“You didn’t make any adjustments before you tested it on Charlotte Rowe?”

“Like I said, I had a different theory.”

“You were counting on her to have a different brain?”

Dylan just stares at him.

Shoot him, Cole thinks. Shoot him right now. Anyone who could give that pill to an unsuspecting person after watching someone tear themselves apart—

“It works, Cole,” Dylan whispers, as if he can read Cole’s thoughts. “I was right. It works. And whether you can admit or not, you want to know why. You have to know. We both do.”

After a deep but quiet breath, Dylan continues. “No amount of social progress will ever change the average difference in physical strength between the genders. It must be leveled with biochemistry. And until it is, the most persistent and insidious crimes in our society will continue day in and day out, across the globe.”

“And your mother will still be dead,” Cole says.

“Yes, and cheap pop psychology will still be incapable of distracting me from my goals.”

“We’re in agreement there.”

“Activate The Consortium, Cole. Enlist their surveillance technologies. Hell, they could use it as a chance to test something new of theirs. But if you tell them the truth, if you tell them everything I’ve told you and you show them the video, they’ll see the potential. They’ll see we can’t miss a minute of this. This is everything we’ve been working toward.”

Is this all aging is? Cole wonders. The discovery that a lapse in judgment like the one he showed with Dylan could have a lasting ripple effect?

Or is he just blaming Dylan for the fact there’s a part of him that doesn’t want to give up on Project Bluebird, either?

These are private thoughts. Not to be even mulled over in Dylan’s presence. God knows, the man’s smart enough to detect them and use them to his advantage, no matter how silent Cole remains.

Cole starts to leave.

“My guess is she’s in a town called Altamira,” Dylan says, “just south of Big Sur, west of the 101 freeway in the adjacent valley.”

This news stops Cole in his tracks, which he’s pretty sure was Dylan’s intention. “So you don’t need us to find her.”

“She’ll use Zypraxon again. Mark my words. And when she does, that’s when we convince her to come in for testing, and that’s when you get those vials of paradrenaline you’ve always been after.”

“And if I just bring her in now and get whatever I want from her?”

“You won’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re not me.”

“Is that a compliment or an insult?”

“She’s had one successful run. On the third or fourth, she could go lycan, just like the others. There’s no telling. Better to hang back and see how she performs. See if she’s worth tipping your hand to. Because if she’s not and you bring her in and reveal everything we’ve done, there’s only one way to be rid of her, and you’re not very good at letting people die.”

“Some people call it murder.”

Dylan doesn’t answer.

Cole can feel surrender in his bones, can feel it relaxing his limbs and his posture, and possibly his face, before he can stop it, which gives him no choice but to continue past Dylan and start for the helicopter. The engine chugs as the rotary blades begin to spin.

“Cole?”

He turns.

“It’s good to be working with you again,” Dylan says.

“Suck my dick,” Cole answers with a smile. “Again.”

Then he heads for the helicopter with Ed on his heels.

They’ve just flown back over the state line into California when Ed lets out a startled grunt. Since they’ve boarded, he’s been listening to his recording of Cole and Dylan’s conversation with noise-canceling headphones.

A few minutes ago, something inspired him to start a web search on his phone, and now he’s eager for Cole to see the results.

Cole takes the phone.

Instantly he recognizes the face that accompanies the article. It’s like seeing an old college classmate, someone who was familiar to him on a daily basis for a short period of his past but has since vanished from his life entirely. This isn’t one of his Stanford classmates, however.

Her hair’s completely different now, her face longer and more adult. But she’s the girl in the video. “It’s Burning Girl.”

“That explains everything,” Ed says.

“Not everything,” Cole answers.

And Ed says nothing, maybe because he knows Cole’s right.

20

When Luke was in college, he didn’t know the meaning of a day off.

Days off were for other people. People who didn’t have life plans. People who didn’t use wipe-off pens to turn one window of their dorm rooms into a running list of both daily and weekly tasks and objectives.

If he didn’t have class, he was studying or working one of two jobs, or he was in the gym. Holidays, especially the long ones, were spent doing prep work for whatever classes he was planning to take the following semester. It always gave him a thrill to walk into a language course already fluent in basic conversational phrases.

Yeah, how’d that work out for you, hotshot? You’re really wowing Mona with your Mandarin, aren’t you?

He’s not too crazy about days off now, either. Especially since his job feels like a monotonous grind that only uses a third of his available mental energy. When he shelves his badge after a long week, he doesn’t feel the kind of bone-deep exhaustion and satisfaction he associates with hard work.

Instead he feels restless and bored.

A slug of Heineken should help.

When his cell phone rings, he jumps, spilling beer down the front of his shirt. He grabs for it, expecting to see Mona’s name on the caller ID, but he doesn’t recognize the number.

“Howdy, hometown hero,” Marty says when Luke answers.

“OK. We can go with that, I guess.”

“Still want to see Trina?”

Luke stands, brushing beer foam from the front of his T-shirt.

“I’d like to be in touch with her, yeah. But I didn’t say I could—”

“You’re renting the old Hickman place, right?”

“Yeah, but—”

“We’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

“Wait. Now?”

“No, not now. Twenty minutes.”

“Yeah, I’m not really ready to receive visitors.”

“Ah, just brush off the Cheetos dust and put the porn away. She’s not expecting high tea, for Christ’s sake.”

“I’m not watching porn.”

“And it’s not gonna be visitors plural. Just her. I’m gonna wait outside in case you start wailing on each other.” For some reason, Marty cracks up like this is the funniest joke anyone’s ever made.

“Yeah, or maybe this evening I can meet her in town or something, and we can grab a cup of coffee or a—”

“What’s your problem, Jack? Do you want to make this right or not?” Marty barks. “She’s in town, she doesn’t have much time, and she’s willing to see you. Isn’t this what you wanted?”

“Why doesn’t she have much time?”

“Ask her yourself. In twenty minutes.”

“Marty—”

“Oh, and by the way, she changed her name. Goes by Charley now.”

“OK.”

“You know, probably because of people like you.”

Marty hangs up.

Luke reaches for his beer and downs the remainder of it. Whoever said you can’t go home again was just engaging in a bunch of wishful thinking.

As Marty drives, Charlotte studies the pill in her palm.

Up close and in broad daylight, she can see the wrongness of it, the lumpiness that suggests it didn’t come off a factory assembly line. In Dylan’s office, she’d been distracted by too many things to notice the strangeness of the pills or the cheapness of their packaging.

“Take it,” Marty says. “Soothe an old man’s nerves.”

“You’re not that old,” she says.

“Come on, Charley. You don’t want me busting in on your old high school bully with guns blazing, do you?”

“I don’t want to waste a pill over something that’s probably not true.”

“What? You got big plans for the rest?”

“We’ve been over this.”

“Not really. I mean, I get it. It’s important. What they can do. Maybe they could help people in the right hands. Only problem is, the hand that gave it to you doesn’t seem like one of those hands.”

“I’m having a hard time believing Luke Prescott is in on this, Marty.”

“You had no idea Dylan was in on it, did you? And you still don’t really have any idea what it even is.”

Ouch.

“Fine.”

She swallows the pill as if it were an Advil and turns her attention to the road.

They’d arrived in darkness early that morning, after which she’d slept until noon, occasionally roused by the sounds of Marty moving about the house, having low conversations with guys who’d dropped by throughout the morning, other sober men he’d enlisted to help protect her. “I’ve kept their secrets. It’s not asking much of them to return the favor,” Marty told her. Each time she woke, this thought comforted her enough to send her back to sleep.