Without warning, Kelly leaped on him and began beating him with a fury unlike anything Gina had ever seen in a human being, kicking him, slamming him with her fists. He staggered back, and Gina thought to help her, but before she could, three pale hybrids burst out of the woods and threw themselves on the girl and pulled her away.

She fought and snarled, “You’re monsters, you raped my city, you raped San Francisco!”

They took her away into the woods. A moment later, Gina heard her muffled cry.

“She’s innocent! It’s murder!”

She saw something in “Dr. Turner’s” hand, a black disk. He drew it slowly across her right temple. For an instant, she was dizzy, but it passed immediately.

She did not realize what had just happened to her. She had no understanding that a pass on her program had just happened and changed her mind. Instead, all she noticed was a sudden burst of loyalty toward Turner. She forgot Kelly.

He spoke now with new confidence. “You are to press this against either of Mark’s temples. It’s a magnetic disk that will reprogram his cerebral cortex. It’ll bring him back to us.”

“Back?”

“Back to us. Gina, we’re brothers and sisters. You, too.”

“You’re saying you reprogrammed me?”

“Do you know of Dr. Emma Walker?”

“The geneticist at Stanford? General Walker’s wife?”

“General Walker started out as a sergeant detailed to my project. He and Emma raised Mark for me, just as the Lyndons raised you. And Emma worked on both your programs. She did the actual structural work, to my specifications.”

Why did he sound like that? It was as if he were reading his own thoughts out of some sort of book. Really odd.

But she knew of Emma Walker, of course. She was one of the greatest genetic engineers in the world. Among other things, she’d won a Nobel Prize for her work on controlling the zinc finger. Without her discoveries, the profound advances in the cure of genetic diseases that were now taking place would never have happened. But what else had she done, behind the walls of the classification system?

“I know her work, of course, but I’ve never met her.”

“You’ve met her many times. The memories have been removed.” He smiled the twinkling smile of a kindly uncle. “You don’t know who you are, Gina, or who Mark is. You have a distorted view of what’s happening. You need to come home, hon, and bring your dear friend with you. I want to give you both back your memories of your real lives.”