The state lab was a temple to a new, frightening god: efficiency. Under the enforced rule of Ken Ardent, the great building hummed with function it had never previously known. Scientists in immaculate white robes moved through arrays of sequencers and synthesizers, their steps controlled by the equations and formulae that Ken decreed from his golden cage.He sat in a glass-walled office above the main laboratory floor. De Vries's "incentives" were omnipresent: on one monitor, a video of Elara in her blank cell; on another, Sophia in her velvet-prison apartment, her paintings the sole splash of color in a sea of white. Ken's mind, which had once been a fountain of ideas, had become a spigot, turned on and off at the will of the Inspector's taunts.They were succeeding. Terrifying, rapid success. With Sophia's first blood sample as a Rosetta Stone and Ken's brain as the key translator, they'd married a stable form of the antigen. It glowed with the same soft, inner light as her blood. T

The recycled, sterilized air of the state lab had a different flavor now. It was not just the antiseptic odor, the ozone; it was the cold edge of paradigm shock. The failure to synthesize and the whiffs of Sophia's blood had destroyed De Vries's tidy Capture and Control game plan. The playing field had been leveled, then tilted in a different and terrifying direction.Ken was given limited, cautious access to the central lab, a privilege of pragmatism, not trust. He stood before the central viewscreen, now always displaying the hypnotic, impossible whirl of Sophia's antigen. Researchers stood at a distance, their gaze a mixture of fear, bitterness, and a reluctant, wonder-filled curiosity. He was no longer just a captive; he was the only shaman who could understand their god.Elara had been escorted to him under heavy guard. De Vries appreciated the value of a known touchstone for a mind subjected to the type of stress Ken was going through. To behold her, alive and whole, was an oint

The state lab break room was a lesson in enforced sterility. The re-circulating air smelled of oxygen and the lingering, sweet zip of the nutrient paste from the wall dispenser. It was a space of biological need, not comfort, a decompression chamber between shifts in the high-pressure world of enforced discovery. Ken Ardent sat at a small white table, staring into a cup of synthetic coffee that was cold to the point of abstraction. The black fluid was nothing, and he was slipping into it, his face a thin, haunted shadow of the man he once had been. All the lines on his face appeared to be etched by the constant, low-grade fear of recent weeks.The whir of machinery, soft and mechanical, heralded Markus Hale's coming. The clank of his leg braces was the metronome marking Ken's failure. Markus lowered himself into the chair across from him with a groan of pain, the machines that supported the splintered bones in his knees hissing softly as they adjusted to his weight."They've got her on

There was total silence in the command center, broken only by the hum of servers and the soft, pleading clack of analyst Jansen locking the feed. On the main viewscreen, the grainy thermal image was frozen: the unmistakable form of a man crouched over a small, burning form.MATCH: ARDENT, KEN. DR. CONFIDENCE: 87.4%The percentage jumped to 88.1%.Inspector De Vries didn't smile. He didn't smile. He simply absorbed the reality of the photograph, his mind already shifting from chase to harvest. This was no longer a question of chasing an apparition. It was a question of reaping the political reward of a confirmed target."Lock that feed down," he commanded, his voice cutting through the stunned silence. "Total information quarantine. This terminal is now Section Seven. No data in or out without my personal approval." He fixed his gaze on Analyst Jansen and Section Lead Rens. "You two take care of it. You let a word of this leave this ring to anyone, and you'll be counting sewer rats in t

Ken Ardent's world had been brought down to the walls of his glass cage and to the two screens upon which he was witnessing his heaven and hell: Elara in her cell, Sophia in hers.He'd stared at the molecular model on his data-slate for what had seemed like hours. Markus's "gift." The suppressant. The cage he was being commanded to build.His mind, the marvelous calculating machine, already knew. He pictured the routes, the delivery mechanisms, the precise chemical stimuli which would gently, painlessly drop the shutters over his daughter's glorious, terrifying awareness. He could do it. He could do this so that she didn't feel pain, didn't feel fear, while they harvested the miracle in her blood vessels.The price of this "mercy" was his soul.He looked at the screen of Sophia's room. She was awake, sitting up now. A medic was standing with a nutrition drink in her hands. She shook her head, reaching instead for her drawing pad. She was sketching, her small face furrowed in concentrat