Brian Hodge - Prototype

She listened to the hum of the highway beneath them, shut her eyes, and felt Adrienne’s hand sliding tender across the seat to rub her knee. Listened until she heard Clay stir in the back, and speak up for more.

“And what’s the lesson of this one, do you think?” he asked.

“That the almas found a place in the world where they could still live in peace, even if it was the only place on earth left for them. So the almas aren’t really lost at all, not to anybody who bothers to understand. And if they can survive, in a time that’s completely wrong for them… maybe so can a few others who feel as lost as the almas must appear to the rest of the world.”

She smiled back at Clay, who briefly met her eyes before looking away. She waited for more questions but none came, and she thought, for a change, that this was probably for the best.

They reached Chapel Hill in mid-afternoon and found a motel. Toward dusk, Sarah phoned Kendra Madigan to let her know they were in town, and ask when she would prefer they come to her home.

“Let’s make it no later than ten-thirty tomorrow morning, all right? We’ll have a long, long day ahead of us. And you’ll promise me something? That each of you, you’ll get a good long night’s sleep tonight?”

“Promise,” Sarah said.

“Let me ask you something about this subject of yours,” and Ms. Madigan’s voice had dimmed, quieted. “Is he prone to violence when he learns things he might consider unpleasant?”

Sarah’s hand wrapped harder around the phone. “If it’s about himself… he’d more than likely turn his distress inward. What are you expecting?”

“I don’t expect anything specific, Ms. McGuire. We’ll just have to wait and see. And be ready. Because when someone’s under a hypnosis this deep…? It really is impossible to expect what might come bubbling up from so far down.”

Maximum efficiency depended on isolation; of this Valentine was convinced. The greatest movers among humanity — the Alexanders, the Saladins, the Stalins — might be the ones who commanded armies, but even they would remain forever vulnerable. The machinery of their power could grind to a halt by the designs of a single, well-placed individual. The mind, the will, that toiled in perfect isolation could never be betrayed by another.

Only by itself.

And so Patrick Valentine wondered if he might not soon find himself slipping. Opening his house to another this way, he was bound to feel the impact, his focus diluted. Come tomorrow, Daniel Ironwood would be here a week. The impact did not go unnoticed.

Even now, his bedroom was no refuge. Daniel’s voice, from the first floor: “Patrick! Get down here! Right now! ”

Scowling, he rose. He tossed aside the inventory lists he’d been scanning, supplied by Teddy this afternoon, a grocery list of the ordnance in a Maryland armory that soon would donate to the cause.

Downstairs he found Daniel on the floor, wound tight and coiled before the TV, an arm extended, bird-dog still. The face on the screen they knew well; they woke up with it every morning, and still he could never quite surmount that initial vertigo when seeing it worn by someone else.

Valentine watched, listened. The story was half-over, but the rest was not difficult to fill in. News from Texas: Lawyers for Mark Alan Nance had exhausted their final appeal, and no one was cutting him any slack for the Helverson’s defense. Execution was on for the middle of next week. In the grimmest room in Huntsville, a table waited with straps and tubes, needles and plungers.

Valentine could picture that table as clearly as if it were waiting for him, too. Perhaps it someday would.

“They’re really going to stick him this time. Aren’t they?” Daniel spoke with rare reverence. Behind his thick amber lenses his eyes may have been awestruck.

“Turn that thing off.” Valentine heard the pause before the click, Daniel assessing bullshit tolerance and deciding tonight there was none. He collapsed into his favored chair, frowned at Daniel; the remote control still dangled from the kid’s hand. “Don’t you ever read a newspaper?”

“What can I say?” Daniel shrugged. Those damned glasses; too hard to tell where his eyes were most of the time. “I like sound bites. It makes the news go down like a protein shake.”

“Probably want your food prechewed before you get it, too.”

“No, I lied,” he said, backtracking. “I hate getting my hands all inky. Women like clean hands. Speaking of… when the hell am I going to get laid, here, Patrick?”

“In a few nights. The middle of this week.”

“Why not tonight?”

“Because I say so.”

It was a parent’s answer, a peculiar thing to hear slipping from his own lips. But coupled with glowering eyes it was sufficient. There came no more argument.

He could have explained himself further but decided against it. The truth? It wasn’t the proper time to start letting him pass his nights in the penthouse with Ellie. Everything was cold, hard function here — Valentine never lost sight of this, even if he spared his protégés the worst of it — and letting Daniel sleep in her bed would have served none. Yet.

Timing was everything. The world was a vast machine, and if one looked beneath the veneer of chaos that it wore as a disguise, one could see how so many components were geared to their own clockwork mechanisms.

Ellie Pratt, a single cog, kept track of her monthly cycles at his insistence. If she was accurate, she would be fertile again beginning the middle of this week. An ovum would once more slide down its fallopian conduit, and that egg was his, bought and paid for. If he chose to reserve it for the sperm of another, that was his right.

Only then would he allow Daniel Ironwood to lie with her, like a father giving his blessing to an incestuous union between two offspring separated at birth, whose hormones overruled social taboo. Only when she lay ripe would he turn Daniel free of his leash, and only then could nature take its course. The moment had to be optimal, equal halves lust and fertility.

This could have been the problem with Timothy Van der Leun — Valentine had miscalculated timing. Brought him in, let the two of them get acquainted, allowed Van der Leun free access from almost the moment his flight had touched down. They had first gone to bed days before her window of ovulation, which Valentine recognized as his own libertarian mistake. Familiarity breeds contempt, or in this case, impotence. Timothy Van der Leun had been useless.

Fortunately, he had also been replaceable.

They were interchangeable, for Valentine’s purposes. And even Timothy hadn’t been his first choice. That honor had befallen the one in Los Angeles, a twenty-four-year-old scavenger and sometimes grifter named Bryce. Valentine had already been in contact with Bryce for two years, had supplied him with more information on his anomaly than he ever would have received from orthodox science.

“I’ve got a job for you,” Valentine had told him over the phone one night. He’d been blunter with his metaphorical offspring at the time, believing they might naturally defer to him because of his age, his experience, his success at survival. “I want you to impregnate a very special young woman.”

While there was no indication yet that the Helverson’s males had inherited their mutation from a parent, it wasn’t known what characteristics they might pass along to their own children. Only Mark Alan Nance had conclusively sired a child, but it had been the kid’s death that had led to Nance’s genetic testing in the first place. The family had later refused to allow an exhumation; leave the baby dead and buried.