“Why do you say that?” the Uber-Director asked in a silky tone.

“The cabin has been secured.”

“No. Not quite,” said the Uber-Director, who was little more than a human head attached by means of an artificial spinal column to a series of Plexiglas boxes. The bioengine that controlled the airflow over his vocal cords allowed him to sigh, and he did. “The chimney. The skylight.”

The team leader frowned. “The chimney would be impossible to climb,” he said, accessing his internal encyclopedia. Photographs of the prey scrolled quickly across the team leader’s screen. Suddenly an important detail caught his attention, and he froze.

In the corner of one of the photographs, a large feathered wing was visible. The team leader tracked it, zooming in on just that section of the image. The wing appeared to be attached to the prey.

The prey could fly.

He had left routes of escape open.

He had failed!

The Uber-Director closed his eyes, sending a thought signal to the nanoprocessors implanted in his brain. He opened his eyes in time to see the team leader and his troop vaporize with a crackling, sparking fizzle. All that was left of them was a nose-wrinkling odor of charred flesh and machine oil.

Part One: ANOTHER PART OF THE BIG PICTURE

Part One

ANOTHER PART OF THE BIG PICTURE

Chapter 3

3

A DIFFERENT FOREST. Not telling you where.

Okay, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that funerals suck. Even if you didn’t know the person, it’s still totally sad. When you did know the person, well, let’s just say it’s much worse than broken ribs. And when you just found out that the person was your biological half brother, right before he died, it adds a whole new level of pain.

Ari. My half brother. We shared the same “father,” Jeb Batchelder, and you can believe those quotes around “father.”

I’d first known Ari as a cute little kid who used to follow me around the School, the horrible prison–science facility where I grew up. Then we’d escaped from the School, with Jeb’s help, and to tell you the truth, I hadn’t given Ari another thought.

Then he’d turned up Eraserfied, a grotesque half human, half wolf, his seven-year-old emotions all askew inside his chemically enhanced, genetically modified brain. He’d been turned into a monster, and they’d sent him after us, with various unpredictable, gruesome results.

Then there had been that fight in the subway tunnels beneath Manhattan. I’d whacked Ari’s head a certain way, his neck had cracked against the platform’s edge . . . and suddenly he’d been dead. For a while, anyway.