence.

Making a trip like that was impossible. Brad would never allow it. So instead of thinking about escaping her monotonous life, she worried about Brad discovering her email account. Yes, he was a great husband. He just wouldn’t like it if he knew she was on the computer instead of paying attention to the children. He believed being a full-time mother meant that was all the woman should do. He was right, of course. Guilt filled Charlene about writing Judy, but she’d go crazy without any outside contact. Maybe someday she would be the person she needed to be; the person Brad wanted.

For now, she gave in to her weakness and secretly wrote Judy, despite the negativity toward her husband. She didn’t know how Brad would react if he found out. He’d probably break into the computer and read the emails—all of them. He used to search the whole house until he found her journal. The mental images of pillows, clothes, and dishes flying and breaking while he looked had not left her—or his anger after he read it.

“How dare you misrepresent me!” he’d shouted. “You’re nothing but a liar. And you’re so negative. You’re never grateful for all the good things I do for you. How come you can’t see things the way they really are?” Charlene never wrote it right no matter how she tried. Eventually, it wasn’t worth the fuss and she stopped writing altogether. Some things were just easier not to do. Besides, she hated to fight. Their conflicts had gotten ugly before, and she definitely didn’t want to go there again. Every marriage had its problems. She needed to learn how to compromise and what to avoid doing. Unfortunately, sometimes her learning came at the price of experience.

But this time Charlene hoped he wouldn’t find out about her emails. It had been years since the journal incidents, and her husband didn’t even know she had a new friend who had recently moved to Seattle. She had told him about Judy and their trips together to the craft fairs, but he didn’t know how close they’d gotten or how much they liked to chat. Brad was busier with work and surer of their marriage these days. Charlene hoped that by now he trusted her more and wouldn’t mind her having a friend.

She had emailed Judy on the subject: If he does find out, it’s on my head. Please don’t stop writing me. Sometimes I feel like I’m silently crying out to you. I need someone to listen. I look forward to your news, and it’s nice to have someone who cares. Brad knows very little about you, not even your last name. I won’t mention that in the emails. He won’t be able to trace you, only your email address.

Charlene hoped Brad wouldn’t trace other things she had done, like getting her own checking account to pay for the email subscription. She had waited until Brad was caught up with a deadline at work that monopolized his attention. Then, she stopped at the bank. Unsure how to open an account, and worried her kids would unknowingly betray her to Brad, she used the drinking fountain in the front entry as a way to get a moment alone. “Sandra, can you get everyone a drink?” she asked her oldest, who was eleven and liked to be in charge. The kids scurried away, except for Nathan, who was two and too young to be out of her sight. He wouldn’t talk.

She was quickly directed to the right spot. An older, silver-haired gentleman smiled at her. “What can I do for you?”

Paige, her six-year-old, ran up to her. “Mom, Sandra spit water on me.”

Charlene looked at her daughter’s tear-filled eyes and sighed.

“Tell Sandra to stop that or she’s going to get extra chores.”

“But my shirt’s wet,” Paige insisted.

Clenching her hands tighter, Charlene said, “Go on and tell her.” She heard her voice had gone up an octave.

Paige left, and Charlene turned back to the man. “I’d like to open a new account.” She felt hot. Her heart raced as though she was doing something wrong. She looked over at her kids, made a quick mental count to make sure they were all still there, and then turned her attention back to the old man, who was getting forms.

“How much would you like to deposit?”

Charlene pulled out a check she’d received for wall hangings she’d made and sold at a local craft fair. She had created the arrangements when Brad was out of town and had carried the check around for over a month wondering what to do with it. If she kept it much longer, she risked Brad going through her purse and finding it. She didn’t know what excuse she could come up with then. Brad had been okay with her going to the fair, but he wouldn’t like her having a hobby when she should be taking care of the kids. He would also be enraged that she didn’t immediately turn over the money to him.

“With this,” she said, smoothing the crease in the paper. The check was made out for two hundred and thirty-two dollars and sixteen cents. It wasn’t much, but it was more than she’d had in years.

“Fine,” the man said, giving it a cursory glance. “Please fill out these forms.” He slid some sheets over to her. The kids had joined her by now and were tugging on her pants. She tried to ignore them as she filled out each form.

Charlene stopped at the slot for her address. “What do you mail out to us with this account?” She knew this would seem like a strange question and hoped it wouldn’t make him suspect she was up to something.

“An information letter and monthly statements.”

Charlene had grown increasingly hot as she pondered what to do. Should she get this account? Should she go behind her husband’s back? He would kill her if he ever found out. It had taken her quite a while to decide to do this. Should she back out?

No. She’d get it. She knew it was risky, but she felt confident she could get the mail every day before Brad did. She’d have to make a point of it.

She looked up, watching her kids climb over everything. They were talking loud and laughing, obviously bothering many of the other bank customers. “Kids, come here.” They obeyed their mother and came running.

“You definitely have your hands full, don’t you?” the banker asked.

Charlene gave a half nod. What the banker said was true.

“If you tell me your names and ages, I’ll give you all a sucker. Is that okay, Mom?”

Charlene nodded fully this time, relieved.

“Sandra,” her eldest announced. “I’m eleven.” Her short, brown curls shook as she spoke. “I want the green one.”

The banker laughed and gave her the green sucker.

“Cameron,” her second oldest said, head tipped down, and stuck out his hand.

“How old are you, little man?”

“Ten,” Sandra answered for him. She put her arms around her little sister and pushed her forward. “This is Paige, who’s eight.” Then she pointed to next younger sister. “And that’s Lorine. She’s five, and the baby is Nathan, and he’s only two. He doesn’t talk much.”

The banker laughed. “Well then, I guess that’s everyone.”

* * *

Charlene kept her new bank account a secret for several months. Then one day she came home from grocery shopping to find Brad’s car parked in the driveway. What was he doing home so early? Charlene worried as she unbuckled Nathan from his car seat.

She hurried inside, taking a bag of groceries with her. She set it on the kitchen counter with a thump and walked quickly toward Brad’s office. There he was, sorting through the mail.

A terrified lump rose in her throat. Please don’t let there be a bank statement, she prayed, smiling at Brad. “Hello, what are you doing home?”

“I have to go back tonight for a big meeting, so I thought I’d spend a couple of hours at home before then.”

“Oh,” Charlene said. She glanced at the stack of mail. She’d have to look at it before he went through it—how? “Brad, will you help me bring the groceries in?”

“Yeah,” he said, going back to sorting the envelopes.

She had to think fast. Throwing her arms around him, she gave him a long kiss. Then she grabbed his arms and coaxed them around her waist. “I’ve got some milk and other cold stuff out there. If you bring it in now, I’ll cook your favorite meal.” She batted her eyes to be silly.

He laughed. “Okay.”

She walked with him to the doorway and waited until he went outside for the bags before she ran back. She sorted through the mail and, sure enough, spotted a bank statement. She grabbed it, folded it, and shoved it in her pocket before rushing to the kitchen. She waited until his second trip to the car to stash the envelope in her office.

* * *

Charlene knew she had to tell Judy about the risk she was taking, in case Brad made Judy pay for their friendship. Last year, Charlene had hung out with Kelly, a friend she’d made when taking the kids to the park. Whenever they met, Brad would greet her and then wait until she left to laugh about how “psycho,” as he put it, she was.

“Anyone who believes the end of the world is just around the corner is cuckoo.” Other times he would say, “I can’t believe you’re hanging out with that nutcase. She’s not even in the real world. She’s always quoting Revelations. That’s not normal. She’s going to end up in one of those cults, probably dead by a government raid, shot in the head.”

Then he took to laughing at Kelly openly every time he saw her. “Had any more prophesies?” he’d ask, or, “How’s Revelations? Any more six-headed monsters coming to swallow us all up?”

“Actually you don’t understand Revelations at all. You’re mistaken on thinking that a six-headed monster . . .” Kelly tried to explain at first, until she realized Brad was only mocking her. She became so angry and flustered she stopped coming over.

Another time she’d been on the phone talking to Nicol, a woman she’d grown friendly with while babysitting at Sunday school. Brad had called out, loud enough so Nicol could hear, “Is that your skinny, bean-pole friend?” He made a habit of complaining to Charlene while she was chatting with her friend. “Why are you always on the phone? Why don’t you ever make time for me?”

It was embarrassing, and her friends understandably didn’t want to hang out long. For that reason, Charlene stopped inviting people over. This kept her more isolated, and sometimes the days of playing hide-and-seek and cleaning up spills became so tedious she wanted to scream. During those more boring hours, she’d remember with fondness when other mothers had visited when her kids were younger and Brad was away more. They’d sit in the backyard and talk under the shade tree, watching as the kids played and fought.

Charlene hoped her words of warning wouldn’t scare Judy out of writing to her. Although Judy and Charlene hadn’t known each other that well before Judy moved, Charlene didn’t know what she would do if Judy thought their correspondence was too risky. Her life was already so lonely, and Judy seemed like her last lifeline.

* * *

Fortunately for Charlene, Judy didn’t let the risk of getting caught by Brad stop her from emailing. She said she was willing to stand up to anyone for her. Charlene thought that was a little over dramatic but had a smile in her heart the whole day after she read the reassurance.

She immediately wrote and told Judy thank you. She also explained that she couldn’t come to Washington with all her kids, even though Judy had offered to pay. The offer overwhelmed Charlene with its generosity. She thought about how wonderful it would be to sit on the beach, meditating away the afternoon. It sounded divine, but to have her friend pay for it? She couldn’t do that. She and Brad had money. Why would Judy make such an offer? It was confusing, but Charlene decided not to make an issue out of it. Besides, Brad would never let her go anyway, no matter who paid for it.

As Charlene floated through her days, helping her children with their homework, cleaning house, and cooking, she thought often about the beach. Around noon, three days after Judy’s offer, another email dinged in. The contents took all of Charlene’s focus.

ON THE DAY I SET foot on the path to immortality, I was with Justine in her car driving down 95th on our way to pick out her new sofa. Ordinary. That’s what the day was. The plain kind of ordinary that obscures the secrets lurking in the shadows—or behind the faces of those you love.

Justine was the sister I’d never had, and our relationship was close to official since her brother had asked me twice to marry him. Tom was sexy, persuasive, and best of all, dependable. The next time he asked, I was considering saying yes.

A van came from nowhere, slamming into Justine’s side of the car.

Just like that. No warning.

Justine jerked toward me but was ultimately held in her seat by the safety belt. My head bounced hard off the right side window. A low screeching grated in my ears, followed by several long seconds of utter silence.

An explosion shattered the world.

When the smoke began to clear, I saw Justine’s head swing in my direction, though not of her own volition. Her blue eyes were open but vacant, her face still. Fire licked up the front of her shirt. Her blond hair melted and her skin blackened.

“No!” The word ripped from my throat.

I tried to reach out to Justine, but my arms wouldn’t move. Heat. All around me. Terror.

Pain. The stench of burning flesh.

Fire and smoke obscured my vision, but not before I saw something drip from the mess that had been Justine’s face. We were dying. This was it. The point of no return. I thought of my parents, my grandmother, my brothers, and how they would mourn me. I couldn’t even think about Tom.

A premonition of things to come?

I lost consciousness, and when I came to I was lying flat on my back. A sheet covered my face. I was suffocating.

“Witnesses say . . . in flames almost on impact,” a man’s voice was saying. “A fluke . . . not for the fire . . . might have survived.”

I turned my face, struggling to move my mouth from the sheet. Searching for air. Agony rippled up my neck and all over my head and down my body, the pain so decimating that it sapped all strength from me. I couldn’t move again, but that little bit had been enough.

“What the freak!” the voice said. I could barely hear the words, but they gave me something to focus on through the pain. I clung to them. “Gunnar . . . the oxygen . . . thought you said she was dead.”

The sheet lifted and air rushed into my tortured lungs. I could sense people all around me, though I couldn’t see anything except a hazy light. My throat was tight and burning, reminding me of the time I’d had both strep throat and tonsillitis as a child. Only far worse. Blinding pain so intense that I couldn’t even moan.

More snatches of conversation filtered to my brain. “Black as a crisp . . . try an IV . . . have to be amputated . . . University of Kansas . . . Burn Center.”

Motion. The blare of a siren. Then blessed nothing.

When I awoke the next time, my throat still hurt, and so did every single inch of my body, though not with the all-consuming pain that made me wish I were dead. Probably they’d given me drugs. Or maybe too many nerves were damaged. I could feel an oxygen tube in my nose and cold seeping into a vein in my right shoulder. How could that be? I’d had IVs before and I’d never felt the liquid. It was so good, so necessary, that for a moment I concentrated all my attention on that small, steady flow. Life seeping into my body. But far too slowly. I wanted more.

Abruptly the sensation was gone. The pain cranked up a notch.

I tried to open my eyes, but only the right one was uncovered. From what I could tell, I seemed to be completely swathed in bandages and unable to move. My single eye rested on Tom, who was standing near the window, staring out with the unfocused expression of a man who saw nothing.

Tom shifted his weight, his muscles flexing under his T-shirt and jeans. In the past months I’d learned his body almost as well as my own, and even now I felt a sense of wonder at the miracle of our relationship. He didn’t push me for commitment, didn’t question why I was so hesitant to take the next step, and I loved him for that perhaps more than anything. It was also why I didn’t know if things would work out between us.

A tiny rush of air escaped the hole they’d left in the bandages near my mouth. He turned toward me, his face stricken, looking older than his thirty-five years. “Erin? Are you awake?”

I tried to nod, but found I couldn’t. I lay mute and helpless. Finally, I thought to close and open my single eye.

He was at my side instantly. “Oh, honey. Thank God! I thought I’d lost—” He broke off, struggling for control. “Erin, can you understand me?”

I blinked again.

“Okay, good. That’s really good. Do you remember what happened?” He took a shaky breath and hesitated before adding, “Blink once for yes, twice for no.”

I remembered the accident. I remembered the fire and how Justine had burned, but I wanted the rest explained. I wanted to hear if Justine was in a bed like I was. I wanted to hear if we’d be okay.

I blinked twice.

He leaned closer, not touching me, his eyes rimmed in red. His eyes had a tendency to change color with what he wore, and today they were the inviting shade of a lake on a hot summer day. My favorite color.

“This morning you and Justine were in a car accident. There was a fire. You were burned.”

Over seventy percent of my body. The thought came from nowhere, and I wondered if I’d unconsciously heard someone talking about my condition. If that was true, my chances weren’t good. I’d heard of a formula at the insurance company where I worked: take your age, add the percentage of your body burned, and the sum was your chance of fatality. I’d be over a hundred percent.

I’m still alive. I’m the exception.

“Your parents just stepped out for a while. Your grandmother was here, too, almost all day, but they finally convinced her to go home. Chris is on his way.”

Had that much time passed? My older brother, Chris, had left that morning to pilot a charter flight from Kansas City to Tulsa. I’d been planning to go over tonight when he returned so I could spend time with him and Lorrie and their kids.

“They called Jace. He’ll be here soon.”

Jace was on his way from Texas? My younger brother had barely arrived at his new unit, and the army would never allow him to come home.

I knew then what Tom wasn’t saying: I was dying. Was that why there wasn’t as much pain? Or had my limbs been amputated? I tried to move my legs, but they felt heavy, and I wondered if that was the sensation the nerves sent to the brain after amputation. I concentrated on moving my arms, and though they were sheathed in bandages, I managed to move my right one slightly.

Tom’s eyes followed the movement, swallowing so hard I could see the lump in his throat go up and down. He wet his lips, started to speak, stopped, and then tried again. “It’s going to be okay, Erin. You’ll see.” The lie was so bad I felt sorry for him. I knew it was killing him not to do something useful for me, to somehow alleviate my suffering, but there was nothing he could do now, nothing either of us could do. This was one of those moments you endured and survived. Or you didn’t.

A nurse entered, and Tom eased away from the bed. “She’s awake,” he said. A pleading kind of hope had come into his face, and it was painful to see. More painful than the lie. “She understands what I’m saying.”

The nurse leaned in front of my good eye, doubt etched on her round face. Two bright spots of red stood out on her plump cheeks like awkwardly applied blush. “Well, that’s a good sign,” she said, but hesitantly, as though I was somehow breaking the rules by regaining consciousness.

Her eyes lifted toward something behind me. “What happened to the IV? It shouldn’t need changing already. That’s the third time we’ve run out in the last hour.” She shook her head. “Must be something wrong with the valve. I’ll check it and get another bag.”

After she left, Tom said more encouraging words, which only made me feel worse because I’d seen the truth in the nurse’s face. Talk about something real, I wanted to scream. Talk about the things we didn’t do. Talk about Justine. Tell me she’s okay.

He didn’t, and I guessed what that meant. A tear slipped from my eye into the bandage. She was gone. Justine was gone.

Meeting the siblings at the Red Night Club six months earlier had been a changing point in my life. Tom hadn’t been able to tear his eyes away from me that night, or since, and over the past months Justine had loved and bullied me into thinking seriously about my future, something I’d lacked the confidence to do since leaving law school in disgrace. So what if I was thirty-one and living in the basement apartment at my parents’ house in Kansas City? Or that I worked a boring job as an insurance claims clerk when I’d always longed to do something more adventurous? I could change all that. I bought new clothes, took up biking, and began looking for a new apartment.

Tom couldn’t see my tear, but it really didn’t matter. I was dying. I’d lost my best friend, my almost sister. I’d lost any future I might have had with Tom. I couldn’t wrap my understanding around either loss.

The nurse returned, and shortly I felt cool liquid seeping into my veins again. Purely imaginary but sweet all the same. I closed my right eye and concentrated on that lifeline, as though I could suck it into me and repair the damage to my body from the inside out.

“Don’t worry.” Tom’s voice came from far away. “I’m here for you. We’re going to make you well again. No matter how long it takes.” I couldn’t hear the lie in his voice anymore. Maybe it made him feel better to believe.

I wished I could.

The next time I woke, it was dark except for a dim light over the sink that stood against the wall. I sensed someone in the room but couldn’t move my head to see who it was. Tom? My brother Chris? More likely my mother or father.

The door opened and light sliced into the room. In walked a short, broad man with longish dark brown hair, intense brown eyes, and a trim mustache. Not good-looking, exactly, but so sure of himself that he exuded an animal attractiveness. A stethoscope hung from his neck and down his white lab coat. If anyone could accomplish a miracle, this man could; his presence was almost palpable.

Behind him came a similarly dressed blonde, and my single eye riveted on her in surprise. She carried her head and lean body with the same regal confidence of the man, but her face was familiar, though I had no idea where I might have seen her before. The fierce, possessive way her eyes fixed on my unmoving body gave me the unnerving feeling that she’d been looking for something for a long time.

And had found it.

The woman turned on the light, and I shut my eye momentarily at the brightness. “We need to take her for a few tests,” she said to the person at my bedside.

“More tests?” The voice was my mother’s, exhausted but not quite devoid of hope. I opened my eye, straining to see her, but she was out of my line of sight. “She woke up earlier. Isn’t that a good sign? Could the doctors be wrong?”

The woman shook her head. “I don’t believe so, but I promise we’ll do everything we can for your daughter.” Her smooth, clear skin was wrinkle-free, and I pinpointed her age near mine, or perhaps a few years older. Could she be a doctor? A specialist maybe? Her attitude suggested absolute authority. Even if I could have moved my head, I doubted I’d be able to look away from her for long.

“Thank you.” My mother sounded unhappy. Things weren’t perfect between us, but I would give anything to be able to console her, anything not to be trapped in this ruined shell of a body.

“Dimitri,” the woman said. “The IV.” The man nodded and moved around the bed, but not before I caught a glimpse of another IV bag in his hands, though it seemed different. Larger, maybe.

“The bags keep running out before they should,” my mother said. “I’m worried it’s not helping her condition. Where’s all the liquid going?”

Was that a flash of excitement in the woman’s eyes? It was hard to tell with my monovision. “We’re monitoring it carefully,” she assured my mother.

Within seconds I could feel the drip of the liquid again—different this time. Sweeter, thicker, and coming faster. I closed my eye and drew the liquid into my body, though I knew the effect had to be entirely in my mind.

“Don’t I know you?” my mother asked the woman. “You seem familiar.”

“I must have one of those faces.”

“No, I’ve seen you before. I know I have. Aren’t you my mother’s neighbor? The one who teaches karate?”

“I have a sister who teaches taekwondo. People often confuse us.”

A lie. I couldn’t hear it in her voice, but I felt it all the same. An unease, a hint of uncertainty that marred her perfect confidence. What was she trying to hide? Or maybe my imagination was kicking in again.

“That must be it,” my mother said.

“Probably. If you’ll excuse us? We should be back within the hour.”

“I’ll be here.” My mother’s hand briefly touched my shoulder as I was rolled from the room. I wished I could see her face.

The hallway was quiet, nearly deserted, though the lights overhead blazed brightly. We passed several tired-looking nurses and an orderly mopping a section of floor.

“Ava,” the man said from the head of my bed. “The bag’s half gone.”

“Then we were right.” The woman walking beside me fell silent a moment before adding, “It’s about time.”

“Too bad it had to happen like this. She’s suffered a lot.”

“At least we’re sure. And there won’t be anything to explain to her family. They’re already prepared for the worst.”

“She might not cooperate. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“She must cooperate. There’s too much at stake.”

I didn’t like her clipped tone, or any of their words. They were talking about me, but I couldn’t understand the context. None of it made sense. Maybe the drugs had scrambled my brain.

When they began discussing transfer papers with another man, icy suspicion crawled through my mind. Where were they taking me? Maybe they weren’t with the hospital at all. As they loaded me into an ambulance, panic ramped up my breathing, but no one noticed my distress. My mouth refused to utter a sound.

The woman sat near my head out of sight while the man stayed at my side. I didn’t see who was driving. “This bag’s gone,” the man said. “I’ll get a new one. I’ll start another IV, too. The idiots already amputated half her left arm. She’ll need the extra.”

My left arm was gone? Bile threatened to choke me. No! This was too much. I couldn’t survive another minute.

Yet when the man put the second IV in my upper chest, I felt another rush of cool liquid, and my body gulped it down as though it were life itself. My fear numbed at this relief, and I dozed as the ambulance cruised through the streets, rousing a little each time we stopped at the traffic lights. I heard honking, a snatch of music, the throb of the engine, and my own breathing, which seemed loud and fast in the small confines of the ambulance.

Something was very wrong. They’d told my mother I’d be back within an hour, but we’d been driving too long for that now. Not to mention that removing me from the burn center would lower what minimal chance I had of survival. Yet whoever these people were, they didn’t seem to want me dead—for now.

I tried to move, but the only limb I could get to obey me was my right arm. I lifted it halfway in the air before the man grabbed it. “It’s okay, Erin. I really am a doctor. Best one in the world, I daresay. I’m Dimitri, and my friend is Ava. We’re here to help you.” To the woman, he added, “She’s a fighter.”

“So it seems.” Satisfaction laced Ava’s voice, and I felt a sudden and distinct hatred for her. What did she want from me? Was she an organ harvester? It was the only rational explanation—though utterly terrifying.

Dimitri laid something on my chest. Another IV bag. “Hold onto this.” He placed my right hand over the bag. Immediately, a delicious coolness entered my fingertips even through the plastic bag and the bandages. I blessed him silently and gave myself up to this drug-induced hallucination.

The next thing I knew, I was being rolled into a cavernous room. I had the impression of large crates and of a woman sitting in front of several computers which she seemed to be using all at once. One of the computers was connected by a thin black cord to a woven metal headpiece the woman wore on her head like a crown. Her chair turned toward us, one hand twisting up a circular section of the headpiece that obscured one eye. “Good, you’re back.” A smile spread over her face.

I stared. I’d been wrong thinking Ava and Dimitri were the most assured, compelling people I’d ever seen. This new woman had the same confident bearing as the other two, but it was coupled with straight dark hair, a heart-shaped face, slanted Asian eyes, and flawless golden skin. Her revealing green tank showed an ample bosom and a torso that fell to an impossibly thin waist, flaring again for perfect hips. Her delicacy and utter perfection was the kind that inspired poets and started wars between nations—and made me feel completely inadequate.

I knew that feeling well. I felt it often in the presence of my mother.

“Cort’s got the room ready,” the woman said. She was younger than the others, perhaps in her late twenties, though her dark eyes were far too knowing for true innocence. A chill shuddered in my chest.

“Thanks, Stella.”

I knew Stella meant star in some other language, and the name fit her perfectly.

We were moving away, and Stella vanished from my line of sight. My thoughts of her cut off abruptly as I was wheeled into a smaller room, bare except for what looked like a coffin on a long table.

A coffin!

My heart slammed into my chest, its beating furious and erratic.

Ava withdrew scissors from the pocket of her lab coat and started cutting the bandages from my feet and legs. Dimitri began at my head. I caught a glimpse of blackened tissue, the bloody stub of my left arm. Tears leaked from my right eye, but I couldn’t see anything through my left and I doubted I still had tear ducts there. Now I knew why Tom had felt the need to lie. No one could be this badly burned and survive.

If by some cruel twist of fate I did live, I would be a monster.

I tried to struggle against them, but any tiny movement sent shards of pain in every direction until it seemed pain was all I had ever known. Neither would my mouth open to scream, though hoarse sounds of distress issued from my throat, sounding grotesque and panicked. My chest convulsed wildly with the effort. Before too long, my throat became too raw for sound, and even that haunting noise ceased.

“It’s okay,” Dimitri said, his voice gentle. “It’ll be over soon.” Somehow I didn’t feel comforted.

When I was nothing more than a mass of burned and bleeding raw flesh, Ava and Dimitri lifted me into the coffin. Exquisite torture. My vision blurred and darkened. Nausea gouged at my insides.

A gelatinous substance oozed around me and the pain slightly eased. Dimitri pushed it up against my chin and smoothed a layer over my entire face. They’re drowning me in Jell-O, I thought, but Dimitri made sure I had ample space beneath my nose to breathe. The syrupy sweetness I’d felt with the IV bags was increased a hundredfold, as though each of my damaged nerve cells had become a conduit for an IV.

Dimitri’s face leaned close to mine. “I’ve added something to one of these IV bags to put you out. It’d be impossible for you to sleep in this stuff otherwise. But you’ll heal better if you aren’t awake.” Already I struggled to keep my good eye open.

Ava stood by the coffin looking in. “Don’t fight it, Erin. You’ll have your answers soon. Sleep, Granddaughter. Sleep.”

Granddaughter? I must not have heard her correctly.

Well, I suppose there could be worse ways to die than cradled in a coffin full of sweet gelatin. I gave up fighting and let my right eye close.

I PEERED AROUND THE TREE at the couple who sat on the park bench, their faces set, their bodies taut and anxious. The woman, Mari Jorgenson, had no idea what she was—what she had become. She spoke earnestly, but the man only pretended to listen. His eyes roamed the trees that dotted the area, stopping briefly on a grouping of three evergreens crowded by thick bushes.

What was he searching for?

I pushed my awareness out as far as I could, but nothing unusual registered on my senses. This area of the park appeared deserted, which was natural since November had slammed down on Portland like an iceberg from the Bering Sea, bringing a brutal cold spell the city hadn’t seen in decades. Still, it was a nice change from the constant rain or the wet snowflakes that seemed to saturate every inch of every piece of clothing I wore. My hometown of Kansas City wasn’t exactly warm in the winter, but the cold and wet had never been as penetrating. A twinge of nostalgia pinged in my chest when I thought about Kansas because I could never, ever go back to what I’d been. I was fortunate to have escaped mostly in one piece; others hadn’t been so lucky.

Peering around the tree again, my eyes found Mari’s small form on the bench. Even at this distance, I could see the Change that had taken place gradually over the two months I’d been watching her. I’d already sensed that she was Unbounded, though in the beginning it was hard to tell, even for someone like me. Complete confirmation had come last week after we’d gone skiing in Utah, and she’d banged up her knee so badly the doctors had told her she wouldn’t regain full use of it.

A day later she was walking. With that single event, both her life expectancy and the likelihood of violent death increased by nearly twenty-four hundred percent.

I felt for my Sig tucked inside its holster at the back of my jeans, easing it out so my long jacket couldn’t get in the way. It was racked, a bullet in the chamber. I’d double-checked before I followed them from work.

Crouching, I eased forward behind the bare bushes to the right of the tree, my muscles singing in relief at the movement. I’d trained vigorously for hours with the other Renegades before I went jogging in the park with Mari this morning, but I’d had all day for any strained muscles to heal. I felt as fresh as when I’d awakened.

My mind ran over what I would soon have to do. Mari and I had become friends, and I knew how betrayed she’d feel at the depth of my deceit. She’d figure it out quickly once it was all in the open. Her brain was already running at high speed because of the changes inside her. At the accounting firm where I worked with her under an assumed name, she’d begun to accurately calculate entire columns of numbers without the aid of a machine. Her Unbounded father had been skilled at engineering, and her great-aunt Stella was a technopath, so this ability didn’t surprise any of us. It was only a matter of time until her co-workers noticed. There was no telling what else she might be able to do, and her very existence made her a potential danger. To us, to our enemies, to the entire world.

Mari jumped to her feet, hands in her coat pockets, her breath forming white clouds in the air, more visible now that the sun had set and twilight was deepening. Night came early on these winter nights, though it wasn’t quite six o’clock, and some distance away, I could still hear the faint sounds of rush hour traffic on the main road. I couldn’t make out what Mari was saying, but I knew her well enough to guess that she was giving Trevor an ultimatum. She wanted to see a marriage counselor and for them to work toward having a child. I wondered if he noticed the new sureness in her movements, how the blemishes in her skin had disappeared, and how thick her long, silky hair had become. Her heart-shaped face showed only a hint of her Japanese heritage, which was less than an eighth, but since her Change, I thought she was looking more and more like the small-boned Stella, whose mother had been full-blooded Japanese.

Trevor also came to his feet but didn’t yell back at her, which made the fine hair on my body rise in alert. I’d been forced to get to know him somewhat over the past two months since we’d come for Mari, and this calm wasn’t like him. He was a loud, opinionated man who liked his dinner on the table by six-thirty and his wife submissive at all times. He never planned dates, remembered her birthday, or sent flowers on their anniversary. She’d admitted to me once in tears that he only touched her with affection when he wanted her in bed—which happened less and less these days.

Trevor was another reason we had to act sooner than later. Unbounded had a high rate of fertility and most birth control methods failed. If she slept with him now, we might end up with more complications than we bargained for. Better that Mari first understood the consequences.

Trevor eased away from Mari, his hands in his jacket pocket. He darted a nervous glance in the direction of the trees behind her. Something was very wrong. If I were closer, or if I touched him, I might be able to sense what he was hiding, but the only thing I felt from him now was a tight nervousness. I almost hoped he’d turn violent. If he did, it would save us oceans of headache in the long run, though I wasn’t about to let him have the satisfaction of hurting Mari.

A faint movement in the trees behind Mari caught my attention. Easing around the bushes, I paused at the edge of the sparse covering offered by an evergreen. To check out the movement physically, I’d have to expose myself by running across open space. Mari, Trevor, and whoever might be there would see me coming, and I couldn’t have that. Being careless might cost more lives than just my own. The Renegades depended on me.

A breeze hit my face, soothing my fears. Only the wind.

The cell phone in my pocket vibrated, and I checked the caller ID before answering. It was Ava, the fearless leader of our little band of Renegades, and also my fourth great-grandmother. I wondered if she was calling about Cort, who was supposed to have taken over watching Mari after we left the accounting firm. Unfortunately, Mari had quit work early when her husband showed up without warning. Cort should be following the signal from my GPS chip now, and catch up to me at any moment, but he’d been known to become distracted with whatever scientific experiment he was working on in his lab. It was kind of getting to be a problem. As one of the newest Unbounded in our group, I was at the bottom of the useful list and tattling wouldn’t earn any brownie points, but I’d endured the torture of the office all day and it was only fair that he and the others took their turns. Mari’s Change affected all of us.

“What’s up?” I asked, keeping my voice low.

“We have a problem.” The tension in Ava’s voice dissolved my concerns about Cort. She didn’t stress over anything small.

“What is it?”

“You need to get back here as fast as you can. I’ll explain later.”

I glanced again at the bushes behind Mari. No more movement. Had it really been the wind? Regardless, I couldn’t leave Mari alone with Trevor. “Is Cort on his way?” Okay, so I would rat on him. A guy who’d lived almost five hundred years should know better.

“He’s on a plane to Mexico—as of nine o’clock this morning. Dimitri went with him. I would have notified you sooner, but we’ve been a bit busy.”

I gritted my teeth. We had only two main interests in Mexico, and problems with either would mean more deaths. Worse, her tone told me Mexico was only the beginning of what had gone wrong.

“I want you to bring in Mari,” Ava continued. “We need you here. We should have brought her in last week when we were sure.” There was no censure in her voice, though I’d sided with Stella in waiting. I knew how hard it was to have my life change from one minute to the next.

I was tempted to ask for backup, but I could imagine the fun my brothers and the rest of the Renegades would have if the movement in the trees turned out to be nothing more than the wind or a stray dog. I needed to be sure. I hesitated several heartbeats before saying with a slightly forced confidence, “I’ll be there within the hour. Sooner if I can.”

“Good.” The line went dead.

How soon I’d actually make it depended on what I decided to do with Trevor and how good a fighter he turned out to be. Though I trained hard every day, my Unbounded ability had nothing to do with combat. I’d been weeks ahead of my brother Jace, and he’d surpassed me during his first lesson, his quickness immediately identifying his area of skill. Even so, they claimed I was progressing faster than most new Unbounded, and every now and then I felt I could almost see what my opponent would do next the way Jace could.

And Ritter Langton.

My stomach clenched. With the events in Mexico, would Ava call Ritter back from wherever he’d been the past two months? My pride hadn’t let me ask, but she probably had some way to contact him.

I shoved away the unneeded distraction, though the tightness in my belly remained. Trevor was the main problem here. If it came to it, I could deal with him, but I didn’t think knocking out her husband would go far toward lulling Mari’s suspicions so I could more easily kidnap her.

First I needed to be sure about those trees. Pushing out my thoughts, I began searching, straining. A dull throbbing began at the base of my skull, my mind not at all appreciating the effort. Yet there in the trees where I’d seen the movement earlier, I now felt two faint life forces. They didn’t glow as brightly as the average mortal, though they weren’t as dark as someone who was experienced at blocking sensing Unbounded. So something in between, which could mean a lot of different things. From this distance, I couldn’t pick up any thoughts or emotions. I fumbled in my pocket and came up with a tiny pair of binoculars that Stella had assured me were vital to my assignment. In the past two months, I’d used them exactly twenty-three times on mornings when Mari couldn’t jog with me, when she’d run errands at lunch, or eaten out with Trevor. I was lucky not to have been arrested as a stalker.

I studied the trees, regretting the fading light. Someone was definitely crouching behind one of the evergreens, but I could see little more than a patch of green jacket. Wait. Between the branches of the bush next to the evergreen, where a few tenacious leaves clung to an otherwise bare limb, I spied what might be the black barrel of a rifle. I shifted to another position that was slightly more exposed and looked again. Another figure hunched farther to the left, the insignia of a hunter with a rifle standing out on his dark jacket. A jolt of emotion arrowed through me.

Hunters.

There are few things Unbounded fear, and Hunters are one of them. For over fifty years the society of Hunters has dedicated their lives to eradicating both the Renegades and our enemy, the Emporium, never differentiating between the two Unbounded groups. That many of the Hunters’ older members began life as failed Emporium genetic experiments and were later abandoned, only makes their hatred that much stronger. Despite the fact that Renegades protect mortals from the Emporium, Hunters view all Unbounded as false gods they need to depose and punish. Eradicate like vermin. Kill.

My first thought was that the Hunters had somehow tracked me, though I was new enough not to be in their database. The tightness in my stomach now extended to the tips of my fingers. Both my previous run-ins with Hunters had nearly ended in a date with a sharp blade.

My left hand slid to the cell phone in my coat pocket, pressing and holding the single button on the side. After the Emporium attack two months ago on our Renegade allies in New York, where nine Unbounded and a dozen mortals were murdered in a macabre slaughter, and several more had been taken captive, we’d begun carrying these altered phones.

With Cort and Dimitri in Mexico, Ritter gone, and Ava up to her ears in whatever she wouldn’t explain over the phone, who would they send to answer my call? Stella wouldn’t come, not in her condition, and my brothers lacked training. Chris wasn’t even Unbounded. No, it would be someone from our mortal security detail, most of whom had served with the government in black ops. They were well trained and deadly. More than a match for any Hunters. Still, I’d try to mop up the Hunters before they got here—if only to prove to myself that I could.

I glanced at Mari, needing to adjust my position again to get a clear view. Trevor had moved several feet away from her, and now he dipped his head as he glanced at the trees where the Hunters crouched.

A signal.

I didn’t know how he’d been contacted by them, but somehow he was involved—and he was giving them Mari. What was his price? Anger flooded me, and it was all I could do not to go running into the open and smash my fist into his face. Instead, I pushed partway through the bushes, forcing myself to wait.

Mari was still talking, her voice louder now. I couldn’t quite make out the words, but her tone was pleading. I hurt for her, for what she was about to lose. It wasn’t fair. Trevor had done a good job of isolating her in the three years since her mother’s death, and lately she had no one to confide in except him—and me. I was about to betray her now. How long would it be before she’d trust anyone again? Ava had told me when I Changed that I’d been given a priceless gift or a great curse, and this was yet one more example. The necessity of sneaking around, of lying to people who would be your friends.

Somehow, I had to get us out of this situation. I couldn’t depend on the others making it on time. They won’t shoot unless Mari fights them. Except she probably would. She wouldn’t realize that they didn’t care how they managed to take her prisoner. A simple bullet to the brain or heart would temporarily stop any struggle—long enough for the cutting to begin.

Biting my lip until I tasted blood, I edged forward as far as I could without exposing myself, close enough now to pick out actual words.

The Hunters stepped from behind the distant trees, running toward Mari, as silent as wolves. Still only two. Good. A thrill of anticipation rolled through me. One man sported a ponytail, a grizzled beard, and wore a camouflage jacket; the other was clean-faced with stringy blond hair that emerged from his knit cap and fell to the collar of his brown coat. The older man would likely be more dangerous, especially if he’d dealt with Unbounded before. Neither was a match for me, though if they got off a lucky shot, they could immobilize me long enough that I might be in trouble.

Mari must have heard something because she glanced behind her. Seeing the strangers, she moved forward quickly to join Trevor, but he held up his hands and spoke loud enough for the oncoming Hunters to hear. “Nothing personal, Mari. You have too much of their blood. It’s tainted. I can’t be with you anymore.”

“What are you talking about?” Mari sounded dazed. “Who are they? This has nothing to do with anyone but us.”

Trevor shook his head like the dog he was. “They tracked your ancestry. It was a long shot that you were one of them”—he uttered the word with disgust—“but they assigned me to you to make sure. Last week when your knee got better, and how you can add up those numbers. It all means something, Mari.” He gave her a mean little grin. “It means you’re a monster.”

I was going to kill that man when I got my hands on him.

Mari reached for Trevor, but he shook her off as though she carried contagion. The other men laughed and lunged for her, securing her arms.

“Hey, I know you.” Mari peered at the younger man. “You were at our wedding!”

He barked a laugh. “Ask Trevor how much bonus he got for that. Best way to see if you turned.”

“Let me go!” Mari began struggling.

At the panic in her voice, Trevor hesitated. “Go easy on her now.”

The older Hunter snorted. “You know what she is, and what you signed on to do. What you was paid to do. Now git outta here if you ain’t got the stomach for it.”

“You—you’re not going to, uh, do it here, are you?” Trevor stared at his frightened wife.

“Of course not. Now git. Or have you changed your mind? Because you know what that means.” The old man leveled his rifle at Trevor.

Trevor held up his hands, stumbling back a few steps.

“Trevor,” Mari whimpered.

Without another word, Trevor turned and fled.

Mari’s scream filled the park, and the grizzled Hunter shook her. “Stop that, or I’ll shoot you right here. Ain’t no one gonna hear you anyway. We got men making sure no one comes this way.”

She didn’t stop struggling. Fighting was against her docile nature—her former nature—but now that she’d Changed, the old Mari was gone.

The young Hunter pulled Mari against him, her back to his chest, and put a hand over her mouth. She promptly bit him, but he only laughed and stroked her neck with his other hand. “She’s a pretty one—and feisty. I want a go at her.” Squatting slightly, he rubbed his groin up her backside. A terrified sob escaped Mari’s throat as she arched away.

“There’s no time,” growled the old Hunter.

“Sure there is. It’s not like I have to talk pretty to her. You said yourself they ain’t human. What’s it gonna hurt? I want to see what it’s like. What Trevor’s had all this time.” His hand snaked to Mari’s waistband.

The old man searched the growing darkness. “Be quick about it then. You know how the others are. They think it’s a sin to touch one.” He laughed hoarsely. “Like it’s catching.”

“Then hold this.” The young Hunter thrust his rifle at his companion before turning his attention back to Mari, his hand slipping under her hip-length coat.

She struggled more furiously as he yanked open her pants. He turned her around, still pulling on the material, but Mari’s fist caught him in the face. Shoving her at the old guy, he ground out, “Grab her. Keep her standing. Won’t take but a minute. Smack her good if she tries anything. Might be true what they say about some of them being able to get into our minds.” He emanated a wave of lust so strong, I could feel it from where I hid without even trying.

Tucking the rifles under his arm, the old Hunter complied, placing one big hand on Mari’s stomach and pulling her to him, his other hand clapping over her mouth, jerking her head back until it hit his shoulder. Mari kicked at his leg, trying to free herself, but he shook her roughly. “Stop that, bitch, or he’ll make it worse for you.”

The young man laughed, his hand fumbling at his own clothing. “Just hold still and enjoy. I’m way more of a man than Trevor ever was.”

Enough. It was tempting just to shoot them both, but I didn’t want to alert the companions they claimed to have out in the darkness. If Ritter had been around, he’d have probably made sure I was carrying a silencer. But he wasn’t. He’d abandoned me, and I didn’t need him to finish this task. Mari was my responsibility; I wasn’t going to let them have her.

Slipping the gun back into my holster, I arose silently from my hiding place and sprinted toward the men, leaving a few strands of my blond hair on the bushes as I squeezed through. I’d traveled half the distance separating us before the old guy looked up and saw me, his face gray in the sparse light. He let go of Mari and tried to bring up his rifle, but he was clumsy with the added weight of the younger man’s weapon.

I helped him drop both guns to the ground with a well-placed kick that even my brother Jace would have appreciated. The old man grunted as my foot continued on to connect solidly with his side. As he curled forward in pain, I followed with a left hook, striking him to the frozen grass and hopefully buying me a little time.

Mari screamed, and I turned to face her. The young man, his pants open and sliding down his narrow hips, had jumped behind Mari, his arm circling her waist.

“Mari, it’s going to be okay,” I told her. “But don’t scream again.”

The young Hunter peered into the night. “Help!” he shouted.

Great. I hadn’t expected him to have that many cells left in his tiny brain.

Movement behind me signaled that the old guy had recovered. I whirled, slamming my elbow into his head as he tried to rise, a rifle clutched in his hands. I kicked the gun out of his reach.

The young man was backing away, dragging Mari after him. I took out my gun. “Let her go.”

He shook his head, his knit cap askew. His breath came in fast gasps.

“Let her go, or when I get finished with you, you’ll never touch another woman again.” I took aim at the thin slice of his face that wasn’t hidden behind Mari.

“You—you won’t shoot her.” His voice increased two octaves on the last words.

“Why not?” I took a step closer. “As you said, she’s not human, so it won’t matter if I shoot her. In fact, it’d probably be easier for me. I’ll get you both with one bullet. It definitely won’t hurt her as much as what you have planned.”

The sound from his throat was half protest, half sob. His eyes grew impossibly wide. “You’re one of them, ain’t you?”

“One of who exactly?”

No answer.

I shifted my position so I could keep an eye on the old man. He wasn’t moving, but cockroaches had a way of coming back to consciousness when least expected. Besides, there was no way to tell if anyone else had heard the commotion. I had to be prepared for the worst.

Mari was struggling again, her efforts loud in the quiet of the park.

“I’ll give you to the count of three,” I said to the Hunter. “One . . . two . . .”

The young Hunter’s eyes went again to the blackness, where help had failed to materialize. With a whine, he pushed Mari at me and ran.

I sidestepped Mari and leapt after him. I didn’t have far to go. His jeans slid further down his thighs and tripped him. I chuckled, kicking his sprawled body over with my foot, my eyes sliding down his nakedness. “So that’s why you’re a rapist. Can’t blame a woman for not wanting any of that.”

Heat filled his eyes. He jumped up and lunged toward me, forgetting my gun and his bareness. Exactly what I’d hoped. I mean, how can you strike a naked guy lying on the ground?

I blocked his punch with my right arm, and hit him with two left jabs. He lunged at me again, and I heard a sharp click half a second before hot fire spread through my stomach.

A knife. I hadn’t expected that. We trained with knives as we did everything else, and for an instant, I considered retrieving the one I carried inside my boot. Stupid when I had the gun.

I aimed the Sig. “Stop.” I could feel warm blood leaking down my stomach, though already the wound would have begun healing. There were only two ways to kill Unbounded, and a scratch like that wasn’t one of them.

“You ain’t going to use that gun,” the Hunter mocked. “My friends will hear. Then you’ll be the one begging for this.” He felt his groin before hitching up his pants and rushing me. His movements were sloppy, unpracticed, but he had a knife and twenty pounds on me.

I turned to avoid the knife, hitting him at the same time with another left jab. He stumbled past me, pivoted on his heel, and dived at me again. I cracked the gun in my right hand down on his head. Take that, idiot. A pistol had more than one use.

He fell forward with a thump—and lay there unmoving.

Carefully I turned him over. He’d cut himself in the stomach with the knife, but unfortunately not deep enough to bleed to death. He still had a pulse, too, so that meant he’d recover from being pistol-whipped. For all that he was a scumbag, I was relieved. Since my Change, I’d shot people and fought a lot more, but I’d never killed anyone. Not permanently killed. Killing Unbounded didn’t count if it wasn’t permanent. At least that’s what I told myself because in truth it was still horrifying.

No time to think about it. I had to get Mari to the safe house—and I still had to decide what to do with the Hunters. They could identify me now.

I turned, half expecting Mari to have collapsed in a sobbing heap, but she’d grabbed one of the Hunter’s rifles and was pointing it—at me. She backed away, her eyes wild.

I put the Sig in my pocket and held my hands up to show I wasn’t armed. “Put it down, Mari. We have to get out of here.”

“You—how—why . . .”

“I promise I’ll explain everything, but later, okay? Trust me.”

“You killed him! You were going to shoot me!” Her face was flushed and her eyes wide, her hands shaking with fear. Fear of me, the person who’d gone to work at a boring accounting firm for months in order to protect her from people a lot worse than the Hunters. The person who’d brought her food when she was too depressed to eat. The one who’d urged her to start taking charge of her life.

The truth of it was that she had more than enough reason to be wary of me. I’d run myself if I were in her place—in fact, I had run, and my family had paid for that mistake with a life. Luckily, Mari had no family to endanger, except fourth cousins she didn’t know and Stella, who was technically her fifth-great aunt but whom she hadn’t seen since she was a little girl.

Mari looked ready to bolt, and I still didn’t know what else might be lurking out there in the dark. “He was going to rape you,” I reminded her. “Besides, he’s not dead.”

“How did you know I was here?”

“I followed you.” The street lamps in the park chose that moment to go on, making me feel exposed. How long before the Hunters’ backup arrived?

“You followed me?” Her voice rose to a pitch that hurt my ears. “Who are you, Erin? Who are you really? Because normal people don’t follow their friends. Normal people don’t know how to fight like that.” Her eyes went to the sprawled Hunters.

“I told you I’ll explain later. We have to get out of here. These guys usually travel in a pack.”

Besides, wherever there were Hunters, the Emporium was never far behind. Hunters might hate all Unbounded, but Emporium agents had been infiltrating their organization for decades, using them as a weapon against us. That the Hunters had found Mari or knew to watch for her Change smacked of the Emporium more than the Hunters, who were too short-lived to think over generations. But no matter how they’d found her, if I didn’t get Mari out of this situation safely, Stella might never talk to me again. Renegade Unbounded guard their family lines as carefully as any treasure—even from most fellow Renegades—and she’d been waiting more than a hundred years for someone in her family line to Change.

I sent out my mind, trying to determine if anyone else was out there in the darkness, or at least within my sensing range. We needed to avoid running into anyone else. Mari was already spooked as it was without watching me fight again.

Someone was coming—and fast. Had to be Unbounded. No mortal could move that rapidly. No time to run.

I reached for my gun.

Mari gasped as a shadow appeared from behind her, yanking the rifle from her hand. Her eyes went to the man, as if she didn’t know whether she should scream and run—or fall into his arms and weep with relief.

Which was almost exactly the way I felt.

He was a tower of strong muscle, carrying himself with undeniable grace, as did all those gifted with combat. No movement wasted, no attack he couldn’t anticipate. His black hair fell to the right, grazing a mole on his cheek. His square jaw, in need of a shave, was set in determination, and his eyes glittered with anger. He carried a gun in his right hand, and the sword emerging from a back sheath announced that he’d come prepared to find Emporium Unbounded. Wet-looking patches spotted his black jeans and jacket. Definitely blood.

Ritter was back. After two months with no word, he was back.

“Gaven and I took care of their friends.” He spoke in a clipped voice, one he might have used in his former life as a policeman a quarter of a century ago. I wondered if he was thinking of his family—and the woman he hadn’t been able to save.

“Who are you?” Desperation laced Mari’s voice.

Ignoring her, Ritter crossed the space between us. I felt burning inside him when he was still feet away. I’d always been able to catch glimpses of him like this, even from the first before I knew about my ability or how to use it. Desire swept through me, and I couldn’t tell if it was his or mine—or if it mattered. I had a brief vision of going into his arms, of our mouths clinging together, our bodies melding. Everything in my body screamed that he was mine.

Yet he’d broken his promise, and in a world where almost everyone I knew lied to survive, I valued truth more than just about anything. At least that’s what I told myself.

He reached for me, but I held myself stiff.

“Erin,” he began.

“Later.” I pulled my arm from his grip, jerking my chin at the Hunters. “They’ll be able to identify me, and we still don’t know how they found Mari. Are you sure you got the rest of them?” The emotions swirling around him cut off when I pulled away, as though they’d never existed. I knew differently.

“I’m sure.” His eyes glittered so darkly that the only color for them was black. He was nothing but empty space to my sensing now, and it wasn’t likely he’d relax enough to let anything more slip. We all learned how to block or suffer the consequences. The Emporium had at least two sensing Unbounded, one more powerful than I dreamed of becoming. She’d almost controlled me once, and I knew she’d eventually come for me again. I might be young in Unbounded terms, but I was valuable—or so everyone told me. I hoped when the time came that I’d be ready for her.

For a brief moment I thought with envy of my former life as a law-school dropout working a dead-end job as an insurance claims agent. Nothing more exciting than talking to distressed people and pushing buttons on a keyboard.

No one trying to carve me or my family into pieces.

Except I didn’t really want to go back. If it meant saving the lives that had been lost, I’d agree in a heartbeat, but that could never happen.

Being Unbounded changes everything.

I RUBBED MY HANDS TENSELY over my bare arms as I studied each person in the lobby, but everyone we passed was mortal. None of them was shielded or thinking about Unbounded. Their thoughts came to me loudly, their life forces glowing with the additional brightness I’d felt since Mexico, when I’d pushed my ability to its limits. The increased sensitivity made me jumpy since coming to New York, where there seemed to be a crush of people and stray thoughts everywhere I turned. My own mental shield was becoming conversely strong as I worked at keeping them out.

Keene McIntyre arched a brow, a question in his eyes, and I shook my head, indicating that I hadn’t located any Emporium Unbounded or Hunters. Of course we had yet to see our target.

I wondered for the hundredth time how Ava had talked me into attending this swanky political fundraiser in New York City. She or Stella would have been a much better choice for hobnobbing with the rich and famous, as well as ferreting out the truth about our target. I’d agreed only because a prominent Hunter and his cronies would be in attendance and I was one of the few Renegades not in their database—the only one who also had the sensing ability.

“Cold, Erin?” Keene whispered, amusement thick in his voice. As luck would have it, he was the only other experienced Renegade in our group who was likewise not in the Hunters’ database. In fact, before his defection from the Emporium, he’d worked undercover with the Hunters. That he was mortal was ironic, since it meant he was also one of the most vulnerable of our group, but he was good at what he did, coming by his fighting ability through sheer force of will and determination rather than by inheritance.

Not that we were left to ourselves. This mission was far too important. All the Renegades who could be spared were watching the grounds, ready to back us up if needed. Keene and I were here to gain information about our target, not take him out—unless we uncovered information that made his demise more important than our safety.

I rolled my eyes at Keene’s comment. “A strapless dress like this in December doesn’t make sense, and why did I have to check my fur coat?”

His eyes, their green color bright under the chandelier, roamed over the dress appreciatively. “Because people who spend five thousand dollars for a picture with the vice president of the United States always check their coats.” Easy for him to say since he wore a tuxedo and couldn’t feel the winter chill seeping into the gilded lobby.

Cold notwithstanding, I’d spent far too much time working lately not to enjoy wearing the dress. The silky folds hugged all the right curves and made me feel feminine and in control. Unfortunately, the last time I’d worn red, things hadn’t gone so well, and right now there were a lot of other places I’d rather be. Particularly with our Renegades not involved in tonight’s operation, who were several miles away keeping watch on the building where the Emporium had taken five of our people captive. We’d staked out the compound for three weeks since discovering their whereabouts, but so far we hadn’t found a way to rescue them.

My eyes went past Keene and the reception hall entrance, where men in stiff white suits were helping attendees to their destinations. With so much power and money here tonight, the Emporium would likely be represented in significant numbers, though we had yet to verify the presence of any operatives. That fact contrasted sharply with the uneasy feeling in my gut that told me something would go terribly wrong before the night was over. The sensation related to my ability and was one I’d learned not to ignore. I wanted to warn the others, but it wouldn’t make a difference to our plan. We all knew the danger. We were prepared for it.

“You ready to do this?” I asked.

For an answer, Keene extended his arm to me. He looked lean and attractive in his black tux, his longish brown hair combed back to expose the scar that ran along the right side of his face near his ear. He appeared comfortable, which was more than I could say for myself. At least my dress fell to the tips of my incredibly tall red heels, obscuring the knives in the sheath around my thigh, knives made not of metal but of plastic with 3D printers and nanotechnology. A couple of guns made of the stuff would have been better, but even we hadn’t found a way around exploding barrels and the metal required by firing pins and decent bullets.

We passed the Secret Service agents and through the metal detector at the door in front of the reception hall without incident. As I was replacing my dangling earrings and the glittering gold bracelet Stella had lent me for the evening, a man in a white suit appeared before us.

“May I have your ticket, please?” He extended his hand. Keene gave it to him, and he checked it briefly before handing it back. “Thank you. The photos are being taken behind that backdrop. Please wait with the others. It shouldn’t be long. After you pose for your picture with the vice president, please use the exit over there. However, if you wish to stay for the speech, you may still upgrade your ticket. I apologize, but all the dinner tickets have been sold.”

“Oh, that’s terrible news,” I said. “I was hoping there would be a last-minute cancellation.”

Keene almost laughed aloud. I’d been the one who refused to stay for the overpriced dinner. Not only was I an opponent of our current vice president, but I could think of a lot better ways to spend thirty thousand dollars, or the sixty it would have cost for both of us.

“I’m very sorry.” The man gave a little bow and moved aside so we could pass.

A wave of heat welcomed us as we approached the midway point of the room where photographers had set up their equipment. We couldn’t see Vice President Mann behind the backdrop from where we stood, but the line for photographs wasn’t too long when you considered he was likely to be president after the next election. Clusters of well-dressed people gathered all over the room talking, some holding a small digital copy of the photograph they’d taken with the vice president. I understood that event organizers would mail larger copies later to attendees, and I planned to use mine for target practice.

“Cort, can you still hear us?” I said, testing to make sure I hadn’t damaged the tiny microphone in the left earring when I’d removed them for the metal detector. Keene had another mic in a ring in case we were separated, but I didn’t want to depend on him.

“Both signals at full strength,” came the voice in my earbud. “And everything’s still a go.”

“Remember. In and out,” another more forceful voice reverberated in my ear. Ritter Langton, of course, making sure we stayed on task. He’d take any failure as a personal one. “No dallying.”

Dallying? I couldn’t help smiling. Who used that term these days? Only old people—and long-lived Unbounded apparently.

“Yes, Your Deathliness.” I’d started calling him that since our arrival in New York, in part because he was in charge of the operation to free our imprisoned Renegades but mostly because it bugged him. I was bugged, too. We were supposed to be figuring out our relationship, but all we’d been doing was working and training.

Ritter didn’t respond to my jab, as I knew he wouldn’t, but I’d probably pay for the remark later. I was even looking forward to it because I was beginning to see a downside to the possibility of living two thousand years. Decisions in non-life-threatening issues, such as intimacy and romance, seemed much slower to come by, and since my ability made me privy to his emotions as well as my own, I was pretty much a hormonal wreck. It didn’t help that Keene had been hanging around so much, adding to the tension.

Cort laughed in my ear. “We’ll let you know if anything happens on our side. So far everything looks calm.”

“Great,” I answered. “We’re almost to our target.”

Heads turned in my direction as we passed. Most Unbounded and mortals are unaware of the confidence exuded by all Unbounded, simply translating it as beauty or physical attraction, but to a sensing Unbounded like me, the pull was as clear as a neon arrow pointing out the identity of any quasi immortal. In fact, the early days of a Change were the only time I couldn’t definitively pinpoint an Unbounded.

There was the strong possibility that some of these milling people were Emporium plants. The Emporium had many new operatives that we didn’t know about, both Unbounded and mortal, a direct result from their active breeding program. Unlike the mortal Hunters, the Emporium was aware of my existence as well as Keene’s. If we were noticed and identified, getting out of the hotel alive could become a serious problem.

“That woman wants to meet you,” I whispered to Keene as we passed a brunette, whose black dress exposed most of her long, shapely legs. She stared at him intently from under long lashes. She was beautiful enough to be Unbounded, but a glance told me she was mortal.

Keene laughed and flashed me a crooked grin. “I’m more into blondes.” His stare made me flush, though that might be more because of Ritter’s possible reaction than my own. The men had a sort of uneasy truce at the moment, fueled by a grudging admiration for each other, but I worried that the fire simmering below the polite silences and gruff exchanges might flare into something dangerous at any moment.

We arrived at the end of the line, where two waiting couples turned to greet us. Mortals all, in their fifties, the men with thin, graying hair and expensive suits, and their coifed and expertly made-up wives dressed in silk and dripping expensive jewelry. They gave us falsely wide smiles.

One man wore glasses, and it was he who introduced the others. I nodded politely, hearing little of what he said; whatever corporation he and his partner owned didn’t interest me, and I certainly wouldn’t be having lunch with their wives.

Keene shook hands with the men and nodded at the women, giving our prepared spiel about some West Coast Internet startup that had made millions. The company was real, run by mortals we’d secretly helped with our advanced technology, but new enough that none of them should be familiar with the owners.

“Nice.” The man with glasses smiled, but inside he burned with resentment of young geniuses that made more overnight than he’d accumulated in years of sweat and toil. I shut out his thoughts and continued scanning the crowd. With so many pinpoints that signaled life forces, the room felt positively glowing.

There. I’d found one. An Unbounded man hovered near the exit, talking to someone from the hotel staff and carefully examining those leaving before the speech. He wore a black tuxedo and a tie the color of fresh blood. I leaned over to Keene, catching his eye. He followed my gaze and then said to the others without betraying any concern, “So you’re friends with Mrs. Mann, you say?”

“Oh, yes,” said the blonde next to the man with glasses, her pointed nose twitching slightly. “I’ve known Carolyn Mann for many years. Our daughter went to college with their son. From what I’ve seen, he’s following his father into politics. In my opinion, Carolyn will make a fine first lady someday.”

The second woman leaned forward and said in a conspiratorial whisper, “Actually, it may happen faster than we think. I hear President Stevens is very ill. It’s not been in the news, what with all those foreign conferences he has coming up, but I expect if things don’t change, they’ll have to make an official announcement soon.” Her tone implied that the announcement was long overdue, and that she’d love to see Vice President Mann take over for the president immediately.

Keene and I exchanged a look. Unfortunately, this information went a long way toward confirming our suspicions. Three weeks ago, on a thumb drive we’d stolen from the Emporium, the same drive that identified the location of our missing people, we’d found references to the vice president taking over the oval office. The encrypted information hadn’t been clear, simply citing meetings that had taken place earlier, but put together with intel we’d uncovered months back about a possible Emporium connection with the vice president’s son, it was serious enough to check out. It became even more important with the quickly approaching election year when no one had yet announced whether or not President Stevens would run for reelection. There didn’t seem to be any connection between the vice president and the Emporium, but that didn’t mean they hadn’t gotten to him, especially if the rumors about his son were true.

Keene chuckled. “Well, I’m sure an announcement will come through soon, or will if the press has its way. Is it me, or are there more of them than usual hanging around outside tonight?”

“Tell me about it,” the second woman responded. “But even vultures sometimes have a use.” She smiled, her dark eyes looking predatory, and I suspected she’d already had her say to the press—or planned to. Her annoying attitude gave me the urge to send a flash of light to her mind that would evoke a splitting headache, but doing so would seriously deplete my strength. The truth was, I didn’t know how much damage I could do, and mortals were so fragile. Annoying or not, she was one of those we were trying to protect.

Outside in the communications van, Cort was probably already relaying this new information to Stella, who would be on her computers with her neural headset connected, searching for additional information. If there was anything out there on the president’s condition, in printed or digital format, she’d find it within the hour.

The two couples ahead of us continued talking to each other, and we hung back slightly as the line moved forward, garnering a little space so I could report the Unbounded in the black tux to our listening friends. The man was still near the exit, though no longer talking to anyone.

“Well, we knew to expect them,” Ritter said. “Just keep your distance. At least you know where he is.” He was right. Finding the mortal agents was more problematic in a crowd this large.

The line moved again and we moved with it, nearly to the point where we could see the pictures being taken. One glimpse would be all I needed to decide our next move, though with the line growing behind us, I wasn’t at all sure that we’d be able to leave even peacefully without being arrested for some kind of rich society faux pas.

I kept scanning the crowd. No more Unbounded or mortals who appeared to be operatives. Wait, near the entrance of the room where the vice president would be speaking, I sensed several life forces that glowed dimmer than the others in the large reception room, a sign of thoughts being blocked. Four people stood out, the most prominent a man in the middle, who walked with an exaggerated swagger. His short stature was made less so by the pristine dark brown cowboy hat that looked incongruous on his head, despite his matching tuxedo, and set him apart from the crowd. I couldn’t see his front, or the insignia of a man with a rifle that was likely embroidered on his hat or lapel, but I was pretty sure I’d found the Hunter we were warned would be in attendance.

At his side walked a matronly woman with her grayish blond hair swept up into a tight bun. Her purple plaid dress might be ugly, but I’d crammed in enough study the past week to recognize it as one made by a top designer. She wore it uncomfortably, as though afraid she would trip on her high heels and ruin the dress. Two tall men flanked the couple, broad enough to be bodyguards and likely fellow Hunters. The only problem was that one of them radiated Unbounded confidence.

I swallowed hard, my hand moving instinctively closer to my knives.

Since Hunters’ sole purpose in life was to rid the earth of Unbounded, the bodyguard had to be an Emporium agent who’d infiltrated the organization. It was a dangerous game he played; if he was caught, the Hunters would take joy in cutting him into three precise pieces that would assure no regeneration. Of course, the rewards he’d receive from the Emporium for a job well done would be astronomical.

“Hunters?” Keene asked in a low voice.

“That’s my bet. But the bodyguard on the right is probably also working for our other favorite group. Definitely Unbounded, and he’s not one of ours.”

“Great.”

“Do you know any of them?” There weren’t that many Hunters in the world. At least I hoped not.

He shook his head. “I’ve mainly worked with groups on the West Coast, though the guy with the hat does look familiar. I’ve at least seen his picture before.”

The Unbounded bodyguard’s presence was definitely something we’d have to look into further. Hunters had kept records of Unbounded genealogy since their mortal ancestors had been abandoned by the Emporium during their early phases of genetic experimentation. If this guy was working for the Emporium, we couldn’t risk him infiltrating far enough to get the records that might also contain information about our descendants. Like it or not, we were often linked by blood to the Emporium.

“Copy that,” Cort said in my earbud. “Describe them, and we’ll start Stella researching their identities.”

I did, beginning with the purple dress and the cowboy hat that would likely be mentioned by gossip bloggers covering tonight’s event. “Maybe one of us should follow them.”

“No,” Ritter said. “Stay together. Keep your mind on the mission.” It was difficult to believe he’d be willing to risk losing this lead. Maybe he planned to track down the bodyguard after we cleared the party and question him personally. That would be just like Ritter. He didn’t kill Hunters except in self-defense, but his mercy wouldn’t extend to an Emporium agent who had helped murder Renegades.

Anger radiated from Keene at Ritter’s order. “Easy,” I murmured.

Keene frowned, his frustration quickly vanishing as his mental shield strengthened. Now his barrier was tight, but his lapse worried me. I hadn’t spotted an Emporium sensing Unbounded nearby, but that didn’t mean much because anyone with the sensing ability could mask life forces completely.

As if feeling our stares, the middle Hunter paused at the door and turned in our direction, scanning the room. I caught a glimpse of light red hair peeking from under the cowboy hat before I casually allowed my gaze to slide past them, pretending I was simply enjoying the crowd and the commotion. At the same time, I reached out mentally to the man. His shield was poorly erected, filled with gaps as though he didn’t quite believe anyone could delve into his private thoughts, and despite the space between us, it crushed easily beneath my onslaught. There was no sign of suspicion. He’d stopped only because his Unbounded bodyguard had paused.

My thoughts shifted to the bodyguard, who was searching the crowd. He was several decades younger than his employer, a handsome blond who looked smart in his tux. Not your typical uneducated Hunter. He has to be an Emporium agent, I thought. Yet his shield was as poorly constructed as his boss’s, and I swept it aside to find that he was simply searching for a fifth member of their party—a young lady, if I had it right—to make sure she was safe. Even as I found the answer, a red-haired girl detached herself from a young man and made her way over to the woman in the purple dress.

The others turned to enter the next room, but the bodyguard’s attention drifted to the reception room exit, pausing on the Unbounded in the black tux. A signal to a cohort? I started to check the bodyguard’s thoughts, only to find him now staring at me. My heartbeat increased, the pumping loud in my ears. If he recognized me or Keene from his Emporium briefings, he might choose to point me out to the Hunter, which would endanger our mission. Before I could decide what his scrutiny meant, he smiled and I received a strong impression of eagerness and curiosity. Nothing more. With a nod in my direction, he turned on his heel and followed his companions.

Keene gave a little chuckle. “Look who has an admirer. Do you think you could lure him into a dark room for me?”

“No!” The bark in my ear came from Ritter and caused me to wince.

That made Keene’s grin stretch wider. He put his hand up to the side of my face, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear, and said, “Emporium agent or no, I don’t blame that bodyguard one little bit. For the record, I’d go into any dark room with you.” His hand left me as he stepped forward with the suddenly moving line. “Hey, we’re almost there.”

“Stop it with the feedback,” Cort crackled in my ear. “Remember, you have to keep the earring and the ring apart or all we hear is static.”

Keene gave me a wink. I glanced back at the bodyguard, who passed through the double doors, disappearing from sight, his thoughts fading. My range still wasn’t as far as I’d like, though it had improved drastically since Mexico. If I pushed, I could follow him a bit longer, but I needed my full attention for the task at hand.

“I’m pretty sure he didn’t recognize me,” I said. “But the way he was staring could have been a signal of some sort to the guy near the door.”

Keene’s eyes went past me. “Uh, speaking of the guy at the door, where’d he go?”

Sure enough, the Unbounded in the black suit was missing. Keene turned his body slowly, casually searching the room.

Ahead of us, the woman with the pointed nose uttered a soft exclamation and lifted a hand to wave at someone behind the backdrop. I stepped forward to see who she was looking at, and finally a balding Vice President Mann came into view. He was smiling widely for the camera, his arm around one of the guests like a best friend. His wife stood on his other side, her gaze leaving the woman who’d waved and going back to the camera just in time for the bright flash. Tonight, apparently, the pictures were a two-for-one deal: the Vice President and Mrs. Mann.

Next to me Keene’s body radiated readiness, but I shook my head. Whoever the vice president might serve, the man himself wasn’t Unbounded. Neither was Mrs. Mann with her pale, regal face, wide-set eyes, and chestnut hair. Both of their life forces also gleamed brightly, without any sort of barriers, so it was likely they’d never heard of mental shields. Of course, that didn’t mean the vice president was innocent of all connection with the Emporium. I pushed my thoughts toward the couple.

He was thinking about his speech and wondering why his son had been acting so strangely the past year—and if there was any way to fix whatever had gone wrong between them. She was wondering what the daughter of the woman in front of me was up to these days, and if she still had a habit of chasing older men for their money. While the vice president exuded strength, weariness leaked from Mrs. Mann like water from cupped hands. She wasn’t going to last the whole night, not without the help of drugs. Maybe her doctor was here somewhere behind the half dozen Secret Service agents.

“Keene?” I asked, wanting to know if he’d spotted the Unbounded in the black tux.

“No sign of him.”

I nodded, trusting Keene to keep watch while I did my job. I tried to delve deeper into the vice president’s mind, but the cacophony of voices and thoughts around me made it difficult to distinguish his thoughts from the others that pushed in around me. “I need to get closer.”

“The line should move soon,” Keene said.

I joined him for a moment in scanning the room but refocused on the vice president as a small group of friends finished their individual pictures and left together, leaving a large gap in the line. We stepped forward.

I pushed harder, and a throbbing began at the base of my skull, something I hadn’t felt in weeks. It only meant my brain was tiring from all the scanning, but I was nowhere near ready to give up. I began absorbing from the air, regaining my strength. A posh hotel right before dinner was a great place for absorbing, all those molecules with expensive, organic nutrients floating about begging to be taken in through my pores. In seconds, the throbbing eased.

Focusing more tightly, I watched the vice president shake hands with another couple and smile for the camera. More worry seeped from him. Something wasn’t right. The fact that he worried so much about his adult son, who was supposedly holding his own in politics, seemed to underscore our intel.

“Erin!”

Keene’s voice, but the warning came too late. Hard fingers bit painfully into the flesh of my shoulder.

WE HUNKERED DOWN IN THE bushes and waited until the patrolling guards passed. My nerves tingled in anticipation, my Unbounded genes kicking in. We’d slipped over the massive stone fence surrounding the estate but were still far from our goal and the evidence we’d come to steal. Intel on a recovered thumb drive had led us here, but we didn’t know for sure that our information was correct. Not one communication circuit in the world had made even a roundabout mention of it, which meant those responsible were being careful not to use any regular channels.

The large house didn’t appear different from its neighbors, at least not visually. Aerial photographs taken of West Lake Hills, a suburb of Austin, Texas, showed only a sprawling mansion with manicured lawns, stables, a tennis court, an elaborate swimming pool, two connecting guesthouses, and a parking lot rivaling those found outside many shopping malls. It was rumored to have a second pool inside the house itself, along with a race track and two racquetball courts.

None of this was unusual for Mr. Desoto, a billionaire whose various companies held several important US defense contracts. Even the security of patrolling guards wasn’t that far out of the ordinary. But the fact that I couldn’t sense inside the house meant they had Emporium technology and were aware that someone like me existed.

“Ready?” Ritter Langton asked. Even in the dark and with my mind shield closed, his presence was tangible to me. Tangible and compelling. I had the ability to see all life forces, even if their thoughts were blocked, but I perceived his differently. Probably because I considered him mine.

I nodded, reaching for the hood I carried in my pocket to cover my pale skin and blond hair. Next to me, the dark-haired Mari Jorgenson did the same. The hood was made of metamaterials like the bodysuits we wore, or in other words, particles smaller than the wavelength of light. Cort had been working on them for the past century, and finally technology was catching up to his theories. Though these new prototypes didn’t make the wearer truly invisible, they helped hide us in the dark.

Ritter glided to the edge of the bushes, his sharp eyes penetrating the darkness, searching for signs of danger. He wouldn’t be going inside the house because Mari and I planned to shift out once the shield was down, and we couldn’t take him along with us, but he’d be close in case something unexpected happened. Hopefully close enough for me to use his combat ability if we ran into problems. I was good, but next to his ability, I looked like a beginner.

“Check your suit’s heat nullifiers.” Stella Davis, the fourth member of our party, glanced up from a small tablet she held in her hand. “I can’t guarantee they’ll have infrared, but if this information is as important as I think it is, they’ll have something in place to check heat sources for anything larger than a cat.” She took out a device twice as thick as my cell phone. “Here it is.”

I was supposed to plug the decoder into any computer attached to their network, and it would give Stella access to their computers so she could disable the house’s shields.

“Be careful,” Stella added. For all her two centuries of experience with ops, her slanted eyes radiated nervousness. That was because Mari was one of Stella’s two descendants to survive our ongoing conflict with the Emporium, and Stella really didn’t like her going inside the house. Being nearly immortal didn’t mean as much as it might when your worst enemies were every bit as immortal and knew exactly how to permanently end your existence.

Stella put on a blinking headset that looked somewhat like a thin crown with tiny pieces of metal that worked their way past her sleek, dark hair to make contact with her scalp, providing a neural link to her computer. As a technopath, she could use the device to compare and manipulate data at a rate several dozen times that of an average human. Even with the odd-looking headset, Stella was arrestingly beautiful, owing in part to her half-Japanese heritage, but mostly because of the nanites she controlled inside her body, enhancing her features faster than her Unbounded genes could put them back to normal.

“I’ll let you know when it’s in place,” I said. I didn’t tell Stella I’d take care of Mari; she already knew. We Renegades, self-appointed guardians to a mortal human world, who for the most part were unaware of our existence, took care of our own. We were closer than family.

“What if the shield isn’t connected to their computer?” Mari asked, almost startling me with her closeness, though I could clearly sense her life force in my mind. The metamaterial suit did seem to help her with stealth. Not that she, a shifter, needed improvement in that area.

“The shield is generated by electricity.” Stella pulled a knit hat over her headset to obscure the tiny blinking lights. “If the controls aren’t linked to their network, I’ll simply find their outside circuits and blow them up.” She gave Mari a bland grin. “Don’t worry. If you run into trouble, I’ll sic Ritter on them. We’ll make sure you can shift out.”

Mari couldn’t teleport past the invisible barrier any more than I could sense past it. But that was only an annoyance, not an insurmountable obstacle.

“Just don’t blow up the house until we’re out.” This I said mostly for Ritter, who as a combat Unbounded sometimes got a bit too much into his work.

He looked my way, his eyes black and glittering in the dark, sending a delicious wave of heat through me. I put in my earbud, checked the attached mic, and pulled on my hood. “Ready.”

Ritter led the way. Had he wanted, he could have left us far behind. Even without the new suit, he could move fast enough that he was difficult to see. If he dropped his mental barrier, I could channel his ability, but it wasn’t necessary now, and doing so might alert a sensing Unbounded working for the Emporium, if any were near. It was always a possibility.

Two weeks ago, after my last encounter with an Emporium sensing Unbounded, I’d ended up with a shiny, black, snake-like thread in my head. I’d tried pushing it out, blasting it, and otherwise decimating it with my mental ability—all without result. It was still there, contained now, but I hadn’t discovered its purpose. Doing so was on my short list of priorities.

Even through her mind shield, Mari’s exuberance glimmered from her. So different from the accountant she’d been before her Change had made her one of us. I extended my own mental shield to cover her. She wouldn’t even realize I was doing it, but it made me feel better. At the first hint of danger, she could shift back to the airfield where my brother, Chris, waited with our plane, so she was actually safer than the rest of us—well, provided we turned off their electric shields so she could use her ability. But because of her rare talent, the Emporium would pay a high price to get their hands on her and her ovaries, so I felt protective of her.

Ritter guided us unfailingly through the bushes, keeping to the shadows when we neared the house. The two-man patrol we’d dodged earlier came around again, triggering motion lights on the house. I could tell from looking at them that they were human, not Unbounded—a useful aspect of my gift—but their minds were blocked, if poorly. With only a little pushing, I saw from their thoughts that while they were familiar with the Emporium, they knew nothing about the file we sought. Not that it really mattered because we were almost certain where it was being kept. A part of me was relieved they were mortal, but another part was angry at the Emporium’s penchant for using mortals. If something went wrong, mortal agents too often meant more deaths.

Deaths I wasn’t willing to be responsible for.

We sat still beneath some trees as the patrol passed, but they didn’t even look our way. The January night was a bit colder than it had been in San Diego, home to our new headquarters, but mild enough for our purpose, and the suits kept us comfortable. When the patrol was gone, Ritter gestured for us to wait while he took care of the motion lights. He sprinted forward across the grass toward the house. A light on the roof came belatedly to life, but he was already out of sight. If anyone was observing, they might assume some animal had tripped it. A few seconds later, the light winked out of existence.

Ritter signaled with a whistle, and Mari and I started forward. Even this close, I couldn’t penetrate the shield around the house, so they had to be using a lot of electricity to maintain it. No doubt in response to what had happened in New York, when we’d gotten past their shields at a prison compound.

I removed the launcher from my back and shot a grappling hook onto the roof above a second-floor window of the spare room we were targeting. Pulling the grappling rope toward me until it caught one of the numerous chimneys, I activated the retraction feature and began walking up the side of the house as it towed me upward, my stomach clenching with revulsion.

Climbing wasn’t the problem. It was only what happened once I got high enough for my acrophobia to kick in. I’d conquered it for the most part, but being someplace high always required effort. I was ever aware of the fear, knowing it would burst free and paralyze me if I allowed it any space in my mind.

“Five minutes,” Ritter said in my earbud.

Five minutes during which Mari and I had to climb to the window and wait there until the patrol changed and the alarm was turned off so the guards could sign in and out for their shifts. That was when we’d force the window open with the crowbar I’d brought along for the job.

I reached the window ledge and balanced between it and my hold on the launcher. Mari was still rising with her own launcher and rope, painfully slow. Finally she shifted, disappearing from below and appearing next to me on the window ledge, grabbing her rope again just in time to stop herself from falling. Somehow she managed to prevent her abandoned launcher from banging into the side of the house as it dangled at the end of the rope.

“No way is this coming out of the eaves,” she whispered, staring up at where her grappling hook had penetrated the siding instead of making it on top of the roof. “I didn’t aim so well. I’ll have to leave it behind.”

“I’ll take care of it once you’re inside.” Ritter’s voice came to our ears. “In fact, I’ll take care of Erin’s, too, since I’ll be up there.”

I didn’t doubt that he would. His ability gave him strength, speed, and agility I only guessed at even after experiencing it firsthand. Two hundred and seventy-three years of practice helped, I supposed. All of which was a good thing tonight. We hoped to be in and out with no one the wiser. It was good to steal information from our enemies at any time, but far better to do it without them knowing we were onto them. Especially when we were dealing with the Emporium and the people on their payroll.

“Car approaching,” Stella said in our earbuds. “Get ready.”

My free hand closed around the crowbar, sliding it from my belt. If the house hadn’t been so protected, Stella would have used her technology to learn the house alarm codes, but whatever prevented me from probing the house also prevented any kind of signals from coming out. Our spybots were useless. If this house was attached to the Internet and the outside world, it was by cables buried deep in the earth.

“They’re opening the door,” Stella said. After several seconds, she added, “There, that should be enough time for them to have put in the code.”

“You’re clear to enter,” Ritter added. “No one in sight on this side of the house.”

My senses verified Ritter’s observation, so unless there was a sensing Emporium Unbounded nearby who could mask his life force, we were good to go.

I jabbed in the crowbar, but the window didn’t budge.

“Uh, any time soon, Erin,” Ritter muttered.

“Why don’t you come up here and do it yourself, Your Deathliness?” I put emphasis on the nickname I normally used only when he was irritating me.

“Maybe I will.” His voice held a mixture of threat and promise.

I reached out, tapping on his shield. Let me in. He couldn’t keep me out, not anymore, though he would be able to soon. All our Renegades were practicing shielding after I’d proven false the long-held belief that mind shields always worked. I’d learned that some sensing Unbounded—at least me and Delia Vesey, one of the Emporium Triad leaders—could break through normal mental shields. The discovery had come about partly because of desperation, but mostly because I was new and didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to be able to do it. Ava O’Hare, who was the leader of our group of Renegade Unbounded and also my ancestor, couldn’t break through shields before I showed her how. Now she could break through the shields of our newest Renegades, who were mentally the weakest.

Ritter dropped his shield, and I channeled his ability, seeing immediately how to solve the problem. Mostly it was just brute force. The window slid open.

You owe me, Ritter thought.

He had no way of knowing if I’d picked up his thought, so I chose to ignore it. His Deathliness was arrogant enough without me egging him on. The fact that he was that good didn’t help matters.

As I swung into the room, the shield over the house cut me off from Ritter, and I felt a yank of loss that was all out of proportion to a simple disconnect with any other person. I shouldn’t feel that way, despite our relationship, but I did.

“They are so going to know we were here if they open this window,” Mari said, sliding her hand along the frame before she closed it.

“The room’s unused,” I said. “It could be months.”

“It’s so dark.” Mari flipped out a penlight and swung it around the room before snapping it off. Long enough to verify that no one lurked in the corners.

Too bad I hadn’t been able to maintain contact with Ritter, whose ability gave his eyesight a boost in the dark. We were also cut off from communication until we disarmed the shield.

“Come on.” I led the way to the door.

We’d both memorized the plans to the house and knew where the security room should be. Careful research on Stella’s part had revealed that Mr. Desoto had installed a state-of-the-art surveillance system, complete with cameras and a dozen monitors. What we didn’t know was if someone actually watched the monitors constantly. It was, after all, Mr. Desoto’s residence, not one of his many businesses, though apparently our intel was correct about him storing important information here—the patrols were proof of that. Since it was his home, however, and patrols made regular circuits around the house, we were hopeful that instead of constantly monitoring their camera feed, the patrolmen would check the security room only if their computer programs alerted them to something suspicious.

We moved silently into the hallway and down a flight of stairs. The room we’d entered was far from the master suite, where I assumed Mr. Desoto was enjoying his evening, and that also meant we had a good way to go before we neared the security room where I had to plug in Stella’s decoder.

After gliding through a long hallway and a sitting room, we started down the front stairs that were illuminated by a slice of moonlight shining through the huge window over the entryway. The crystals on an elaborate chandelier above the entryway glittered as they eerily reflected the moonlight. Next to me, there was a brief change in the air and a soft pop. I knew without looking that Mari had shifted. She reappeared down below and crouched behind a wall table, giving me the all-clear signal. I finished descending the stairs the usual way, and as my foot touched the bottom stair, a series of beeps came to us faintly. I froze for a few heartbeats until I realized it was the alarm being reactivated by the new patrol guards. Hopefully, that meant the security room was unmanned.

We continued farther into the house, nearing the kitchen. When noise of a lid settling on a pot came rather too loudly, I put my hand on Mari’s arm and pressed us up against the wall of the hallway, sending out my thoughts to see who it was. I couldn’t sense past the house’s invisible barrier, but now that we were inside, everything in the house was available to me. The noise had come from the live-in cook, who was getting a jump on tomorrow’s meal preparations. No mental shield protected her thoughts. She was watching a television embedded in the wall, wearing headphones so the sound would have no chance of disturbing Mr. Desoto, though his suite was far enough away that it wouldn’t be a problem. I saw in her mind that she planned meals only for one person the next day because Mrs. Desoto and her two teenagers were visiting her sister in Chicago for the weekend. There was, of course, no information about the security room or where Mr. Desoto might keep his top secret files.

When inside people’s minds, I mostly remain an observer, careful not to touch their thought streams that appeared to me as rivers of sand cascading from some imaginary ceiling and then curving sideways and away out of sight before reaching the floor. All the scenes of their current thoughts or any memories they were pondering would fling by at tremendous speeds, showing me details about their lives. If I touched the thought stream at all, people who knew of Unbounded would immediately suspect someone was inside their minds, while regular mortals might suspect they were going insane. Permanent damage was possible inside anyone’s mind, which was why I preferred to examine an unconscious person, since it was far easier to obtain information while the brain was sleeping.

But there were ways around my no-touch policy. I formed a thought of my own and set it adrift near the top of the cook’s thought stream. It floated for several seconds, drifting closer to the stream, until all at once it was sucked inside.

Almost immediately, she began thinking about the security room and the nice young man who was on the night shift. I gently released another thought. A suggestion really. She should take him a tasty snack. Again, her mind took over. Yes, some of those cookies she’d baked today and a hot cup of gourmet coffee with cream and two sugars the way he liked. The good kind of coffee and not the cheap stuff the patrol made themselves from a coffee pot inside the security room. The boy reminded her of her own son before he’d married and moved to Florida.

Keeping the link with the cook open, I refocused on Mari and the dark corridor where we hugged the wall. “Bad news,” I whispered. “There’s a guy in the security room, but the cook’s planning to take him some coffee. Her thoughts say he’s young enough that even if he’s Emporium, he can’t have Changed.”

“If she’s taking him coffee, we can use the magic powder instead of gassing him to sleep,” Mari said with a grin.

The magic powder would put an average-sized man asleep within two minutes but was gentle enough that he’d think he’d just fallen asleep. It wouldn’t be enough to keep him unconscious for more than a half hour, but that was plenty of time for us to play havoc with his security system, grab the information we sought, and get out. There was also a little something extra in the powder that would make the man traceable for up to a week within a certain range. It wasn’t anything we’d probably need in this situation, but we never passed up an opportunity to learn more about our enemies. If he was an Emporium operative, that little addition might lead to his capture when all this was over.

I waited until the cook had the coffee brewing and had walked around to the far side of the large counter, her eyes fixed on her movie. Then I did a double check for life forms. Sensing no one in the immediate vicinity, I whispered to Mari to drop her shield. Mari couldn’t shift to a place she’d never been or couldn’t see—unless someone she was strongly connected to was in that location—but I could see the kitchen area quite clearly through the cook’s mind, and I could channel Mari’s ability.

Crouching, I shifted to the near side of the counter and reached up to drop the powder into the mug the cook had waiting near the coffee maker. Given the very small amount of powder and the reading glasses on the counter, I was positive she wouldn’t notice when she filled the cup. Seconds later, I was back with Mari. Let’s move, I said to her before severing our mental connection.

We continued down the hallway and cut through another sitting room that was near the security room. There, we waited in the dark by the door. Within minutes, we heard the flip-flop of the cook’s house slippers as she moved down the hallway with her tray. I opened my senses and went along for the ride.

She knocked on the security room door. “Hey, Walker, it’s me, Melissa. I’ve brought you some decent coffee instead of that black slop you guys brew in there.”

The door was opened by a man who couldn’t be older than mid-twenties. “Hey, thanks. I really appreciate it.” He took a sip of the coffee, followed by a longer gulp. “Wow, this is amazing!”

“You’re welcome. I know it’s no fun working the night shift.”

He laughed, pushing back blond hair that was, in Melissa’s opinion, too long. “This job’s actually ideal. I’ve gotten a ton of studying done in the month I’ve been here. If I finish my degree, I’m hoping Desoto will move me up. I’d like to work at his factory in security management.”

“Which factory?”

“I’m not picky.”

“You’ll do it. He’s good to work for. He rewards loyalty, and to take the night shift like this, you’ve definitely shown that.”

Lovely to know they liked their boss. I felt a twinge of uncertainty. Maybe the information on the thumb drive was wrong about Desoto. After all, his business was to provide weapons to the US government. He should be one of the good guys. Yet the electronic shield around the house screamed that he was in bed with the Emporium or someone as equally dangerous. Anyone who worked for the Emporium was our enemy and an enemy of all mortals.

For all the information I was getting from Melissa’s thoughts, I saw nothing from the security guard. Walker, I reminded myself. He might not be old enough to have Changed, but someone had taught him to close his mind. I needed to get inside his brain to see exactly what he knew. Was he an Emporium agent? If so, did Desoto know he had an agent inside his house? It made sense for the Emporium to keep an eye on him if he had dealings with them, but Desoto might not be aware that all his movements were being watched every bit as carefully as he watched anyone who might be approaching his house.

I pushed against the wall surrounding the guard’s mind. It was gray like stone but was already crumbling under my touch, and I wasn’t exerting much pressure. It’s the drug, I thought.

Thankfully, Walker bid goodnight to the cook and went back to his chair behind the monitor. His thought stream was slowing. I caught images of his mother, a Styrofoam cup from his favorite coffee house, and a girl he’d gone out with the week before. Nothing about the Emporium or the information we’d come for.

He set down his coffee mug and blinked as the monitors blurred. Then he was out, the drug taking effect so fast his mind didn’t even have time to register that he was tired. All at once, I was in the lake of his unconsciousness, dodging memory bubbles. More of his mother and of a woman with long blond hair. A computer in a cubical, newspaper clippings. So much information. If he worked for the Emporium, I wasn’t seeing any sign of it. Not that it really mattered. Our job was to get the information, not waste time determining his loyalty.

“Well?” Mari whispered.

I swam up out of the lake and left his mind. “He’s out.”

The cook had long vanished back the way she’d come, so we crept into the hall and opened the door. It wasn’t locked, and from the thoughts in Melissa’s mind when she’d given the guard the coffee, locking it wasn’t customary. Her knock had been for the sake of politeness.

“Watch the door,” I told Mari as I sprinted to the computer the guard had been working on and pushed the decoder into the USB port. Codes started running across the screen. “Hopefully, it only takes out the shield and whatever is blocking communication. If the whole place goes dark, Desoto’s going to know something’s up.”

Mari’s laugh was a small explosion in the stillness. “This is Stella we’re talking about. When has she ever been wrong about something to do with computers?”

She had a point, and I grinned under my hood. The thing was tight and uncomfortable, and even as I had the thought, Mari was pulling hers off and wiping beaded sweat from her forehead. Her long black hair was pinned tightly against her head, and the style made her brown eyes seem even larger in her heart-shaped face. Though she was less than a fourth Japanese and looked more American than anything, she still resembled Stella, who was her fifth great-aunt. Mari had been a simple accountant before her Change, but now she added columns of numbers with barely a glance, folded space to teleport—or shift as we called it—and always knew exactly what time it was. She was a bit impulsive these days, and I liked her more for it. She’d come a long way from the catatonic state she’d fallen into after her husband’s betrayal and subsequent murder by the Emporium.

Mari’s attention transferred to the unconscious Walker, whose messy hair reminded me of my brother Jace’s, except the guard’s hair was shorter and had a bit of red highlighting. “He’s good-looking, isn’t he?” Mari asked.

I fingered the textbook next to the keyboard: The Ethics of Journalism. “Not my type. Or yours.”

A frown creased Mari’s face. She brought out a small knife from somewhere and twirled it in her hand. “You think he likes knives?”

“Not like you do. Looks like more of a pacifist to me. A bookworm.”

“Well, he’s cute anyway.” Mari brought the hand holding the knife near her cheek and delicately scratched her cheek with her finger. “Speaking of men, did you and Stella work out that nanite thing? You’ve only got two weeks left before the big day.”

My stomach both jumped and twisted at her words. Two weeks. Right. Not a lot of time. Before I could decide if I would answer Mari, Stella’s voice sounded in my ear. “I’m in. Accessing the database now. Looks like I won’t need you to enter anything from his keyboard. The decoder is enough. I still need it plugged in, though, so leave it and get going. I’ll have the codes for you before you get to his office.”

We left the security room, turned a corner, and continued down a hallway until we arrived at the office. As predicted, there was a lock, and Mari drew out her tools. She’d taken to picking locks almost as well as knife work.

By the time Mari had the door open, Stella was speaking into my ear with the information she’d found in Desoto’s computer system. “The combination is forty-two, eighty-nine, fifty-eight, A, Q, R.”

Inside the spacious office, I dodged a marble statue and hurried to the bookshelf. There, I flipped a hidden lever detailed in the house builder’s plans that Stella had hacked days ago from his computer. The bookshelf swung open, revealing a panel on a door. “Repeat the code,” I said to Stella.

“Here, let me.” Mari moved past me. Of course, she’d remember the sequence. “This is so James Bond,” Mari exulted as the door swung open.

Two easy chairs with a small table between them and a fancy wooden filing cabinet were the only furnishings in the tight space. I hurried to the cabinet and began searching for the file on Iran. I almost hoped it wouldn’t be there, that our intel was wrong. Because if we were right, an unspeakable evil was about to be leashed upon the world.

The file was there. Mari helped me spread out the pages, which I carefully photographed and sent to Stella, who scanned them for readability. She directed a retake of only one page. Mari and I were both quiet as we returned the file to the cabinet and made our way from the room, the flush of success having turned into a realization that our information was correct. Desoto really was planning to supply Iran with plutonium and help start a war.

“I’m erasing the record of the entry into the room,” Stella told us. “Now get my decoder and get out of there.”

“Be careful.” Ritter’s voice this time. “One of the patrol guys just went back into the house.”

We hadn’t heard any beeps from the alarm being deactivated by someone entering the house, but that wasn’t unusual considering how large the place was. I linked to Mari’s mind, and we shifted back to the sitting room near the security office.

A man with dark hair came down the hall. Not just any man, I saw, as he strode past the opening to the darkened sitting room, but an Unbounded. So Desoto did have Emporium agents working right here at his estate, and the Unbounded likely worked directly for the Emporium, whatever Mr. Desoto believed.

The man opened the door to the security room without knocking and didn’t close it behind him. “Walker?” we heard, followed by a slap. “Hey, wake up! Those sheep can wait for counting another time. Good thing I needed coffee, or Desoto might have found you sleeping on the job. What were you thinking?”

“I don’t know,” came the groggy response. “I wasn’t even tired when I got here.” His mind shield wasn’t yet in place, and I jumped inside to observe from his eyes.

“Here, I’ll get you some more coffee.”

“Wait, that’s the good—”

Too late. The patrol guard poured the remains of the first cup of coffee into the drain of the narrow sink that was in the corner of the room, his quick, agile movements signaling his ability in combat. Even so, I was debating the wisdom of shifting in and out for Stella’s device when Walker said, “Hmm, what’s this? I don’t remember that being here before.”

“What’s what?” the Unbounded turned toward him, holding a stained coffee pot from the brewer on the narrow counter.

“Oh, nothing. I think I’m still half asleep.” Giving the patrol guard a sluggish grin, Walker slipped the device into his pants pocket.

Why had he done that? I was pretty sure I could make him take it out again, though controlling people wasn’t easy, but I didn’t want the decoder to be discovered by the Unbounded patrol guard any more than Walker seemed to want him to notice it, so I let it stay.

“You okay now?” asked the guard, setting a new mug of coffee in front of Walker.

“Yeah. Thanks for the coffee and for waking me. You saved my butt.”

“Just don’t let it happen again.”

“I’ll triple up on my caffeine. No worries.”

I was about to ask Ritter and Stella if they wanted us to wait for the Unbounded to leave so we could distract Walker and grab the device when Ritter’s voice came through our earbuds. “Scratch meeting us at the car. We’ve got company out here. We’ll need your help.”