Merida drew back and waved Jessica’s hand away.
“Don’t say that,” she said. “Don’t say ‘baby.’ You only say that when you think I’m being stupid. Well, maybe I am being stupid. But I can’t help it. I can’t help wondering why the hell you’d rather spend all the time we’re together talking to other people instead of talking to me. Hell, it ain’t just you. Everybody does that. We’d all rather stare at our phones and at holograms than... than just talk to the people right in front of us!”
She brushed past Jessica and went down the hall.
Jessica followed her. “Wait, look. It’s not what you think. This is about a story—”
“I don’t want to know what this is,” said Merida, standing next to the couch and pointing at the laptop. “I don’t care. I don’t want to know why you slammed it shut so I wouldn’t see.”
Now that her eyes had adjusted to the dark, Jessica could see one tear drop rolling down Merida’s cheek. She had seen Merida cry more tonight than she had in their entire relationship.
“I come here sometimes when you’re at work and search through your messages and your internet history,” said Merida. “I used to hate myself for doing it. Now it’s just habit. I never find a damn thing to worry about because it’s you. Even if you wanted to cheat, you’re too busy with work for that. But I keep doing it anyway because I always think, I’m not finding anything because she knows how to hide it. I keep looking because I think one day you’ll slip up and confirm what I’ve been afraid of. That’s paranoid as hell, and I know it.”
The two women stared at each other with the couch and the laptop between them. Jessica wanted to say something to help. But she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Sometimes it seemed like Merida spent half their time together talking about how good-looking somebody was—almost always a man—or talking about how good some partner of hers used to be in bed. Once, she had even suggested (only half-jokingly) that the two of them watch porn together. None of this ever made Jessica jealous because jealousy just wasn’t in her nature. But how could Merida be this jealous and insecure?
“Nothing, huh?” said Merida after a short silence. She put up her hands and shrugged. “Well.”
She went to the front door. Jessica tried to say something, but the words just weren’t there.
“I’m sorry,” said Merida, and she sounded like she really was. She closed the door quietly behind her.
Jessica stared at the apartment door in the quiet and the dark. After a minute, she heard the elevator chime, the doors close, and then the faint hiss of the elevator sliding down to the first floor.
She picked up her phone and found her conversation with Merida in the messages app. She ought to say something to reassure her. She started typing. I’m sorry. I wish I had known. But then she thought about baby Taylor and the way she had projected what her eyes saw into Jessica’s mind. Antonio floating in the warmth of his artificial uterus. The Dragonflies. Havana and Beck. She needed answers before she made any decisions, took any action, even with Merida.
Samford, for fuck’s sake.
Whatever she decided to do with the information on this laptop, it was bigger than her relationship problems. She couldn’t think about Merida until later. Hell, she wouldn’t be able to think of anything else until later, anything at all. She had to know.
She backspaced through the message to Merida, turned off her phone, and dropped it on the couch. She wanted to feel something for Merida—sadness, guilt, something—but instead, all she could feel was relief.
“Jeremy,” she said. “Turn on the coffee maker.”
“Of course.”
She flipped open the laptop’s screen and clicked on the folder named PROTEUS.
18
She kept the gun raised and her finger on the trigger a few seconds, the red dot of the laser sight on Steiskal’s temple. Braden was at her side, speaking in her head.
I can stop you. Please don’t, mom.
But she wasn’t paying any attention. She stepped down the hall toward Steiskal, still holding the laser sight on the woman’s temple.
“Mom!” yelled Braden, and the air in the house began to tingle with electricity again. Her pulse pounded in her chest. In her throat. In her fingers where they closed around the grip of the gun. Her footsteps on the hardwood floor creaked.
Just one squeeze. Bang. The woman’s brains all over the floor of her house.
“Don’t,” gasped Kim, when she reached him. “Don’t do it. Braden needs you, and they’ll hunt you... even harder if you kill one of them. Don’t give them an excuse to...” But his voice died away in a coughing fit.
Braden was beside her now, grabbing at her arm, trying to lower the gun. Val didn’t fight him. Kim was right. But as she lowered the gun, she trained the red dot on Steiskal’s knee and squeezed the trigger. The sound of the gun was loud in the hall, even with silencer. Steiskal’s leg twisted, and her whole body spasmed. Her eyes opened wide as her face twisted into a silent scream.
“GO!” yelled Kim, his hand reaching out feebly and shoving Val’s leg. “Get out... of here...”
Val bent over and kissed him again hard on the lips. She needed to tell him that there was nothing she’d ever change about her life. Not one thing. She couldn’t bear the thought of him dying without her telling him at least one more time.
Still holding Val’s arm, Braden pulled her toward the back door.
“We’ll find you,” she said. But Kim stared at the ceiling.
Braden urged her on, and she turned to follow him down the hall. He clearly wanted to run, but Val held him back to a hurried walk. When they passed the man who had shot Kim, she put a bullet through his thigh without even pausing. The man woke with a start and yelled.
“Stop it!” yelled Braden, tears streaming his cheeks. Val felt light-headed all of a sudden. He was going to take her down, too, and then he’d be on his own.
She threw the back door open and scanned the yard. A Dragonfly sat parked twenty yards or so away, right in the middle of the vegetable garden. It shone two bright white lights like eyes toward the house, nearly blinding Val, but inside the illuminated cockpit she could see the pilot and the gunner, their helmeted heads resting on the dash of the vehicle.
Two more men lay on the ground not far from the back door, both of them stirring.
“Move,” said Val. “Go straight for the woods over there.” She pointed to the east.
Braden hurried down the steps and started running across the yard, Val right behind him. One of the men moaned as they passed him. His arm groped at the ground by his side as if he thought there was something there to grab.
“Stop right there!” said a voice from somewhere behind the Dragonfly.
Braden froze, and Val ran into the back of him, nearly knocking him down.
“Don’t move!” said the voice again. A figure stepped from behind the Dragonfly, staggering as if he’d had too much to drink. “I don’t want to hurt either one of you, but I’ll put you and that boy down if you don’t drop the gun right now.”
The man stepped out into the blaze of the Dragonfly’s headlamps. He had a pistol pointed right at Braden, but even from twenty or thirty yards away, Val could see his aim wavering. He wore black body armor and a pilot’s helmet. Almost without even realizing ahead of time what she was going to do, Val raised her gun and fired two quick shots right at the space between the man’s chin and body armor. It wouldn’t do any good to shoot him in the chest and hit Kevlar. His throat opened in a burst of dark blood, and he made a gurgling sound as he crumpled to the ground with a thump.
Braden let out a sob.
Val dropped to one knee next to him and grabbed his shoulder.
“Don’t do that,” she said. “Not now.”
Tears streamed his cheeks, and the grief in his face twisted her heart like someone wringing water from a cloth. She’d never prepared him for this. Not really. They’d talked a
bout the possibility that people would come for him, but neither she nor Kim had ever really told him what it would be like if they had to run. How could they have?
“We can’t do this now. Dry it up.”
She ran to the dead officer and took the gun out of his hand. Another 9mm. Newer than Val’s, but the same make. The clips should be interchangeable. That was good.
She took the gun back to Braden, but he only stood staring across the dead man, who lay strewn across a row of carrots.
“Take this,” she said, holding out the gun. “It’s a lot like the ones you already know how to shoot.”
I don’t want to, Braden thought.
“Look,” said Val, crouching next to him and grasping his shoulders. She tried to hide her panic. Her desperation. Knowing it wouldn’t do any good. She tried to suppress the rage that was clawing its way from deep inside her to the surface, but it was already too late. She wanted to kill every one of them, and there was no hiding it from Braden. There was no hiding anything from him. She just wished that she could convince him that sometimes you had to kill.
Looking him right in the eyes, she said, “From now on, we can’t just hide. We’re going to have to run. We’re going to have to fight. And sometimes, I might have to kill people. From now on, you do exactly what I say without question. Without argument.”
She shook him lightly to emphasize her words, and Braden’s eyes widened. It was a look she’d never seen on his face, and the realization of what it meant struck her like the bullet that had struck her husband. He was afraid of her.
She took a deep breath. She didn’t have time, but she had to make him understand. She had to say something more.
“I was a soldier once,” she said. “I fought side by side with other soldiers. They were my brothers and sisters. We never once kicked down the door of civilian family and tried to take their children from them. That’s not part of being a soldier. These people… what they’re doing is evil. They’re attacking civilians—not just civilians, but their own countrymen, in their own homes, on American soil. We have the right to defend ourselves. I have the right to protect my own child. Do you understand?”
The shadow of fear passed from Braden’s face, but he still looked at her mistrustfully.
“But it’s wrong,” he said. “It’s wrong.”
She let go of him so that he wouldn’t feel how much her muscles were tensing.
“We have to get out of here,” she said, standing up. “We’ll talk about this later. But remember something: everything I do now is to keep us alive and you out of their hands.”
“Where are we going?”
She’d been imagining this day for all of Braden’s life, running through a hundred different scenarios, thinking about variables, different routes they might take. And now that the moment was here, she had no idea where they were going.
FROM: DR. REGINALD SAMFORD
TO: KRISTIN SASSE
DATE: JANUARY 29, 2026
SUBJECT: PROTEUS PROJECT
1.5.1 does exactly what we expected it to. Infected spermatogenic tissue is incapable of producing healthy sperm. Tomorrow we plan to try insemination with these malformed sperm cells to determine conception rates. My guess is that there will be at least a few successful conceptions, not the zero we’re hoping for, but these things take time.
Should we produce any zygotes, Dr. Gorman wants to destroy them immediately. I recommend we monitor their gestation for at least three months to determine the range and severity of the deformities that are certain to develop.
And that’s why I’m reaching out to you. Dr. Gorman is consistently undermining our efforts to study the virus beyond the scope of its military usefulness. The man is positively myopic! And infuriating! Why are we limiting ourselves to sterilization? I know you share my frustration at the limits being imposed on our research.
Reprogramming spermatogenic tissue could be the key to eliminating all manner of hereditary illnesses from Parkinson’s Disease to obesity. Dr. Gorman may be content to pursue the pathetically small-minded goal of developing a “sterility bomb” (as he calls it) to drop on America’s enemies, but I am not. And I don’t think you are either. I urge you to do everything in your power to remove Dr. Gorman from this project.
In the meantime, we’re working with Victor Barnhardt and the Dep. of Defense team on delivery methods. There are some exciting possibilities there, too. More on that later when we can speak in person. Speaking of which... I enjoyed Monday night a lot. I haven’t had that much fun with another person in a long time. Let’s do it again soon.
RS
DOCUMENT #: 1450250799-81
DESCRIPTION: Personal log of Dr. Michelle Novak (transcription of audio recording)
CLASSIFIED: Y-TOP
Transcription A: 9:34 PM, 08/01/28
[Sound of shuffling papers. A sigh.]
To say that what the subject can do is extraordinary... that’s one hell of an understatement. When I questioned her earlier about her parents, for example, she knew that I had them separated. She knew they each had refused to answer any questions until they could see the subject. She also knew that I’d been asking them specifically about their family history and whether or not they, their parents, or grandparents ever showed any signs of...
[A chair creaks. Speaker pauses.]
...signs of unusual abilities. The distance between the subject’s room and her parents is roughly fifty feet. All of the walls are soundproof.
[Pause. The sound of breathing, slightly labored. The sound of the speaker taking a drink from a glass. The sound of her setting it on a desk.]
And she knew. She knew what I had asked them, and she knew how they had responded.
[Pause.]
She can hear them. Their thoughts. From fifty feet and several walls away. Is it one way, or can she communicate with them as well? The subject didn’t give any indication that she was communicating with them, but...
[Pause.]
We’ll have to give that more thought. We’ve got surveillance cameras in each room, so we might be able to tell something from watching them simultaneously...
[Pause. The chair creaks again.]
I tried the same line of questioning on the subject. Has she ever known of a relative who had an ability like hers? Has she ever known anyone who can do what she can do? Has she ever suffered a head or brain injury of any kind? At first, she refused to respond to anything. She stared at the floor, at the one-way window. At anything except me. She was clearly agitated. She’d wring her hands and shift in her chair. I took her to be afraid of me, but finally she looked right into my eyes and said, “I can make you let me see them. But I promised them that I’d never do anything like that.” And, God, her eyes were so chilling. It felt like... like looking at a doll that had come to life.
[The sound of the speaker taking a drink.]
As a doctor... Shit, this is hard to admit, but the girl scares the hell out of me. I’ve spent my whole career working with the mentally ill. Some violent people. Some sadistic. A couple of guys who walked straight out of a horror movie. But none of them scared me like this girl.
[Pause.]
If she can really do what it looks like she can do... and I don’t see what other explanations there are for it...
[Pause. The speaker exhales audibly.]
Seeing that kind of power in the face of a scared little girl... It’s unnerving. I’m going to have to be careful to remain objective and professional. The subject deserves humane treatment, even if her ability is the most frightening thing I’ve... ever seen.
[Pause. More shifting of papers.]
Tomorrow I plan to perform a non-sedated MRI and an EEG on the subject if she’s cooperative. We’ll sedate her if we have to, but I’d like to see what kind of abnormal brain activity shows up when she... uses her ability.
[Pause.]
At the very least I want to pinpoint any abnormal structures o
r formations in the brain. We have no precedent for this kind of thing, so I’ve got no ideas about what to expect to find.
[Pause. Sigh. Another sip from the glass.]
What we’re going to do with the parents... is not decided at this time. At least not to my knowledge. The CIA officials on site will... they’ll be the ones to make that decision. I’m told this thing goes way up, all the way to the top. If they take this from me and refuse to give me any credit...
[Pause. Another sip.]
Getting ahead of myself. We’ll see what we see tomorrow.
[The recording ends.]
Transcription B: 9:51 PM, 08/02/28
[Heavy breathing. Footsteps echoing in a large room or a hallway.]
Performed an EEG and an MRI on the subject today, and the results were... absolutely nothing. Her brain looks like any normal kid’s brain. I don’t know what to make of that. Could it be that this... what do you call it? Ability? Condition? Anomaly? Disorder? Could it be that this thing of hers is somehow caused by another structure in the body? Something located in the spinal column? That’s a possibility worth pursuing.
[A door opens. Footsteps no longer echo. Novak has stepped into a room of some kind.]
The CIA folks are some real pieces of work. They’re keeping us on site for the duration. I can’t even talk to Tom or the kids. They say that they’ve let Tom know the situation, but everyone here is confined to the facility until they decide what to do about the girl.
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