Then came another, even deeper shock—her voice echoing in among the trees. “Mark! Forgive me. Please, Mark.” Then, more softly: “Oh, for the love of God.”

Then he saw a suggestion of movement in some brush, and it came to him in a searing flash: He hadn’t seen her because he hadn’t been looking for a hybrid. But only another hybrid could be as stock-still as she’d been.

His mind worked fast. Maybe it was no accident that they’d been brought together. Maybe they were a team of hybrids, and maybe that explained the curious sense he had that he’d known her before. But if they were hybrids, were they both defective? Was that why they were fighting the other hybrids?

Or maybe she wasn’t fighting them. If she was loyal to the other hybrids, that would explain why she had tried to kill him.

“Mark! Mark, I know you’re here, just don’t shoot me, Mark. I made a mistake, but I was tricked, Mark. You have to believe that. I was tricked!”

In among the trees, he saw flashes of blue and green, then heard a flurry of leaves, and then they were there, appearing as if out of the air itself, seven of them, their skin gleaming in the mottled sun. He recognized three of them from the Glade. One, whose arm he had cut off, had a stub emerging, red and wet, with bumps in the end of it that would be fingers when the arm had regrown. But of course, if you wanted to build a soldier, things like the genes of the lizard with their ability to regrow limbs would be a do-not-miss proposition.

It looked at him, and in its eyes he saw not anger but curiosity, and in the lifted lips, a smile of reproach.

It was close enough for him to dart forward and cut in half, but he hesitated, suddenly aware that it cherished its life.

Gina was close, too. He could see her turning round and round, listening, looking.

“Oh, Mark, please, I’m afraid. Say something, Mark. Listen, I know you have good in you. I lived with it every day of my life. Mark, they’re evil. Evil, Mark, like you can’t imagine. They’ve wrecked San Francisco. Oh, Jesus, what I saw, Mark, you have no idea. Please, you’ve got to help us. You can’t go over. Mark, please.”

He needed to reduce the variables here, and fast. So he stepped out of cover. She had not expected him to be so close and cried out and jumped back. Then her dusky blue eyes came to his, and it felt like an invisible kiss.

She grabbed him, clutched at him, and he found her so fair to look upon that it frightened him. He wanted to bury his heart in her, to feel his lips upon hers, to devour the symmetries of her body.