The old man chuckled. “These days they tell me I’m a general, so I think I can give a colonel an order. But you’ll always be my boy. So please indulge your old dad.”

Mark had never thought of it before, but now it struck him with great force. “You really are my father.”

The old man nodded. “In part. And Dr. Turner, him, too.”

And an egg, Mark thought, from somebody who had left behind not even her name. Slowly, standing there alone with himself, he felt his heart change. His inner demons slid away and with them the deep loathing of who and what he was. In their place came something that abides in the souls of ordinary people, a regard for self and others that recognizes the vulnerability of all, and the limitless importance of each to himself. This is our compassion, the root of human being.

Tears came, and this time his tear ducts opened, he let them flow.

In this first moment of a new life and a new world for him, he sucked the air of freedom. How sweet were the flowers, the scents of life. And the colors, suddenly brighter, the roses flaring red and pink and white, and the sky, the infinite blue of Gina’s eyes.

His inner monster was sleeping deep now, the murder lust he had felt in the Glade put to rest. The man had come forth, and with him all the needs and fears that came with being human. He thought again: Gina.

He could not bear to ask what had happened to her. He could not bear to be told that they did not know, or that they were certain. Without her, he understood that he would be entirely alone. There was nobody else like him, but more than that, his secret was revealed. Anybody who met him would know what he was. No woman would open her heart to a machine.

The sort of public life that the future implied was the most total form of isolation that he could imagine. But Gina would have meant warm arms around him and sweet words in the night, a refuge. He would have been her refuge, also, and he would have been good for her, he was sure of it, strong for her and sensitive to her hungers and her furies.

He was like the last of a species, the last mountain gorilla or the last salmon leaping alone.

Maybe, even, he would need to engage in battle again, and do it alone, and perhaps die alone. Twice today, once at the lab and again just now, his body had recorded tremors that were too regular to be natural. Were they caused by distant drilling in the foundations of San Francisco, where there was a lot of construction, or was it something deeper and more dangerous, the tattered fragments of the hybrid community down there in the deep of the earth, coming back to life?