Natasha’s twelve-year-old self sat in the first row of the photo, second from the left. White hair, talc-white skin, long, knobby white arms and legs. Her large, deep-set eyes without expression. Her smile flat and lifeless.

The smile had been an alien thing on her face, disconnected from her feelings, something she’d put on every morning like the school uniform. She’d gotten more than her share of scrutiny from the instructors and scientists because of her mutation. She had wanted to avoid drawing equal attention to her unhappiness.

“Everyone stick with me while I lay this out,” Morse said now. “Take a look at the breast patches. I’ll get right to what’s written at the bottom of each crest.”

Natasha didn’t need to look. She was all too familiar with it. The triangular red border, the white field inside it, the red double-chevrons pointing upward like inverted Vs against the white. At the vertex of the larger, outer chevron, a five-pointed red star. Stitched above the base of the triangle, also in red, was a single set of Cyrillic characters.

“The word is Vershina,” Morse said. “It translates as summit...or pinnacle. Not coincidentally, that’s the name of a secret Russian program dating back to Stalin. The goal was to create the ideal human specimen through genetic selection, then mold them into apex spies and soldiers. They called it forced evolution. The guy who came up with it was a Darwin fan, a zoologist who bred and studied foxes. He figured he could domesticate them over successive generations and make them more like dogs. Trainable, eager to obey commands. His theory being that if it worked, he could eventually do the same with humans.”

Natasha took a breath. She hated remembering the program. And she still felt ambushed by Morse. But she couldn’t ignore the grave faces in the room.

“Dmitry Belyayev,” she said. “That was the scientist’s name. His title was Director of the Institute of Cytology and Genetics. He died fifteen years before I was born.” She paused. “At the Pinnacle school, they called us tame foxes in his honor. Cute.”

“Give them credit,” Morse said. “Belyayev was mostly a quack. But while he was training his furry animals, the KGB found real scientists who gave the program legitimacy. They did their first in vitro fertilization in the early sixties. In the late eighties they were splicing chromosomes. That was the critical development. By 1990 or so, they were genetically engineering human zygotes at one of their ZATOs, or secret cities.” She turned to Natasha. “I think you should explain about the project leader.”

She inhaled again.

“His name was Ivan Mori. My father. I was a Pinnacle baby. He modified one of my mother’s eggs and then reimplanted it. That’s why I’m in that class shot. But if we were the successes, I won’t get into the failures. It’s too fucking horrible to mention.”