That’s when she saw how well the other two women were faring. The smaller one, with chestnut hair, was holding off at least three bangers with her metal pipe, and to judge from the blood, that’s not all she’d been doing with it. The blonde didn’t seem to need weapons. She moved in a slow, ready circle, hissing beneath her breath in words that sounded Asian to Faith’s untrained ear. When she struck, she struck hard and fast, kicking one boy right in the jaw, martial-arts style.
Two men already lay unconscious at her feet.
Someone grabbed Faith’s ankle and yanked her down into the wet garbage. It was the man who’d tried to strangle her. She kicked out at him, sending his kneecap into a world of pain, even as tattoo-boy got her pinned by the shoulders.
“You coulda just taken it, you stupid bitch,” he whispered over the frenzied barking of the hurt dog. He exuded a hatred that frightened her even worse than his words did. “Now we gotta finish it. Right here. Right—”
Then he slumped, unconscious, down onto her.
“Yeah,” muttered the woman called Dawn as, having dispatched this final threat, she dragged his inert form off Faith and rolled him against the brick wall. “Blah blah blah. Don’t these idiots know that they expend energy with all that bad-guy bullshit?”
Then she extended a helping hand.
Faith looked, dazedly, from her to the smaller, darker-haired woman.
That one dropped her metal pipe with a clang and swept her shoulder-length hair out of her face. “All done,” she announced.
She was right.
The remaining gang members had scattered. The dog had stopped barking to hobble closer to some of the forms that lay, insensible to the rainfall, on the alley floor. It snuffled them warily, looking from them to Dawn.
They’d won.
“We should probably head out ourselves, unless we want a lot of extra attention,” said Dawn, bending to make the offer of her hand even more obvious, more impatient. “I don’t know about you, but I’d prefer to stay under the radar just now.”
She had unusual, green-gold eyes. Something about them disturbed Faith…but she couldn’t ignore the woman indefinitely.
She took the offered hand—and the impressions that came with it.
A sterile environment—lots of white, lots of metal. Almost impervious to pain, to wounds. Powerful emotional shields…shields that had begun to crack. A circle of concerned women, strong women, seeking something. And a sense of closure, of triumph beyond the fight….
Something in Dawn seemed to say, At last.
And that familiarity!
As soon as she could, Faith released the woman’s hand. Faith tried to hide her confusion with a fleeting smile, but she didn’t need to be able to read people to know she hadn’t fooled either of them.
Quickly, she bent and gathered the hurt, wet dog into her arms, so that she wouldn’t have to shake the other woman’s hand. Not yet. Not so soon after…
Faith wasn’t sure after what. But touching Dawn had been more than enough sensory input until she at least caught her breath.
Holding the dog helped. It was quickly calming, in the cradle of her arms, which calmed her in return. Dogs were so simple. Hungry. Safe. Hurt. Safe. Friends.
It still cast wary looks toward Dawn, but otherwise it wiggled and licked raindrops off her arm, which calmed her even further.
Dawn stood slightly taller than Faith. The other woman, the one with the chestnut hair, was slightly shorter than her. That one smiled with a quiet grace that was almost as unsettling as Dawn’s touch.
“Pleased to meet you, Faith,” she said, her voice thick with an emotion Faith didn’t understand. “I’m Lynn White.”
She, too, had unusual eyes. And now, Faith recognized them.
From the mirror.
Her world bottomed out—even as Lynn finished the introduction.
“We’re your sisters.”
They left the little dog with a nearby veterinarian, who insisted on keeping it overnight to give it IV nutrients after he set its leg. He said it was a cocker mix, and from its level of malnutrition, it had probably been a stray for weeks.
Faith hardly paid attention as she guaranteed to cover the bill and collect the dog the next day.
Sisters?
By unspoken agreement, none of them broached that revelation until they’d found a secluded corner in a café where they could have some privacy. The delay had given Faith a chance to process the bombshell they’d just dropped on her…and to try to come to terms with how true it felt.
Her mother’s lifelong secrecy.
How very similar she and the others were in appearance—especially Dawn’s hair color, and their unique, green-gold eyes.
The sense of earnestness she read off both of them.
So, cradling her coffee between two hands, Faith didn’t bother arguing the idea, no matter how mind-boggling it was. Instead, she simply asked, “You’re my half sisters?”
Dawn and Lynn exchanged telling glances. “Not exactly,” said Lynn.
“You mean…my mom had more than one daughter?” The birth certificate had said Single Birth. Older? Younger?
“No, you’re her only child. As far as we know.”
Faith was out of options.
“Here’s how it is.” Dawn leaned across the table in her intensity. “You’re the product of artificial insemination. Tamara Hallwell may be your birth mother—”
“Corbett,” whispered Faith. “She’s Tamara Corbett.”
“—but she’s not your biological mother.”
“I know it’s a shock.” Lynn covered Faith’s hand in sympathy, before Faith thought to draw back. It happened again.
Sheltered life. Scholarship. The clicking of a computer keyboard. Recent betrayal by her father figure. Love…
Faith snatched her hand free, but not before she’d gotten that last, definite impression. Lynn White was in love with someone. But she was here, instead of with him. Out of concern for Faith.
“I’m sorry,” she said to her—her sister—at the same time as Lynn.
Lynn smiled her sympathy, instead of touching again. “I was pretty stunned when Dawn showed up and told me, too. But things were already a mess, at that point.”
“Apparently Corbett is the name your birth mother took after she ran off, pregnant with you,” Dawn continued. She had a more direct manner. “From what we can tell, she answered an ad to be a surrogate mother. She was implanted with three fertilized embryos, just like Lynn’s and my surrogate mothers were. But somehow she convinced the folks who hired her that she wasn’t pregnant. Gave up on the promise of a $50,000 payoff to do it, too.”
Faith shook her head, unsure what to even ask next. “Why?”
Lynn said, “You’ll probably have to ask her.”
“And your mothers?”
Again, her sisters exchanged telling glances.
“You’re the only one of us who got to have that,” admitted Lynn. “Dawn’s surrogate mother died in childbirth. She was young, a waitress who wanted the money to get her brother out of foster care.”
“Justin Cohen,” said Dawn. “He’s an FBI agent now. He’s one of the people who tracked me down.”
“Mine originally did it for the fifty thou,” admitted Lynn, “But…well, her story’s complicated. And our biological mother, the egg donor, never even knew about us…she only started to figure things out last year.”
“And then,” announced Dawn, grim, “they killed her.”
The rest of the story became something of a blur for Faith. It was almost too incredible to be believed. Almost, but not quite. Not after everything Faith had seen in herself. Not after what she’d sensed from these…
From her sisters.
It all traced back to the Athena Academy for the Advancement of Women, the most elite college-prep school for women in the United States. Founded almost a quarter of a century earlier, the school counted among its graduates some of the most successful women in government.
It also, against the best wishes of its founders, harbored an ugly secret.
“The name sounds familiar…wasn’t it in the news, last year?” asked Faith.
“We need to start a lot earlier than that,” said Dawn. “With Lab 33. It’s government sponsored and top-secret. When the school was created, about twenty-three years ago, its scientists fixed on the academy’s students as perfect egg donors for their experiments in genetic enhancement. The problem was how to get any of these students, who were underage and weren’t fools, to make a donation.”
“The lab planted two employees at the school, and chose a donor. They gave her something to cause symptoms of appendicitis. And on the way to the hospital…”
Faith listened in fascinated horror as the story unfolded. Eggs had been harvested from one of the Athena Academy’s best and brightest students, thirteen-year-old Lorraine Miller, under the guise of an appendectomy. Lab 33 then fertilized the eggs with sperm stolen from a clinic. The lab team ended up with nine viable embryos to implant into three surrogate mothers.
“They wanted disposable women,” said Dawn, a trace of bitterness under her matter-of-fact presentation. “Women who wouldn’t be missed if they were killed after giving birth.”
“So my mom…” Faith hesitated, but what else was she going to call Tamara Hallwell Corbett? The woman had given birth to her, had raised her. Tamara had kissed Faith’s boo-boos and braided her hair and told her about the birds and the bees. She was more her mother than this faceless Lorraine Miller person…wasn’t she? “My mom’s been on the run ever since, afraid Lab 33 would find out that she really did give birth.”
“Apparently,” agreed Dawn. “The scientists didn’t know you existed. A man named Jonas White kidnapped Lynn when she was born and raised her on his own, leaving her surrogate mother for dead. That left Lab 33 with me.”
Lynn’s face had darkened at the mention of Jonas White. The name sounded familiar to Faith, but she wasn’t sure why. She kept her attention on Dawn.
“You were raised by scientists?” Faith couldn’t begin to imagine it.
“Not completely.” Dawn held her gaze. “I had my Uncle Lee.” She said the name darkly.
“And,” said Lynn quickly, “she got to spend a year at the Athena Academy. Everything leads back to the Athenas.”
The previous year, Lorraine Miller Carrington had called an emergency meeting of her old Athena Academy friends. Keeping a sacred promise made during their school years, the women had heeded her call. But Lorraine, or Rainy, as her friends called her, never made the meeting.
“She was in a car accident,” explained Dawn, who seemed to know more of the story than Lynn did. “A rigged car accident. A special device made her fall asleep at the wheel, and her seat belt was rigged to fail. Once the Cassandras began to investigate—”
Faith raised her hand, momentarily silencing her sister. She could hardly breathe. “The who?”
“The Cassandras.” Dawn shrugged, seeing she would have to explain. “Every year the school takes in about thirty new students. They’re divided into five teams of six each, and they have friendly competitions against each other.”
“Like at Hogwarts,” supplied Lynn. “Slytherin versus Gryffindor.”
“But at Athena, each team picks a name from Greek mythology. Rainy Miller’s group chose Cassandra. Anyway…”
She continued her narrative, but Faith heard less of it than before. She caught the pertinent pieces. Rainy, an attorney who had struggled with infertility throughout her marriage, had realized that she was the victim of egg mining. An assassin had killed her before she could tell the others.
But they hadn’t counted on the determination of the Cassandras.
“One of them took down the assassin,” said Dawn, clearly conflicted. “But they still don’t know exactly who hired him. And they’ve been looking for us, for Rainy’s daughters, the whole time. At first they thought I was the only one who’d survived. But then I found Lynn, and we realized you might be alive and tracked you down. It wasn’t easy. Thank goodness Lynn’s a computer whiz.”
Lynn downplayed her role. “We can search records online that would have been impossible to access ten years ago. It helps that your mother kept her first name—and that it was an unusual one.”
“So you’ve been following me since yesterday,” said Faith softly.
“We had to be sure it was you,” explained Lynn. “We tried e-mailing, on a fictitious reason of course, through your mom, but she never responded. This isn’t the kind of news we’d want to give the wrong person, by accident.”
“I guess not.” Faith shook her head. “‘Hi. We’re the sisters you never knew. And you…’”
One of the points they’d skimmed past loomed into precedence now. Experiments in genetic enhancement.
Why else would they have needed stolen eggs? Stolen sperm? Disposable surrogate mothers?
Experiments.
Faith finished, “‘And you are a mutant freak.’”
Chapter 15
“‘Mutant freak’ might be a bit extreme,” said Dawn dryly. “I prefer ‘lab rat.’”
“Give her a break, Dawn.” Lynn reached out to pat Faith’s hand again, then caught her own hand back. She learned fast. “You’ve known your whole life that you had special abilities. You were trained in them. Even my godfath—I mean, even Jonas White knew I’d been enhanced, so he made sure I grew into my potential. But this has got to be a complete shock for Faith.”
“Special…” Faith shook her head, trying to digest it all. “What kind of special abilities do you have?”
“The scientists had nine embryos,” explained Dawn, like a soldier making a report. “They altered them so that three would have extra healing abilities, three would have super strength and agility, and three would have super intelligence. And they kept each set of three together. Since none of the surrogate mothers had multiple births, the experiments resulted in one of each. My ability is that I heal fast. Really fast.”
“You’ll have to see her do it sometime,” agreed Lynn. “It’s amazing.”
“And you?” asked Faith, of Lynn.
“Strength and agility.”
“White put that to good use, too,” said Dawn. Her tone left no confusion about her opinion of Jonas White.
That left Faith with…“But I’m not super intelligent. I mean, my grades have always been good, but I still had to study. I’m a college dropout. Something must have gone wrong with me.”
So she wasn’t just an experiment—she was a failed experiment?
“You mean you’ve never noticed anything that you’re especially good at?” challenged Dawn. “Just because you aren’t book-smart doesn’t mean the alterations didn’t take. Maybe you’re smart with money. Or languages.”
Faith shrugged. “No more than the next person.”
“Computers?” suggested Lynn, and Faith shook her head. “People?”
“I’m terrible with people! Mom never wanted me getting too close, because…” She hated to mention this part. It was probably related, probably a side effect of the failed experiments, which made her abilities even more embarrassing. Still, if she couldn’t tell these women…
“Because I read them,” Faith admitted.
Dawn said, “Come again?”
“My programming must not have taken correctly. I’m…hyperaware. I can hear your heartbeats, right now, and your breathing, and I can smell what you had not just for lunch but breakfast, and what kind of soap you used. And when I touch someone, I get weird flashes of information about them.”
“That might be exactly what they meant to accomplish,” Lynn assured her. “I have some similar abilities—really good eyesight and hearing. It sounds as if your senses are just as acute, but focused differently. Focused on people.”
“But how’s that make me intelligent?”
“The scientists can explain it better than me,” said Dawn. “But hello, which organ processes all th
ose nerve responses?”
Faith studied the tablecloth, scowling. “My friends keep saying I’m psychic. I was beginning to think maybe…”
But there was no reason to go into the crazy notions she’d begun to entertain.
“Does it matter what you call it?” asked Lynn. “At least now you know it’s real. Now you know where it comes from.”
“Yeah,” muttered Faith. “A test tube.”
“And Lorraine Miller Carrington,” Dawn reminded her.
Faith nodded. Somehow, one little detail—trivial to her two sisters—struck her as the strangest part. How had she known?
“One of the Cassandras,” she said.
Once Faith reached her mother’s home, she couldn’t sit, couldn’t rest. It was just too much to take.
And yet she had to take it, didn’t she?
“You stole me?”
Her mother, hands clasped tightly in her lap as she sat on the designer sofa, did not deny it. She simply looked up at Faith with those remarkably pale-blue eyes, and she looked…broken. “I should have known you’d find out. Especially once I saw that you were…”
Her voice trailed off, and her eyes filled with tears.
“That I was a freak?” supplied Faith. Or, to use Dawn’s term, “A lab rat?”
“Don’t call yourself that. You’re different, yes. You’re special.”
“As in special education classes.”
“As in a beautiful, unique, talented woman who deserves to be cherished for exactly who she is. The way I’ve cherished you.”
Faith shook her head, still pacing. She’d come here as soon as she left her sisters at their hotel, with promises to get together the next day. She was afraid to stop moving. She was afraid of what her new knowledge would do to her head once she slowed down enough to process it all.
“You haven’t been cherishing me,” she argued. “You’ve been manipulating me by withholding the truth. You knew I was an experiment from the start. You knew it!”
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