“I didn’t throw anything away, Mr. Burke. In my life before, you know what I was?”

“What?”

“A tweaker and a drunk.”

“And what? Pilcher found you? Gave you a chance to be all you could be?”

“I met him just out of prison—a three-year stint for vehicular manslaughter. I was high and drunk and killed a family on New Year’s Eve. He saw something in me I never knew was there.”

“Didn’t you have a family? Friends? A life that was at least your own? What made you trust him in the first place?”

“I don’t know, but he was right, wasn’t he? We’re a part of something here, Mr. Burke. Something that matters. All of us.”

“Here’s the thing, Marcus, and I don’t want you to ever forget it. Nobody f**king asked me or anyone in that valley if we wanted to be a part of this.”

Ethan walked on.

At the bottom of the stairwell leading out into Level 1, a noise stopped him.

Marcus was already swiping his card at the glass-door entrance to the cavern.

Ethan started down the corridor.

“Mr. Burke, where are you going?”

The noise was something screaming.

Banshee-like.

Tortured.

Inhuman.

He’d heard it before and it chilled him to his core.

“Mr. Burke!”

Ethan was jogging down the corridor now, the screams getting louder.

“Mr. Burke!”

He stopped at a wide window.

Stared through the plate glass into a laboratory.

There were two men in white coats and David Pilcher.

They surrounded an aberration.

The creature had been strapped to a steel gurney.

Stout leather restraints buckled down across its legs, below its knees and above.

One across its torso.

Another across its shoulders.

A fifth securing its head.

Its thick wrists and ankles had been clamped down to the sides of the gurney with heavy-gauge steel bracelets, and the thing convulsed against the leather straps as if in the throes of electrocution.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Marcus said, sidling up to Ethan.

“What are they doing to it?”

“Come on, let’s go. Mr. Pilcher won’t be happy if he sees—”

Ethan pounded on the glass.

Marcus said, “Oh geez.”

The men turned.

The two scientists scowling.

Pilcher said something to them and then walked over to the lab entrance. When the door opened, the abby’s screams amplified, echoing up and down the corridor like something calling out from hell.

The doors whisked closed.

“Ethan, how can I help you?”

“I was on my way out. I heard screams.”

Pilcher turned toward the plate glass. The abby had calmed down or worn itself out. Only its head swiveled under the strap, its screams reduced to croaks. Ethan could see its massive heart beating furiously through its translucent skin. There was no detail. Only color and form and motion, all obscured as if behind frosted glass.

“Quite a specimen, no?” Pilcher said. “He’s a three-hundred-seventeen-pound bull. One of the largest males we’ve ever seen. You’d think he’d be alpha male of a sizeable swarm, but my sniper spotted him coming down the canyon this morning, all by his lonesome. Took four hundred milligrams of Telazol to bring him down. That’s the full-grown adult male jaguar dosage. And he was still only sluggish by the time we reached him.”

“How long did that keep him sedated?”

“These tranqs only work for about three hours. After that, you better have them locked up, because boy do they come back angry.”

“He’s a big boy.”

“Bigger than the one you tangled with for sure. I think it’s fair to say if you’d met this bull in the canyon, we wouldn’t be speaking right now.”

“What are you doing with it?”

“Getting ready to remove a gland at the base of its neck.”

“Why?”

“Abbies communicate through pheromones. These are airborne signals that give information and trigger responses.”

“Don’t humans do the same thing?”

“Yeah, but it’s at a much more instinctual, broader level for us. Sexual attraction. Mother-infant recognition. Abbies use pheromones like we use words.”

“So why are you effectively cutting out that thing’s tongue?”

“Because the last thing we want is for him to tell all his friends he’s in trouble. Don’t get me wrong. I love the fence. I trust the fence. But several hundred abbies on the other side trying to figure out how to save their brother makes me a little uncomfortable.” Pilcher glanced down at Ethan’s waist. “You still aren’t wearing your revolver.”

“I’m here. In the mountain. What does it matter?”

“It matters, Ethan, because I asked you to do it. It’s a simple thing, isn’t it? Wear a gun at all times. Look the goddamn part.”

Ethan stared back through the glass.

One of the scientists was leaning over the abby’s face, shining a penlight into its left eye as it hissed.

It looked to be between six and seven feet tall.

Arms and legs like cords of intertwined steel fiber.

Ethan couldn’t take his eyes off the beast.

Its black talons as long as his fingers.

“Are they intelligent?” Ethan asked.

“Oh my, yes.”

“As smart as chimpanzees?”

“Their brains are larger than ours. Because of obvious communication barriers, testing their intelligence—on our terms—becomes problematic. I’ve attempted a battery of social and physical tests, and it’s not that they can’t do them. They just refuse. It would be like me trying to test you and you telling me to stick it up my ass sideways. That sort of a response. We did capture a somewhat compliant specimen several months ago. She’s down in cage nine. Low hostility rating. We call her Margaret.”

“How low?”

“I gave her recall tests sitting across a table from her in her cage. Now I did have two guards behind me pointing shotguns loaded with twelve-gauge slugs at her chest. But still—she displayed no signs of aggression.”

“How’d you test her?”

“With a simple child’s memory game. Walk with me.”