An odd red bulge appeared on the stump of his arm, growing until it was round and shivering like a balloon filled with water. It kept spreading, though, transforming itself into smaller orbs, then into a haze like the one still issuing from his nose, but deeper red and more dense.

She was aware of her own movements, aware of analyzing and evaluating, and she went along, then noticing out of the corner of her eye three of the hybrids going toward Mark, their legs pulsing so slowly that it seemed impossible that they could ever reach him. For the moment abandoning the crumpling man, she turned and brought the knife up, impaling one of them—which caused the other two to turn and come racing far faster toward her than they had been moving toward Mark.

The first one flew into pieces as she hacked frantically at it, but the second got in past her knife, enclosing her in a prison of arms and legs, and a rancid odor. She ripped it off her and, as it fell away from her, reached up with the knife, slicing off one arm.

A series of drubbing thuds followed, which quickly changed into a tearing sound, as if some great curtain were being ripped in two.

Again the ripping sound came, and Pete said, “Screw you,” and laughed, and again it came, and this time she turned and saw that the road behind them was heaped with a mangle of twisted remains.

The silence was broken only by the trembling sobs of Kelly Frears.

Three bodies were in front of Mark, and lying on the ground at her own feet, a hybrid in a pool of blood.

“Did I do that?”

“Linda,” Mark said, “get that Metal Storm and get it operational. They’re coming in for another try.”

“Yessir.”

“What’s happening?” Kelly shouted. She grabbed Gina’s shirt. “What are you people? How can you do that?”

Then Gina realized it: She had herself been in flicker. She had. That accounted for what she had just seen. The world around her, and her victim, hadn’t been moving slowly, she had been moving fast.

Her mind raced. This was impossible, she wasn’t like him, not a creature that somebody had made. She was human! She’d been attracted to his strength, deceived by her own heart into believing that her desire for him was love. She was human!

Mark was watching her again, with those careful eyes.

She backed away from him.

“No, it’s impossible! I have a normal life, I have—” She stopped, remembering her early days as an adopted child. So what if she wasn’t her parents’ daughter at all but their … thing? What if, all along, Mom and Dad had been not raising a child but training a biological machine? She began to look back over her life.

What about her earliest memory, for example, what was it?