Final shadows, p.5
Final Shadows, page 5
New enemies.
He expected losses. Expected some plans to prove . . . unsuccessful. That was just the nature of things. What had always been the nature of things.
So many different plans in different places had been attempted, some of them ambitious. Some costly in resources, but with a potentially worthwhile payoff.
Some too ambitious.
So there would always be adjustments to be made along the way.
But there were more players on the board than ever before, on the board and in motion, like that unstoppable ocean moving silently under ice, and that made Duran uneasy. It made him uneasy that Murphy had uncovered information he’d intended to leave long-buried, and it made him uneasy that players recruited by Murphy and her group, especially recently, had more skills and more resources than ever before.
“Hello, Duran. Fancy meeting you here.”
FOUR
He had been moving, unusually preoccupied by his own thoughts, in the darkness between two buildings, but stopped the instant he heard her voice, consciously aware of a wry lack of surprise that she had found him in the night.
Murphy had the knack of finding and knowing all kinds of things he would have kept from her if he could have.
“Can you see in the dark?” she asked in an idle tone, perhaps honestly curious. Or perhaps not.
When she stepped closer to him, emerging from the darkness not three feet in front of him, he caught the catlike gleam of her sharp green eyes.
“Not one of my abilities,” he admitted, holding his voice calm and steady. Keeping his hands in the pockets of his zip-up jacket because it was chilly this early even in June and he hated the cold. And because it was an unthreatening position. Which counted for quite a lot when one was facing Murphy.
“It’s one of mine. Does that surprise you?”
“Not really,” he said dryly.
A low laugh escaped her. And another half step brought her closer, so that he could see more than her eyes, so he could see that angular, striking, curiously youthful face, her hair pale in the dim light, so likely some shade of blond now.
She changed it often, apparently on a whim. At least once it had been purple.
He could see that her own hands were also in the pockets of the army jacket she often wore.
He didn’t have to see the gun she undoubtedly had trained on him inside one of those pockets. This was not a temporary truce, a white-flag meet planned in advance. This was two wary enemies encountering one another in the night.
Enemies met carefully, especially in the dark.
And Murphy was nothing if not very, very careful.
“What are you doing back in Charleston, Duran? You agreed to pull your people out weeks ago.”
“Yes. And I did. But—it wasn’t an open-ended agreement, Murphy.” Something she had once said to him. Something he knew she would remember.
“So many things aren’t. In our world, yours and mine. In this world of . . . lies, half-truths, and a kind of understanding born of experience.”
He couldn’t tell how she felt about that.
“Why are you out patrolling?” she asked suddenly. “This is not something you normally do. In fact, I’ve never known you to do it before. Ever.”
“I’ve done every job I’ve asked my people to do,” he said evenly, wondering how closely she had been watching him, and for how long. “Even a simple patrol.”
“Is that what this is?” Her head tilted slightly, birdlike, and the sharp green eyes caught what light there was and gleamed. “But you’re not a simple man, are you, Duran? Nothing about you is simple.”
“I imagine that could be said about most people,” he responded in a pleasant tone.
“But some more than others. I did notice you took care of our little problem weeks ago. Eliot Wolfe. So no run to be lieutenant governor of the state. Or any other political office. Not for him, at least. Never for him.” There was the faintest of emphasis on that last word.
She knows there are others being readied and placed in positions of power. But does she know who? Where? Does she know why—even though I don’t?
He didn’t know how he felt about the possibility of that either.
“Wolfe had become a liability. You were right about that.”
“I was also right about Tasha Solomon and Brodie.”
Something in her voice made his own attention sharpen. “There was a connection,” he said slowly.
“There’s more now,” she said. “Much more. A complete and total bond. What seems to require an intense emotional as well as physical joining, at least for us. Not that I wanted to intrude on their privacy, you understand, but . . . Well. The psychic thing. It keeps a lot of us more connected than you might think.”
It was something Duran had long suspected and about which he was far from happy. But all he said was, “That’s not something you can control. Not something you can deliberately create.”
“Not a weapon for our side, you mean?”
“Not a . . . tool, shall we say.”
“No, it doesn’t appear to be,” she responded readily. “So far, at least. Nor can you create that . . . tool . . . deliberately. Or even by accident. Because it isn’t happening among your people, is it, Duran?”
He was silent.
Being Murphy, she didn’t really care that he was silent. She had things to say, for whatever reasons of her own, and she would say them.
“It’s never happened. You don’t have a single pair of bonded psychics. Even those born psychics you stole from their normal lives and managed to . . . breed . . . never formed any sort of psychic or emotional bond, did they, Duran?”
He remained silent.
Murphy still didn’t seem at all disturbed by his lack of response. “It was something we figured out when we understood that Tasha was among your earliest generations of . . . engineered . . . born psychics. Perhaps even the first truly successful generation, part of the first truly meaningful experiment. Born in one of your little breeding operations, her parents two born psychics captured or co-opted by you into mating to produce offspring. But no bond ever formed between Tasha’s biological parents, did it? Even the mother was probably unable to bond with the child she carried and bore, despite the human biological imperative to do just that. It was one reason Tasha was adopted out to nonpsychic parents.”
“No, they didn’t bond,” he said finally.
“Did the mothers even recognize their children once they were born?” She sounded mildly curious, but also as if she wanted a theory confirmed.
Duran wondered how far he was putting his head into a noose, but heard himself answering anyway. “The mothers didn’t even remember being pregnant or giving birth within hours afterward.”
“Uh-huh. What about all those other born psychics you so carefully matched with more born psychics? Did those men and women bond at all?”
“No.”
“Didn’t you give them time for a little romance before you shoved them into a bed?” she asked mockingly.
“That wasn’t—” He cursed himself silently, because he always had trouble guarding his tongue with her, and Murphy was quick. Too quick.
“That wasn’t why they didn’t bond,” she murmured. “Because that wasn’t the way you handled the . . . situation. It’s something else I’ve been thinking about these last weeks. Pondering. Why there are clearly damaged mothers carrying psychic babies, but the babies are never kept there long after birth. Not long at all.”
A part of Duran wished he could have been surprised by her knowledge. But he wasn’t.
“What I think,” Murphy said slowly, “is that your people didn’t know it was anything more than biology. Only the mating of a male and a female. Should have been just that simple. But there were failures that bothered your medical people and scientists because it was clear something was lacking. So the decision was made to go with pure science. In vitro fertilization, for one thing. Conception in a petri dish without all the messy human complications of bringing two people together and hoping to strike a spark.
“So much simpler. Just abduct a few human females and steal some eggs, abduct a few human males and steal some semen, mix together under the proper laboratory conditions, add in biological material from your people, whatever substance or attributes your scientists developed that was the latest promise of a breakthrough, and let biology take its course. Then all you need is a willing—or mindless—womb in which to plant your creation.
“That would have been the most efficient, especially if you’re aiming for your idea of the . . . perfect . . . offspring. And it was only biology. So, of course, your people tried with some of your very willing women first, those females of your people with all the traits you wanted passed on to their offspring. Their eggs, I’m guessing, and enhanced. And the sperm of psychic human males, also possibly . . . enhanced. Those were the fertilized eggs implanted in your females in those very early days more than decades ago. Am I warm with that one?”
Duran was silent only a moment. “There was some early laboratory experimentation. Which ultimately failed to produce . . . acceptable results.”
“I’m guessing serious birth defects.”
“Which produced early miscarriages,” he said briefly.
“Did any survive?”
“Not long,” he replied in an even briefer answer.
“I guess some wombs are more hostile than others to . . . the implantation and nurturing of genetically manipulated new life.”
“So it appears.”
* * *
• • •
Sadie Fletcher knew, as she fought her way out of the nightmare, that Duncan had been right there with her. It was part of their connection: He shared her telepathic communications and she shared his clairvoyance.
Which was, even after several years together, still a bit disconcerting. Especially when it happened during sleep.
She finally woke with a jerk to find her husband’s arms around her, and knew instantly that he was already awake.
“It wasn’t a nightmare,” he murmured.
Sadie could see past his shoulder that it was still dark outside, before dawn. Inside, their bedroom was lit only by the light in the bathroom beyond a half-closed door. She couldn’t bear totally dark rooms.
“It wasn’t?” She wanted to believe it had been. Surely it had been.
“No. I don’t think so. I think . . . a lot of very, very young psychics screamed out for help, even knowing it was too late for anyone to help them.”
“There was a fire,” Sadie said, her voice shaking. “Someone . . . I think someone did it deliberately. To kill the babies.”
Duncan nodded silently.
“Jamie,” she whispered. Their two-year-old son, sleeping peacefully just down the hall, was already showing definite signs that he had inherited his mother’s telepathic abilities.
“We can’t know he’s in danger,” Duncan said steadily. “What I got was something that happened far away from here. Not sure where, but . . . We’ve taken all the precautions they recommended, and then some. We won’t let anyone take or hurt our son, Sadie.”
She drew a shuddering breath. “I still don’t want to—to fight with the others. I know it’s selfish of me, but—”
“Shhh.” His arms tightened around her. “You were pregnant with Jamie when they found us. They said it would be too dangerous for us to join. That we might be able to help later, but not then. They told us how to protect ourselves and Jamie. And we have the number we can call. Any hour, they said, day or night.”
“Maybe we should call, Duncan. Those babies . . . So many of them. So many of them murdered horribly. What if the other side is going after babies, after kids? Psychic kids? Born psychic kids?”
“Sadie—”
“We need to know that. We need to know what’s happening.”
He was silent for a few moments, his hands stroking her back, trying to soothe. But he knew his wife. “You won’t rest until we know what’s happening, will you?”
“I can’t. We have to know if the other side is more of a danger to us now, to Jamie. Something might have changed.”
He couldn’t deny the possibility of that. They had been warned that too much was still uncertain, that they were still learning about the other side. Their capabilities. Their motivations and goals.
“Call now, Duncan. Please?”
He kissed her gently, then shifted slightly to reach for the lamp on the nightstand. And then for the portable phone of the landline they had kept only for this . . . possibility.
* * *
• • •
Murphy nodded slowly. “I’m guessing you also discovered, when you returned to the old-fashioned way, that the couples you were matching based on DNA or fertility or some other criteria simply had absolutely nothing else in common. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if you had to routinely give the men little blue pills and the women something similar to force a physical response in order to get any kind of mating accomplished.”
He was silent.
“Come on, Duran. You know I’ll find out sooner or later. Save us both the headache.”
“We were unable to . . . force . . . actual matings between your people without medical intervention,” he said finally.
“There’s a whole lot of bad in that sentence,” she observed without visible emotion.
Duran was silent.
“So . . . he got a little blue pill or something like it. And what did she get? A female response in a human mating is a lot more complex than a male’s, especially when she’s confronted by a stranger, and even more when the goal is a pregnancy. A lot more has to go on in the female mind and emotions before the body is willing and accepting. Maybe because we’re the ones who take all the risks, the ones who carry and bear the offspring. We have a biological imperative to choose our mates carefully.”
He was silent.
“Rape?” she said coldly.
“No physical force,” he said after several very long beats of frosty silence.
“No physical force. But there were a lot of social restraints placed on women back when your people started all this, restraints that too many of them would have been raised to obey. Good girls need a wedding ring first. And it wasn’t part of the plan to marry couples, at least not unless and until you knew a mating would be . . . successful . . . for your purposes.
“That being the case, something was surely needed to induce compliance if not willingness, especially in the women. So you did what was necessary. The men were easy. Easy to manipulate, easy to arouse or, if not, certainly easy to drug, and I’m sure you made sure most never knew they’d sired offspring. But the women . . . That took more than a little blue pill. That took something that was more than a temporary fix. Because it wasn’t just about sex with the women, a few minutes of mindless physical pleasure. They had to be willing to get pregnant. To carry to term. To give birth.”
“Murphy—”
“I’m not really guessing.”
“Yes. I know.”
“I want confirmation, Duran.”
“Why?”
“I want to know how much damage was done.”
He was silent.
Murphy nodded. “The women were a lot more trouble. So you fucked up their minds to make them willing for at least nine months,” Murphy said. “Some kind of psychological or physical tinkering with their minds, their brains. A flood of synthetic hormones at best. More likely something a lot more drastic. Because whatever you did turned them into happy walking baby factories. Compliant, even perhaps eager. Stepford mamas. You do understand that term?”
“I’m familiar with it. Stepford women: mindless robots intended to replace living women.”
“Right. Fictional, or so we’d always believed. And naturally programmed with all those lovely male ideas of . . . perfect womanhood.”
“We did not intend to alter their personalities,” Duran said.
“Really? But whatever you used, whatever you did, to make them willing, well . . . it did alter their personalities. Maybe erased their personalities. Even more, it lasted longer than you’d bargained for, didn’t it, Duran? It lasted indefinitely. Perhaps even permanently.”
“There are always unintended consequences,” he said evenly. “We’ve discussed such things before.” He got the distinct impression that Murphy was controlling what he knew was a formidable temper.
He was not surprised.
He was very wary.
“Stepford mamas who loved getting pregnant, being pregnant, who followed all the habits and rules to keep themselves healthy, who loved their babies—until they were born. Then the moms forgot the whole experience, as if it had never happened, focused entirely on the next man, the next mating, the next pregnancy. Their own bodies and minds demanded that. You had created in them a biological drive to mate and give birth—but not to love and nurture their young. More unintended consequences?”
He nodded, silent.
“Yeah. But that wasn’t all, I think. After those first . . . manufactured . . . psychic babies they bore, after whatever it was you did to make them so happy to breed for you, none of your Stepford mamas were psychic anymore,” she said softly.
That did surprise him. And he wasn’t sure whether she was guessing—or whether she or one of their other psychics had gotten past the shadows and close enough to know for certain. Or even if they could know for certain.
“No. They weren’t. Most read as psychic, but seem . . . unaware. Unable to tap into and use those abilities.”
“No matter how strong they were before.”
