Pierce made his decision. He edged past the injured man, staying well clear of any lunges in case Mason heard his footsteps.
Pierce got past him, turned. “Last chance.”
Mason’s face gaped open. A twisted, macabre smile. “Better dead than blind.”
EIGHTY-NINE
Illusion. All that was needed was money. Something Razor had in abundance, thanks to the man who had once tormented him for years, T. R. Zornenbach.
After he’d walked away from Pierce and Theo, Razor had gone to another one of his hideout hotel rooms. He’d dyed his hair, popped in contact lenses to change his eye color, put padding inside his upper cheeks to alter the dimension of his face.
But the biggest illusion was clothing. His sleek new clothing clearly marked him as an Upper Influential. That alone guaranteed him immunity. Not only as he moved through various strata of Influentials, but also preventing any hassle by Illegals.
In less than ten minutes, dressed in the expensive silks and cashmeres that gave Influentials the illusion of beauty and self-importance and entitlement, he had transformed himself. His sleek wallet held false identification.
He had walked without fear back into the hallway and to the elevator and through the checkpoint into Charmaine’s neighborhood, telling the guard he was looking for some entertainment at a friend’s house.
On the way out of Charmaine’s neighborhood, clearing the gate at the neighborhood checkpoint would be just as easy; a trolley would take them to the inner core of the city. Back to one of Razor’s permanent hotel rooms, where they’d be safe until Pierce arranged for their escape to the west.
Just before the checkpoint, Razor drew Caitlyn to the side and spoke softly, making it clear the conversation wasn’t meant for Billy and Theo.
“You can’t stay here very long, near this city or any other city, with your wings and expect your secret to be safe,” Razor said. “Too many people.”
“That’s the reason for going west.”
“Yeah,” Razor said, “Pierce told me he meant his promise. He’ll make sure you reach the west. The three of you.”
Billy looked back once, briefly, but must have understood the intensity of their conversation because he looked away immediately.
Billy was the right one for her, Caitlyn thought. Why did she want Razor?
“Pierce offered you a job as an agent,” Caitlyn said. “You’d be a good one.”
“I’d go west,” Razor said. “If you asked me.”
This was a big moment. She knew it. Beside her was fast and sharp and dangerous. Ahead was Billy’s large silhouette, his broken arm against his side. A man who loved her without reserve. Who had filled the doorway when she most needed it. Who played no games.
Billy was the right one for her.
But in his own way, Razor had not abandoned her either.
As a girl, even in her solitude in the mountains with Jordan, Caitlyn had wondered if she would ever find someone who would look past her freakishness and want to kiss her. She had wondered what it would be like to be kissed, how a girl could know a kiss was coming, how to respond.
Here it was. Certainty. If she leaned forward, turned her head in invitation, Razor would close the gap. He was holding his breath, waiting. So simple.
So complicated.
A kiss. What would it tell Razor? And if Billy looked back, what would it tell Billy?
She ached to kiss Razor but couldn’t trust whether it was simply a physical desire or something deeper. West was the best option, especially with Pierce’s promise to help. Could she accept the responsibility for taking Razor away from the setting where he was most alive? Fast, sharp, and dangerous, able to move through all the levels of this world. Or perhaps she could accept surgery to stay here and, in so doing, change who she was? Either way, one of them would sacrifice.
This man did make her feel alive. Perhaps that sensation could make up for losing her wings.
But did she have a right to think only of herself? It flashed into her mind, the image of the little girl she’d held in the shanty, and how Caitlyn had helped the girl with a smudge of blood.
In that moment, Caitlyn realized what she had to do. That her own wishes mattered little compared to the responsibility that came with the powers woven into her genetic code.
If she were choosing between Billy and Razor, and this was the moment it had to be done, the most important question was simple.
Who would be the better father?
It meant there was something she had to know about Razor.
“Back there, Pierce offered you immunity,” Caitlyn said. “Is it true? You killed someone and took his name?”
“Holly,” Pierce said on the phone, well down the street from the house where Mason had chosen to die. Wilson beside him, helping keep Dawkins on his feet, was still cuffed. Charmaine now conscious, hobbling along. “I’m calling in backup. There’s a hostage situation in the house. Two genetic freaks called hybrids. Holding Caitlyn. I’ve been able to clear two others—Dawkins and Charmaine—from the house. Wilson’s with me. We need a team to take out the hybrids. Be better if we kept Caitlyn alive, but remember Wilson’s orders. Dead or alive, we want her body.”
That should cover it, Pierce thought. Three charred bodies would be found in the house, and this phone conversation had established that Caitlyn was one of them. Government didn’t have a DNA sample to prove otherwise. Dawkins and Charmaine didn’t know Mason had stayed in the house; they too would believe the three bodies were two hybrids and Caitlyn. Once it was established that Caitlyn was dead, her burned body beyond any genetic use, the hunt for her would be over.
“Sure.” The tone of Holly’s voice was unreadable. She could have taken this moment to remind Pierce that obviously it had been a mistake to go in alone. She didn’t.
“But don’t send SWAT to the address I left with you,” Pierce said. “Instead, we’re four blocks away.”
Pierce gave her the accurate address. Of Jessica Charmaine’s house. Or what would be left of her house.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “You said that Caitlyn wasn’t at Charmaine’s address.”
“I lied to you earlier,” he said. “There was a leak in our team. Someone reporting to Dawkins. I didn’t know if it was you or Jeremy or Avery. I gave each of you a different address. Wanted to see what would happen.”
Silence. Pierce thought of the three locations. One east, one west, and one north. He’d given her north. Avery west. Choppers and floodlights had descended on the fake address to the east.
“After you call in for SWAT,” Pierce said, thinking of the choppers that had swarmed a place four blocks east, “take Avery, and the two of you put Jeremy in lockdown. He’s our leak.”
“Must be lonely not trusting anyone.”
“You get used to it,” Pierce said. “Don’t worry. I’ll approve the transfer and put in a good word. You’ll be at the next pay grade by tomorrow noon.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“But at this point, still team leader. Send out the SWAT team.”
“I’m not transferring to get away from you,” she said. “I want in another unit so that when we go to a beach in Cuba together, it doesn’t break any regulations. And so you won’t be so lonely.”
“Didn’t know anything about Cuba.”
“Now you do. I want the transfer tomorrow by noon. And you’d better not have any plans for tomorrow night. Cuba will follow. When I say the time is right.”
Pierce started to grin. That’s when the explosion from a block away staggered him with a blast of noise and heated air.
“Zornenbach was an old man,” Razor told Caitlyn. “He took boys from the subways, kept them a few years at a time. I was one of those boys. The last of those boys.”
He let her absorb this, then continued. “He was a rich, rich Influential. He taught his pet boys manners, gave them an education, and made them squeaky clean and refined. Transformed them from sewer rats into s
omething he could enjoy. Until they started to hit puberty. Then he’d get rid of them. When I figured it out, I got rid of him first. Otherwise he would have killed me like all the others and gone back into the subway tunnels for another victim.”
No way was he going to tell her the rest of it. That the old man Zornenbach had decided Razor was special enough to keep longer than he’d kept the others. Nor was he going to tell Caitlyn what steps the old man had taken to ensure Razor’s body remained at a prepuberty stage. Steps the old man had taken satisfaction in doing himself. There was a reason Razor’s limbs were slightly longer and thinner than normal; a lack of testosterone for a few crucial years in his early teens had meant his bone’s joints had not hardened in a normal manner. His rib bones were longer too, giving him greater lung power and breath capacity. These were traits, as he knew from his thorough research on the subject, that made the castrati so valuable in operas.
Razor. Not just because he was fast, sharp, and dangerous. But also because self-irony was necessary to keep him from morbid self-pity. Razor. Because of how he’d been altered beyond repair—by the straight razor blade that the old man had used one night after drugging him, leaving him to wake in blood and horror.
“I was smarter with computers than the old man realized,” Razor said, pushing aside the memory. “I found ways to hack into his systems and continue his business and banking as if he were still alive. I set it up so that it appeared he had legally adopted me. He tended to be a recluse anyway. No one gave it any thought when they didn’t see him for months on end. It worked. All that was his became mine. You’ve seen how I live my life. Illusion.”
His greatest illusion was keeping from the world that he was a freak, dependent on hormone replacement therapy to maintain the illusion. He’d watched Caitlyn enough to know she was a freak too. That’s one of the things that had drawn him to her. Made him want to protect her.
“Illusion?” Caitlyn looked directly at him. “When I needed you, you were solid.”
“It wasn’t an accident I was there when the Illegals had you pinned in the alley,” he said. “Remember the telescope on the thirty-fifth floor, across from the hotel? From there, I used to watch you on the roof. I saw what happened the night you jumped. I watched you, in the near dark, soaring down to the alley. And I went looking for you.”
“Without you, I wouldn’t be alive.”
“What do you want now?” he asked.
“You were born for the cities and shanties,” Caitlyn said. A slow smile. “Fast, sharp, dangerous. Remember? You sure you would want to leave?”
“I want to know what you want. Not what you think I want.”
Would she choose him? Or Billy? He saw Billy staring at them, wondering about the conversation.
“What I want,” Caitlyn said, “is a father for my children. A good father. And a place to raise them safely.”
Razor drew a deep, deep breath into the lungs beneath his unnaturally long rib bones. Before he could decide how to respond, the sky bloomed bright orange behind Caitlyn, briefly lighting the street in front of her and the others. The tremendous boom of an explosion came as she turned, and then a slight trembling of the ground.
Silence followed. But not darkness. The glow merely diminished, and he could see her face clearly. She closed her eyes, opened them. She put her hand up, between her face and Razor’s. She brushed Razor’s lips with her palm.
“Thank you,” she said, “for those flowers. Seems like a lifetime ago, but it was just yesterday. The ones that you had hidden in your sleeve when we escaped the wheelchair guy.”
“That sounds like a good-bye.” He knew that wasn’t true. It might not have been a good-bye. It could just as easily have been a beginning. But Razor didn’t want to find out. And wouldn’t give her a chance to tell. Better to always believe she might have chosen him.
He kissed her palm, dropped her hand, and stepped back.
“I’m not the kind of guy who would make a good father,” he said. “So Caitlyn, I think that’s what it should be. Good-bye.”
EPILOGUE
The Arizona sunset was spectacular but so routine that only the stranger among the other four men was looking sideways from his saddle to absorb the oranges and reds that spread from thin cloud cover to the razor-sharp mountaintops jagged on the western horizon.
All of the men, including the stranger, who’d been given an elderly mare, were on horses, walking a slow pace in the heat that was oppressive even at the approach of dusk. Unlike the others, however, he was not equipped with holstered pistol or a rifle in a saddle scabbard. Neither had they given him a canteen full of water—instead, they gave him water when he needed it. He was further set apart from the men by the cracking skin on his forehead and the back of his neck, where sunburn had peeled away. Of more significance, his hands were bound in front of him. And his feet were bare, except for socks. Without water or shoes, he depended on them totally for his survival.
The lead man stopped the group, pulling the stranger away from his thoughts. They’d reached a sheer rock wall. Hours earlier, the low mountain face had appeared only a couple of miles across the flat desert valley from the town where he’d met the guides.
Both were shimmering illusions. The distance. And the flatness. The sand and cactus hid sudden drops into ancient gullies that might roar with a flash flood only every ten years. Time and again, the horses had been forced to pick their way down in the gullies and back out again, and the rock face had, at times, seemed to recede during the slow progress.
Now the men on the horses were at the base of the steep rock wall, where another gully led outward from the rock face, revealing a narrow canyon entrance that hadn’t been visible until less than five hundred yards away. Behind them, the desert flats were clear of any rising dust that would indicate they’d been followed. That was a minimal chance anyway. The group had originally been ten, but every few miles, a man had dropped out to guard the path by hiding in a sniper’s position.
“It’s time for the hood.” The lead man hadn’t given his name. He had a square face beneath his brimmed hat and neatly trimmed dark beard. Midforties. Not much fat. A working man on a working horse. “Last chance to turn back.”
“I didn’t come this far to turn back,” the stranger said. He paused and fought the horrible liquid coughs that had slowly been draining his life over the previous year. “And what I’ve told you is the truth.”
“We can hear by your cough how badly you need the Healer. For those with nothing to lose, that’s enough reason to lie. Just for the hope that she’ll overlook the lie to listen to them plead.”
“I understand.”
“You’re keeping in mind all the warnings. First thing a vulture does is tear out your eyes.”
The stranger nodded. Along the way, these men—the Protectors—had pointed out human skeletons stretched out on the sand, wrist bones still attached by nylon rope to stakes in the ground. This is what happens, they’d explained, to anyone who tried to deceive the Protectors. There had been other skeletons picked clean too, but still ragged with clothing. Those did not belong to someone who had been left naked on the sand, but to those who had followed and had fallen where a sniper’s bullet had shattered their skulls.
After listening to the stranger’s story, they’d made no promises. Sometimes she was in the camp. Sometimes she wasn’t. And when she wasn’t, there was no telling where she might be or what she might look like. The times she traveled, she was invisible, like an angel in disguise among the people of the territory.
Those who guarded her were invisible too; each of them had in common that she’d saved a child in their family, and in gratitude, they formed a small secret society and called themselves the Protectors.
When she touched and healed, she’d disappear again, changing her appearance, moving on to another town, where she would depend on the kindness of strangers. Her existence had already begun to gentle the lawlessness of the dusty and isolated towns. It hadn�
�t taken long for word to spread—someone among them could perform miracles, but only for people she caught treating others with kindness. As a result, most tended to be conscientious about their behavior, in case she was among them, watching. There had been a revival of faith, too, in the territory, for many, believed she truly was an angel. Some because of the healing and others because of the rumors that she could fly. It had only been a year since she’d first brought someone back from a deathbed, but already, she was approaching mythical status.
“I didn’t come this far to turn back,” the stranger repeated. “It’s all or nothing for me.”
The stranger accepted the hood. He didn’t need his vision. He had his hands on the horn of the saddle, and he was comfortable with the rhythm of the horse’s motion.
Shortly after, he felt the air become cooler, and he knew they had entered the deep shadows of the canyon. A few minutes later, the horses stopped and he heard a man dismount. Now, after all the months to get here, was it the time?
No. He heard light swishing sounds, and it puzzled him, until he decided that the Protector who had dismounted behind them was sweeping the sand clean of the hoofprints of the horses.
The rocking motion of a moving horse began again, and they traveled in silence. The stranger did not count to mark time. He had no need to try to map in his head the route they were taking. He was well aware that the canyon led to a labyrinth of natural stone. And well aware that escape would be impossible.
They’d promised him that if he was telling the truth about his unique claim, when the hood came off to prove it, he would live. Just as they’d described how vultures and desert rats and insects would leave his skeleton dry on the sand for the centuries ahead if he had lied in desperation to be led to the one who could heal.
Despite a range of emotions swirling through him, the stranger felt oddly calm. Almost like an out-of-body experience. He’d lived with memories and hopes, regret and satisfaction. His biggest fear, his only fear, was that the Healer would not be in the canyon sanctuary. The stranger did not have long to live. If she was here, she could heal him. If she wasn’t, he doubted he’d be able to survive until she returned.
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