20

OREGON

They had left the dirt road twenty minutes ago and Mitch still had not seen anything compelling. The game was beginning to wear. He slammed on the brakes and the old truck creaked on its shocks, swayed for a moment, then stalled out. He opened the door and mopped his forehead with a paper towel from the roll he kept under his front seat, along with a squeegee to remove mud.

Dust billowed around them until a stray draft between narrow rills spirited it away.

“I give up,” Mitch said, walking back to stare into Eileen's window. “What am I supposed to be looking for?”

“Let's say there's a river here.”

“Hasn't been one for a few centuries, by the looks of things.”

“Three thousand years, actually. Let's go back even further—say, more than ten thousand years.”

“How much more?”

Eileen shrugged and made an “I'm not telling” face.

Mitch groaned, remembering all the troubles that came with ancient graves.

Eileen watched his reaction with a weary sadness that he could not riddle. “Where would you set up some sort of long-term fishing camp, say, during the fall salmon run? A camp you could come back to, year after year?”

“On hard ground above the river, not too far.”

“And what do you see around here?” Eileen asked.

Mitch scanned the territory again. “Mostly mudstone and weak terraces. Some lava.”

“Ash fall?”

“Yeah. Looks solid. I wouldn't want to dig it out.”

“Exactly,” Eileen said. “Imagine an ash fall big enough to cover everything for hundreds of miles.”

“Broken flats of ash. That would have to be above this bed, of course. The river would have worn through.”

“Now, how would an archaeologist find something interesting in all that confusion?”

He frowned at her. “Something trapped by ash?”

Eileen nodded encouragement.

“Animals? People?”

“What do you think?” Eileen peered through the dusty windshield of the Tahoe. She looked sadder and sadder, as if reliving an ancient tragedy.

“People, of course,” Mitch said. “A camp. A fishing camp. Covered by ash.” He shook his head, then mockingly smacked his forehead, Such a dummy.

“I'm practically giving it away,” Eileen said.

Mitch turned east. He could see the dark gray-and-white layers of the old ash fall, buried under ten feet of sediments and now topped by a broken wall of pines. The ash layer looked at least four feet thick, mottled and striated. He imagined walking over to the cut and fingering the ash. Compacted by many seasons of rain, held in place by a cap of dirt and silt, it would be rock hard at first, but ultimately frangible, turning to powder if he hit it vigorously with a pick.

Big fall, a long time ago. Ten thousand and more years.

He looked north again, up a wash and away from the broad mud and gravel bed of the long-dead river, spotted with hardy brush and trees, a course now cut off even from snow melt and flash floods. Undisturbed by heavy erosion for a couple of thousand years.

“This used to be a pretty good oxbow, I'd say. Even in the Spent River heyday, there'd have been shallows where you could walk across and spear fish. You could have set up a weir in that hollow, under that boulder.” He pointed to a big boulder mostly buried in old silt and ash.

Eileen smiled and nodded. “Keep going.”

Mitch tapped his lips with his finger. He circled the Tahoe, waving his arms, making swooshing sounds, kicking the dirt, sniffing the air.

Eileen laughed and slapped her knees. “I needed that,” she said.

“Well, shucks,” Mitch said humbly. “If I'm tapping into mystic spirits, I got to act the part.” He fixed his gaze on a gap that led to higher ground, above the ash. His head leaned to one side and he shook out his bad arm, which was starting to ache. He got the look of a hound on the scent. Eyes sweeping the rough ground, he walked up the wash and climbed around the boulder.

Eileen yelled, “Wait up!”

“No way,” Mitch called back. “I'm on it.”

And he was.

He spotted the camp ten minutes later. Eileen came up beside him, breathless. On a level plateau only thinly forested, marked by patches of gray where the deep ash layer had been exposed by erosion, he saw twelve low-slung, light-weather tents covered with netting, dead branches, and bushes uprooted from around the site. A pair of old Land Rovers had been parked together and disguised as a large boulder.

Mitch had taken a seat on a rock, staring glumly at the tents and vehicles. “Why the camouflage?” he asked.

“Satellites or remoters doing searches for the BLM and Army Corps, protecting Indian rights under NAGPRA,” Eileen said. Federal interpretation of the complaints of certain Indian groups, citing NAGPRA—the Native American Graves Protection Act—had been the nemesis of American archaeologists for almost twenty years.

“Oh,” Mitch said. “Why take the chance? Do we need that now? Having the feds cover your dig with concrete?” That was how the Army Corps of Engineers had protected Mitch's dig against further intrusion, more than a lifetime ago, it seemed now. He waved his hand at the site and made a face. “Not very smart, staying hidden like this, hoping to avoid the Big Boys.”

“Isn't that what you did?” Eileen asked.

Mitch snorted with little humor. “It's a fair cop,” he admitted.

“These are not rational times,” Eileen said. “You'll understand soon enough. Don't we all need to know what it means to be human? Now more than ever? How we got to where we are, and what's going to come later?”

“What are a few old Indian bones going to tell us that we don't already know?” Mitch asked, feeling his sense of discovery start to sputter and stall.

“Would I have called you out here if that was all we had at stake?” Eileen said. “You know me better than that, Mitch Rafelson. I hope you do.”

Mitch wiped his hand on his pants leg and looked over his shoulder at the long fan of the wash. They had climbed about twenty feet, but he could still see evidence of ancient bank erosion. “Big river, way back when,” he said.

“It was smaller at the time of our site,” Eileen said. “Just a broad, shallow stream filled with salmon. Bears used to come down and fish. One of my students found an old male on the other side. Killed by an early phase of the ash fall, stage one of the eruption.”

“How long ago?” Mitch asked.

“Twenty thousand years, we're estimating. Ash gives a good potassium-argon result. We're still refining with carbon dating.”

“Something more than just a dead grizzly?”

Eileen nodded like a little girl confirming that there were, indeed, more dolls in her room. “The bear was female. She was missing her skull. It had been cut off, the bones hacked through with stone axes.”

“Twenty thousand years ago?”

“Yeah. So my student crossed the Spent River and started looking at other reveals. Just killing time until the Land Rover came to pick her up. She found an eroded layer of high-silica ash, right down there, about fifty meters from where the camp is now.” Eileen pointed. “She almost stepped on a human toe bone mixed with some gravel. Nothing spectacular, really. But she tracked down where it had weathered out, and she found more.”

“Twenty thousand years,” Mitch said, still incredulous.

“That isn't the half of it,” Eileen said.

Mitch took a huge leap of supposition and bent backwards, then did a little dip of disbelief. “You are not suggesting . . .”

Eileen stared at him keenly.

“You found Neandertals?”

Eileen shook her head, a strong no, then rewarded him with a teary-eyed smile that gave some hint of the distress she had gone through, at night, lying awake and thinking things over.

Mitch let out his breath. “What, then?”

“I don't want to be coy,” she said primly, and took his hand. “But you're not nearly crazy enough. Come on, Mitch. Let's go meet the girls.”

21

BALTIMORE

Morgenstern's questions were spot on and difficult to answer. Kaye had done her best, but she felt she had goofed a few of her responses rather badly. She felt like a mouse in a room full of cats. Jackson appeared more and more confident.

“The fertility group concludes that Kaye Rafelson is not the proper individual to continue research in ERV knock outs,” Morgenstern concluded. “She has obvious bias. Her work is suspect.”

A moment of silence. The accusation was not rebutted; everyone was considering their options and the map of the political minefield around them.

“All right,” Cross said, her face as serene as a baby's. “I still don't know where we stand. Should we continue to fund vaccines? Should we continue to look for ways to create organisms without any viral load?” Nobody answered. “Lars?” Cross inquired.

Nilson shook his head. “I am perplexed by Dr. Morgenstern's statements. Dr. Rafelson's work looks impressive to me.” He shrugged. “I know for a fact that human embryos implant in their mothers' wombs with the aid of old viral genes. Dr. Morgenstern is undoubtedly familiar with this, probably more than I.”

“Very familiar,” Morgenstern said confidently. “Utilization of endogenous viral syncytin genes in simian development is interesting, but I can quote dozens of papers proving there is no rhyme or reason to this random occurrence. There are even more remarkable coincidences in the long history of evolution.”

“And the Temin model of viral contributions to the genome?”

“Brilliant, old, long since disproved.”

Nilson pushed his scattered notes and papers into a stack, squared them, and thumped them lightly on the table top. “All my life,” he said, “I have come to regard the basic principles of biology as tantamount to an act of faith. Credo, this I believe: that the chain of instruction arising from DNA to RNA to proteins never reverses. The Central Dogma. McClintock and Temin and Baltimore, among many others, proved the Central Dogma to be wrong, demonstrating that genes can produce products that insert copies of themselves, that retroviruses can write themselves to DNA as proviruses and stay there for many millions of years.”

Kaye saw Jackson regarding her with his sharp gray eyes. He tapped his pencil silently. They both knew Nilson was grandstanding and that this would not impress Cross.

“Forty years ago, we missed the boat,” Nilson continued. “I was one of those who opposed Temin's ideas. It took us years to recognize the potential of retroviruses to wreak havoc, and when HIV arrived, we were unprepared. We did not have a crazy, creative bouquet of theories to choose from; we had killed them all, or ignored them, much the same. Tens of millions of our patients suffered for our own stubborn pride. Howard Temin was right; I was wrong.”

“I would not call it faith, I'd call it process and reason,” Jackson interrupted, tapping his pencil harder. “It's kept us from making even more horrible blunders, like Lysenko.”

Nilson was having none of this. “Ah, get thee behind me, Lysenko! Faith, reason, dogma, all add up to stubborn ignorance. Thirty years before that, we had missed the boat with Barbara McClintock and her jumping genes. And how many others? How many discouraged postdocs and interns and researchers? It was prideful, I see now, to hide our weaknesses and spite our fundamentalist enemies. We asserted our infallibility before school boards, politicians, corporations, investors, patients, whomever we thought might challenge us. We were arrogant. We were men, Ms. Cross. Biology was an incredible and archaic patriarchy with many of the aspects of an old boy network: secret signs, passwords, rituals of indoctrination. We held down, for a time at least, some of our best and brightest. No excuses. And once again we failed to see the coming juggernaut. HIV rolled over us, and then SHEVA rolled over us. It turned out we knew nothing whatsoever about sex and evolutionary variation, nothing. Yet some of us still act as if we know it all. We attempt to assess blame and escape our failures. Well, we have failed. We have failed to see the truth. These reports sum up our failure.”

Cross seemed bemused. “Thank you, Lars. Heartfelt, I'm sure. But I still want to know, where do we go from here?” She hammered her fist on the table with each emphatic word.

Still stuck in his chair in the far corner, pushed back from the table, wearing his trademark gray jacket and yarmulke, Maurie Herskovitz raised his hand. “I think we have a clear-cut problem in epistemology,” he said.

Cross squeezed her eyes shut and pressed the bridge of her nose. “Oh, please, Maurie, anything but that.”

“Hear me out, Marge. Dr. Jackson tried to create a positive, a vaccine against SHEVA and other ERV. He failed. If, as Dr. Morgenstern accuses, Dr. Rafelson came to Americol to demonstrate that no babies would be born if we suppressed their genomic viruses, she has made her point. None have been born. Regardless of her motivations, her work is thorough. It is scientific. Dr. Jackson continues to put forth an hypothesis that the results of his labors seem to have disproved.”

“Maurie, where do we go from here?” Cross repeated, her cheeks pinking.

Herskovitz lifted his hands. “If I could, I would put Dr. Rafelson in charge of viral research at Americol. But that would only be to curse her with more managerial duties and less time in the laboratory. So, I would give her what she needs to conduct her research on her own terms, and let Dr. Jackson focus on what he is best suited for.” He peered happily at Jackson. “Administration. Marge, you and I can make sure he does it right.” Herskovitz then looked at everyone around the room, trying hard to appear serious.

The faces at the table were stony.

Jackson's skin had turned a bluish shade of ivory. Kaye worried for a second that he might be on the verge of a heart attack. He ticked his pen in a brisk shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits. “I welcome, as always, Dr. Nilson's and Dr. Herskovitz's opinions. But I don't think Americol wants a woman who may be losing her mind in charge of this particular area of research.”

Cross leaned back as if caught in a cold wind. Morgenstern's watery gaze finally settled on Jackson with an attitude of dread expectancy.

“Dr. Rafelson, last night you spent some hours with our chief radiologist in the imaging lab. I noticed the billing request when I was picking up results from radiology this morning. I asked what the billing was for, and I was told that you were looking for God.”

Kaye managed to hold on to her pencil and not let it drop to the floor. Slowly, she brought her hands up to the tabletop. “I was having an unusual experience,” she said. “I wanted to find out what the cause might be.”

“You told the radiologist you felt God was inside your head. You had been having these experiences for some time, ever since the removal of your daughter by Emergency Action.”

“Yes,” Kaye said.

“Seeing God?”

“I've been experiencing certain psychological states,” Kaye said.

“Oh, come on, we've just been lectured by Dr. Nilson about truth and honesty. Will you deny your God three times, Dr. Rafelson?”

“What happened was private and has no influence on my work. I am appalled that it should be brought up at this meeting.”

“None of this is relevant? Other than the expense, some seven thousand dollars of unauthorized tests?”

Liz seemed thunderstruck.

“I'm willing to pay for that,” Kaye said.

Jackson lifted a paper-clipped set of invoices and rippled it in the air. “I see no evidence of your picking up the bill.”

Cross's calm look was replaced by indignant irritation—but at whom, Kaye could not tell. “Is this true?”

Kaye stammered, “It is a personal state of mind, of scientific interest. Almost half—”

“Where will you find God next, Kaye?” Jackson asked. “In your cunning viruses, shuffling around like holy ratchets, obeying rules only you can understand, explaining everything you can't? If God was my mentor, I'd be thrilled, it would all be so easy, but I am less fortunate. I have to rely on reason. Still, it is an honor to work with someone who can simply ask a higher authority where truth waits to be discovered.”

“Astonishing,” Nilson said. In the corner, Herskovitz sat up. His smile appeared cut in plaster.

“It is not like that,” Kaye said.

“That's enough, Robert,” Cross said.

Jackson had not moved since beginning his accusation. He sat half-slumped in his chair. “None of us can afford to give up our scientific principles,” he said. “Especially not now.”

Cross stood abruptly. Nilson and Morgenstern looked at Jackson, then at Cross, and got to their feet, pushing back their chairs.

“I have what I need,” Cross said.

“Dr. Rafelson, is God behind evolution?” Jackson called out. “Does he hold all the answers, does he jerk us around like puppets on a string?”

“No,” Kaye said, eyes unfocused.

“Are you really sure, now, in a way none of the rest of us can be, with your special knowledge?”

“Robert, that is enough!” Cross roared. Seldom had any of them heard Cross when she was angry, and her voice was painful in its crackling intensity. She let the stack of papers in her hands slip back to the table and spill onto the floor. She glared at Jackson, then shook her fists at the ceiling. “Absolutely unbelievable!”

“Astonishing,” Nilson repeated, much quieter.

“I apologize,” Jackson said, not at all chastened. His color had returned. He looked vigorous and healthy.

“This is over,” Cross declared. “Everyone go home. Now.”

Liz helped Kaye from the room. Jackson did not deign to look at them as they left.

“What in hell is going on?” Liz asked Kaye in an undertone as they walked toward the elevator.

“I'm fine,” Kaye said.

“What in hell was La Robert on about?”

Kaye did not know where to begin.

22

OREGON

Eileen escorted Mitch down the slope on a crude stairway made of boards hammered into the dirt. As they walked through a copse of pines and up a short embankment, gaining a closer view of the camp, Mitch saw that a large excavation of about ten thousand square feet, L-shaped and covered by two joined Quonset huts, had been hidden by brush arranged over netting. From the air, the entire site would be little more than a smudge in the landscape.

“This looks like a terrorist base, Eileen. How do you conceal the heat signature?” he asked half-seriously.

“It's going to terrorize North American anthropology,” Eileen said. “That's for sure.”

“Now you're scaring me,” Mitch said. “Do I have to sign an NDA or something?”

“I trust you,” Eileen said. She rested a hand on his shoulder.

“Show me now, Eileen, or just let me go home.”

“Where is home?” she asked.

“My truck,” Mitch said.

“That heap?”

Mitch mockingly implored forgiveness with his broad-fingered hands.

Eileen asked, “Do you believe in providence?”

“No,” Mitch said. “I believe in what I see with my eyes.”

“That may take a while. We're into high-tech survey for now. We haven't actually pulled up the specimens. We have a benefactor. He's spending lots of money to help us. I think you've heard of him. Here's his point man now.”

Mitch saw a tent flap open about fifty feet away. A lean, red-headed figure poked out, stood, and brushed dust from his hands. He shaded his eyes and looked around, then spotted the pair on the bluff and lifted his chin in greeting. Eileen waved.

Oliver Merton jogged toward them across the pale, rugged ground.

Merton was the science journalist who had dogged Kaye's career and footsteps during the SHEVA discoveries. Mitch had never been sure whether to look on Merton as a friend or an opportunist or just a damned fine journalist. He was probably all three.

“Mitch!” Merton called. “How grand to see you again!”

Merton stuck out his hand. Mitch shook it firmly. The writer's hand was warm and dry and confident. “My god, all Eileen told me was she was going to fetch someone with experience. How absolutely, bloody appropriate. Mr. Daney will be delighted.”

“You always seem to get there ahead of me,” Mitch said.

Merton shaded his eyes against the sun. “They're having a kind of mid-afternoon powwow, if that's the right word, back in the tents. Bit of a knockdown, really. Eileen, I think they're going to decide to uncover one of the girls and take a direct look. You have perfect timing, Mitch. I've had to wait days to see anything but videos.”

“It's a committee decision?” Mitch asked, turning to Eileen.

“I couldn't stand having all of this on my shoulders,” Eileen confessed. “We have a fine team. Very argumentative. And Daney's money works wonders. Good beer at night.”

“Is Daney here?” Mitch asked Merton.

“Not yet,” Merton said. “He's shy and he hates discomfort.” They hunkered their shoulders against a gritty swirl blowing up the gully. Merton wiped his eyes with a handkerchief. “Not his kind of place at all.”

The wide, bush-studded net flapped in the afternoon breeze, dropping bits of dry branch and leaf on them as they stooped to enter the pit. The excavation stretched about forty feet north, then branched east to form an L. Mottled sunlight filtered through the net. They descended four meters on a metal ladder to the floor of the pit.

Aluminum beams crossed the pit at two-meter intervals. Rises in the pit, like little mesas, were topped with wire grids. Over the mesas, some of the beams supported white boxes with lenses and other apparatus jutting from the bottoms. As Mitch watched, the closest box slowly railed right a few centimeters and resumed humming.

“Side scanner?” he asked.

Eileen nodded. “We've scraped off most of the mud and we're peeking through the final layer of tephra. We can see about sixty centimeters into the hard pack.” She walked ahead.

The Quonset structure—arched wooden beams covered by sheets of stamped, ribbed steel and a few milky sheets of fiberglass—sheltered the long stroke of the L. Sunlight poured through the fiberglass sheeting. They walked over flat, hard dirt and haphazard cobbles of river rock between the high, irregular walls. Eileen let Mitch go first, ascending a dirt staircase to the left of a flat-topped rise being surveyed by two more white boxes.

“I don't dare walk under these damned things,” Eileen said. “I have enough skin blotches as is.”

Mitch knelt beside the mesa to look at alternating layers of mud and tephra, capped by sand and silt. He saw an ash fall—tephra—followed by a lahar, a fast-moving slurry of hot mud made of ash, dirt, and glacier melt. The sand and silt had arrived over time. At the bottom of the mesa, he saw more alternating layers of ash, mud, and river deposits: A deep book going back far longer than recorded history.

“Computers do some really big math and show us a picture of what's down there,” Eileen said. “We actually debated whether to dig any deeper or just cover it over again and submit the videos and sensor readings. But I guess the committee is going for a traditional invasion.”

Mitch moved his hand in a sweeping motion. “Ash came down for several days,” he said. “Then a lahar swept down the river basin. Up here, it slopped over but didn't carry off the bodies.”

“Very good,” Merton said, genuinely impressed.

“Want to see our etchings?” Eileen asked.

Eileen unrolled a display sheet in the conference tent and tuned it to her wrist computer. “Still getting used to all this tech,” she murmured. “It's wonderful, when it works.”

Merton watched over Mitch's shoulder. Two women in their thirties, dressed in jeans and short-sleeved khaki shirts, stood at the rear of the long, narrow tent, debating in soft but angry voices. Eileen did not see fit to introduce them, which clued Mitch that she was not the only high-powered anthropologist working the dig.

The screen glowed faintly in the tent's half-light. Eileen told the computer to run a slide show.

“These are from yesterday,” she said. “We've done around twenty-seven complete scans. Redundancy upon redundancy, just to be sure we're not making it up. Oliver says he's never seen a more frightened bunch of scientists.”

“I haven't,” Merton affirmed.

The first image showed the pale ghost of a skeleton curled in fetal position, surrounded by what looked like sheets of grass matting, a few stones, and a cloud of pebbles. “Our first. We're calling her Charlene. As you can see, she's fairly modern Homo sap. Prominent chin, relatively high forehead. But here's the tomographic reconstruction from our multiple sweeps.” A second image came up and showed a dolichocephalic, or long-headed, skull. Eileen told the computer to rotate this image.

Mitch scowled. “Looks Australian,” he said.

“She probably is,” Eileen said. “About twenty years of age. Trapped and asphyxiated by hot mud. There are five other skeletons, one close to Charlene, the others clustered about four meters away. All are female. No infants. And no sign of males. The grass matting has decayed, of course. Just molds remain. We have a shadow mold around Charlene, a cast of fine silt from seepage through the mud and ash showing the outlines of her body. Here's a tomographic image of what that cast would look like, if we could manage to pry it loose from the tephra and the rest of the overburden.”

A distorted ghost of a head, neck, and shoulders appeared and rotated smoothly on the display sheet. Mitch felt odd, standing in a tent that would have been familiar to Roy Chapman Andrews or even to Darwin himself, while staring down at the rolled-out sheet of the computer display.

He asked Eileen to rotate the image of Charlene again.

As the image swung around and around, he began to discern facial features, a closed eye, a blob of ear, hair matted and curled, a hint of cooked and distorted flesh slumped from the back of the skull.

“Pretty awful,” Merton said.

“They suffocated before the heat got to them,” Eileen said. “I hope they did, anyway.”

“Early-stage Tierra del Fuegan?” Mitch asked.

“That's what most of us think. From the Australian migration out of South and Central America.”

Such migrations had been charted more and more often in the last fifteen years; Australian skeletons and associated artifacts found near the tip of South America had been dated to older than thirty thousand years BP, before the present.

The two other women walked around them to reach the exit, as serious and unsocial as porcupines. A plump, red-faced woman a few years younger than Eileen held the flap open for them then stepped in and stood before Mitch. “Is this the famous Mitch Rafelson?” she asked Eileen.

“Mitch, meet Connie Fitz. I told her I'd bring you here.”

“Delighted to meet you, after all these years.” Fitz wiped her hands on a dusty towel hanging from her belt before shaking hands. “Have you showed him the good stuff?”

“We're getting there.”

“Best picture of Gertie is on sweep 21,” Fitz advised.

“I know,” Eileen said testily. “It's my show.”

“Sorry. I'm the mother hen,” Fitz said. “The others are still arguing.”

“Spare me,” Eileen said. Another image cast their faces in a pale greenish light.

“Say hello to Gertie,” Merton said. He glanced up at Mitch, waiting to see his reaction.

Mitch poked the surface of the screen, making the light pool under his finger. He looked up, on the edge of anger. “You're kidding me. This is a joke.”

“No joke,” Merton said.

Eileen magnified the image. Then, clearing his throat, Mitch asked, “Fraud?”

“What do you think?” Eileen asked.

“They're in close association? Not in different layers?”

Eileen nodded. “They were buddies, probably traveling together. No infants, but as you can see, Gertie was maybe fifteen or sixteen, and she was probably gravid when the ash covered her.”

“Either that or she ate babies,” Merton said. Another twitch of the lip from Eileen.

“Oliver's on borrowed time,” Fitz said.

“Matriarchy,” Merton accused, deadpan.

The tent suddenly seemed very stuffy. Mitch would have sat down had there been a convenient chair. “She looks early. Different from Charlene. Is she a hybrid?” he asked.

“No one's willing to say,” Eileen replied. “You'll like our late-night debates. A few weeks back, when I wanted you to join us, everyone shouted me down. Now, we're all at each other's throats, and Oliver, I'm told, convinced Daney it was time.”

“I did,” Merton said.

“Personally, I'm glad you're here,” Eileen added.

“I'm not,” Fitz said. “If the feds find out about you, if there's any publicity at all, we're NAGPRA toast.”

“Tell me more, Mitch,” Eileen suggested.

Mitch massaged the back of his neck and for the ninth time watched the image of the skull grow and rotate. “Skull seems compressed. She's long-headed, more even than the Australian. There's a flint implement near her hand, and she's carrying some sort of grass bag over her shoulder, if I'm not mistaken.”

“You're not.”

“Filled with what looks like bush or small tree roots.”

“Desperation diet,” Fitz said.

“Maybe that was just her assignment, gathering roots for the stone soup.”

Merton looked puzzled. Eileen explained stone soup.

“How colonial,” Merton said.

“Ever the B-movie Brit, aren't you?” Fitz said.

“Please, children,” Eileen warned.

“Relatively tall, taller than Charlene, maybe, and pretty robust, heavy boned,” Mitch continued, trying to talk himself out of what he was seeing. “Sloping forehead, mid-sized to small brain case, but the face is fairly flat. Impressive supraorbital torus. A bit of a sagittal keel, even an occipital torus. I'd love to get a better look at the incisors.”

“Shovel-shaped,” Eileen said.

Mitch rubbed his limp hand to still the tingling and looked at the others as if all of them might be crazy. “Gertie is much too early. She looks like Broken Hill 1. She's Homo erectus.”

“Obviously,” Fitz said with a sniff.

“They've been extinct for more than three hundred thousand years,” Mitch said.

“Apparently not,” Eileen said.

Mitch laughed and stood back with a snap as if he had been leaning over a wasp that had suddenly taken flight. “Jesus.”

“Is that it?” Eileen asked. “Is that the most you can say?” She was kidding, but her tone had an edge.

“You've had longer to get used to it,” Mitch said.

“Who says we're used to it?” Eileen asked.

“What about the fetus?”

“Too early and too little detail,” Fitz said. “It's probably a lost cause.”

“I'm thinking we should drive a tube, take a thin core sample, and PCR mitochondrial DNA from the remaining integuments,” Merton said.

“Dreamer,” Fitz said. “They're twenty thousand years old. Besides, the lahar cooked them.”

“Not to mush,” Merton countered.

“Think like a scientist, not a journalist.”

“Shh,” Eileen said in deference to Mitch, who was still staring at the rolled-out screen, mesmerized. “Here's what we have on the central group,” she said, and paged through another set of ghostly images. “Gertie and Charlene are outliers. These four are Hildegard, Natasha, Sonya, and Penelope. Hildegard was probably the oldest, in her late thirties and already racked with arthritis.”

Hildegard, Natasha, and Sonya were clearly Homo sapiens. Penelope was another Homo erectus. They lay entwined as if they had died hugging each other, a mandala of bones, elegant in their sad way.

“Some of the hardliners are calling this a flood deposition of unassociated remains,” Fitz said.

“How would you answer them?” Eileen challenged Mitch, reverting to his teacher of old.

Mitch was still trying to remember to breathe. “They're fully articulated,” he said. “They have their arms around each other. They don't lie at odd angles, tossed together. This is in no way a flood deposit.”

Mitch was startled to watch Fitz and Eileen hug each other. “These women knew each other,” Eileen agreed, tears of relief dripping down her cheeks. “They worked together, traveled together. A nomadic band, caught in camp by a burp from Mount Hood. I can feel it.”

“Are you with us?” Fitz asked, her eyes bright and suspicious.

“Homo erectus. North America. Twenty thousand years ago,” Mitch said. Then, frowning, he asked, “Where are the males?”

“To hell with that,” Fitz fumed. “Are you with us?”

“Yeah,” Mitch said, sensing the tension and Eileen's discomfort at his hesitation. “I'm with you.” Mitch put his good arm around Eileen's shoulders, sharing the emotion.

Oliver Merton clasped his hands like a boy anticipating Christmas. “You realize that this could be a political bombshell,” he said.

“For the Indians?” Fitz asked.

“For us all.”

“How so?”

Merton grinned like a fiend. “Two different species, living together. It's as if someone's teaching us a lesson.”

23

NEW MEXICO

Dicken showed his pass at the Pathogenics main gate. The three young, burly guards there—machine pistols slung over their shoulders—waved him through. He drove the cart to the valet area and presented the pass for his car.

“Going for a drink,” he told the serious-faced middle-aged woman as she inspected his release.

“Did I ask?” She gave him a seasoned, challenging smile.

“No,” he admitted.

“Don't tell us anything,” she advised. “We have to report every little thing. Vodka, white wine, or local beer?”

Dicken must have looked flustered.

“I'm joking,” she said. “I'll be back in a few minutes.”

She returned driving his leased Malibu, adapted for handicapped drivers.

“Nice setup, all the stuff on the wheel,” she said. “Took me a bit to figure it out.”

He accepted the inspection pass, made sure it was completely filled out—there had been some trouble with such things yesterday—and slipped it into a special holder in the visor. The sun was lingering over the rocky gray-and-brown hills beyond the main Pathogenics complex. “Thanks,” he said.

“Enjoy,” the valet said.

He took the main road out of the complex and drove through rush hour traffic, following the familiar track into Albuquerque, then pulled into the parking lot of the Marriott. Crickets were starting up and the air was tolerable. The hotel rose over the parking lot in one graceless pillar, tan and white against the dark blue night sky, proudly illuminated by big floodlights set around stretches of deep green lawn. Dicken walked into a low-slung restaurant wing, visited the men's room, then came out and turned left to enter the bar.

The bar was just starting to crowd. Two regulars sat at the bar—a woman in her late thirties, looking as if life and her partners had ridden her hard, and a sympathetic elderly man with a long nose and close-set eyes. The worn-down woman was laughing at something the long-nosed man had just said.

Dicken sat on a tall stool by a high, tiny table beside a fake plant in an adobe pot. He ordered a Michelob when the waitress got around to him, then sat watching the people come and go, nursing his beer and feeling miserably out of place. Nobody was smoking, but the air smelled cold and stale, with a tang of beer and liquor.

Dicken reached into his pocket and withdrew his hand, then, under the table, unfolded a red serviette. He palmed the serviette over the damp napkin on the table, also red, and left it there.

At eight, after an hour and a half, his beer almost gone and the waitress starting to look predatory, he pushed off the stool, disgusted.

Someone touched his shoulder and Dicken jumped.

“How does James Bond do it?” asked a jovial fellow in a green sport jacket and beige slacks. With his balding pate, round, red Santa nose, lime green golf shirt bulging at the belly, and belt tightened severely to reclaim some girth, the middle-aged man looked like a tourist with a snootful. He smelled like one, too.

“Do what?” Dicken asked.

“Get the babes when they all know they're just going to die.” The balding man surveyed Dicken with a jaundiced, watery eye. “I can't figure it.”

“Do I know you?” Dicken asked gravely.

“I've got friends watching every porthole. We know the local spooks, and this place is not as haunted as some.”

Dicken put down his beer. “I don't know what you're talking about,” he said.

“Is Dr. Jurie your peer?” the man asked softly, pulling up another stool.

Dicken knocked his stool over in his haste to get up. He left the bar quickly, on the lookout for anyone too clean-cut, too vigilant.

The balding man shrugged, reached across the table to grab a handful of peanuts, then crumpled Dicken's red serviette and slipped it into his pocket.

Dicken drove away from the hotel and parked briefly on a side street beside a used car lot. He was breathing heavily. “Christ, Christ, Cheee-rist,” he said softly, waiting for his heart to slow.

His cell phone rang and he jumped, then flipped it open.

“Dr. Dicken?”

“Yes.” He tried to sound coldly professional.

“This is Laura Bloch. I believe we have an appointment.”

Dicken drove up behind the blue Chevrolet and switched off his engine and lights. The desert surrounding Tramway Road was quiet and the air was warm and still; city lights illuminated low, spotty cumulus clouds to the south. A door swung open on the Chevrolet and a man in a dark suit got out and walked back to peer into his open window.

“Dr. Dicken?”

Dicken nodded.

“I'm Special Agent Bracken, Secret Service. ID, please?”

Dicken produced his Georgia driver's license.

“Federal ID?”

Dicken held out his hand and the agent whisked a scanner over the back. He had been chipped six years ago. The agent glanced at the scanner display and nodded. “We're good,” he said. “Laura Bloch is in the car. Please proceed forward and take a seat in the rear.”

“Who was the guy in the bar?” Dicken asked.

Special Agent Bracken shook his head. “I'm sure I haven't the faintest idea, sir.”

“Joke?” Dicken asked.

Bracken smiled. “He was the best we could do on short notice. Good people with experience are kind of in short supply now, if you get my meaning. Slim pickings for honest folks.”

“Yeah,” Dicken said. Special Agent Bracken opened the door and Dicken walked to the Chevrolet.

Bloch's appearance was a surprise to him. He had never seen pictures and at first he was not impressed. With her prominent eyes and fixed expression, she resembled a keen little pug. She held out her hand and they shook before Dicken slid in beside her on the rear seat, lifting his leg to clear the door frame.

“Thank you for meeting with me,” she said.

“Part of the assignment, I guess.”

“I'm curious why Jurie asked for you,” Bloch said. “Any theories?”

“Because I'm the best there is,” Dicken said.

“Of course.”

“And he wants to keep me where he can see me.”

“Does he know?”

“That NIH is keeping an eye on him? No doubt. That I'm speaking with you, now, I certainly hope not.”

Bloch shrugged. “Matters little in the long run.”

“I should get back soon. I've been gone a little too long for comfort, probably.”

“This will just take a few minutes. I've been told to brief you.”

“Who told you?”

“Mark Augustine said you should be prepped before things start happening.”

“Say hello to Mark,” Dicken said.

“Our man in Damascus,” Bloch said.

“Beg your pardon? I don't get the reference.”

“Saw the light on the road to Damascus.” She regarded Dicken with one eye half closed. “He's being very helpful. He tells us Emergency Action is soon going to be forced to do some questionable things. Their scientific underpinnings are coming under severe scrutiny. They have to hit pay dirt within a certain window of public fear, and that window may be closing. The public is getting tired of standing on tiptoes for the likes of Rachel Browning. Browning has put all her hopes on Sandia Pathogenics. So far, she's keeping the Hill off her back by appealing to fear, national security, and national defense, all wrapped in tight secrecy. But it's Mark's belief that Pathogenics will have to violate some pretty major laws to get what they want, even should it exist.”

“What laws?”

“Let's leave that open for now. What I'm here to tell you is that the political winds are about to shift. The White House is sending out feelers to Congress on rescinding Emergency Action's blanket mandate. Cases are coming up in the Supreme Court.”

“They'll support EMAC. Six to three.”

“Right,” Bloch said. “But based on our polling, we're pretty sure that's going to backfire. What's the science look like so far, from the Sandia perspective?”

“Interesting. Nothing very useful to Browning. But I'm not privy to what's going on with all the samples brought in from Arizona—”

“The Sable Mountain School,” Bloch said.

“That's the main source.”

“Goddamned bastard is consistent.”

Dicken sat back and waited for Bloch's face to clear an expression of angry disgust, then concluded, “There's no evidence that social interaction or stress is causing viral recombination. Not in SHEVA kids.”

“So why is Jurie persisting?”

“Momentum, mostly. And fear. Real fear. Jurie is convinced that puberty is going to do the trick. That, and pregnancy.”

“Jesus,” Bloch said. “What do you think?”

“I doubt it. But it's still a possibility.”

“Do they suspect you're working with outside interests? Beyond NIH, I mean?”

“Of course,” Dicken said. “They'd be fools not to.”

“So, what is it with Jurie—a death wish?”

Dicken shook his head. “Calculated risk. He thinks I could be useful, but he'll bring me into the loop only when it's necessary and not a second before. Meanwhile, he keeps me busy doing far-out stuff.”

“How do the others feel about what Pathogenics is doing?”

“Nervous.”

Bloch clenched her teeth.

Dicken watched her jaw muscles work. “Sorry not to be more helpful,” he said.

“I will never understand scientists,” she murmured.

“I don't understand people,” Dicken said. “Anybody.”

“Fair enough. All right,” Bloch said. “We have about a week and a half. Supreme Court is scheduled to release their decision on Remick v. the state of Ohio. Senator Gianelli wants to be ready when the White House is forced to cut a deal.”

Dicken fixed her gaze and raised his hand. “May I have my say?”

“Of course,” Bloch said.

“No half measures. Bring them down all at once. Tell the big boys Department of Health and Human Services needs to revoke EMAC's blanket national security exception to 45 CFR 46, protection of human subjects, and exceptions to 21 CFR parts 50 and . . . amended, what is it, 312? 321? Informed consent waiver for viral national emergency,” Dicken said. “Are they going to do that?”

Bloch smiled, impressed. “21 CFR 50.24 actually applies. I don't know. We've got some institutional review boards coming over to our side, but it's a slow process. EMAC still funds a boatload of research. Get us whatever you can for ammunition. I don't want to sound crass, but we need outrage, Dr. Dicken. We need more than just pitiful bones in a drawer.”

Dicken tugged nervously on the door handle.

“We're on the knife edge of public opinion here. It could go either way. Understand?” Bloch added.

“I know what you need,” Dicken said. “I'm just disgusted that it's gone this far, and we've become so difficult to shock.”

“We don't claim any moral high ground, but neither the senator nor I are in this for political advancement,” Bloch said. “The senator's approval rating is at an all-time low, thirty-five percent, twenty percent undecided, and it's because he's outspoken on this issue. I'm beginning to take a dislike to our constituents, Dr. Dicken. I really am.”

Bloch offered him her small, pale hand. He paused, looking into her steady black eyes, then shook it and returned to his car.

Special Agent Bracken closed his door for him and leaned down to window level. “Some friends in the New Mexico State Police tell me that citizens around here aren't happy about what's going on at Sandia,” he said. “They—the police, and maybe the citizens—plan to engage in some civil disobedience, if you know what I mean. Not much we can do about it, and damned few details. Just a heads up.”

“Thanks,” Dicken said.

Bracken tapped the roof of the car. “Free to go, Dr. Dicken.”

24

ARIZONA

Stella awoke before dawn and stared at the acoustic tile ceiling over her bunk. She was instantly vigilant, aware of her surroundings. The dormitory was quiet but she smelled something funny in the air: an absence. Then she realized she couldn't smell anything at all. A peculiar sensation of claustrophobia came over her. For a moment, she thought she saw a pattern of dark colors form a circle over her bunk. Little flashes of red and green, like distant glowing insects, illuminated the circle, became tiny faces. She blinked, and the circle, the lights, the faces faded into the shadowy void of the ceiling tiles.

Stella felt a chill, as if she had seen a ghost.

Her thighs were damp. She reached under the covers with her hand and brought up her finger, curling it to keep the sheet clean. The finger was tipped with a smudge of black in the moonlight shining through the windows. Stella made a little sound, not of fear—she knew what it probably was, Kaye had explained it years ago to her—but of deeper recognition.

Just that afternoon, she had seen spots of blood on a toilet lid in the bathroom. Not her own; some other girl's. She had wondered if somebody had cut herself.

Now she knew.

With a sigh, she wiped the blood on her nightgown, beneath the fabric of her short sleeve, then thought for a moment, and touched the finger to the tip of her tongue. The sensation—taste was not really the right word—was not entirely pleasant. She had done something that seemed to violate her body's rules. But slowly her sense of smell returned. The sensation on her tongue lingered, sharp with an undertone of mystery.

I'm not ready, she thought. And then remembered what Kaye had told her: You won't believe you're ready. The body propels us.

She lifted the sheets with her knees and then let them drop, wafting her own scent through the small gaps around her midriff. She smelled different, not unpleasant, a little sour, like yogurt. She liked her earlier smell better. She recognized it. This new smell was not welcome. She did not need any more difficulties.

I don't care. I'm just not ready.

She shivered suddenly, as if a ropey loop of emotion had been pulled, rasping, through her body, then felt a sudden contraction of muscles around her abdomen, a cascade of unexpected pleasure. The tip of her tongue seemed to expand. Her entire body flushed. She did not know whether she was dreaming or what was happening.

Stella kicked back the covers, then rolled on her side, wincing at the stickiness, wanting to get up and get clean, wash away the new smell. Slowly, as the minutes passed, she relaxed, closed her eyes. Natural stuff. Not so bad. Mother told me.

Her nostrils flared. Currents of slow air moved around the dormitory, propelled by drafts through the doorways, cracks in the ceiling; at night, it was possible sometimes for girls to scent and communicate, reassure each other, without getting out of bed. Stella was reasonably familiar with the circulation patterns of the building at different hours and with the wind outside coming from different directions.

Around the room, she smelled the other girls on their bunks and heard them moving quietly in the bars and shadows of moonlight. Some of them moaned. One and then another coughed and softly called out her friends' names.

Celia rolled out of the bottom bunk and stood up beside Stella. Her eyes were large in the dim light, her face a moving blob of paleness framed by wild black hair. “Did you feel that?” she whispered.

“Shh,” Stella said.

Felice's face joined Celia's beside Stella's bed.

“I think it's okay,” Stella said, almost too softly for them to hear.

“We're getting-KUK our first periods,” Celia said.

“All together?” Felice asked, squeaking.

Someone in another bunk heard and giggled.

“Shh,” Stella insisted, wrinkling her face in warning. She sat up and looked along the rows of bunks. Some of the younger girls—a year or more younger—were still asleep. Then, her back tingling, Stella looked up at the video cameras mounted in the rafters. Moonlight reflected from the linoleum floor glinted in their tiny plastic eyes.

Four girls left their bunks and padded into the bathroom, walking bowlegged.

Useless to hide it, Stella thought. They're going to know.

And they would be even more frightened. She could predict that easily and with assurance. Everything different frightened the humans, and this was going to be very different.

25

OREGON

Eileen set the Coleman lantern on a metal table and laid out the cold dinner: a nearly frozen loaf of white bread, Oscar Meyer bologna in a squat, rubbery cylinder, American cheese, and a chilled, half-eaten tin of Spam. A Tupperware box, yellow with age, contained cut celery stalks. She positioned two apples, three tangerines, and two cans of Coors beside this assortment. “Want to see the wine list?” she asked.

“Beer will do. Breakfast of diggers,” Mitch said. The plastic roof of the hut over the long reach of the L-shaped excavation rattled in the wind rolling down the old riverbed.

Eileen sat in the canvas seat of her camp chair and let out her breath in a sigh that was halfway to a shriek. But for them and the still-hidden bones, the excavation was empty. It was almost midnight. “I am dead,” she proclaimed. “I can't take this anymore. Dig ‘em out, don't dig ‘em out, keep your cool when the academics start to scrap about emergence violations. The whole goddamned human race is so primitive.”

Mitch cracked his can and tossed back a long gulp. The beer, almost tasteless but for a prolonged fizz, satisfied him intensely. He put down the can and picked up a slice of cheese, then prepared to peel back the wrapping. He turned it into a grand gesture. Eileen watched as he lifted the slice, rotated it on tripod fingers, and then, using his teeth, delicately lifted and pulled off the intercalary paper. He glanced at her with narrowed eyes and raised one thick eyebrow. “Expose ‘em,” he said.

“Think so?” Eileen asked.

“Give me that old-time revelation. I'd rather see them personally than trust future generations to do it better. But that's just me.” The beer and exhaustion both relaxed Mitch and made him philosophical. “Bring them into the light. Rebirth,” he said. “The Indians are right. This is a sacred moment. There should be ceremonies. We should be appeasing their troubled spirits, and our own. Oliver is right. They're here to teach us.”

Eileen sniffed. “Some Indians don't want their theories contradicted,” she said. “They'd rather live with fairy tales.”

“The Indians in Kumash gave us shelter when Kaye was pregnant. They still refuse to hand their SHEVA kids over to Emergency Action. I've become more understanding of anybody the U.S. government has repeatedly lied to.” Mitch raised his beer in toast. “Here's to the Indians.”

Eileen shook her head. “Ignorance is ignorance. We can't afford to hang on to our childhood blankies. We're big boys and girls.”

Mostly girls, Mitch thought. “Are anthropologists any more likely to see what's under their noses?”

Eileen pursed her lips. “Well, no,” she said. “We've already got two in camp who insist these can't possibly be Homo erectus. They're creating a tall, stocky, thick-browed variety of homo sap on their laptops even as we speak. We're having a hell of a time convincing them to keep their mouths shut. Ignorant bitches, both of them. But don't tell anybody I said so.”

“Absolutely,” Mitch said.

Eileen had finished assembling a Spam and American cheese sandwich, with two stalks of celery sticking out like lunate Gumby feet from the pressed layers of perfect crust. She bit into a corner and chewed thoughtfully.

Mitch wasn't particularly hungry, not that he minded the food. He had eaten much worse on previous sites—including a meal of roasted grubs on toast.

“Was it another SHEVA episode?” Eileen mused. “A massive leap between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens?”

“I wouldn't think so,” Mitch said. “A little too radical even for SHEVA.”

Eileen's speculative gaze rose beyond the rattling plastic roof. “Men,” she said. “Men behaving badly.”

“Uh-oh,” Mitch said. “Here it comes.”

“Men raiding other groups, taking prisoners. Not very choosy. Gathering up all the females with the appropriately satisfying orifices. Females only, whomever and whatever they might be.”

“You think our absent males were raiders and rapists?” Mitch asked.

“Would you date a Homo erectus? I mean, if you weren't at the absolute bottom of any social hierarchy?”

Mitch thought of the mother in the cave in the Alps, more than a lifetime ago, and her loyal husband. “Maybe they were more gentle.”

“Psychic flower children, Mitch?” Eileen asked. “I say these gals were all captives and they were abandoned when the volcano blew. Anything else is pure William Golding bullshit.” Eileen was pushing the matter deliberately, playing both proponent and devil's advocate, trying to clear her head, or possibly his.

“I suppose the Homo erectus members of the group might have been slaves or servants—captives,” Mitch said. “But I'm not so sure social life was that sophisticated back then, or that there were such fine gradations of status. My guess is they were traveling together. For protection, maybe, like different species of herd animals on the veldt. As equals. Obviously, they liked each other enough to die in each other's arms.”

“Mixed species band? Does that fit anything in your experience with the higher apes?”

Mitch had to admit it did not. Baboons and chimps played together when they were young, but adult chimps ate baby baboons and monkeys when they could catch them. “Culture matters more than skin color,” he said.

“But this gap . . . I just don't see it being bridgeable. It's too huge.”

“Maybe we're tainted by recent history. Where were you born, Eileen?”

“Savannah, Georgia. You know that.”

“Kaye and I lived in Virginia.” Mitch let the thought hang there for a moment, trying to find a delicate way to phrase it.

“Plantation propaganda from my slave-owner ancestors, my thrice-great grandpappy, has tainted the entire last three hundred years. Is that what you're suggesting?” Eileen asked, lips curling in a duelist's smile, savoring a swift and jabbing return. “What a goddamned Yankee thing to say.”

“We know so little about what we're capable of,” Mitch continued. “We are creatures of culture. There are other ways to think of this ensemble. If they weren't equals, at least they worked together, respected each other. Maybe they smelled right to each other.”

“It's becoming personal, isn't it, Mitch? Looking for a way to turn this into a real example. Merton's political bombshell.”

Mitch agreed to that possibility with a sly wink and a nod.

Eileen shook her head. “Women have always hung together,” she said. “Men have always been a sometime thing.”

“Wait till we find the men,” Mitch said, starting to feel defensive.

“What makes you think they stuck around?”

Mitch stared grimly at the plastic roof.

“Even if there were men nearby,” she said, “what makes you think we'll be lucky enough to find them?”

“Nothing,” he said, and felt hazily that this was a lie.

Eileen finished her sandwich and drank half her can of Coors to chase it down. She had never liked eating very much and did it only to keep body and soul together. She was hungry and deliberate in bed, however. Orgasms allowed her to think more clearly, she had once confessed. Mitch remembered those times well enough, though they had not slept together since he had been twenty-three years old.

Eileen had called her seduction of the young anthropology grad student her biggest mistake. But they had stayed friends and colleagues all these years, capable of a loose and honest interaction that had no pretense of sexual expectation or disappointment. A remarkable friendship.

The wind rattled the roof again. Mitch listened to the hiss of the Coleman lantern.

“What happened between you and Kaye, after you got out of prison?” Eileen asked.

“I don't know,” Mitch said, his jaw tightening. Her asking was a weird kind of betrayal, and she could sense his sudden burn.

“Sorry,” she said.

“I'm prickly about it,” he acknowledged. He felt a waft of air behind him before he saw the woman's shadow. Connie Fitz stepped lightly over the hard-packed dirt and stood beside Eileen, resting a hand on her shoulder.

“Our little stew pot is about to boil over,” Fitz said. “I think we can hold the lid down for another two or three days, max. The zealots want to issue a press release. The hardliners want to keep it covered up.”

Eileen looked at Mitch with a crinkled lower lip. All that was outside her control, her expression said. “Enslaved women abandoned in camp by cowardly males,” she resumed, getting back to the main topic, her eyes bright in the Coleman's pearly light.

“Do you really believe that?” Mitch asked.

“Oh, come on, Mitch. I don't know what to believe.”

Mitch's stomach worked over the meal with no conviction. “You should at least tell the students that they need to expand the perimeter,” he said. “There could very well be other bodies around, maybe within a few hundred yards.”

Fitz made a provisional moue of interest. “We've talked about it. But everybody wants a piece of the main dig, so nobody was enthusiastic about fanning out,” she said.

“You feel something?” Eileen asked Mitch. She leaned forward, her voice going mock-sepulchral. “Can you read these bones?”

Fitz laughed.

“Just a hunch,” Mitch said, wincing. Then, more quietly, “Probably not a very good one.”

“Will Daney continue to pay if we dawdle and poke around a couple of more days?” Fitz asked.

“Merton thinks he's patient and he'll pay plenty,” Eileen said. “He knows Daney better than any of us.”

“This could become every bit as bad as archaeology in Israel,” said Fitz, a natural pessimist. “Every site loaded with political implications. Do you think Emergency Action will come in and shut us down, using NAGPRA as an excuse?”

Mitch pondered, slow deliberation being about all he was capable of this late, this worn down by the day. “I don't think they're that crazy,” he said. “But the whole world's a tinderbox.”

“Maybe we should toss in a match,” Eileen said.

26

BALTIMORE

Kaye woke to the sound of the bedside phone dweedling, sat straight up in bed, pulled her hair away from her face, and peered through sleep-fogged eyes at the edge of daylight slicing between the shutters. The clock said 5:07 a.m. She could not think who could be calling her at this hour.

Today was not going to be a good day, she knew that already, but she picked up the phone and plumped the pillow behind her into a cushion. “Hello.”

“I need to speak with Kaye Lang.”

“That's me,” she said sleepily.

“Kaye, this is Luella Hamilton. You got in touch with us a little while ago.”

Kaye felt her adrenaline surge. Kaye had met Luella Hamilton fifteen years ago, when she had been a volunteer subject in a SHEVA study at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda. Kaye had taken a liking to the woman, but had not heard from her since driving west with Mitch to Washington state. “Luella? I don't remember . . .”

“Well, you did.”

Suddenly Kaye held the phone close. She had heard something about the Hamiltons being connected to Up River. It was reputed to be a very choosy organization. Some claimed it was subversive. She had forgotten all about her letter; that had been the worst time for her, and she had reached out to anyone, even the extremists who claimed they could track and rescue children.

“Luella? I didn't—”

“Well, since I knew you, they told me to make the return call. Is that okay?”

She tried to clear her head. “It's good to hear your voice. How are you?”

“I'm expecting, Kaye. You?”

“No,” Kaye said. Luella had to be in her middle fifties. Talk about rolling the dice.

“It's SHEVA again, Kaye,” Luella said. “But no time to chat. So listen close. You there, Kaye?”

“I hear you.”

“I want you to get to a scrambled line and call us again. A good scrambled line. You still have the number?”

“Yes,” Kaye said, wondering if it was in her wallet.

“You'll get a cute mechanical voice. Our little robot. Leave your number and we might call you back. Then, we'll go from there. All right, honey?”

Kaye smiled despite the tension. “Yes, Luella. Thank you.”

“Sorry to ring so early. Good-bye, dear.”

The phone went dead. Kaye immediately swung her legs out of bed and walked into the kitchen to fix coffee. Thought about trying to reach Mitch and tell him.

But it was too early, and probably not a good idea to spread such news around when any phone call was risky.

She stood by the window looking out over Baltimore and thought about Stella in Arizona, wondering how she was doing, and how long it would be until she saw her again.

Something snapped and she heard herself making little growls, like a fox. For a moment, clutching the coffee cup in her trembling hand, Kaye felt a blind, helpless rage. “Give me back my daughter, you FUCKHEADS,” she rasped. Then she dropped back into the nearest chair, shaking so hard the coffee spilled. She set the cup on a side table and wrapped herself in her arms. With the thick terry sleeve of her robe, she wiped tears of helplessness from her eyes. “Calm down, dear,” she said, trying to copy Mrs. Hamilton's strong contralto.

It was not going to be an easy day. Kaye strongly suspected she was going to be put at liberty. Fired. Ending her life as a scientist forever, but opening up her options so she could go get her daughter and reunite her family.

“Dreamer,” she said, with none of the conviction of Luella Hamilton.

27

ARIZONA

They pumped a thick strawberry smell into the dorm at eight in the morning. Stella opened her eyes and pinched her nose, moaning.

“What now?” Celia asked in the bunk below.

The humans did that whenever they wanted to do something the children might object to. Shots, mass blood samples, medical exams, dorm checks for contraband.

Next came a wave of Pine-Sol, blowing in through the vent pipes slung under the frame roof. The smell came in through Stella's mouth when she breathed, making her gag.

She sat on the edge of the bed in her nightgown, her stomach twisting and her chest heaving. Three men in isolation suits walked down the center aisle of the dormitory. One of the men, she saw, was not a man; it was Joanie, shorter and stockier than the others, her blank face peering through the plastic faceplate of the floppy helmet.

Joanie reminded Stella of Fred Trinket's mother; she had that same calm, fated expectancy of everything and anything, with no emotional freight attached.

The suited trio stopped by a bed four down from Stella's. The girl in the top bunk, Julianne Nicorelli, not a member of Stella's deme, climbed down at a few soft words from Joanie. She looked apprehensive but not scared, not yet. Sometimes the counselors and teachers ran drills in the camp, odd drills, and the kids were never told what they were up to.

Joanie turned and walked deliberately toward Stella's bunk. Stella slid down quickly, not using the ladder, and flattened her nightgown where it had ridden up above her knees. She hid her chest with her hands; the fabric was a little sheer, and she didn't like the way the men were looking at her.

“You, too, Stella,” Joanie said, her voice hollow and hissy behind the helmet. “We're going on a trip.”

“How many?” Celia asked.

Joanie smiled humorlessly. “Special trip. Reward for good grades and good behavior. The rest get to eat breakfast early.”

This was a lie. Julianne Nicorelli got terrible grades, not that anyone cared.

28

BALTIMORE

“Heads up. Marge will be here in twenty minutes,” Liz Cantrera said. “Ready?”

“Ready as I'll ever be,” Kaye said, and took a deep breath. She looked around the lab to see if there was anything that could be put away or cleaned up. Not that it mattered. It was her last day.

“You look fine,” Liz said sadly, straightening Kaye's lapels.

Marge Cross understood the messy bedrooms of science. And Kaye doubted that she wanted to check up on their housekeeping.

Around Kaye, Cross was almost always cheerful. She seemed to like Kaye and to trust her as much as she trusted anybody. Today, however, Cross was saying little, tapping her lip with her finger and nodding. She lifted her head to peer at the pipes hanging from the ceiling. She seemed to study a series of red tags hanging from various pressurized lines.

Only three people accompanied Cross. Two handsome young men in charcoal gray suits made notes on e-tabs. A slender young woman with long, thin blonde hair and a short, upturned nose took photos with a pen-sized camera.

Liz kept to the background, conspicuously allowing Kaye the point position. She gave them all a brief tour, well aware they were taking inventory in preparation for a transfer or a shutdown.

“We've lost,” Cross said. “Everything this company has been charged to do by the government and by the people has turned into a can of worms,” she added quietly, and chewed her lower lip. “I hear you did a good job on the Hill this week.” Cross regarded Kaye with a faint smile.

“It went okay.” Kaye shifted her eyes to one side and shrugged. “Rachel Browning tried to pull down my shorts.”

“Did she succeed?” Cross asked.

“Got them down to my curlies,” Kaye said.

The young men looked ready to appear shocked, should Cross be. Cross laughed. “Jesus, Kaye. I never know what I'm going to hear from you. You drive my PR folks nuts.”

“That's why I try to keep my head down and stay quiet.”

“We're not learning how to stop SHEVA,” Cross said reflectively, still examining the ceiling pipes.

“That's true,” Kaye said.

“You're glad.”

Once again, Kaye felt it was not her place to answer, that she had responsibilities to others besides herself.

“La Robert is failing, too, but he won't admit it,” Cross said. She waved her hands at the others in the lab. “Time to go, kiddies. Leave us sacred monsters alone for a while.”

The young men filed through the door. The slender blond tried to remind Cross of appointments later in the morning.

“Cancel them,” Cross instructed her.

Liz had stayed behind, solicitous of Kaye. The way she twitched, Kaye thought her assistant might try to physically intervene to protect her.

Cross smiled warmly at Liz. “Honey, can you add anything to our duet?”

“Not a thing,” Liz admitted. “Should I go?” she asked Kaye.

Kaye nodded.

Liz picked up her coat and purse and followed the blond through the door.

“Let's take the express to the top floor,” Cross suggested pleasantly, and put her arm around Kaye's shoulder. “It's been far too long since we put our heads together. I want you to explain what happened. What you thought you'd find in radiology.”

The Americol boardroom on the twentieth floor was huge and extravagant, with a long table cut lengthwise from an oak trunk, handmade William Morris–style chairs that seemed to float on their slender legs, and walls covered with early twentieth-century illustrative art.

Cross told the room what to do and two of the walls folded up, revealing electronic whiteboards. Sections of the table rose up like toy soldiers, thin personal monitors.

“If I were starting over again,” Cross said, “I'd turn this into a kindergarten classroom. Little chairs and wagons with little cartons of milk. That's how ignorant we are. But . . . We do cling to our beauty and wealth. We like to feel we are in control and always will be.”

Kaye listened attentively, but did not respond.

Cross pushed another button and the whiteboards replayed long strings of scrawled notes. Kaye guessed these were a frozen record of several late-night and early-morning pacing sessions, Cross alone up here in the heights, wielding her little pen wand, moving along the boards like a sorcerous queen scattering spells on the walls of her castle.

Kaye could decipher very few of the scrawls. Cross's handwriting was notorious.

“Nobody's seen this,” Cross murmured. “It's hard to read, isn't it?” she asked Kaye. “I used to have perfect penmanship.” She held up her swollen knuckles.

Kaye wondered where Cross intended to go with this. Was it all some devious way of letting her go gracefully, with a hearty handshake?

“The secret of life,” Cross said, “lies in understanding how little things talk to each other. Correct?”

“Yes,” Kaye said.

“And you've maintained, from before the beginnings of SHEVA, that viruses are part of the arsenal of communications our cells and bodies use to talk.”

“That's why you brought me to Americol.”

Cross dismissed that with a slight frown and a lift of one shoulder. “So you turned yourself into a laboratory to prove a point, and gave birth to a SHEVA child. Gutsy, and more than a little stupid.”

Kaye clenched her jaw.

Cross knew she had touched an exposed nerve. “I think the Jackson clique is right on the money. Experience biases you in favor of believing SHEVA is benign, a natural phenomenon that we'll just have to knuckle under and accept. Don't fight it. It's bigger than all of us.”

“I'm fond of my daughter,” Kaye said stiffly.

“I don't doubt it. Hear me out. I'm going somewhere with this, but I don't know where just yet.” Cross paced along the whiteboards, arms folded, tapping one elbow with the remote. “My companies are my children. That's a cliché, but it's true, Kaye. I am as stupid and gutsy as you were. I have turned my companies into an experiment in politics and human history. We're very much alike, except I had neither the opportunity—nor, frankly, the inclination—to put my body on the line. Now, we both stand to lose what we love most.”

Cross turned and flicked the whiteboards clean with the press of a button. Her face curled in disgust. “It's all shit. This room is a waste of money. You can't help but think that whoever built all this knew what they were doing, had all the answers. It's an architectural lie. I hate this room. Everything I just erased was drivel. Let's go somewhere else.” Cross was visibly angry.

Kaye folded her hands cautiously. She had no idea what was going to happen, not now. “All right,” she said. “Where?”

“No limos. Let's lose the luxuries for a few hours. Let's get back to little chairs and cookies and cartons of milk.” Cross smiled wickedly, revealing strong, even, but speckled teeth. “Let's get the hell out of this building.”

A gray, drizzly light greeted them as they pushed through the glass doors to the street. Cross hailed a cab.

“Your cheeks are pinking,” she told Kaye as they climbed into the backseat. “Like they want to say something.”

“That still happens,” Kaye admitted with some embarrassment.

Cross gave the driver an address Kaye did not recognize. The gray-haired man, a Sikh wearing a white turban, looked over his shoulder.

“I will need card in advance,” he said.

Cross reached for her belt pouch.

“My treat,” Kaye said, and handed the driver her credit card. The cab pushed off through traffic.

“What was it like, having those cheeks—like signboards?” Cross asked.

“It was a revelation,” Kaye said. “When my daughter was young, we practiced cheek-flashing. It was like teaching her how to speak. I missed them when they faded.”

Cross watched her absorbedly, then gave a little start and said, “I learned I couldn't have children when I was twenty-five. Pelvic inflammatory disease. I was a big, ungainly girl and had a hard time getting dates. I had to take my men where I found them, and one of them . . . Well. No children, and I decided not to reverse the scarring, because there was never a man I trusted enough to be a father. I got rich pretty early and the men I was attracted to were like pleasant toys, needy, eager to please, not very reliable.”

“I'm sorry,” Kaye said.

“Sublimation is the soul of accomplishment,” Cross said. “I can't say I understand what it means to be a parent. I can only make comparisons with how I feel about my companies, and that probably isn't the same.”

“Probably not,” Kaye said.

Cross clucked her tongue. “This isn't about funding or firing you or anything so simple. We're both explorers, Kaye. For that reason alone, we need to be open and frank.”

Kaye peered out the taxi window and shook her head, amused. “It isn't working, Marge. You're still rich and powerful. You're still my boss.”

“Well, hell,” Cross said with mock disappointment, and snapped her fingers.

“But it may not matter,” Kaye said. “I've never been very good at concealing my true feelings. Maybe you've noticed.”

Cross made a sound too high-pitched to be a laugh, but it had a certain eccentric dignity, and probably wasn't a giggle, either. “You've been playing me all along.”

“You knew I would,” Kaye said.

Cross patted her cheek. “Cheek-flashing.”

Kaye looked puzzled.

“How can something so wonderful be an aberration, a disease? If I could fever scent, I would be running every corporation in the country by now.”

“You wouldn't want to,” Kaye said. “If you were one of the children.”

“Now who's being naÏve?” Cross asked. “Do you think they've left our monkey selves behind?”

“No. Do you know what a deme is?” Kaye asked.

“Social units for some of the SHEVA kids.”

“What I'm saying is a deme might be the greedy one, not an individual. And when a deme fever scents, we lesser apes don't stand a chance.”

Cross leaned her head back and absorbed this. “I've heard that,” she said.

“Do you know a SHEVA child?” the driver asked, looking at them in the rearview mirror. He did not wait for an answer. “My granddaughter, a SHEVA girl, is in Peshawar, she is charmer. Real charmer. It is scary,” he added happily, proudly, with a broad grin. “Really scary.”

29

ARIZONA

Stella sat with Julianne Nicorelli in a small beige room in the hospital. Joanie had separated them from the other girls. They had been waiting for two hours. The air was still and they sat stiff as cold butter on their chairs, watching a fly crawl along the window.

The room was still thick with strawberry scent, which Stella had once loved.

“I feel awful,” Julianne said.

“So do I.”

“What are they waiting for?”

“Something's screwy/ Made a mistake,” Stella said.

Julianne scraped her shoes on the floor. “I'm sorry you aren't one of my deme,” she said.

“That's okay.”

“Let's make our own, right here. We'll/ Like us/ join up with anyone else/ locked away/ who comes in.”

“All right,” Stella said.

Julianne wrinkled her nose. “It stinks so bad/ Can't smell myself think.”

Their chairs were several feet apart, a polite distance considering the nervous fear coming from the two girls, even over the miasma of strawberry. Julianne stood and held out one hand. Stella leaned her head to one side and pulled back her hair, exposing the skin behind her ear. “Go ahead.”

Julianne touched the skin there, the waxy discharge, and rubbed it under her nose. She made a face, then lowered her finger and frithed—pulling back her upper lip and sucking air over the finger and into her mouth.

“Ewww,” she said, not at all disapprovingly, and closed her eyes. “I feel better. Do you?”

Stella nodded and said, “Do you want to be deme mother?”

“Doesn't matter,” Julianne said. “We're not a quorum anyway.” Then she looked alarmed. “They're probably recording us.”

“Probably.”

“I don't care. Go ahead.”

Stella touched Julianne behind her ear. The skin was quite warm there, hot almost. Julianne was fever scenting, desperately trying to reach out and both politely persuade and establish a bond with Stella. That was touching. It meant Julianne was more frightened and insecure than Stella, more in need.

“I'll be deme mother,” Stella said. “Until someone better comes in.”

“All right,” Julianne said. It was just for show, anyway. No quorum, just whistling down the wind. Julianne rocked back and forth. Her scent was changing to coffee and tuna—a little disturbing. It made Stella want to hug somebody.

“I smell bad, don't I?” Julianne said.

“No,” Stella said. “But we both smell different now.”

“What's happening to us?”

“I'm sure they want to find out,” Stella said, and faced the strong steel door.

“My hips hurt,” Julianne said. “I am so miserable.”

Stella pulled their chairs closer. She touched Julianne's fingers where they rested on her knee. Julianne was tall and skinny. Stella had more flesh on her frame though as yet no breasts, and her hips were narrow.

“They don't want us to have children,” Julianne said, as if reading her mind, and her misery crossed over into sobs.

Stella just kept stroking her hand. Then she turned the girl's hand over, spit into her palm, and rubbed their palms together. Even over the strawberry smell, she got through to Julianne, and Julianne began to settle down, focus, smooth out the useless wrinkles of her fear.

“They shouldn't make us mad,” Julianne said. “If they want to kill us, they better do it soon.”

“Shhh,” Stella warned. “Let's just get comfortable. We can't stop them from doing what they're going to do.”

“What are they going to do?” Julianne asked.

“Shh.”

The electronic lock on the door clicked. Stella saw Joanie in her hooded suit through the small window. The door opened.

“Let's go, girls,” Joanie said. “This is going to be fun.” Her voice sounded like a recording coming out of an old doll.

A yellow bus, like a small school bus, waited for them on the drive in front of the hospital. The bus that had brought Strong Will had been a different bus, secure and shiny, new; she wondered why they were not using that bus.

Four counselors in suits moved five girls and four boys forward, toward the door of the bus. Celia and LaShawna and Felice were in the group once again. Julianne walked ahead of Stella, her loose clogs slapping the ground.

Strong Will was among the boys, Stella saw with both apprehension and an odd excitement. She was pretty sure it wasn't a sexual thing—based on what Kaye had told her—but it was something like that. She had never felt such a thing before. It was new.

Not just to her.

She thought maybe it was new to the human race, or whatever the children were. A virus kind of thing, maybe.

The boys walked ten feet apart from the girls. None of them were shackled, but where would they run? Into the desert? The closest town was twenty miles away, and already it was a hundred degrees.

The counselors held little gas guns that filled the air with a citrus smell, oranges and limes, and a perennial favorite, Pine-Sol.

Will looked dragged down, frazzled. He carried a paperback book without a cover, its pages yellow and tattered. He did not look at the girls; none of the boys did. They appeared to be okay physically, but shuffled as they walked. She could not catch their scent.

The door to the bus opened and the boys were led in first, taking seats on the left-hand side. Through the windows, Stella saw plastic curtains being drawn and fastened. They looked flimsy, like shower curtains. Joanie moved the girls up to the door. They walked to the right of the curtain and sat in the five middle rows of slick blue plastic bench seats, one girl to each seat.

Stella squirmed and her pants stuck to the plastic. The seat felt funny, tacky and oily. It exuded a peculiar smell, like turpentine. They had sprayed the interior of the bus with something.

Celia sat directly in front of her and leaned forward to talk to LaShawna.

“Stay where you are,” Joanie instructed them in a monotone. “No talking.” She surveyed the children on both sides of the curtain, then walked forward and took Julianne by the arm. She removed Julianne, backing out of the bus. Julianne shot a frightened but relieved look at Stella, then stood outside, arms straight by her sides, shivering.

A security guard came aboard. He was in his middle forties, stocky and bare-armed, wearing a pair of khaki pants and a short-sleeved white shirt that clung to his shoulders. He carried a small machine pistol in a holster on his belt. He glanced back at the boys, then leaned to one side, and peered along the right side of the bus at the girls.

Everyone on the bus was silent.

Stella's stomach seemed to shrink inside her.

The door closed. Will swung his hand against the plastic curtain and made the hooks rattle on the rail bolted to the roof. The guard leaned forward and frowned.

Stella couldn't smell a thing now. Her nose was completely clogged.

“Am I allowed to read on the bus?” Will yelled.

The guard shrugged.

“Thank you,” Will shouted, and the girls giggled. “Thank you very much.”

The man obviously did not like this duty. He faced forward, waiting for the driver.

“What about lunch?” Will shouted. “Are we going to eat?”

The boys laughed. The girls sank back into their seats. Stella thought maybe they were being taken away to be killed and dissected. Felice was clearly thinking the same thing. Celia was shivering.

Finally, Will stopped yelling. He pulled a page from the paperback, crumpled it into a ball, and tossed it over three seats into the well next to the driver's window. Tongue between his lips and making a clownish grin, he pulled out another page, crumpled it, and lobbed it into the empty driver's seat. Then another, which fell to the floor in front of the driver's seat. Stella watched through the transparent sheeting between the rows, embarrassed and exhilarated by this show of defiance.

The driver climbed up the steps. He picked up the crumpled paper with his gloved hand, made a face, then tossed it out the door. It bounced from the chest of the second security guard as she came aboard. She was also large and in her forties. The female guard muttered something Stella could not hear. Both guards were equipped with noseys pinned to their breast pockets. The noseys were switched off, Stella noticed.

The driver took his seat.

“Let's go!” Will shouted. Behind him, one of the boys began to hoot. The female guard swiveled and glared at them, just in time to be hit by another crumpled ball of paper.

The male guard walked to the back along the boys' side of the plastic barrier.

“Go! Go!” Will shouted, and bounced in his seat.

“Sit down, damn it,” the first guard said.

“Why not tie us down?” Will asked. “Why not strap us in?”

“Shut up,” the guard said.

Stella felt a chill. They were being taken somewhere by a team that had had little experience with SHEVA children. She had an instinct for such things. These two, and the driver, looked even dumber than Miss Kantor. None of the humans inside or outside of the bus looked happy; they looked as if something had gone wrong.

Stella wondered what had happened to that other bus, the one they usually used.

Will was watching the guards and the driver like a hawk, eyes steady. Stella tried to keep his face in focus through the plastic, but he leaned back and got fuzzy.

The wire-reinforced plastic windows were locked shut from the outside; this was the kind of bus she had seen as a child carrying prisoners to pick up trash or cut down brush along the highways. She stared out through the window and shivered.

Her body ached. In front of her, Celia hunched forward, whispering to herself, her hands clasping the padded rail. LaShawna was yawning, pretending not to care. Felice had wrapped herself in her arms and was trying to go to sleep.

“Go, go, go!” the boys hooted, bouncing in their seats. Felice laid her head against the window. Stella wanted the boys to be quiet. She wanted everything to be quiet so she could close her eyes and pretend she was somewhere else. She felt betrayed by the school, by Miss Kantor, by Miss Kinney.

That was stupid, of course. Being at the school was a betrayal in the first place. Why would leaving be any worse? She leaned her head back to keep from feeling nauseated.

The female guard told the driver to close and lock the door. The driver started the bus and put it in gear. It lurched forward.

Celia began to throw up. The driver jerked the bus to a halt at the end of the concrete apron before the main road.

“Never mind!” the female guard shouted, her face a mask of disgust. “We'll clean it up when we get there. Just go!”

“Go, go, go!” the boys chanted. Will glanced at Stella, straightened his lips, and began to peel another page from the paperback.

Once the bus was under way, air began to move through small vents above the windows and Stella felt better. Celia stayed quiet, and the two other girls sat stiffly in their seats. Stella was thinking over their situation and decided it was all very clumsy and badly planned, probably last-minute. They were being transported like lobsters in a tank. Time was of the essence. Someone was eager to get to them while they were still fresh.

Stella tried to make some spit to moisten her mouth. The taste on her tongue was terrible.

“This will take about an hour and ten minutes,” the driver said as they pulled out of the school parking lot. “There's water in bottles below each seat. We'll make one bathroom stop.”

Stella reached below the blue seat and picked up a plastic bag with a bottle of water inside. She looked down at it, wondering what it held besides water; what was going to happen at the end of the ride, their treat for being such good little boys and girls? To stay calm, she thought of Kaye, and then she thought about Mitch. Last, but not least, she remembered holding their old orange cat, Shamus, and stroking him while he purred.

If she was going to die, she could at least be as dignified as old Shamus.

30

OREGON

Mitch got up before sunrise, dressed without waking Merton, and left the tent they shared to stand at the rim of the Spent River gulley. He watched the early-morning sun try to spread light over the shaded landscape. He could clearly see Mount Hood, twenty miles away, its snows purple in the dawn.

He found a twig and stuck it between his lips, then bit it with his teeth.

Mitch had never thought he was prescient, sensitive, psychic, whatever name one gave to having second sight. Kaye had told him, years ago, that scientists and artists shared similar origins for creative thinking—but that scientists had to prove their fancies.

Mitch had never told Kaye what he had gotten out of that conversation, but in a way it had helped him put things in perspective—to see the artistic side of how he came to his own, often logically unsupportable conclusions. It wasn't ESP.

He was just thinking like an artist.

Or a cop. Nature was the world's most efficient serial killer. An anthropologist was a kind of detective, not so much interested in justice—that was entirely too abstract in the face of time's immensity and so many deaths—but in figuring out how the victims had died and, more important, how they had lived.

He wiped his eyes with one finger and looked north along the gulley, to the deeper gorge that had long ago been cut through alternating layers of mud and lava and ash. Then he turned and peered at the L-shaped site with its array of canvas and plastic covers, concealed by camouflage netting.

“Shit,” he said, almost in wonder at the way his feet began to walk him along the rim of the gulley, away from the main dig.

That bear. That damned, enigmatic bear that had started it all.

The bear had come down to the river to do some fishing and had been suffocated by a fall of ash—but several days before the humans had arrived. The humans typically tracked bears, he was almost sure of it, relying on them to find good fishing. Someone had claimed the skull, but had not butchered the carcass—there were no cut marks on the bones—which meant it was probably in an unappetizing condition by the time they found it.

Salmon came back in the spring, summer, and fall to spawn and die, different groups and different species at different seasons. Nomadic bands had timed their journeys and arranged their settlements to take advantage of one or more of these returns, when the rivers ran thick with rich, red-fleshed fish.

Leaves changing color. Water running crisp and cold. Salmon wriggling over the rocky streambeds like big red pull toys. Bears waiting to march across the stream and grab them.

But most of the bears had probably left with the first ash fall, leaving behind one old male too sick to travel far, maybe chewed up in a fight, waiting to die.

Guessing. Just guessing, goddamnit.

Why would people walk up the river and ignore the ash fall? Not even hunger could have driven them into that landscape, or made them stay once there. Unless it had been raining, every step would have brought up a cloud of choking ash. Setting up a fishing camp would have been stupid in the extreme.

Like the bear, they were being followed.

He had dreamed about the bones in the night. He did not know whether artists dreamed their work—or whether detectives dreamed solutions to their cases. But the way he worked was, he often dreamed of the people he found, in their graves or where they had fallen and died.

And sometimes he was right.

Often he was right.

Hell, nine times out of ten, Mitch's dreams turned out to be right—so long as he waited for them to evolve, to ripple through their necessary variations and reach their inevitable conclusion. That was how it had been with the Alpine mummies. He had dreamed about them for months.

But now there was not enough time. He had to rely on what amounted to a hunch.

The Australians had clued him, even more than the Homo erectus skeletons. They were very far north. Only now was anthropology accepting the many tides and clashes of peoples in the Americas—the early arrival by storm-driven boats of a few Australians in the south, the later and frequent arrivals of the Asians moving along and over the land and ice bridges in the north.

The Australoids had been in South America—and now it was apparent North America—for tens of thousands of years before they met the Asians. The Asians conquered and killed, subdued, pushed them back south from whatever northern territories they might have explored. It must have been a monumental war, spread out over millions of square miles and many thousands of years, race-based and violent.

In the end, the Australians had all but vanished—leaving only a few mixed-race descendants on the eastern coast of South America: the Tierra del Fuegans familiar to Darwin and other explorers.

They were being chased. They partnered with the Homo erectus individuals because they faced a common enemy.

Mitch stepped out like an automaton, eyes sweeping the ground ahead, ignoring everything but the pound of his boots on the old rounded river rocks. It was no place to take a tumble, especially with one bum arm.

Too far north. In dangerous territory, surrounded by Asians. They had come up here for the rich runs of fish, following the bears; men and women, an extended family group. Perhaps united under one powerful male—and maybe he did like dabbling with the Homo erectus females. No sense being naÏve.

But his women did not care. No babies ever resulted. Mitch could almost see the Homo erectus males and females tagging along, behind the Australians, begging at first, then being set up to do work for the women, then offering themselves to the men, their own males indifferent to the exchange. Attitudes of a hungry, dying people.

In the end, there had been some measure of affection, perhaps more than masters for their pets. Equals? Probably not. But the Homo erectus members of the group were not stupid. They had survived for more than a million years. Homo sap was just a newcomer in the equation.

Mitch snuffed air and blew his nose into his handkerchief; the warming air was thick with grass pollen. He was not normally susceptible, but his years in prison, with musty air and lots of mold, had exaggerated his reactions.

If the men are out here—and no guarantee of that—they couldn't save the women. They failed, and they probably died, too. Or they hightailed it out of this miserable place ahead of the wave of hot mud—leaving the women behind.

How am I any better?

I left my women behind, and they took Stella.

What if I do find the males, what of it? What in hell am I looking for? Salvation? An excuse?

He glanced up at the sun, then shaded and dropped his eyes. The thickest deposit of mudstone had set in a dark brown layer all around the banks of the old river, weathered in spots to soil rich enough to support shrubs and trees, hard and stripped and barren elsewhere. Boulders the size and shape of soccer balls pocked the ground, and nowhere any clue as to where an elusive collection of fossils might just poke up underfoot.

He sat on a weather-split boulder and lifted his left elbow onto his knee to get the tingle out of his slack arm. Sometimes the blood just cut off in that arm, and then the nerves, and after a while the arm jerked awake and hurt like hell.

It wasn't easy staying attentive and on point. Something insisted on getting in the way, perhaps an all-too-real sense of the complete futility of what he was trying to do. “Where would you go?” he whispered. He hunched his knees slowly around the rock, turning his eyes to sweep the rugged land, up the high ground and down into the swales filled with brush. “Where would you weather out twenty thousand years after you died? Come on, guys. Help me out.”

A light breeze whistled through the brush and touched his hair like phantom fingers. He blew a fly away from his lips and brushed the hair out of his eyes. Kaye had always chided him about getting haircuts. After a while she had just let it drop, giving up, and Mitch wondered what he resented more—being treated like a little boy or being given up on by his own wife.

His teeth ground lightly, like a beast scaring away enemies. His chest ached from loneliness and guilt.

Wandering.

His eyes could tell a chip of bone from a pebble at a dozen paces, even now. He could set mental filters to ignore squirrel and rabbit bones, any recent subset of bleached, chewed, or sinew-darkened remnant.

His eyes narrowed to slits.

An experienced band of males might have seen or heard the lahar and become frightened, tried to make it to high ground. That's where he was now, where his feet had taken him, to the highest ground in the area, a ridge of hard rock and cupped pockets of soil and brush. He could see the camp, or at least where he knew it was, about half a mile away, obscured by tall brush and trees.

And north, the ever-present sentinel of Mount Hood, a quiet, squat dunce cap of repressed Earth energy, hissing faint plumes of steam but confessing nothing about past tantrums, past crimes.

Mitch closed his eyes completely and visualized the head male of the band. The picture cleared. Mitch went away, and in his place stood the band's lead hunter, the chief.

The chief's face was dark and intent, hair flecked with ash, skin streaky gray with ash, like a ghost. In Mitch's imagination, the chief started out purple-brown and quite naked, but pieced skins suddenly appeared on his lanky, stooped frame, not crude rags even twenty thousand years ago, because people were savvy about fashion and utility even then; leggings and tunic tied at the waist, pouch for flints and obsidian tips or whatever they might have with them.

Their hearts beat fast seeing the pallor on their skins, they already look dead. They're afraid of each other. But the chief holds them together. He jumps and makes faces until they crow at their ashen complexions. The chief is more than smart; he cares about the anomalous little group of males, partners in this harsh land; and he is solicitous of the females, the chewers of skins and makers of the clothing he wears.

Never underestimate your ancestors, your cousins. They lasted a long, long time. And even then they loved, they cared, they protected.

31

ARIZONA

The bus cut through a Flagstaff suburb, low, flat, brown brick and stucco houses surrounded by dusty gravel yards. Stella had lived in such a suburb as a girl. She laid her head back on the plastic seat and stared at the passing homes. Even with air-conditioning, the bus was hot inside and her water was running out fast.

The boys had stopped talking and Will seemed to be asleep next to a small pile of crumpled yellow pages from his old paperback book.

Someone tapped her shoulder. It was the male guard. He had a larger plastic bag from which he pulled another bottle of water.

“Not long now,” he said, and stuck the bottle into her hand. “Give me the empties.” The girls handed him their empties and he passed them to the female guard, who stuck them into another bag and sealed it. Then he stepped around the curtain at the front of the bus and gave the boys fresh bottles, again collecting the empties.

The male guard shook his head and glared down disapprovingly at Will's mess before giving the boy a bottle.

“Having fun?” he asked Will.

Will stared up at him and shook his head slowly.

The bus driver was making lots of turns, taking them up and down many streets as if he were lost. Stella did not think the driver was lost. They were trying to avoid someone or something.

That made her sit up. She looked behind. The bus was being followed by a small brown car. Up front, as they turned a corner she saw another car, this one green, with two people in the front seat. The bus was following the lead car. They had escorts.

Nothing too unexpected about that. Why, then, did Stella feel that none of this had been planned out well, that something had gone awry?

Will was watching her. He pushed close to the plastic curtain and moved his lips but she could not hear what he was saying over the road noise; they were on gravel now, rumbling across a farm track through a fallow dirt field to a state road. The bus bounced up onto the asphalt and swung left. The lead car slowed for the bus to catch up.

She tracked Will's lips more carefully now that the bouncing had stopped: Sandia, he was mouthing silently. She remembered him asking earlier if she had heard of it, but she still did not know what Sandia was.

Will drew his finger across his throat. Stella closed her eyes and turned away. She could not watch him now. She did not need to be any more scared than she already was.

Another hour, and they rode on a straight stretch of highway between rocky desert with low red mountains on the horizon. The sun was almost directly overhead. The trip was taking a lot longer than Joanie had said it would.

The highway was almost empty, only a few cars going either way. A small red BMW with New Mexico plates swung around to the left of the short caravan and zoomed by. The boys tracked its speedy passage listlessly, then held up their hands with crooked finger signs and laughed.

Stella did not know what they meant. The laughter sounded harsh. The boys worried her. They seemed wild.

The long, sandy, rocky stretches beside the highway hypnotized her. The mountains were always far away. She wondered what Sandia meant once more, then stuffed the word away, hating the sound of it, more so because it was actually a pretty word.

Screech of tires.

She was jerked up out of a doze by a sudden swerve. Stella clung to the seat back in front of her as the bus veered left, then right, then tilted. Tires kept on screaming over the asphalt. Celia's head and shoulders bounced one way then another, and as Stella looked right, the outside world flew up and dropped down, mountains and desert and all. Then everything shoved sideways, and she slipped along the plastic seat and crashed down on the window, jamming her head, neck, and shoulder against the plastic. Plastic crazed and peeled away in wire-clasped ripples and her shoulder pressed into dirt and gravel.

For a moment, the bus was very quiet. It seemed to be lying on one side, the right side, her side. The light was not very good and the air was thick and still and full of the smell of burned rubber.

She tried to move and found that she still could, which caused a surge of excitement. Her body was still working, she was still alive. She pushed up slowly and heard jingling and ripping sounds. Then, a boy fell onto the curtain and jammed his knee into her side. Through the taut veil of plastic above her, she saw another boy's denim-clad butt and a vague, contorted face. Will, she thought, and with a grunt, pushed up against the body, but could not move it.

“Please, get off,” she demanded, her voice muffled.

Stella was in pain. She thought for a minute she was going to panic, but she closed her eyes and made that go away. She could not bring her hand around to feel her shoulder, but she thought it might be bleeding, and her blouse seemed to be ripped. She could feel gravel or something sharp against her bare skin.

Outside, she heard some voices, men talking, one man yelling. They seemed far away. Then a door squealed open. The knee on her chest drew up and a foot came down hard on her ankle, pressing it into the frame of the seat in front. She screamed; that really hurt.

“Sorry,” a boy said, and the foot was lifted. She saw shadows moving over her, clumsy, dazed, pressing against the plastic curtain. Will's face seemed to blur and fade, and he was gone. The curtain lay lightly around her. Something sighed, a brake cylinder maybe, or a boy. She rolled enough to finally touch her shoulder and lifted her hand against the curtain to see a bit of blood there, not a lot. Light filtered around the seat back behind her. Someone had opened the bus's rear emergency door, and maybe a ceiling hatch as well.

“We'd better get you out of there,” a man called congenially. “Everybody hear me?”

Stella lay on her back now against the gravel and the dirt and the side of the bus. She rolled over completely and did a kind of knee-up, arm-up between the seats, which were jammed together closer than they had been before the crash. A feathery, leafy branch somehow got into her mouth and she spit it out, then finished wriggling until she was on her knees.

She had cuts all over, but none of them were bleeding a lot. Stella flailed against the plastic curtain until someone pulled it away with a jingle of hooks.

“Who's in here? LaShawna? You in here?” A man's voice, deep and distinct.

And someone else, “Celia? Hugh Davis? Johnny? Johnny Lee?”

“It's me,” Stella said. “I'm here.”

Then she heard LaShawna call out. The girl began crying. “My leg is hurt,” she wailed.

“We're going to get you, LaShawna. Be brave. Help is coming.”

Someone cursed loud and long at someone else.

“You just back off. You stay away from here. This is horrible, but you back off.”

“You drove us the fuck off the road!”

“You went into a skid.”

“Well, what the hell else could I do? There were cars all over the road. Jesus, we need an ambulance. Call an ambulance.”

Stella wondered if perhaps she should just stay where she was for the time being, in the half-dark, and nobody knowing she was there.

Suddenly, someone was pulling on her arm, tugging her out from between the seats and into the space between the top of the seats and the roof of the bus, now a kind of hallway with windows on the floor. It was Will. He crouched and peered at her like a frazzle-haired monkey, his face smeared with blood.

“We can go now,” he said.

“Where?” Stella asked.

“It's people coming for us. Humans. They want to rescue us. But we can leave.”

“We have to help.”

“What can we do?” Will asked.

“We have to help.”

For a passing moment, she wanted to smear her hand on his face. Her ears felt hot.

Will shook his head and scrambled in a half-hunch to the front of the bus. He looked for a moment as if he were just going to climb out through a window, but then two pairs of arms stretched down, and he glanced back at Stella. A sour look came to his face.

“There's a girl back there; she's okay,” he said. “Take care of her, but leave me alone.”

Stella sat by the side of the long two-lane highway with her face in her hands. She had banged her head pretty hard in the wreck and now it throbbed. She peeked between her fingers at the adults walking around the bus. About twenty minutes had passed since the crash.

Will lay beside her, hand tossed casually over his eyes as if he were taking a nap. He had ripped his pants and a long scratch showed through. Otherwise, they both seemed to be okay.

Celia and LaShawna and the three other boys were already sitting in the backs of two cars, not the escort cars. Both of the escort cars had run off into a culvert and were pretty banged up—crumpled grilles, steam hissing, trunk lids popped.

She thought she heard the two security guards on the other side of the bus, and possibly the bus driver as well.

Parked by the side of the road about a hundred yards behind were two law enforcement vehicles. She could not see the insignia but their emergency lights were blinking. Why weren't they helping out, getting ready to take the children back to the school?

Would there be an EMAC van coming soon, or an ambulance?

A black man in a rumpled brown suit approached Stella and Will. “The other girls and boys are pretty badly bruised, but they're going to be fine. LaShawna is fine. Her leg is okay, thank God.”

Stella peered up at him doubtfully. She did not know who he was.

“I'm John Hamilton,” he said. “I'm LaShawna's daddy. We've got to leave here. You have to come with us.”

Will sat up, his cheeks almost mahogany from the combination of sun and defiance. “Why?” he said. “Are you taking us to another school?”

“We have to get you to a doctor for checkups. The closest safe place is about fifty miles from here.” He pointed back down the road. “Not back to the school. My daughter will never go there again, not while I'm alive.”

“What's Sandia?” Stella asked John, on impulse.

“It's some mountains,” John said, with a startled expression, and swallowed something that must have been bitter. “Come on, let's get going. I think there's room.”

A third car pulled up, and John talked to the driver, a middle-aged woman with large turquoise rings on her fingers and brilliant orange hair. They seemed to know each other.

John came back. He was irritated.

“You'll go with her,” he said. “Her name is Jobeth Hayden. She's a mom, too. We thought her daughter might be here, but she isn't.”

“You ran the buses off the road?” Stella asked.

“We tried to slow down the lead car and take you off the bus. We thought we could do it safely. I don't know how it happened, but one of their cars spun out and the bus plowed into it and everyone went off the road. Cars all over. We're damned lucky.”

Will had retrieved his battered and torn paperback book from the dirt and clutched it in his hand. He peered at the rip in his jeans, and the scratch. Then he stared back down the road at the cars with the emergency lights. “I'll just go by myself.”

“No, son,” John Hamilton said firmly, and he suddenly seemed very large. “You'll die out here, and you won't hitch any rides because they'll know what you are.”

“They'll arrest me,” Will said, pointing at the blinking lights.

“No, they won't. They're from New Mexico.”

Hamilton did not explain why that was significant. Will stared at Hamilton and his face wrinkled in either anger or frustration.

“We're responsible,” Hamilton said quietly. “Please, come with us.” Even more quietly, focusing on Will, his voice deep, almost sleepy, Hamilton said again, “Please.”

Will stumbled as he took a step, and John helped him to the car with the orange-haired woman, Jobeth.

On the way, they came close to the red Buick that carried Celia, Felice, LaShawna, and two of the boys. LaShawna leaned back in the rear seat, in the shadow of the car roof, eyes closed. Felice sat upright beside her. Celia stuck her head out the window. “What-KUK a ride!” she crowed. A white bandage looped around her head. She had blood on her scalp and in her hair and she clutched a plastic bottle of 7-Up and a sandwich. “I guess no more school, huh?”

Will and Stella got in the car with Jobeth. John told Jobeth where they were going—a ranch. Stella did not catch the name, though it might have been George or Gorge.

“I know,” the woman said. “I love there.”

Stella was sure the woman did not say “live,” she said “love.”

Will leaned his head back on the seat and stared at the headliner. Stella took a bottle of water and a bottle of 7-Up from John, and the cars drove back on the road, leaving the wreck of the bus, two guards, and three drivers, all neatly tied and squatting on the shoulder.

The official vehicles turned out to be from the New Mexico State Police, and they spun off in the opposite direction, their lights no longer flashing.

“Won't be more than an hour,” Jobeth said, following the other two cars.

“Who are you?” Stella asked.

“I have no idea,” Jobeth said lightly. “Haven't for years.” She glanced back over the seat at Stella. “You're a pretty one. You're all pretty ones to me. Do you know my daughter? Her name is Bonnie. Bonnie Hayden. I guess she's still at the school; they took her there six months ago. She has natural red hair and her sparks are really prominent. It's her Irish blood, I'm sure.”

Will ripped a page out of his paperback and crumpled it, then waggled it under his nose. He grinned at Stella.

32

OREGON

They've been out hunting, the men, taking along the younger males, those near or beyond puberty; heading up to the high ground to see where there might be some game left after the ash fall. But the ash has covered everything with grit for a hundred miles and the game has moved south, all but the small animals still quivering in their burrows, in their warrens, waiting . . .

And then the men hear the lahar coming, see the pyroclastic cloud that has melted all the snow and ice rippling around the base of the mountain like a dirty gray shawl falling from the black Storm Bear whose claws are lightning . . . or the mountain goddess sitting and spreading her wrap, the edge of the soft skin rushing over the land tens of miles away with a sound like all the buffalo on Earth.

Beneath the wrap, the meltwater has mixed with hot gas and gathers ash and mud and trees, roaring toward where the men stand, pallid and weak with fear.

The chief, with the sharpest eyes, the quickest brain, the strongest arm, the most sons and daughters in this band, yet probably only thirty-five or forty years of age, at the oldest . . . The chief has never encountered anything like the approaching lahar. The ash was bad enough. The distant wall of gray smudge looks as if it might take days to reach them, rolling over and through the distant forests. How could it ever touch where he stands with his sons and hunters, no matter how furious and powerful?

But, just in case, he walks back to be with the women.

Mitch pushed on his knee to get up and started walking toward the camp.

The men lope down the hills, taking the short route from the high ground, puffs of ash rising around their feet as they run, and the chief looks up above the ash cloaking the tiny crew in a choking haze and sees that the cloud has come that much closer in just a few minutes. He trembles, knowing how ignorant he is. Death could be very near.

Mitch strode down into the swale, across the old mudstone and around the whistling patches of brush.

Big old splash coming. Hot breath out of hell unnamed, perhaps unthought of then. The chief runs faster as the roar grows louder, the sound bigger even than the biggest stampeding herd in the biggest hunt, the wall of cloud rampaging over the land with a swift but lumbering dignity, like a great bear.

For a moment, the chief pauses and points out that the gray cloud has stopped. They laugh and hoot. The gray cloud is thinning, breaking up. They cannot see the flood beneath.

Then comes the biggest ash fall yet, thick curtains and fat billows, blinding, stinging the eyes and catching in the nose and mouth, gritty between lips and gums, choking. They try to cover their eyes with their hands. Blind, they stumble and fall and shout hunting cries, identity cries, not yet names. The roar begins again, grows louder, rhythmic pounding, screaming of trees, ripping.

Mitch stopped briefly on the upslope of the swale, peering at the weathered layers, the broken, crumbling remains of the ancient lahar. He rubbed his eyes, trying to push back a sliver of light in his vision.

From the top of the crest, he half-slid, half-walked down to the edge of the Spent River, a bluff overlooking the dried-up watercourse. They might have been near the river, waiting to cross, in a straight line between the high ground where Mitch (and the chief) had been a few minutes before, not far from where Mitch stood now, his dead arm at his side, ignoring the tingling there as well as the precessing, aching silver crescent.

He walked along the bluff. His eyes swept the ground a few meters ahead, looking for that weathered-out phalange or even bigger bone or chip of bone not worried over by a coyote or hauled off by a ground squirrel, falling out of its little hollow in the ash, that hard little mold of death.

The roar is loud and growing louder, but the cloud seems to be dissipating. What they cannot see, from where they stand, is the lahar breaking up into long fingers, finding channels already carved and ripped in the land, blowing out the last of its energy, reaching, reaching, but growing weaker. What they cannot see clearly is that this new threat is trying with all of its fading might to kill them.

Perhaps they will live.

They would be on his right, if they were anywhere at all, if they were still here. Their bones might have weathered out and fallen from the bluff centuries ago. He was walking so near the edge that there might be nothing left. The river would have been higher then, its bed not so worn and deep; but the bluff might have been high enough to give them pause . . .

The chief looks northwest. The leading run of the dying lahar roars down the channel. His eyes grow wide, his nostrils flare in rage and disappointment. It is a fuming, curling, leaping torrent of mud and steaming water. It fills his eyes, his brain. It travels faster than they can run. They hunker down and it roars past, below their feet, digging out the embankment. They crawl up the bank to safety, but the lahar vaults up and the spill catches them as they raise their arms. The thick liquid scalds, and the chief hears the others screaming, but only for a moment.

Mitch's breath hitched.

Their women must have died at the same moment, or within seconds, across the Spent River.

The chief falls with his arms over his head. He and all his sons and the other hunters struggle for tenths of seconds against the scalding mud and then must lie still. It covers them, a blanket more than two feet thick, larded with sticks and chunks of log and rocks the size of fists, with bits of dead animals.

As Mitch walked, he grew calmer. Things seemed to fall into place. When the search was on, his mind became a quiet lake.

The land is hot and steaming. Nothing near the river lives that stood above ground. Bushes denuded of their leaves crouch smashed and wilted along the river course. Corpses lie baked and half-buried under gouts of steaming mud. The ground smells like mud and steamed vegetables. It smells like cooked herbs in a meaty stew.

The mud cools.

And then comes the third fall of ash, entombing the remains of the men, the women, and the ravaged land along the Spent River and for miles around.

It was over.

Mitch kept his head down and pressed one eye with a finger, but the pain was coming anyway. Price to be paid.

Rod Taylor pushes the lever forward on the old time machine. The mud hardens under the gray pall of falling ash. Time flies past. The bodies decay within their molds, staining the hard mud. The flesh seeps away and the bones rattle with earthquakes and the mud and stone cracks and fresh water and mud enters, filling the hollow with mud of different density, different composition, holding the bones, finally, still.

The men can rest.

Mitch knew they were still here, somewhere.

He stopped walking and looked to his right, into a step cut into the bluff by hundreds of centuries of erosion. At first he could not see what had attracted his attention; it was hidden by the painful little sliver of light.

The top of the mudstone step was at least six feet above his head. A streak of dark gray capped the step beneath a superficial wig of soil and brush. But his vision tunneled into a bright ball and all he saw was the shiny brown prominence lying horizontally in the stone.

He hardly dared to breathe.

Mitch stooped, arm hanging, propping his knees against the mound of weathered-out clods and pebbles. Reached out with his right finger and brushed along the compacted gray ash and caked mudstone.

The prominence was firm in the hardened layer. It could have been a bone from a deer, a mountain goat, or a bighorn sheep.

But it was not. It was a human shin, a tibia. In this layer, it had to be at least as old as the bones in the camp. He reached down with one hand, sparks flying in his right eye, and felt for the small piece he had seen there, a dark brown talus of bone amongst the rocky talus.

He held it up, turning it until he could see it clearly. It was small, but also from a human. Homo at least. He replaced it. Position would be important when they surveyed.

He took a dental pick from his jacket and worked at the hardened mud and ash around the tibia until he was sure, fighting the pain in his cranium for long minutes. Then he sat back and drew up his knees.

He could no longer put it off. The migraine had arrived. He hadn't had one this bad in more than ten years. The dental pick fell from his hand as he curled up on the ground, trying not to moan.

He managed to reach up with one finger and stroke the half-buried length of bone.

“Found you,” Mitch said. Then he closed his eyes and felt his own lahar wash over him.

33

NEW MEXICO

Dicken's monitor was filled with comparisons of protein expression in embryonic tissues at different stages of development, looking for the elusive retroviral or transposon trigger that might have crept into a complex of developmental genes, promoting the hymen in human females. Even using prior searches and comparisons—incredibly, he had found some in the literature—it looked as if this would take months or years.

Dr. Jurie had shunted Dicken into the safest and least interesting position at Sandia Pathogenics. Putting him in safe, cold storage until needed.

An odd little dance of utility and security. Jurie was keeping Dicken under his thumb, as it were, just to know where he was and what he was up to, and possibly to pick his brain.

But also to confess? To be caught out?

Dicken would not rule out anything where Aram Jurie was concerned.

The man had passed along a list of rambling, long e-mail messages, cryptic, elusive, and a little too evocative for Dicken's comfort. Jurie might be on to something, Dicken thought, a twisted and crazy but undeniably big insight.

Jurie held the belief—not exactly new—that viruses played a substantial but crude role in nearly every stage of embryonic development. But he had some interesting notions about how they did so:

“Genomic viruses want to play in the big game, but as genetic players go, they're simple, constrained, fallen from grace. They can't do the big stuff, so they engage in cryptic little elaborations, and the big game tolerates and then becomes addicted to their subtle plays . . .

“Weak in themselves, endogenous viruses may rely on a very different form of apoptosis, programmed cell suicide. ERVs express at certain times and present antigen on the cell surface. The cell is inspected by the agents of the immune system and killed. By coordinating how and which cells present antigen, genomic viruses can participate crudely in sculpting the embryo, or even the growing body after birth. Of course, they work to increase their numbers and their position in the species, in the extended genome. They work by maintaining a feeble but persistent control in the face of a constant and powerful assault by the immune system.

“And in mammals, they've won. We have surrendered some of the most crucial aspects of our lives to the viruses, just to give our babies time to develop in the womb, rather than in the constraining egg; time to develop more sophisticated nervous systems. A calculated gamble. All our generations are held ransom because of our indebtedness to the viral genes.

“Like getting a loan from the Mafia . . .”

Maggie Flynn knocked on the open door to Dicken's office. “Got a moment?” she asked.

“Not really. Why?” Dicken asked, turning in his rolling chair. Flynn looked flushed and upset.

“Something's come up. Jurie's off the campus. He tells us to sit tight. I don't think we can. We just aren't prepared.”

“What is it?”

“We need expert advice,” Flynn said. “And you could be the expert.”

Dicken stood and stuck his hands in his pants pockets, alert and wary. “What sort of advice?”

“We have a new guest,” Flynn said. “Not a monkey.” She did not appear at all happy with the prospect.

If Maggie Flynn believed Dicken had Jurie's confidence, who was he to correct her? Flynn's pass could clear them both if his own pass was blocked—he had learned that much yesterday, visiting Presky's monotreme study lab.

Flynn took him outside the building to a small cart and drove him around the five linked warehouses that contained the zoo. Out in the open, away from listening devices, she expressed herself more clearly.

“You've worked with SHEVA kids,” Flynn began. “I haven't. We have a tough situation, medically speaking, ethically speaking, and I don't know how to approach it. As the only married female in this block, Turner picked me to provide some moral support, establish a rapport . . . but frankly, I haven't a clue.”

“What are you talking about?” Dicken asked.

Flynn stopped the cart, even more nervous. “You don't know?” she asked, her voice rising a notch.

Dicken's mind started to race and he saw he was on the edge of screwing up a golden opportunity. You've worked with . . . As the only married female . . .

They're doing it. They've done it. He felt his pulse going up and hoped it did not show.

“Oh,” he said, with a fair imitation of casualness. “Virus children.”

Flynn bit her lip. “I don't like that phrase.” She pushed the cart forward again with the little control stick. “Jurie never worked directly with them. Only with specimens. Neither has Turner, and of course Presky is an animal guy, no bedside manner whatsoever. We thought of you. Turner said that must be why you're here, and why you're being given shit theoretical work—so you can be pulled loose for something like this when the time comes.”

“Okay,” Dicken said, putting on a mask of professional caution. He pressed his lips together to keep from saying anything revealing or stupid.

“Something's gone wrong at the border, I don't know what. I'm not in that particular loop. Jurie's in Arizona. Turner told me to bring you in before he gets back.” Her smile was fleeting and desperate. “The cat's away.”

It was an in-house conspiracy after all, and not a very convincing one. Flynn seemed to expect him to say something reassuring and glib. The whole damned lab functioned on a morphine high of glibness, as if to hide the gnawing awareness that what they were doing might someday attract the attention of The Hague.

“God bless the beasts and children,” Dicken said. “Let's go.”

On the north side of the array of Pathogenics warehouses, a segmented, inflatable silver enclosure perched on a black expanse of parking lot like some huge alien larva. An access tube led from the enclosure into Warehouse Number 5, which contained most of the primate study labs. Dicken noticed two outside compressors and a complicated, freshly assembled sterilization unit on the south end of the sausage.

He didn't realize how big the enclosure was until they were almost upon it. The whole complex was as big as one of the warehouses and covered at least an acre.

They parked the cart and entered Warehouse 5 through the delivery door. Turner met them in a small clinic inside the warehouse—a hospital clinic, obviously equipped for humans and not just for primates. “Glad you could make it, Christopher,” he said. “Jurie's dealing with some mess at the border. A bunch of protesters blocked a lab bus, refused to let it enter Arizona. They had help from the local police, apparently. Jurie had to order up another bus at the last minute and route it around the roadblocks.”

“No surprise,” Flynn said. Dicken glanced between them both. What he saw chilled him. The glibness had completely evaporated. They knew their careers were on the line.

“The preparations have been obvious, but Jurie only told us yesterday,” Turner said. Their statements piled together.

“She's a very unhappy girl,” Flynn said.

“I'm not sure we should even have her here,” Turner said.

“She's pregnant,” Flynn said.

“A rape, we're told. Her foster father,” Turner said.

“Oh, God, I didn't know it was rape,” Flynn said, and pressed her knuckles to her cheek. “She's only fourteen.”

“They brought her from a school in Arizona,” Flynn said. “Jurie calls it our school. That's where we've been getting most of our specimens.”

“She's pregnant?” Dicken asked, dumbfounded, and then wondered if he had blown his cover.

“That's not generally known even in the clinic,” Turner said. “I'd appreciate some discretion.”

Dicken let his astonishment come forward. “That's major.” His voice cracked. “But she's 52 xx. What about polyploidy?”

“I only know what I see,” Turner said grimly. “She's pregnant by her foster father.”

“That's absolutely huge,” Dicken said.

“She arrived at the school a month ago,” Turner said. “We discovered her pregnancy when we processed a set of her blood tests. Jurie almost had a heart attack when he got the results from the lab. He seemed elated. He got her transferred to Pathogenics last week without telling the rest of us.”

“I was so mad,” Flynn said. “I could have clobbered him.”

“What else could we do? The school couldn't take care of her, and it's for damn sure no hospital would touch her.”

Dicken held up his hand. “Who's working the clinic?” he asked.

“Maggie, Tommy Wrigley—you met Tommy at the party, and Thomas Powers. Some people brought in from California; we don't know them. And, of course, Jurie, on the research side. But he's never even visited the girl.”

“What's her condition?”

“She's about three months along. Not doing too well. We think she may have self-induced Shiver,” Flynn said.

“That is not confirmed,” Turner said angrily. “She's acting as if she has the flu, and that's all it may be. But we're being extra cautious. And this information goes nowhere . . . don't even tell anyone else at Pathogenics.”

“But Dr. Dicken would know if it's Shiver, wouldn't he?” Flynn said defensively. “Isn't that why Jurie brought you here?”

“Let's look at the girl,” Dicken said.

“Her name is Fremont, Helen Fremont,” Flynn said. “She's originally from Nevada. Las Vegas, I think.”

“Reno,” Turner corrected. Then, his face collapsing in utter misery, his shoulders slumping, he added, “I don't think I can take this much longer. I really don't.”

34

BALTIMORE-WASHINGTON

Kaye and Marge Cross sat in the back of the taxi in silence. Kaye looked at the passive neck of the driver below his turban, caught a glimpse of his small grin in the rearview mirror. He was whistling to himself, happy. For him, having a SHEVA granddaughter was no great burden, obviously.

Kaye did not know much about conditions for SHEVA children in Pakistan. Generally, traditional cultures—Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists—had been more accepting of the new children. That was both surprising and humbling.

Cross drummed her fingers on her knee and looked out the window at the highway, passing cars. A long semi rolled past with TRANS-NATIONAL BIRMINGHAM PORK emblazoned in huge red letters on the sides of its two trailers.

“Spent lots of money on that one,” Cross murmured.

Kaye assumed she was referring to pig tissue transplants. “Where are we going, Marge?” she asked.

“Just driving,” Cross said. Her chin bounced up and down, and Kaye could not be sure whether she was nodding or just moving her jaw in time to the truck ruts in the roadway.

“That address is in a residential neighborhood. I know Baltimore and Maryland pretty well,” Kaye said. “I assume you aren't kidnapping me.”

Cross gave her a weak smile. “Hell, you're paying,” she said. “There's some people I think you'll want to meet.”

“All right,” Kaye said.

“Lars came down pretty hard on Robert.”

“Robert's a sanctimonious prick.”

Cross shrugged. “Nevertheless, I'm not going to take Lars's advice.”

“I didn't think you would,” Kaye said. She hated to lose her labs and her researchers, even now. Doing science was her last comfort, her lab the last place she could take refuge and lose herself in work.

“I'm letting you go,” Cross said.

To her surprise, the blow did not feel so heavy after all. It was Kaye's turn to nod in time to the cab's rubbery suspension.

“Your work with me is over,” Cross said.

“Fine,” Kaye said tightly.

“Isn't it?” Cross asked.

“Of course,” Kaye said, her heart thumping. What I have been putting off doing. What I cannot do alone.

“What more would you do at Americol?”

“Pure research on hormonal activation of retroviral elements in humans,” Kaye said, still grasping at the past. “Focus on stress-related signaling systems. Transfer of transcription factors and regulating genes by ERV to somatic cells. Study the viruses as common genetic transport and regulatory systems for the body. Prove that the all-disease model is wrong.”

“It's a good area,” Cross said. “A little too wild for Americol, but I can make some calls and get you a position elsewhere. Frankly, I don't think you're going to have time.”

Kaye lifted her eyebrows and thinned her lips. “If I'm no longer employed by you, how can you know how much time I'll have?”

Cross smiled, but the smile vanished quickly and she frowned out the window. “Robert picked the wrong hammer to hit you with,” she said. “Or at least he did it in front of the wrong woman.”

“How's that?”

“Twenty-three years ago come August, I was beginning to drum up venture capital for my first company. I was packing my schedule with meetings and heavy-duty lunches.” Her expression turned wistful, as if she were recalling an old, wonderful romance. “God dropped in. Bad timing, to say the least. He hit me so hard I had to drive to the Hamptons and hide out in a hotel room for a week. Basically I swooned.”

She was avoiding direct eye contact, like a little girl confessing. Kaye leaned forward to see her face more clearly. Kaye had never seen Cross look so vulnerable.

“I can't tell you how scared I was that He was a sign of madness, epilepsy, or worse.”

“You thought it was a he?”

Cross nodded. “Doesn't make sense for a couple of strong women, does it? It bothered me a lot, then. But no matter how bothered I was, how scared I was, I never thought about visiting a radiology center. That was brilliant, Kaye. Not cheap, but brilliant.”

Kaye glanced at the driver's face in the rearview mirror. He was obviously trying to ignore the words being spoken in the backseat, trying to give them privacy—and not succeeding.

“Love isn't the word, but it's all we have. Love without desire.” Cross reached up to wipe her perfectly manicured fingers beneath her eyes. “I've never told anybody. Someone like Robert would have used it against me.”

“But it's the truth,” Kaye said.

“No, it isn't,” Cross said peevishly. “It's a personal experience. It was real to you and to me, but that doesn't get us anywhere in this old, cruel world. That same vision might have compelled someone else to burn old women as witches or kill Englishmen, like Joan of Arc. Cranking up the old Inquisition.”

“I don't think so,” Kaye said.

“How do you know the butchers and murderers didn't get a message?”

Kaye had to admit that she did not.

Cross said, “I've spent so much of my time trying to forget, just so I could do the work I had to do to get where I wanted to be. Sometimes it was cruel work, stepping on other folks's dreams. And whenever I remembered, it just crushed me again. Because I knew this thing, it, He, would never punish me, no matter what I did or how I misbehaved. Not just forgiveness—no judgment. Only love. He can't be real,” Cross said. “What He said and what He did doesn't make any sense.”

“He felt real to me,” Kaye said.

“Did you ever hear what happened to Thomas Aquinas?” Cross asked.

Kaye shook her head.

“The most admired theologian of all. Furiously adept thinker, logical beyond all measure—and pretty hard to read nowadays. But smart, no doubt about it, and a young fellow when he made his mark. Student of Albertus Magnus. Defender of Aristotle in the Church. He wrote big thick tracts. Admired throughout Christendom, and still revered as a thinker to this day. On the morning of December 6, 1273, he was saying Mass in Naples. He was older, about my age. Right in the middle of the sermon, he just stopped speaking, and stared at nothing. Or stared at everything. I imagine he must have gawped like a fish.” Cross's expression was quizzical, distant.

“He stopped writing, dictating, stopped contributing to the Summa, his life's work. And when he was pressed to explain why he had stopped, he said, ‘I can do no more; such things have been revealed to me that all I have written seems as straw, and I now await the end of my life.’ He died a few months later.” Cross snorted. “No wonder Aquinas was brought up short, the poor bastard. I know a hierarchy when I see one. I'm little better than a wriggly worm in a pond compared to what touched me. I wouldn't dare try to tell God how to behave.” She smiled. “Yes, dear, I can be humble.” Cross patted Kaye's hand. “And that's that. You're fired. You've done all you need to do, for now, at my company.”

“What about Jackson?” Kaye asked.

“He's limited, but he's still useful, and there's still important work for him to do. I'll have Lars watch over him.”

“Jackson doesn't understand,” Kaye said.

“If you mean he's narrowly focused, that's just what I need right now. He'll cross all the t's and dot all the i's, trying to prove he's right. Good for him.”

“But he'll get it wrong.”

“Then he'll do it thoroughly.” Cross was adamant. “Robert's problem was familiar to Aquinas. He called it ignorantia affectata, cultivated ignorance.”

“God should touch him,” Kaye said bitterly, and then flushed in embarrassment, as if that were any kind of punishment.

Cross considered this seriously for a moment. “I'm surprised God touched me,” she said. “I'd be shocked if He wanted to have anything to do with Robert.”

35

NEW MEXICO

Inside the silver tent were eight single wide mobile home trailers, sitting up on blocks on a wrinkled and patched gray plastic floor and surrounded, at a distance of thirty feet, by a circle of transparent plastic panels topped with razor wire. The trailers did not look in the least comfortable or friendly.

Dicken tried to orient himself in the general gloomy light that seeped through the silver tent. They had entered on the western side. North, then, was where a small Emergency Action van was parked, the same van that had presumably brought Helen Fremont from Arizona. South of the mobile homes and the wall of plastic and razor wire, a small maze of tables and lab benches had been set up and stocked with standard medical and lab diagnostic equipment.

A few klieg lights mounted on long steel poles supplemented the dim sunlight.

Dicken saw no one else under the tent.

“We don't have a team in place yet,” Flynn said. “She just came down sick this morning.”

“Is there a phone connection in the trailer, an intercom, a bullhorn, anything?”

Flynn shook her head. “We're still putting it together.”

“Goddamnit, she's alone in there?”

Turner nodded.

“For how long?”

“Since this morning,” Flynn said. “I went in and tried to do an exam. She refused, but I took some pictures, and of course, there's the video. We're running tests on the waste line fluid and the air, but the equipment here isn't familiar to me. I didn't trust it, so I took the samples over to the primate lab. They're still being run.”

“Does Jurie know she's ill?” Dicken asked.

“We called him,” Turner said.

“Did he give any instructions?”

“He said to leave her alone. Let nobody in until we were sure.”

“But Maggie went in.”

“I had to,” Flynn said. “She looked so scared.”

“You were in a suit?”

“Of course.”

Dicken swung about on his stiff leg and leaned his head to one side, biting his cheek to keep his opinions to himself. He was furious.

Flynn would not meet his eyes. “It's procedure. All tests done under Level 3 conditions.”

“Well, we sure as hell follow the goddamned rules, don't we?” Dicken said. “Haven't you at least asked her to come out and have a doctor inspect her?”

“She won't come out,” Turner said. “We have video cameras tracking her. She's in the bedroom. She's just lying there.”

“Dandy,” Dicken said. “What in hell do you want me to do?”

“We have the pictures,” Flynn said, and took her data phone from her pocket.

“Show me,” Dicken said.

She brought up a succession of five pictures on the phone's screen. Dicken saw a young SHEVA girl with dark brown hair, pale blue eyes with yellow specks, thin features but prominent cheekbones, pale skin. The girl looked like a frightened cat, her eyes searching the unseen corners, refusing even in her misery to be intimidated.

Dicken could tell the girl was exhibiting no obvious signs of Shiver—no lesions on her skinny arms, no scarlet cingulated markings on her neck. A live update chart butted in at the conclusion of the slide show and displayed a temperature of 102.

“Remote temperature sensing?”

Flynn nodded.

“You said her viral titers were high.”

“She cut herself getting into the van. They had been instructed not to draw blood, but they sequestered the stain and we took a sample under controlled conditions. That's why the van is still here. She's producing HERV.”

“Of course she is. She's pregnant. She doesn't present any of the necessary symptoms,” he said. “What makes you think it's Shiver?”

“Dr. Jurie said it might be.”

“Jurie isn't here, and you are.”

“But she's pregnant,” Turner said, scowling, as if that explained their concern.

“Have you tested for pseudotype viruses?”

“We're still running the samples,” Turner said.

“Anything?”

“Not yet.”

“You've had Shiver,” Flynn said sullenly. “You should be even more cautious.” She looked more angry than distressed now. They were wondering whose side he was on, and he was half inclined to tell them.

“I won't even need a suit,” he said contemptuously, and tossed the phone back to Flynn. He walked toward the trailer.

“Hold it,” Turner said, his face red. “Go in there without a suit, and you'll stay. We won't—we can't let you out.”

Dicken turned and bowed, holding out his arms in exasperated placation. There was work to do, a problem to resolve, and anger wasn't helping. “Then get me a goddamned suit! And a phone or an intercom. She needs to communicate with the outside. She needs to talk with someone. Where are her parents—her mother, I mean?”

“We don't know,” Flynn said.

The narrow rooms inside the mobile home were neat and cheerless. Rental-style furniture, upholstered in beige and yellow plaid vinyl, lent them an air of cheap and soulless utility. The girl had brought no personal effects, and had touched none of the stuffed animal toys that lined the shelves in the tiny living room, still in their plastic wrappings.

Dicken wondered how long ago the stuffed animals had been purchased. How long had Jurie been planning to bring SHEVA children into Pathogenics?

A year?

Two dining chairs had been upset beside the dinette. Dicken bent to set them right. The plastic in his suit squeaked. He was already starting to sweat, despite the air conditioner pack. He had long since come to sincerely hate isolation suits.

He looked for other obstructions that might snag the plastic, then moved slowly toward the bedroom at the back of the trailer. He knocked on the frame and peered through the half-open door. The girl lay on her back on the bed, still wearing pedal pushers, blouse, and a denim jacket. The bed's green plastic covers had been tossed aside, and she was staring at the ceiling.

“Hello?”

The girl did not look at him. He could see her skinny chest moving, and her cheeks were ruddy with fever or fear or perhaps despair.

“Helen?” He walked along the narrow space beside the bed and bent over so she could see his face. “My name is Christopher Dicken.”

She swung her head to one side. “Go away. I'll make you sick,” she said.

“I doubt it, Helen. How do you feel?”

“I hate your suit.”

“I don't like it much, either.”

“Leave me alone.”

Dicken straightened and folded his arms with some difficulty. The suit rustled and squeaked and he felt like one of the plastic-wrapped stuffed animals. “Tell me how you're feeling.”

“I want to throw up.”

“Have you thrown up?”

“No,” she said.

“That's good.”

“I keep trying.” The girl sat up on the bed. “You should be afraid of me. That's what my mother told me to say to anyone who tries to touch me or kidnap me. She said, ‘Use what you have.’ ”

“You don't make people sick, Helen,” Dicken said.

“I wish I could. I want him to be sick.”

Dicken could not imagine her pain and frustration, and did not feel comfortable probing it out. “I won't say I understand. I don't.”

“Stop talking and go away.”

“We won't talk about that, okay. But we need to talk about how you're feeling, and I'd like to examine you. I'm a doctor.”

“So was he,” she snapped. She rolled to one side, still not looking at Dicken. Her eyes narrowed. “My muscles hurt. Am I going to die?”

“I don't think so.”

“I should die.”

“Please don't talk that way. If things are going to get any better, I have to examine you. I promise I won't hurt you or do anything that makes you feel uncomfortable.”

“I'm used to them taking blood,” the girl said. “They tie us down if we fight.” She stared fixedly at his face through the hood. “You sound like you've helped a lot of sick people.”

“Quite a few. Some were very, very sick, and they got better.”

“And some died.”

“Yes,” Dicken said. “Some died.”

“I don't feel that sick, other than wanting to throw up.”

“That might be your baby.”

The girl opened her mouth wide and her cheeks went pale. “I'm pregnant?” she asked.

Dicken suddenly felt the bottom fall out of his stomach. “They didn't tell you?”

“Oh, my God,” the girl said and curled up, facing away from him. “I knew it. I knew it. I could smell something. It was his baby inside of me. Oh, my God.” The girl sat up abruptly. “I need to go to the bathroom.”

Dicken must have showed his concern even through the hood.

“I'm not going to hurt myself. I have to throw up. Don't look. Don't watch me.”

He said, “I'll wait for you in the living room.”

She swung her legs out over the side of the bed and stood, then paused, arms held out as if to keep her balance. She stared down at the fake wooden floor. “He used nose plugs and scrubbed me with soap, and then he covered me with cheap perfume. I couldn't make him stop. He said he wanted to learn whether he would ever have grandchildren. But he wasn't even my real father. A baby. Oh, my God.”

The girl's face wrinkled up in an expression so complex Dicken could have studied it for hours and not understood. He knew how a chimpanzee must feel, watching humans emote.

“I'm sorry,” Dicken said.

“Have you met anyone else like me who was pregnant?” the girl asked, holding, compelling his gaze through the plastic.

“No,” Dicken said.

“I'm the first?”

“You're the first in my experience.”

“Yeah.” She got a panicky look and walked stiffly into the bathroom. Dicken could hear her trying to throw up. He went into the living room. The smell of his sorrow and loathing filled the helmet and there was no way to wipe his eyes or his nose.

When the girl came out, she stopped in the doorway, then sidled through, as if afraid to touch the frame. She held her arms out to her side like wings. Her cheeks were a steady golden brown and the yellow flint-sparks in her eyes seemed even larger and brighter. More than ever, she looked like a cat. She glared at him quizzically. She could see his puffy eyes and wet cheeks through the plastic. “What do you care?” she asked.

Dicken shook his head inside the helmet. “Hard to explain,” he said. “I was there at the beginning.”

“What does that mean?”

“I'm not sure there's time,” he said. “We need to find out why you're sick.”

“Explain it to me, and then you can look at me,” the girl said.

Dicken wondered how they would react outside if he spent a couple of hours in the trailer. If Jurie should happen to come back . . .

None of that mattered. He had to do something for the girl. She deserved so much more than this.

He pulled up the covering seal and unzipped his helmet, then removed it. It certainly wasn't the worst risk he had ever taken. “I was one of the first to know,” he began.

The girl lifted her nose and sniffed. The way her upper lip formed a V was so strangely beautiful that Dicken had to smile.

“Better?” he asked.

“You're not afraid, you're angry,” the girl said. “You're angry for me.”

He nodded.

“Nobody's ever been angry for me. It smells kind of sweet. Sit in the living room. Stay a few feet away, in case I'm dangerous.”

They walked into the living room. Dicken sat on a dinette chair and she stood by the couch, arms folded, as if ready to run. “Tell me,” she said.

“Can I examine you while I talk? You can keep your clothes on, and I won't stick you with anything. I just need to look and touch.”

The girl nodded.

Rumors and half-truths were all she had ever heard. She remained standing for the first few minutes, while Dicken pressed his fingers gently under her jaw, into her armpits, and looked between her fingers and toes.

After a while, she sat on the vinyl couch, listening closely and watching him with those incredible flint-spark eyes.

36

ARIZONA

The three cars split off at a crossroads going through a small desert town. Stella looked through the rear window at the diminishing dot of the car that contained Celia and LaShawna and two of the boys. Then she turned to look at Will, who seemed to have fallen asleep.

JoBeth Hayden had talked about her daughter for the first half hour or so, about how she had been glad Bonnie was not on the bus, being taken to Sandia, yet how disappointing it was not to see her and have her be free.

After a while, Stella had felt her muscles tighten from the aftereffects of the crash, and she had tuned out Jobeth, focusing instead on the pile of crumpled pages that Will had arranged on the seat between them.

Will opened his eyes and leaned forward. “Mrs. Hayden,” he said, and ran his tongue over dry lips, avoiding Stella's curious stare.

“Yes. Your name is William, isn't it?”

“Will. I'd like to put these up by you.” He dropped some crumpled pages in the middle of the front bench seat.

“That's trash,” Jobeth Hayden said disapprovingly.

“I can't keep it back here,” Will said.

“I don't see why not.”

Stella could not figure out what Will was up to. She rubbed her nose. The front bench seat was in direct sunlight. Will was fever-scenting. She could smell him now, subtle but direct, like cocoa powder and butter. She had never smelled anything exactly like it.

“Can I?” Will asked.

Jobeth Hayden shook her head slowly. Stella saw her eyes in the rearview mirror; she looked confused. “All right,” she said.

Stella picked up a crumpled page and smelled it. She drew back, rejecting the urge to frith, and stared at Will resentfully. The paperback was a reservoir. Will had been rubbing the pages behind his ears, storing up scent. She poked him with her finger and flashed a query with her cheeks. He took the paper from her hands.

“We don't want to go to this ranch,” Will said to Mrs. Hayden.

“That's where we're going. There's a doctor there. It's a safe place, and they're expecting you.”

“I know a better place,” Will said. “Could you drive us to California?”

“That's silly,” Jobeth Hayden said.

“I've been trying to get there for more than a year now.”

“We're going to the ranch, and that's that.”

Will dropped another wadded-up page onto the pool of sun on the front seat. Stella could smell Will's particular form of persuasion very clearly now, and however much she fought against it, what he said was beginning to seem reasonable.

Mrs. Hayden continued to drive. Stella wondered if too much persuasion would confuse her and make her drive off the road.

Will cradled his head in his arms. “We're fine. I don't need a doctor./ She's fine, she can still drive.”

“We're going to see a doctor in a small town in Arizona, and then we're going straight to the ranch,” Mrs. Hayden said.

“It's right across the state line. You have to drive through Nevada, though. Can I see the map?”

Mrs. Hayden was frowning deeply now, and she started to toss back the pieces of crumpled paper. “I don't think that's a good idea,” she said. “What are you doing?”

“I just want to see the map,” Will said.

“Well, I suppose that's okay, but no more of this trash, please. I thought you children behaved better.”

Stella touched Will's arm. “Stop it,” she whispered, leaning forward so only he would hear.

Will ignored Stella and tossed the paper again onto the front seat, in the pool of sunshine that warmed it and made it release its scent.

“This is really intolerable,” Mrs. Hayden said, but her head straightened and she did not sound angry. She reached over, opened up the glove box, and handed Will an Auto Club map of Arizona and New Mexico. “I don't use them often,” she said. “They're pretty old.”

Will opened the map and spread it across their knees. His finger followed highways going north and west. Stella leaned into the corner where the seat met the door and folded her arms.

“You'll have to sit up straight, sweetie,” Mrs. Hayden told her. “The car has side airbags. It's not safe to slump over.”

Stella sat up. Will looked at her. Her back was really hurting now. Calmly, he reached over and touched her hands, her legs, then her back.

“What are you doing back there?” Mrs. Hayden asked, dimly concerned.

Will did not answer, and she did not press the question. His fingers marched lightly up Stella's spine, and she rolled over to let him examine her back.

“You'll be okay,” Will said.

“How do you know?” Stella asked.

“You'd smell different if you were bleeding inside, or if something was broken. You're just suffering from a little whiplash, and I don't think there's any nerve damage. I smelled a boy with a broken back once, and he had a sad, awful smell. You smell good.”

“I don't like you telling us what to do,” Stella said.

“I'll stop once she takes us to California,” Will said. He did not seem very confident, and he did not smell sure of himself. This was one nervous young man.

“It's a beautiful day/ I learned a lot in North Carolina,” Will doubled. “I'm glad you're here/ That was before they burned our camp.”

Stella had never met anyone more adept at persuasion. She wondered whether his talent was natural, or whether he had been taught somewhere. She also wondered whether they would be in any danger. But Stella was not willing, not yet anyway, to tell Mrs. Hayden her suspicions. She apparently had suspicions of her own. “I'd like to roll down the windows,” Mrs. Hayden said. “It's getting stuffy in here.”

“It's fine, really,” Will said. At the same time, he undered to Stella, “/I need your help. Don't you want to see what we can do?”

Stella shook her head, thinking of Mitch and Kaye, thinking irrationally of the house in Virginia, the last place she had really felt safe, though that had been an illusion.

“Didn't you ever want to run away?” Will asked in a near whisper.

“It really is stuffy,” Mrs. Hayden said. Will was running out of pages.

“Help me,” Will pleaded softly, earnestly.

“What is this place?” Stella asked.

“I think it's in the woods,” Will said. “It's hidden, far from the towns. They have animals and grow their own food./ They raise marijuana and sell it to make money to buy stuff.”

Marijuana was legal now in most states, but still that sounded dangerous. Stella suddenly felt very cautious. Will looked and smelled scary, with his jumbled hair and cocoa-powder richness, his face that seemed capable of so many expressions. He's been with others and they've taught him so much. What could they teach me—and what could I add?

“Would I be able to call my parents?”

“They're not like us/ They'd take you back,” Will replied. “We need to be with our own people/ You'll grow and learn who you really are.”

Stella felt her stomach knot with confusion and indecision. It was what she had been thinking about in the school. Forming demes was impossible with humans around; they always found ways to interfere. For all she knew, demes were just what children tried on for practice. Soon they would be adults, and what would they do then?

How would they ever find out if humans kept clinging to them?

“It's time to grow up,” Will said.

“Why, you're so young,” Mrs. Hayden said dreamily. She was driving straight and steadily, but her voice sounded wrong, and Stella knew they had to do something in concert soon or Mrs. Hayden could go one way or the other.

“I'm only fifteen,” Stella said. Actually, she had not yet had her fifteenth birthday, but she always added in the time her mother had been pregnant with the first-stage embryo.

“There's supposed to be a man there in his sixties, one of us,” Will said.

“That's impossible,” Stella said.

“That's what they say. He's from the south, from Georgia. Or maybe Russia. They weren't sure which.”

“Do you know where this place is?”

Will tapped his head. “They showed us a map before the camp was burned.”

“Is it real?”

Will could not answer this. “I think so./ I want it to be real.”

Stella closed her eyes. She could feel the warmth behind her eyelids, the sun passing over her face, the suspended redness, and below that the rising up of all her minds, all the parts of her body that yearned. To be alone with her own kind, making her own way, learning all she needed to learn to survive among people who hated her . . .

That would be an incredible adventure. That would be worth so much danger.

“It's all you've wanted, I know it,” Will said.

“How do I know you're not just persuading me?” Her cheeks added unconscious quotes to the emphasis on that word, which sounded so wrong, so lacking in nuance, so human.

“Look inside,” Will said.

“I have,” Stella said, a little wail that brought Mrs. Hayden's head around.

“I'm fine,” Stella said, arms folded tightly across her chest. The tires squealed as Mrs. Hayden straightened the car out on the road.

Stella gripped the arm of her seat.

“I'm sweating like a bastard,” she told Will with a little giggle.

“So am I,” Will said, and smiled crookedly.

There was one last question. “What about sex?” she asked, so quietly Will did not hear and she had to repeat herself.

“Don't you know?” Will said. “Humans can rape us, but we don't rape each other. It just doesn't work that way.”

“What if it happens anyway, and we don't know what we're doing, or how to stay out of trouble?”

“I don't know the answer to that,” Will said. “Does anybody? But I know one thing. With us, it doesn't happen until it's right. And now it isn't right.”

That was honest enough. She could feel her independence returning, and all the answers were the same.

She was strong. She was capable. She knew that.

She focused on fever-scenting for Mrs. Hayden.

“Whoo,” Will said, and waved his hand in the air. “You strong, lady.”

“I am woman,/ I am strong,” Stella sang softly, and they giggled together. She leaned forward. “Please, would you take us to California?” she asked Mrs. Hayden.

“We'll have to stop for gas. I only brought a little money.”

“It'll be enough,” Will said.

“Do you need the book?” Stella asked him. It was a yellowed, dog-eared, and now thoroughly reduced paperback called Spartacus by Howard Fast.

“Maybe,” Will said. “I really don't know.”

“Did you learn that in the woods, too?”

Will shook his head. “I made it up myself,” he said. “We have to be smart. They were taking us to Sandia. They wanted to kill us all. We have to think for ourselves.”

37

MARYLAND

The cab dropped off Kaye and Marge Cross at a single-story brick house on a pleasant, slightly weedy street in Randallstown, Maryland. The grass in the front yard stood a foot high and had long since turned straw yellow. A big old Buick Riviera from the last century, covered with rust and half-hearted patches of gray primer, sat up on blocks in the oil-stained driveway.

They walked up the overgrown path to the front porch. Kaye stood on the lower step, unsure where to look or what to expect. Cross punched the doorbell. Somewhere inside the house, electronic chimes played the four opening notes from Beethoven's Fifth. Kaye stared at a plastic tricycle with big white wheels almost lost in the grass beside the porch.

The woman who opened the door was Laura Bloch, from Senator Gianelli's office. She smiled at Kaye and Cross. “Delighted you could be here,” she said. “Welcome to the Maryland Advisory Group on National Biological Policy. We're an ad hoc committee, and this is an exploratory meeting.”

Kaye looked at Cross, lips downturned in dubious surprise.

“You belong here,” Cross told her. “I'm not sure I do.”

“Of course you do, Marge,” Bloch said. “Come on in, both of you.”

They entered and stood in the small foyer opposite the living room, separated by a low wall and a row of turned wooden columns. The inside of the house—brown carpet, cream-colored walls decorated with family pictures, colonial-style maple furniture and a coffee table covered with magazines and a flattop computer—could have been anywhere in the country. Typical middle-class comfort.

In the dining room, seven people sat around a maple table. Kaye was not acquainted with most of them. She did recognize one woman, however, and her face brightened.

Luella Hamilton walked across the living room. They stood apart for a moment, Kaye in her pants suit, Mrs. Hamilton in a long orange and brown caftan. She had put on a lot of weight since she and Kaye had last seen each other, and not much of it from her pregnancy.

“Dear baby Jesus,” Mrs. Hamilton let out with a small, wild-eyed laugh. “We were just on the phone. You were going to stay put. Marge, what is this all about?”

“You know each other?” Cross asked.

“We sure do,” Kaye said. But she did not explain.

“Welcome to the revolution,” Luella said, smiling sweetly. “You know Laura. Come meet the others. Quite a high-toned group we have here.” She introduced Kaye to the three women and four men seated at the table. Most were in their middle years; the youngest, a woman, appeared to be in her thirties. All were dressed in suits or stylish office work clothes. All looked like Washington insiders to Kaye, who had met plenty. She saw gratefully that they were all wearing name tags.

“Most of these folks come from the offices of key senators and representatives, eyes and ears, not necessarily proxies,” Laura Bloch explained. “We won't connect the dots until later. Ladies and gentlemen, Kaye is both a working scientist and a mommy.”

“You're the one who discovered SHEVA,” said one of the two gray-haired men. Kaye tried to demur, but Bloch shushed her.

“Take credit where it's due, Kaye,” Bloch said. “We're presenting a paper to the president within the week. Marge sent us your conclusions about genomic viruses, along with a lot of other papers. We're still digesting them. I'm sure there are lots of questions.”

“Wow, I'll say,” chuckled a middle-aged man named Kendall Burkett. “Worse than homework.”

Kaye remembered Burkett now. They had met at a conference on SHEVA four years ago. He was a fundraiser for legal aid for SHEVA parents.

Luella returned from the kitchen carrying a pitcher of orange juice and a plate of cookies and celery stalks with peanut butter and cream cheese fillings. “I don't know why you folks come here,” she told the group. “I'm not much of a cook.”

Bloch put her arms around Luella's shoulders. They made quite a contrast. Kaye could tell Luella was six months or more along, although it was only slightly apparent on her ample frame.

“Come sit,” said the younger woman. She pointed to an empty chair beside her and smiled. Her name, printed neatly on her tag, was Linda Gale. Kaye knew that name from somewhere.

“It's our second meeting,” said Burkett. “We're still getting acquainted.”

“Orange juice okay for you, honey?” Luella asked, and Kaye nodded. Luella filled her glass. Kaye felt overwhelmed. She did not know whether to resent Cross for not warning her in advance, or to just hug her, and then hug Luella. Instead, she walked around the table and settled into the seat beside Gale.

“Linda is assistant to the chief of staff,” Bloch said.

“At the White House? For the president?” Kaye asked, hopeful as a child looking over a Christmas package.

“The president,” Bloch confirmed.

Gale smiled up at Bloch. “Am I famous yet?”

“About time,” Luella said, passing around the plate. Gale demurred, saying she had to keep in fighting trim, but the others snatched the cookies and held out glasses for juice.

“It's the legacy thing,” Burkett said. “The polls are going fifty-fifty. Net and media are tired of being scaremongers. Marge tells us the scientific community will come out in support of the conclusion that the SHEVA kids won't produce disease. Do you go along with that?”

In politics, even a fragile certainty could move mountains. “I do,” Kaye said.

“The president is taking advice from all sectors of the community,” Gale said.

“They've had years,” Kaye said.

“Linda is on our side, Kaye,” Bloch said softly.

“Won't be long,” Luella said, and nodded, her eyes both angry and knowing. “Mm hmm. Not long now.”

“Dr. Rafelson, I have a question about your work,” Burkett said. “If I may . . .”

“First things first,” Bloch interrupted. “Marge knows already, but Kaye, you have to be absolutely clear on this. Everything said in this room is in the strictest confidence. Nobody will divulge anything to anybody outside this room, whether or not the president chooses to act. Understood?”

Kaye nodded, still in a daze.

“Good. We have some papers to sign, and then Kendall can ask his questions.”

Burkett shrugged patiently and chewed on a cookie.

Two phones rang at once—one in the kitchen, which Luella pushed through the swinging door to answer, and Laura Bloch's cell phone in her purse.

Luella clutched an old-fashioned handset on a long cord. “Oh, my God,” she said. “Where?” Her eyes met Kaye's. Something crossed between them. Kaye stood and clutched the back of her chair. Her knuckles turned white.

“LaShawna's with them?” Luella asked. Then, once more, “Oh, my God.” Her face lit up with joy. “We caught a bus in New Mexico!” she cried. “John says they got our children! They have LaShawna, dear Jesus, John has my sweet, sweet girl.”

Laura Bloch finished her call and clacked her phone shut, furious. “The bastards finally did it,” she said.

38

OREGON

“You found them,” a voice said, and Mitch opened his eyes to a haze of faces in the shadows. The migraine was not done with him, but at least he could hear and think.

“The doctor says you're going to be okay.”

“So glad,” Mitch said groggily. He was lying on an air mattress under a tent. The mattress squeaked beneath his shifting weight.

“One of your migraines?”

That was Eileen.

“Yeah.” He tried to sit up. Eileen gently pushed him down again on the mattress. Someone gave him a sip of water from a plastic cup.

“You should have told us where you were going,” a woman he did not know said disapprovingly.

Eileen interrupted her. “You didn't know where you were going, did you?” she asked him. “Just what you wanted to find.”

“This whole camp is on the knife edge of anarchy,” the other woman said.

“Shut up, Nancy,” said Eileen's colleague, what was her name again, Mitch liked her, she seemed smart: something Fitz. Then, it came to him, Connie Fitz, and as if in reward, the pain flowed out of his head like air from a balloon. His skull felt cold. “What did I find?”

“Something,” Fitz said admiringly.

“We're taking scans now with the handheld,” said Nancy.

“Good,” Mitch said. He took a plastic bottle of water from Eileen and swallowed long and hard. He was as dry as a bone; he must have lain out on the rock and dirt for at least an hour. “I'm sorry,” he said.

“De nada,” Eileen said with a hint of pride.

“It's a tibia, isn't it?” Mitch asked.

“It's more than that,” Eileen said. “We don't yet know how much more.”

“I found the guys,” he said.

The women would not commit.

“Just be happy you didn't die out there,” Eileen said.

“It's not that hot,” Mitch said.

“You were three feet from the bluff,” Eileen said. “You could have fallen.”

“They weathered out,” Mitch mused, and took another swallow of water. “How many are left, I wonder?”

He peered into the blue light of the tent at the three women: Nancy, a tall, striking woman with long black hair and a stern face; Connie Fitz; Eileen.

The tent flap opened and the light assaulted him, bringing back a stab of pain.

“Sorry,” Oliver Merton said. “Just heard about the incident. How's our boy wonder?”

“Explain it to me,” Merton said.

Mitch sat alone with Oliver under the sun shade. He sipped a beer; Oliver was working away, or pretending to, on his small slate. He had a tracer cap on one finger and typed on empty air. All the archaeologists from the camp, except for two younger women standing guard at the main site, were at the bluff, leaving Mitch grounded, “to recover,” as Eileen put it, but he strongly suspected it was to keep him out of their hair, out of trouble, until it was determined what he had found.

“Explain what?” Mitch asked.

“How you do it. I sense a pattern.”

Mitch covered his eyes with his hands. The sunlight was still dazzling.

“You undergo some sort of psychic revelation, enter a trance state, troop off in search of something you've already seen. . . . Is that it?”

“God, no,” Mitch said, grimacing. “Nothing like that. Was I showboating, Oliver?” he asked, and did not know himself whether he spoke with satisfaction, pride, or real curiosity as to what Merton thought.

Before Merton could answer, Mitch winced at a spike in his thoughts. His neck hair prickled.

Something's wrong.

“Oh, most definitely,” Merton said with a nod and a sly little grin. “Sherlock Holmes, I presume?”

“Holmes was not psychic. You heard them. They still don't know what I found.”

“You found a hominid leg bone. All of Eileen's students, searching for two months around this site, haven't found so much as a chip.”

“They were making us look bad,” Mitch said. “Men in general.”

“A camp full of angry women digging out a camp full of abandoned women,” Merton said. “Look bad? Right.”

“Have there ever been any men here?”

“Beg your pardon?” Merton asked petulantly.

“Working at the camp. Digging.”

“Besides me, not a one,” Merton admitted, and scowled at the screen on the slate.

“Why is that?” Mitch asked.

“Eileen's gay, you know,” Merton said. “She and Connie Fitz . . . very close.”

Mitch thought this over for a few seconds but could not connect it right away with reality, his reality. “You're kidding.”

Merton tried to cross his heart and hope to die, but got it wrong.

The closest Mitch could come to acknowledging this bit of information was to wonder why Eileen had not introduced her lover to him as such. He said, very slowly, “You could have fooled me.”

That's not what's wrong.

“Mr. Daney is amused by it all. He takes quite an anthropological view.”

Mitch pulled back from somewhere, an unpleasant place coming closer. “They're not all gay, are they?”

“Oh, no. But it is a bit of a crazy coincidence. The others appear to be single, to a woman, and not one has shown any interest in me. Funny, how that slants my view of the world.”

“Yeah,” Mitch said.

“Nancy thinks you're trying to steal their thunder. They're sensitive about that.”

“Right.”

“It's just you and me, until Mr. Daney gets here,” Merton said.

Mitch finished the can of Coors and propped it gently on the wooden arm of the camp chair.

“Shall I crush that for you?” Merton asked with a twinkle. “Just to keep up masculine appearances.”

Mitch did not answer. The camp, the bones, his discovery, suddenly meant nothing. His mind was a blank sheet with vague writing starting to appear, as if scrawled by ghosts. He could not read the writing, but he did not like it.

He jerked, and the can fell off the arm of the chair. It struck the gravel with a hollow rattle. “Jesus,” he said. He had never had a hypnagogic experience before.

“Something wrong?” Merton asked.

“Eileen was right. Maybe I'm still sick.” He pushed up out of the chair. “Can I use your phone?”

“Of course,” Merton said.

“Thanks.” Mitch sidled awkwardly one step to the left, as if about to lose his balance, perhaps his sanity. “How secure is it?”

“Very,” Oliver said, watching him with concern. “Private trunk feed for Mr. Daney.”

Mitch did not know whom to trust, whom to turn to. He had never felt more spooked or more helpless in his life.

No ESP, he thought. Please, let there be no such thing as ESP.

39

NEW MEXICO

Dicken sat beside Helen Fremont on the couch in the trailer. She was staring at the wall opposite the couch, fever-scenting, he suspected, but he could not tell what she was hoping to accomplish, if anything. The air in the trailer smelled of old cheese and tea bags. He had finished his story ten minutes ago, patiently going back over old history and trying to justify himself as well: his existence, his work, his loathing for the isolation he had felt all these years, buried in his work as if it were another kind of plastic suit, proof against life. There had been silence for several minutes now, and he did not know what to say, much less what would happen to them next.

The girl broke the silence. “Aren't you at all afraid I'll make you sick?” she asked.

“I'm stuck,” Dicken said, lifting his hands. “They won't let me out until they can make other arrangements.”

“Aren't you afraid?” she repeated.

“No,” Dicken said.

“If I wanted to, could I make you sick?”

Dicken shook his head. “I doubt it.”

“But if they know that, why keep me here? Why keep any of us away from people?”

“Well, we just don't know what to do or what to believe. We don't understand,” he added, speaking softly. “That makes us weak and stupid.”

“It's cruel,” the girl said. Then, as if she was just coming to believe she was pregnant, “How will they treat my baby?”

The door to the trailer opened. Aram Jurie entered first and was almost immediately flanked by two security men armed with machine pistols. All wore white isolation suits. Even through the plastic cowl, Jurie's pallid face was a pepperball of irritation. “This is stupid,” he said as the security men stepped forward. “Are you trying to sabotage everything we've done?”

Dicken stood up from the couch and glanced at the girl, but she did not seem at all surprised or disturbed. God help us, it's what she knows. Dicken said, “You're holding this young woman illegally.”

Jurie was comically incredulous for a man whose face was normally so placid. “What in God's green Earth were you thinking?”

“You're not an authorized holding facility for children,” Dicken continued, warming to his subject. “You illegally transported this girl across state lines.”

“She's a threat to public health,” Jurie said, suddenly recovering his calm. “And now you've joined her.” He waved his hand. “Get him out of here.”

The security men seemed unable to decide how to react. “Isn't he safe where he is?” one guard asked, his voice muffled inside the hood.

The girl reached up to Dicken and tightly gripped his arm. “There is no threat,” Dicken told Jurie.

“You do not know that,” Jurie said, staring hard at Dicken, but the comment was more for the benefit of the guards.

“Dr. Jurie has stepped way over the line,” Dicken said. “Kidnapping is a tough rap, guys. This is a facility doing contract work under EMAC, which is under the authority of the Department of Health and Human Services. All of them have strict guidelines on human experimentation.” And nobody knows whether those guidelines still apply. But it's the best bluff we have. “You have no jurisdiction over the girl. We're leaving Sandia. I'm taking her with me.”

Jurie shook his head vigorously, making his hood waggle. “Very John Wayne. You got that out very nicely. I'm supposed to growl and play the villain?”

The situation was incredible and tense and fairly funny. “Yeah,” Dicken said, abruptly breaking out in a shit-kicking, full-out hayseed grin. He had a tendency to do that when confronted by authority figures. It was one reason why he had spent so much of his life doing fieldwork.

Jurie misinterpreted Dicken's smile. “We have an incredible opportunity here. Why waste it?” Jurie said, wheedling now. “We can solve so many problems, learn so much. What we learn will benefit millions. It could save us all.”

“Not this girl. Not any of them.” Dicken held out his hand. The girl got to her feet and together, hand in hand, they walked cautiously toward the door.

Jurie blocked their way. “How far do you think you'll get?” he asked, livid behind the cowl.

“Let's find out,” Dicken said. Jurie reached out to hold him, but Dicken's arm snaked up and he grabbed the edge of the faceplate, as if to remind Jurie of their unequal vulnerability. Jurie dropped his hands, Dicken let go, and the man backed off, catching up against a chair and almost falling over.

The security men seemed rooted to the trailer's floor. “Good for you,” Dicken murmured. “Hire some lawyers, gentlemen. Time off for good behavior. Mitigating factors in sentencing.” Still murmuring legal inanities, he peered through the door of the trailer and saw a cluster of scientific and security staff, including Flynn, Powers, and now Presky, hanging back beyond the open gate in the reinforced acrylic fence. “Let's go, honey,” Dicken said, and they stepped out onto the porch.

Behind, he heard a scuffle and swiveled his head to see Jurie, his face contorted, trying to grab a pistol and the security guards doing an awkward little dance keeping their weapons out of his reach.

Scientists with guns, Dicken thought. That really was the living end. Somehow, the absurdity cheered him. He squeezed the girl's hand and marched toward the others standing by the gate.

They did not stop him. Maggie Flynn actually held the gate open. She looked relieved.

40

CALIFORNIA

Stella and Will had left the car after it ran out of gas near a town called Lone Pine. They were in the woods now, but she did not feel any closer to freedom, or to where she wanted to be.

They had left Mrs. Hayden asleep in the car, drained after driving all night and then cutting back and forth across the state routes and freeways and back roads all morning. Will trudged ahead of Stella, carrying two empty plastic bottles.

At noon, the air was cool and hazy. Summer was turning into fall. The pines and larches and oaks seemed to shimmer as breezes blew and clouds raced over the low mountains.

They had seen very few houses along the road, but there were some. Will talked about a place that was in the middle of nowhere, with no humans for tens, if not hundreds, of miles. Stella was too tired to feel discouraged. She knew now they did not belong anywhere or to anyone; they were just lost, inside and out. Her feet hurt. Her back hurt. The discomfort from her period was passing. That was a small blessing, but now she was beginning to wonder who and what Will really was.

He looked more than a little feral with his hair sweaty and sticking straight up at the back where he had leaned against the rear seat in Mrs. Hayden's car. He smelled gamy, angry, and afraid, but Stella knew she did not smell any better.

She wondered what Celia and LaShawna and Felice were up to, what had happened to the drivers trussed up and left by the side of the road.

She had only a dim idea how the map in Will's back pocket correlated with where they were. The road looked like a long black river rolling into the distance, vanishing around a tree-framed curve.

For a moment, she stopped and watched a ground squirrel. It stood on a low flat rock beside the shoulder, hunched and alert, with shiny black eyes, like the Shrooz in her room in Virginia.

She hoped they would end up on a farm and she could be with animals. She got along well with animals.

Will came back. The squirrel fled. “We should keep moving,” he said. They trotted clumsily into the trees as two cars rumbled by.

“Maybe we should hitchhike,” Stella suggested from behind a pine trunk. She smelled the cloying sweetness of the tree's sap and it reminded her of school. She curled her lip and pushed away from the rough bark.

“If we hitchhike, they'll catch us,” Will said. “We're close. I know it.”

She followed Will. She could almost imagine a big blue Chevy or a big pickup barreling down the road with Mitch behind the wheel. Mitch and Kaye, together, looking for her.

The next time they heard a car coming, Will ran into the trees but she kept walking. After the car had passed, he caught up with her and gave her a squinch-faced look.

“We're helpless out here,” Stella said, squinching back at him, as if that were a reasonable explanation.

“More reason to hide.”

“Maybe somebody knows where this place is. If they stop we can ask.”

“I'm not very lucky,” Will said, his mouth twisting into a line that was not a smile and not quite a smirk. Wry and uncertain. “Are you lucky?” he asked.

“I'm here with you, aren't I?” she asked, deadpan.

Will laughed. He laughed until he started waving his arms and snorting and had to stop to wipe his nose on his sleeve.

“Eeyeew,” Stella said.

“Sorry,” he said.

Against her better judgment, Stella liked him again.

The next car, Will stuck out his hand, thumb up, and gave his biggest smile. The car flashed by doing at least seventy miles an hour, smoked windows full of blurred faces that did not even look their way.

Will hunched his shoulders as he resumed walking.

They heard the next vehicle twenty minutes later. Stella looked over her shoulder. It was an old Ford minivan, cresting a rise in the two-lane road and laying down a thin cloud of oily white smoke. Neither she nor Will moved back from the road. Their water bottles were empty. It wouldn't be long before they had to turn around and retrace their journey.

The minivan slowed, moved into the opposite lane to avoid them, and passed with a low whoosh. An older man and woman in the front seats peered at them owlishly; the back windows were tinted blue and reflected their own faces.

The minivan pulled over and stopped about two hundred feet down the road.

Stella hiccupped in surprise and crossed her arms. Will stood sideways, like a fencer expecting a strike, and Stella saw his hands shake.

“They don't look mean,” Stella said, but she thought of the red truck and Fred Trinket and his mother who had cooked chicken, back in Spotsylvania County.

“We do need a ride,” Will admitted.

The minivan backed up slowly and stopped about twenty feet away. The woman leaned her head out of the right side window. Her hair was salt-and-pepper gray and she had a square, strong face and direct eyes. Her arm, elbowing out, was covered with freckles, and her face was heavily wrinkled and pale. Stella saw she had lots of big silver rings on the fingers of her left hand, which rested on her forearm as she looked back at them.

“Are you two virus kids?” the older woman asked.

“Yeah,” Will said, hands shaking even harder. He tried to smile. “We escaped.”

The older woman thought about that for a moment, pursing her lips. “Are you infectious?”

“I don't think so,” Will said, and stuck his hands in the pockets of his jeans.

The older woman turned back to the man in the driver's seat. They shared a glance and reached a silent agreement possible only to a couple who had lived together a very long time. “Need a ride somewhere?” the woman asked.

Will looked at Stella, but all Stella could sniff was the thick fume of oil. The man was at least ten years older than the woman. He had a thin face, bright gray eyes, and a prominent nose, and his hands, on the wheel, were also covered with rings—turquoise and coral and silver, birds and abstract designs.

“Sure,” Will said.

The minivan's side door popped and slid open automatically. The interior stank of cigarette smoke and hamburgers and fries.

Stella's nose wrinkled, but the smell of food made her mouth water. They hadn't eaten since the morning of the day before.

“We've been reading about kids like you,” the old man said as they climbed in. “Hard times, huh?”

“Yeah,” Will said. “Thanks.”