She didn't like this, but she let me go. Outside I half expected Dr. Gloria to be waiting for me with a disapproving frown on her face, but no.

Rovil's room was to the left. I turned right, toward town. It was 9:40. I had twenty minutes to make it. It should be plenty of time, but I walked fast just in case. The night was still alarmingly muggy, and by the time I reached the Discount Gas & Liquor, sweat was rolling down my ribs.

The sign on the door said 10AMa10PM MONaSAT. I was there with minutes to spare.

I walked the aisles, considering the rows of gla.s.s bottles. Not a big bottle, I decided. Just enough to get me through the night. I circled back to the front of the store. The pocket sizes were on the shelf behind the cash register. The clerk was an old Latino with wild tufts of gray hair. His eyes tracked me from beneath the shelter of an imposing mon.o.brow.

After a minute he said, "We are closing."

"I know, I know."

"Are you buying or not?"

"Just relax, okay? I'm deciding."

He stared at me.

"Smirnoff is on sale," he said.

"I f.u.c.king hate Smirnoff's."

Another minute pa.s.sed.

"Wild Turkey?" he asked.

"Jesus f.u.c.king Christ!" I said.

I stalked out. The skies were as empty as my hands.

The human egg is a Mrs. Bennet, desperate to marry off her daughters. She starts life with as many chromosomes as any other cell in the body, but when hormones sound the alert she divides herself, making poor little daughter cells, impoverished things with only one set of chromosomes, each in great need of a long-tailed prince to make her whole. The male germline cells were just as desperate. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a sperm must be in want of a matching strand of DNA.

Well, f.u.c.k Mr. Darcy, and his sperm too. A couple of eggs could do the job on their own, thanks to modern science.

Mikala and I decided to make a child out of only ourselves, pairing up two half sets of chromosomes. The process was a few years old, created by a (female) scientist in Melbourne, Australia. It could create only daughters-and debt. The $85,000 bill was not covered by any insurance and was definitely not something Mikala could ask her family for. We emptied our savings and cashed in our 401ks, gambling on a long shot. The success rate was somewhere below thirty percent. But we were optimists.

Both of us became pre-pregnant together. We gave each other shots of Follistim to stimulate our follicles and Cetrotide to stem the tide of ovulation. And when it came time to mix our eggs, we flew to Australia, and in a hotel room loaded up the so-called "trigger shot" of chemicals extracted from the urine of pregnant women. We giggled and made jokes about p.i.s.sed-off fat ladies. Then we counted to three and pulled the trigger together.

They put us under during the egg extraction. By the time we awoke in adjoining recovery rooms, our sides aching from the puncture wounds of long needles, the lab techs were already at work, trying to get our girls to pair up: one set of chromosomes from Mikala's eggs, one set from mine. Twenty-nine of these hybrid eggs fertilized. The doctors chose the dozen best prospects and put the second-stringers in the freezer. Then, on the third day, a catheter slid into my v.a.g.i.n.a and shot the lucky eggs into my uterus. The catheter, satisfied, immediately dozed off.

We flew home. For the next two weeks Mikala and I waited for an egg to implant and start growing into our girl. We were so nervous. We'd traveled so far, and sacrificed so much, that we could not admit that we'd made a terrible mistake.

I don't know now whether Mikala even wanted children. She told me she did, but it was clear to both of us that my desire for a child far outstripped hers. I was older, and my longing bordered on a biological imperative. For a long time I thought that she went through the process with me-shot by shot, appointment by appointment, over the course of a year-to make me happy. But that wasn't it, exactly. She wanted to prove she could make me happy. Mikala did not permit herself to fail at anything.

As for me, I powered forward on the plan with the certainty that a child would be the final catalyst to bind us together permanently, the last link in the benzene ring. Those two weeks after the implantation were the happiest I'd experienced in a long time, and the most nerve-racking. On several nights, Mikala and I fell asleep holding hands.

Then, nothing happened.

All but one of the eggs failed to implant, and that sole survivor clung to the placental wall for days before, inexplicably, letting go. They'd warned us that pregnancy was unlikely. We were scientists, and understood statistics. But the loss struck me like a judgment, like its own proof.

I went into mourning, but I didn't recognize it as that. I took a job as a fixed-term instructor at Loyola and stopped coming to Little Sprout. The lab didn't need me, and neither did Mikala. She'd become consumed by NME 110.

This latest iteration was performing amazingly well in animal tests. The rats refused to die or develop tumors, and in fact were prospering. They were happy, energetic, and smart. Memory tasks, especially visual memory, became trivial for them. They navigated mazes as if someone were whispering in their ear.

Months after, when it was too late, I realized that Mikala had been in mourning too. I understood why, when she saw those happy rats, she tried the drug, and why, after she had tasted it, she decided to use it again. Just a little touch of the G.o.d. A glow that told you that you weren't alone, that you were connected with all living things. And once that door to Heaven opened a crack, who could blame her for pushing it wide?

It was in February that I went out to dinner with Edo-without Mikala or Gil. Edo was excited about the progress with NME and wanted to sell; he'd already entered talks with Landon-Rousse and Kensington, Inc. Gil was ready to cash out, but Mikala and I had always said that we would remain in control of the intellectual property. We'd lease development and manufacturing rights, but the IP remained with us-even if it cost us millions in lost revenue. When we first enlisted Edo he'd said he was fine with this, but that was when our chance of success had been minuscule. I think he always a.s.sumed that if Little Sprout produced something viable, he could talk us into selling.

And he was right.

"The marriage is over," I told him.

Edo expressed shock, then sympathy. He was always good at social niceties. But he was a businessman first, and immediately understood what this meant for him. He tried hard to tamp down his excitement. "Of course you must take care of yourself," he said. "Do you think this would change Mikala's mind-make her vote with us?"

"Never."

Edo nodded. He had expected this answer. It did not change his plans, however; with my vote we did not need Mikala's.

"I need a favor," I said.

"Of course," Edo said. He knew I'd demand something for my agreement, because that's what he would have done. I told him the amount I needed to borrow from him, and that I needed it now.

"May I ask what for?" he said.

"Ransom money," I said. He laughed, thinking I was joking.

Edo sent me the paperwork the next day. He was too much of a shark to trust our deal to a handshake. In return for the loan, I gave him the right to vote as my proxy, without relinquishing any IP rights. The money immediately transferred to my account. Two days after that I paid for the release of seventeen frozen eggs.

I woke to a hand shaking me. "Trouble," a voice said.

"Gloria?" The room was dark, but the angel glowed with artificial light. "You came back." It was embarra.s.sing how happy I was to see her.

"It's Ollie," she said, and pointed toward the bathroom. A sliver of light shone at the bottom of the door.

I sat up, pawed for the clock, finally lifted it in both hands: 2:45 a.m.

"Ollie?" I called. I pulled myself out of bed and made my way to the bathroom door. "You all right?"

Ollie said something I couldn't catch. The door was unlocked. I pushed it open and squinted against the light.

She sat on the edge of the tub, arms on her bare legs, staring hard at the floor. She'd laid out sc.r.a.ps of toilet paper. No, not sc.r.a.ps, shapes: stars, squares, triangles, cigar rolls. She'd arranged them on the tile in the small s.p.a.ce according to a scheme I didn't understand.

"Whatcha doing, sweetie?" I asked gently. It was the voice you'd use on a growling dog as you reached for the door.

"I'm your gun," she said without looking up.

"What?"

"You brought me here to kill Edo."

"What? No!"

She looked me in the eye. "Of course you did. You got me out of the hospital and brought me here and loaded me up with clues-and now you're going to aim me at him. Bang. You get the girl, and I go to jail. But no one can put this on you, because I chose to shoot."

"That's crazy."

"Then what's the plan?" Ollie asked. "What are you going to do when you meet him? What are you going to do with the girl?"

"I don't know! There is no plan."

"You're lying. You know what I used to do. You brought me here to do it again."

"I don't know what you used to do-you never told me."

She squinted at me. She opened her backpack and brought out a silver pistol with a black grip.

"Jesus, what are you-?"

"This is a Sig Sauer P226 with an E-squared grip. It's my favorite sidearm. I've had it since Toronto."

I didn't know what was more alarming, that she had a gun, or a favorite.

"It's that she's got a gun," Dr. Gloria said.

"I don't blame you for bringing me," Ollie said. "You were probably afraid that you wouldn't have the strength to do it when the time came." She smiled tightly. "I can be your strength."

"Look, sweetie ... no." I leaned toward her. "That's not what I-"

Ollie put her hand on the gun. I sat back on my heels.

"You're scaring me," I said.

"I don't mean to."

"Have you taken your meds?"

"Don't condescend to me."

"I think it's time to take those pills."

"That's not an option right now," Ollie said. "It's too dangerous. The cowboy is still out there. Edo has your daughter. Rovil could be working with Edo, or with Gil. The text message could be a trap. They could be trying to get you out there in the desert and-"

"Hon, please..." I held out my hands, palms up. Nothing to fear from me. "I need you to stay here tomorrow."

She looked shocked. "I'm not leaving you."

You're already gone, I thought.

I couldn't call the police or we all went home. I couldn't call 9-1-1 to have her committed, because they would call the police. But if she got in that car tomorrow, someone would die. I just wasn't sure who.

I covered my face with my hands. I might have been praying.

"Give me the words," I said to Dr. Gloria.

"There's got to be another way," the angel said. "If you do this to her-"

"I'll make it up to her later."

"There may not be a later. If she loses trust in you, then she's got no one."

"Give me the words."

Dr. Gloria removed her gla.s.ses. I'd never seen her tear up before. She cleared her throat and said, "I don't love you."

"What else?" I asked the doctor.

"I will never love you."

I began to speak. I laid out the words the doctor had given me like scalpels. I convinced Ollie that she'd been lying to herself, that I found it kind of sad that she thought just because we had s.e.x and shared a few late-night conversations, that I'd told her things I'd never told anyone else-that somehow that meant something. Her damaged brain had taken a few bits of data and strung them into the story she wanted to hear-a fairy tale.

It was not as hard to convince her as I would have thought. Ollie already suspected that I did not love her. She'd invented a dozen conspiracies to explain why I came for her, why I stayed with her. After only thirty minutes of tears and yelling and icy insults, she threw on her clothes and slammed the motel door behind her.

I'd won.

I'd won.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO.

The two men kneeling in the cornfield weren't scared, despite the hoods and the plasticuffs and the near certainty that they were about to die. The Vincent had gotten used to this stoicism by now. He'd been on the trail for two weeks and had interrogated so many of these pastors and deacons of the Church of the Hologrammatic G.o.d, each one calmer and more pain-resistant than the last, that he was getting bored. It was a necessary job, like branding cattle, but it wasn't exactly rocket science.

The original a.s.signment had been to follow Lyda Rose and engage in heavy conversation with whomever gave her the drug. That had led him to the first church and that Mexican pastor, then into the woods of Cornwall Island for the most confusing dead end of his career: fake cops, fake smugglers, and two teenage Afghan gangsters. A circus.

He'd been worried about Lyda's ex-Special Forces, ex-SIGINT sidekick. He'd known a lot of those folks back when he worked with the government, and some of them were G.o.dd.a.m.n nuts. He didn't recognize the name or face of the woman-Olivia Skarsten was probably as fake as his own new name-but they'd probably known some of the same people. Those social circles weren't all that d.a.m.n big.

If he'd had his druthers he would have shot Rose and Skarsten both, just because they'd seen his face, but the employer had given him clear orders on how to handle them. He was forced to let them escape.

He had his own trail to follow. He found the second church in Toronto just by asking around. It wasn't that hard; the thing about evangelicals is that they really wanted you to come to church. He also changed his interrogation method. He didn't have to spend all night coercing some martyr who believed Jesus was perched on his shoulder. He just had to spend one hour coercing two guys.

That led him, eventually, to Detroit, the kookiest d.a.m.n city he'd ever visited. It was the first time he'd seen abandoned homes and decrepit skysc.r.a.pers alongside acres of fresh farmland, all part of some inner-city rejuvenation project to turn the industrial revolution inside out. h.e.l.l, maybe even white people would come back to the city. That would take some doing, but it would happen. The government was broke, and there was plenty more cheap land to buy. A man could raise cattle out here. Of course that man would have to get over his agoraphobia and panic attacks, and maybe buy the upgraded bison that were as big as Saint Bernards, but it was doable. Perhaps even Vinnie and the Vincent could work together. Rancher and Gunslinger, working side by side.