“It looks that way. The tests weren’t conclusive.” He sighed, closed up his laptop, and massaged the bridge of his nose. “But suppose it’s true, George. Suppose that poor kid really has gone through a pregnancy that mushroomed in three months. Suppose there are neuter women down that hole in the ground, a horde of them. Suppose Lucia’s other peculiarities—her paleness, her slow metabolism—are adaptations to living underground. And suppose it’s true—it seems fantastic, but just suppose—that Lucia had sex with this guy Giuliano just once, but she’s going to continue to get pregnant, over and over . . .”

I sat on that plastic-coated seat, in the bright efficiency of the thoroughly modern hospital, gazing through the big windows at the gardens with their cypress trees. “Evolution. They are evolving differently. Is that what you’re saying?”

Peter said, “If the story of Regina is true, the Order have cut themselves off, more or less, from the rest of humanity for sixteen centuries. That’s, say, sixty, seventy, eighty generations . . . I’m no biologist. I don’t know if that’s enough time. But it sounds like it to me.” He shook his head. “You know, twenty-four hours ago I’d never have believed we’d be having this conversation. But here we are.

“. . . I still don’t see the big picture, though. Evolutionary changes happen for a reason.” Peter leaned close. “You’ll have to go back, George. Back into the Crypt. Call your sister again.”

“Why?”

“We need more information. We still have more questions than answers, nothing but a lot of guesswork. If we could get Pina or one of the other neuters into the hands of the doctors—”

“Daniel.”

He looked around. “What?”

“Where’s Daniel?” While we’d been talking, the boy had disappeared from his seat.

We ran down the corridor, the way he must have gone. We heard the receptionist call us back, a sharper yell from the security guy.

We hadn’t gone fifty yards before we met a party coming the other way. Daniel’s arms were pinned by his escorts, a burly male nurse on one side, a security guy on the other. The nice young lady doctor was talking to him, steadily, calmly, about how they had been unsure about our credentials, and it was only proper that they should ask the girl herself about her family . . .

When he saw us Daniel struggled harder. “They took her back,” he said, despairing. “The Order. They came, and they took her back!”

Chapter 44

Chapter 44

It was in the year 1778 that Edmund found Minerva, and lost her.