Maximilian Barnes stood on the back porch of the sprawling country house he’d inherited. The fierce rain pounded hard on the wooden awning above him. The wind snapped at him, sprayed him with a hard shrapnel of icy rain, blew through his thick black hair. Out there, down the long lawn, the Susquehanna River was running high and fast, almost at flood stage, testing its boundaries. White tops crashed on the riled up river surface. Even here, a hundred miles north of DC, what remained of hurricane Zoe was making herself known, thrashing the countryside with her ire.

Barnes’s face was as furious as the storm, his brows knit, his jaw clenched, his dark eyes flicking to-and-fro, as if searching for something upon which to take out his anger.

“Goddammit!” He brought his fist down hard on the wooden rail, felt something splinter below his hand.

After all he’d done for this country.

He’d been so stupid. Holtzman wasn’t like Becker. Wasn’t like the others. Wasn’t a patriot. And Becker… How could Becker have left that data behind? Why hadn’t the virus taken care of it? How had Holtzman gotten hold of it?

It didn’t matter. All that mattered now was the mission. Keep America safe. Keep America vigilant against the threats he understood so well.

Barnes closed his eyes, and it all came back to him. The indoctrination. The beatings. The constant striving to be perfect, knowing it would never be good enough. The crazy rants about the master race, about perfecting humanity, about starting over. He’d left that house at fifteen, changed his name from Bauer to Barnes at eighteen, and still found himself unable to ever do anything but push and push and push, still found himself looking at every enhancement that came on the market, legal or no, to see if it would give him that edge, turn him into something closer to what the father that he hated and hadn’t spoken to in years had wanted.

And then to wake up one day, and hear the news of thousands dead in Laramie, and hear the words “Aryan Rising”, and see the pictures of those clones, those “perfect” Aryan transhuman clone kids, genetically immune to the plague they’d intended to use to wipe out humanity. Evil little Aryan transhumans bent on wiping out the rest of humanity. Vicious little clones that didn’t quite look like Maximilian Barnes. But resembled the boy he’d been at that age a bit too much for comfort.