When the group sees her, they fall silent. The new security team members retreat, headed in the direction of the helicopter, which is coming in for a landing just down the dirt road.

Cole starts toward her. He doesn’t look as exhausted or dazed as he did earlier, but there’s an openness to his expression that startles her. As if he thinks they’ve shared something that makes them friends. And maybe they have.

If the story’s true.

“Are you leaving?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“And the less I know about where you’re going, the better.”

“Probably. Is he still resting?” She nods. “Good. They’ll take good care of him. They’ll take good care of both of you.”

Better care than you did, she thinks. He smiles as if he knows she’s thinking it and is grateful she didn’t say it out loud.

“I’ll be back,” he says.

When he turns for the helicopter, she calls out his name. He turns.

“Why did you tell me? About what happened to you in Colorado. Did you want me to think we were the same?”

“Oh, no. Not at all.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re not the same. You’ve never been raped. You’ve never even been beaten or held down against your will. The one time someone broke into your house, you were able to knock him to the floor in ten seconds flat. And when you were abducted by Pemberton, it was by your own design, remember? You’ve had horrible things happen to you, no doubt. But they’re not the same as what happened to me. Or Luke. Or your mother. I mean, that’s Noah’s theory, isn’t it? That Zypraxon works in you because you haven’t undergone severe physical trauma. That the emotional shock of such trauma deformed the neural pathways in all our other test subjects, and that’s why they went lycan.”

“It’s just a theory,” she says quietly.

“We’ll see. The point is, I didn’t tell you what happened to me so that you’d think we were the same, because we’re not, Charlotte. We’re not the same at all. I told you so that you’d know I see you as something other than dollar signs. Or a subject. Or a project.”

“And what do you see me as?”

“Hope.” His smile strikes her as a little too cheery and forced. The raw and vulnerable person he’d been in Luke’s room a few hours before is being covered up again, piece by icy piece.

“Did Noah know, back when he was Dylan?”

The question startles the smile off his face. “He had his suspicions that there was some . . . trauma in my past, as he put it. He knew one of my front teeth isn’t real.”

“And did he tell you that you could accept that what happened to you made you a better person without celebrating the people who’d done it to you?” Cole’s answer is in his shocked silence. “And is that how he got you to let down your guard and do things that maybe you shouldn’t have? Like swallow a strange new pill without stopping to Google it first? Or send four test subjects to die horrible deaths one after the other in some lab somewhere?”

He doesn’t answer; she doesn’t need him to.

“Then we’re the same,” she says.

“Well, then,” he says quietly. “If it makes you hate me a little less . . .”

She shrugs, and he laughs.

He’s turned for the helicopter when she says, “Did you ever tell your father about what happened in Colorado?”

“Yes.”

“What did he do?”

There it is again, some flash of the authentic Cole, the one she met for the first time just a few hours before. She can’t tell if he’s studying her or coming to some sort of decision. Eventually, he looks to the dirt between them, then takes a few steps toward the porch.

“I’m going to send you a package tomorrow,” he finally says quietly. “The contents will be familiar to you. And the instructions will be clear.”

“Instructions or orders?” she asks.

“Neither, really,” he says, smiling. “More like an invitation. For you and only you.”

“An invitation where?”

“I’m going to pay someone a visit,” he says, “and I’d like you to see how it goes.”

TruGlass, she realizes. Apparently he’s planning to wear a pair, and he is going to give her a monitor and a code for it, just like the ones he sent her five months ago, before they’d ever met in person.

When his helicopter rises into the air a few minutes later, the branches of the nearest trees dance in the downdraft, then the headlight swings south into the dark toward Altamira. Charley stays on the front porch, waiting until it’s out of sight completely so that she can pretend, just for a moment, that the ranch house behind her is a peaceful and ordinary one, and that the small town just to the south is once again only a tiny, forgotten little village in the middle of nowhere that waited patiently for her inevitable return.

Then she goes back inside to be with the man she loves.

41

When Donald Clements hits the light switch in his dining room and sees Cole sitting at the head of his long hardwood table, he raises his Glock 17 in both hands. Cole smiles, holds up the fifteen rounds they removed from the gun earlier that day while Donald was watering the lawn, and passes them to Scott Durham, who pockets them inside his jacket. Donald glances toward the front door, where he probably notices two more shadows blocking the nearest exist. Or maybe he’s looking to his alarm panel to wonder why it didn’t alert him to the presence of intruders.