Nakamura looked across the room. There, the picture of his grandfather as a boy, during World War II. Kenji Nakamura, the first of his family born in the United States. The picture was in black and white. His grandfather was little more than a toddler. He was in the arms of a beautiful, smiling Japanese woman in a dark coat. In the foreground, between them and the camera, was a chain link fence, topped by barbed wire.

His grandfather and great-grandmother had been interned, made prisoners in their country, while his great-grandfather had gone off to fight for America in World War II. It was the oldest family picture he had, more sentiment than anything else. A photo that represented a different time, the sort of thing that couldn’t happen in America any more.

Except that it could, and it was. ERD had developed new internment plans while he was there, to deal with potential threats like the Aryan Rising clones. Those plans had been quietly nixed. But lately he’d heard from his contacts in ERD that they were being reactivated, upgraded, quietly put at the ready in anticipation of a wave of children born with Nexus.

Jesus.

Nakamura sighed. He’d let himself stay at ERD two years after he’d discovered those plans the first time, until finally one too many deceptions, one too many missions about stopping science instead of guarding the nation had pushed him over the edge.

He’d tried to quit. And when ERD wouldn’t let him quit, he’d turned to McFadden, already a department head at CIA. And McFadden had pulled strings, gotten him reassigned.

When the CIA is the place you turn to for moral clarity, Nakamura thought, you might have a problem.

CIA wanted him to find Lane. Finding Lane most likely meant finding Sam as well. And no one knew Sam better than Nakamura.

When he did find her… Did he trust her? Would she trust him?

Images of Sam filled his mind. Sam at fourteen, coughing in that burning room at Yucca Grove, the first instant he’d seen her, with the gun at her feet and blood pouring from the dead prophet below her. Sam in his arms as he’d jumped from the third-floor window of that burning building. Later, huddled in the blanket he’d put around her shoulders as she watched the ranch where she’d lived and been imprisoned and degraded go up in flames. Sam waiting to hear if her sister or parents had made it out, knowing already what the answer would be…

Sam at fifteen, karate practice, the hours they’d spent together with him teaching her how to protect herself. Her tears and anguish on the one year anniversary of Yucca Grove.

Sam on her sixteenth birthday, in a long black gown, out to the opera with her “uncles” Kevin and Peter, resplendent in their tuxedos.