One thing was clear about Mark Bryan: This was what raw power—the real kind—looked like. His hard exterior concealed a softness so profound that it triggered your deepest instincts to make fluffy and make warm. The softness made you want to love him, but that other thing—the dangerous interior—made you afraid to turn your back.

Amid the dancing glasses and surging conversation of a Washington power restaurant, she had thought she had never seen anybody more alone. But then his face would light up into a smile, and she would want to cradle the frightened little boy that had, as if by magic, replaced the gray-eyed wolf in the straining suit.

Such contradictions are the foundation of love, and she had fallen in love with the soldier, the assassin, and the boy, with the shimmering genius and the hard, sad tough guy.

Her father had warned her to always watch the tough ones, because they have hearts, and be it steel or soft, the heart is not your friend.

Goddamnit, Mark had a KIA and an uncontrolled situation. So much for her wizard soldier, precious to her though he was.

She flew the image of Willoughby until she was passing through its streets at eye level. If the movies knew what could actually be done with these satellites, they would have a whole new toy. But people would never believe this, not unless they saw it. She passed a supermarket, then a little strip of shops, a bookstore, a camp-supply store, a hardware.

There were flowers in big planters on the street corners, trees overhanging spacious old houses of the kind she adored. She could imagine evening life on those front porches, with the swings and the yellow porch lights. American beauty.

Up and down the streets of Willoughby she went, cruising around corners, flying up onto porches, going down alleys and into garages, anywhere she could go where there was enough visual information. She saw a girl on a horse passing by, people entering a local watering hole called the Glade.

She could order an air strike on this place, and only one man, who feared her and would not get near her, would need to sign off on the order. Well, screw George Hammond.

She was doing all this obsessive, useless flying because she wanted to find some indication of the danger here, or some indication that there wasn’t any. But you could only see what the satellite saw, so you couldn’t fly into houses, you couldn’t go into basements, you couldn’t go where hybrids might be hiding.

Christ, they’d harvested body parts from poor Massengill. The question was, why?