But Delilah had not been tattooed with the figure of an animal. Instead she had a pyramid of three conjoined, dark green spirals, which Samuel had only seen once before, during a terrible vision he had experienced in one of the abandoned underground laboratories used to create the Takyn.

As his glimpse into Delilah’s life faded, Samuel accessed his encrypted journals, in which he recorded everything he envisioned, opened the file on his findings at the Monterey site, and began to read.

They processed at least five hundred children here; their confusion and pain haunts everything they touched. As before, all of the documentation has been removed and only a few pieces of equipment were left. I can’t go back into the dormitory rooms; the sorrow and terror overwhelms me.

I found a procedure room set apart from the others where some needles were left in an autoclave. As soon as I touched them, I saw the bastards gathered around the table, and the little red-haired toddler they had strapped on it. They didn’t speak, but one of the older men grew tired of the baby’s cries and sedated her with an injection directly into the base of her spine, where she was tattooed with a triangle of three green spirals.

They performed a biopsy via laparoscope and removed several ova. The lead physician then issued orders to isolate the child, whom he referred to as “Gaia,” to prevent any cross-contamination from other subjects before she was released to her caretaker.

I believe that baby might have been an enhanced female who had not yet been imprinted with a specific ability; that would explain the quarantine measures. They may have used or were planning to use her ova as templates for future generations. If she survived, her genes may reveal some important clues about how the rest of us were created.

Samuel closed the file and absently rubbed his aching leg. He had never told the rest of the group about his true motives in searching the country for the hidden labs: finding a cure for his own condition. Unlike Samuel, most of the group had in some way or another made peace with what they were. They had accepted that they had to live with their unnatural psychic abilities.

But none of the others had to live with what Samuel endured. The other aspect of his ability, the one he had kept hidden from the other Takyn, gave him the pre-cognitive ability to see into the timelines of the future, a power that he often could not control. It seemed to come over him whenever he was in close proximity to a person whose timeline had some great importance and yet was in imminent danger of being prematurely changed or terminated. He tried to save as many as he could, but often he was too late. Then he would endure the consequence of his failure: a preternatural backlash that stretched him on some psychic rack and tortured him for hours, sometimes days.

If it had been all in his head, Samuel might have learned to live with it. But failing to rescue a timeline resulted in real, physical damage to his spine, and the damage seemed to be growing more severe with each failure. He’d always hoped that eventually his precognitive ability would fade, but as he grew older, it seemed to be manifesting more often. After a failure and a particularly extended episode of suffering afterward, he finally went to a spinal surgeon for evaluation.

The prognosis had been far worse than anything he’d imagined: Thanks to the repeated injuries and his altered DNA, his immune system had begun to attack his spine. At the rate the deterioration was progressing, he had less than a year to live.

Findley guided the limousine through the automatic iron gate between two ten-foot stone walls that encircled Taske’s winter home, the somewhat palatial mansion he had inherited from his parents, along with several hundred acres of woods, hills, and streams. He always wintered here at Tannerbridge because it contained his happiest memories as well as the nerve center of his private operations. Findley and his new house manager, Morehouse, were the only staff he kept on during the holidays, but both men had no plans and Taske imagined the three of them would enjoy a quiet bachelors’ celebration of the season, and he would have at least a month of uninterrupted research into finding the identity and whereabouts of the elusive Delilah.

What troubled Taske the most was what he would have to do when he found his friend. He couldn’t afford to ask for her cooperation and be refused, not with all that was at stake. Nor could he invite her to take sanctuary with him, which would go against the rules they had established for the group. Delilah would never agree to it. The only thing he could do was the thing he found most abhorrent, the one transgression that he knew would appall her, and for which he would never forgive himself.

As soon as Taske located Delilah, he planned to kidnap her.

After Lilah awoke, it took only a few hours for her body to free itself from the effects of the drugs. Walker also seemed to be getting a little better, but he still couldn’t move freely, and harsh lines of pain etched deeper into his face as he suffered through several episodes of uncontrolled tremors.

“Is it the drugs?” Lilah whispered, holding on to him after the fourth time he convulsed.

“Wearing off.” The cords in his neck stood out as he seemed to be fighting against the reaction, but Lilah saw that he couldn’t control his movements or stop the shakes, which traveled down his arm and pounded his fist into the floor of the truck with hard, booming thuds.

Lilah caught his wrist and pulled his hand away from the floor. “It’s okay. I’ve got you.”

The tremors gradually slowed and then stopped as Walker went limp. Exhaustion and self-disgust filled his expression.

“Hey,” Lilah murmured. “Don’t do that. It’s not your fault.”

“Everything … ” He stopped and rested his brow against her shoulder, too tired to finish the thought.

The truck’s brakes squealed as it slowed down and came to a stop. Lilah listened to opening and slamming doors, and the fainter sound of two male voices arguing. They were too muffled to make out the words, but they drifted around the truck toward Lilah’s feet. Walker lifted his head, his eyes narrowing.

“Coming,” he warned her. “Check us. Quiet. Don’t move.”

She nodded, closing her eyes and holding still. The sound of the truck door being raised made her heart quake, but Walker turned his hand and pushed his stiff fingers through hers, holding them tight.

“See?” a young male voice said. “They ain’t moved. I told you, that sound was just from some boxes bouncing around.”

An older voice answered him with “Shut up, Joey.”

The truck bed dipped as someone climbed in. Lilah held her breath as she heard footsteps thump across the floor and the light over them was blotted out. Something prodded the tarp, a jabbing finger. It struck the knob of her elbow, which she instinctively held in a rigid position.

“It’s like nine degrees back here, Bob,” Joey said. “They’re ice cubes now, man.”

“Yeah, I guess,” the man standing over her said in a deeper, disgusted voice. “I coulda sworn I heard something.” A hand scraped against the canvas and then took a handful of it. “We gotta stop them from bopping around like this.”

As the tarp was pulled away, Lilah felt a biting cold flash of sensation, and the warm dampness of her skin vanished under a layer of hard ice crystals that enveloped her whole body. She couldn’t open her eyes now even if she wanted to; her eyelids were frozen shut.

“Nothing to tie them down with.” A stiff finger prodded her breast. “Hey, she’s not froze up all the way yet. Huh.” That was the younger man’s voice. “I wonder if she can still feel anything.”

“We dosed her with enough shit to kill three horses,” Bob snapped. “She’s a fucking Popsicle, pinhead.”

Lilah heard a grunt, and then her chest flattened as Walker’s body was rolled on top of her.

“What the hell are you doing?” Bob demanded.

“You said you don’t want them sliding all over the place. His weight’ll keep her down.” Joey snickered as he rearranged some boxes around them to keep them in place. “There. Now he’s not going anywhere, are you, Marine?” He nudged Lilah’s hip with his foot and brayed laughter. “This one’ll stay on top of you as long as you want, baby, so you two have a real good time.”

“You’re a perverted twerp.” Something rasped, and Bob sighed. “Christ, I feel like hell.”

“You’re just tired,” Joey said. “Let me drive for a while. You can catch some z’s.”

Silence stretched out as the men hovered. Lilah didn’t dare try to breathe, and her lungs felt as if they were going to burst. Finally she felt the canvas being pulled over them and the voices moved away.

“You better wake me before we cross into Mississippi,” she heard Bob say as he climbed out of the truck. “If we’re gonna get there before this frigging blizzard hits, we’ve gotta head north and take Seventy.”

The truck’s sliding door slammed down.

Chapter 7

Walker’s body pinned Lilah’s to the bed of the truck like a slab of concrete, preventing her from even wriggling beneath him. Even more frightening than his smothering weight was the rage she felt pouring from him, so deep and violent that it gripped him as tightly as the paralysis that had held him immobile. His anger drowned out everything: his reason, his self-control, even her own presence.

That inferno seemed to be bubbling up through his skin, for she could feel the layer of ice covering both of them rapidly melting; thin patches of it slid away from their limbs and fell like slush onto the floor around them.

Walker opened his eyes to see Lilah looking up at him, but he didn’t seem to recognize her. Her vision blurred as the frost on her eyelashes turned to fat beads; she blinked and they slid like tears into her hair. She felt like weeping, but with him on top of her like this she could hardly breathe.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

He moved then, grunting as he managed to prop some of his weight on his forearm, which allowed her to take a shallow breath. The shift also made her feel the stiff length of his penis pressing against her crotch. He couldn’t roll away from her, not wedged in as they were by the boxes Joey had moved. Lilah knew it wasn’t Walker’s fault, but the intimacy of their position made her cringe inside. They were total strangers who were only a few inches from having sex. She didn’t want him to see the shame she felt, so she turned her face away from him.