Gina stopped, looked ahead. Where had she gone? Then she heard a voice nearby, soft but male. For an instant, she was confused. She’d heard it before somewhere. But it could only be a hybrid, and it meant that this innocent kid had probably run straight into a group of them.

Gina took off again, and without quite realizing it, she found herself running faster and faster, until the trees were whipping past and it felt as if her feet were hardly touching the ground. She could not see Kelly ahead, but she could hear others running and knew that hybrids were chasing her and they would get to her before she reached Kelly—and then she was looking across green treetops and could see in the distance the area that she had burned out, but it was all below her, and how could that be—but there was a flash of red—Kelly’s jacket—and there, also, another figure, trim and quick, flickering through the woods in the way of the hybrids.

The next thing Gina knew she was tumbling in the air and crying out, astonished, confused, but going even faster than the hybrid below her—and then she was arcing down, the air screaming around her, and she was dropping on Kelly, and she struck her hard in the back and went rolling with the shouting, terrified girl across the grassy surface of a small clearing.

Before they had stopped, Gina had her knife out, and with it there came a hideous eagerness, and Kelly appeared vulnerable, and the fear in her eyes caused a hunger powerful enough to cause Gina to shudder with an eagerness she was far from understanding.

Where had her confidence with this knife come from, and where her eagerness to menace the girl?

Gina stood, the sweat pouring off her.

It was the same way she’d felt when she was ordering the air strikes on Mark, and she was aware of it again as a perversion, but it was also one that she would never, ever succumb to, she swore that in her soul—then wondered, Do I have one?

Cowering, Kelly looked at her—or, no, she looked past her. Gina heard the rustle of breath, and at once the ugly sadism was replaced by a far more intense emotion—hatred for the hybrids.

“Hello, Gina.”

Reality contracted into a single focal point—that voice again, and it was entirely familiar now. All sound, all sensation, concentrated on that one point. She opened her shock-parched mouth and said in a trembling whisper, “Dr. Turner, what are you doing here?”

A careful expression entered his eyes. “You need to help me with Mark. He’s more dangerous than you understand, Gina, to me and to you and to the world.”

Behind her, she heard a confused sort of a whimper, and she remembered that Kelly was there and was vulnerable, and Gina drew back from him.