Before letting them go, Tom had reprogrammed them, watching with sorrow in his heart as they forgot each other, and then forgot their life here and the man who adored them.

He put two brilliant teenagers on two different planes and watched them leave for new lives.

Then he reported to the committee that the project had been terminated, and all of its “developments,” as he put it in the letter, “permanently curtailed.”

True to his word, the chief counsel had deflected the confiscation of Tom’s lab, so he concealed it under concrete and sold the surface building, as it happened, to a television station.

He moved to Virginia, where he joined DARPA, the Agency of Wonder, and spent his time bleeding his knowledge of organ durability into a new project called Inner Iron, which would at least give the next generation of human soldiers a little better chance of survival, should it ever be decided that altering their genes for their own good was ethical.

He hated the world and nursed his loss. He watched his kids from afar and was proud of them, his brilliant creations.

Chapter Three

CHAPTER THREE

RECONNAISSANCE IN FORCE

They’d silently waited through the predawn, seeing nothing, and so as the sun rose, Colonel Mark Bryan was ready to pull his team out. He clicked his satphone.

“I got a no contact, Gina,” he said to their controller in Langley.

“Request you penetrate another hundred meters south-southwest.”

“You see anything definite?”

“A box.”

He thought about that. What the hell would a box have to do with anything? “Anything about the box I should know?”

“Two things. It’s six feet six inches long. And it wasn’t there ten minutes ago.”

“You saw them bring it in?”

“Negative that.”

Prior to this, the creatures—Gina called them hybrids—had only appeared in isolated areas. Here they were forty miles from San Francisco and thirty from San Jose. This was a forest, but not an isolated one.

The bible on this operation was that an alien species had spent years trying to create a human-alien hybrid that would have their brain in a human body and so be able to live and function among us.

Gina Lyndon had told him the secret of the ages: “We cooperated with them to get what knowledge we could. There wasn’t a single thing we could do to stop them.” But then they’d left, apparently after failing to meet their objective.

Now, however, these tall people, palely gleaming, had started to be glimpsed by the public in isolated areas, and the scientists who had run the old program were hopeful that the aliens had succeeded after all.