Mark lifted the body. Standing to his full height, he held it under its arms, and he shook it until the teeth rattled and the hair flew … and the skin separated in great, billowing sheets and fell from the filigree of scales that constructed its face.

She backed away from it. “But he—no.” She gestured as if protecting herself from a blow. “That’s just a generation three.”

“Exactly.”

“Then we’re being tricked. We need to get out of here.”

He moved off, and after a moment she followed. No matter what happened, they would come to their end there. Either they would die when they successfully detonated the bombs, or they would be killed and dismembered like Dr. Turner and integrated into the hybrid commune.

“I don’t want to die,” Gina said.

“Neither do I.”

They continued on.

Chapter Twenty-Four

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

FIRE

Mark wished that the dripping water could wash away the terrible things he had seen, and the sense of defeat that he felt.

Ahead, the tunnel widened again, and he finally spotted the gleaming machinery of the pump station.

A sound came then, a long, rising hiss that reminded him of steam escaping from a valve that was being opened wider and wider. He touched her shoulder.

A moment later, the dim floor of the tunnel ahead began to move, and Mark saw with growing concern that it appeared to be seething with yet another form of biorobot, an ocean of them racing forward.

Three hundred and eleven feet closer to the oncoming mass, a ladder led up to a manhole.

Instantly he calculated relative speeds and distance. They could not make it.

“We can’t make it,” she said.

“Do you understand our mission?”

“I follow you. That’s my mission.”

“You need to run a diversion,” he said.

She touched his hand. They both knew that he was probably ordering her to her death.

“Okay, move out,” he said. He wondered what ghastly brilliant thing the hybrids had created this time. He asked his private God that Gina not be visited with an ugly death.

She trotted across the tunnel, then began moving toward the oncoming creatures, staying to the far side. Contrary to his expectations, the mass did not swarm toward her. They simply kept coming down the tunnel, not altering their trajectory at all. As they reached her, they surged around her, but still kept coming. She looked down, brushing one and another of them from her legs.

“Mark, they’re rats—ordinary rats!”

In another moment, they were around him, too, scrambling and clawing each other as they struggled to escape whatever had terrified them.

She came close to him again. Her breath was hard through her clenched teeth. His heart was crashing within him, his mind spinning with bell-like joy. She had not gone to her death, so she might still survive, however remote the chance might be.