She stepped out, not looking back at Turner, not willing to. He had a piece of this disaster, and she was damned if she was going to take the whole hit. George had better close ranks with her, though, or she was toast, that was clear.

What if Mark wasn’t the only hybrid in the military? If there were more of them who looked as human as he did, they could be anywhere.

She swiped her finger on the safe room’s entry point. It seemed to take forever for the system to recognize her and buzz her in.

Inside, Hammond, looking pinched and terribly uneasy, sat at the large table.

“George.” She cleared her throat and sat down.

“You handled that jerk pretty well.”

“He’s the responsible party. He recommended the man. Did the vetting. The clearance records are from his office, not ours.”

They looked at one another in silence, each of them considering the complexity of the problem they were facing, trying to work through the maze of secrecy that surrounded the whole muddy situation.

“Turner was involved in the alien-human technology exchange,” George said carefully.

“Is he on side? Or a traitor?”

“Either he planted Mark Bryan on us and it’s time to roll them both up, or Mark slipped through.”

“I need to know more because that doesn’t tell me what to do. He wants me to assassinate Mark.”

“Gina, I’m the one on the front line with this now. Because of a screwup I had nothing to do with.”

“Neither did I, George.”

“You fell in love, God damn you!”

“Jesus, George!”

“Gina, this creature that was your lover lured our soldiers into an ambush. If you hadn’t been so frigging apeshit over him, maybe you would’ve seen something earlier. Maybe you would have saved their lives.”

So she was being thrown to the wolves. There would be no support from this direction. And worse, she probably deserved it—not as much as Turner, perhaps, but she deserved it.

George tossed her a memo, a single, heavily redacted page referencing “DNA Editing via Zinc Finger.” The only visible words were the reference itself.

“Okay, I’ll bite. What’s Zinc Finger?”

“Perhaps the most extraordinary means of altering genes ever devised. A zinc finger is a cellular structure that turns them on and off. An atom of zinc holds two loops of protein together. The fingers recognize specific DNA sequences. Using them—if you can figure out how to do that—you can edit the genome. Profoundly, and with great accuracy.”

“You could make a hybrid?”

“You could do all sorts of things. Among them, make the dream of the perfect soldier real.”

“So it’s connected with Inner Iron?”

“Intimately connected. The process has been used to grow organs that repair themselves. Limbs that regrow. But more than that, brains unlike any we’ve ever known. Memristors, which are artificial neurons—”