Moments later, as he sat in his window seat, the jet pulling away from the gate, that green-eyed girl’s face still loomed in his mind’s eye. He shook his head. What the hell was wrong with him? He had a history of having trouble remembering his girlfriend’s last names, but for some reason, he felt he’d never forget this stranger’s name.

“Katherine O’Reilly,” he muttered, “get out of my head.”

###

Kathy sat at her desk and looked over at her roommate’s messy bed. From somewhere down the hall came the sound of girls laughing.

It felt almost surreal to be a student again. Like stepping back in time.

It had been only three weeks since Kathy had confessed to Father Carson about everything that had happened. Three weeks since he’d assigned to her a rather unusual act of penance.

He had tasked her with going back to school. Had told her to take the money that was a seed of her guilt and use it to restart her life.

It sounded impossible. You don’t just decide to go back to school and then end up there three weeks later. But Father Carson had pulled off a minor miracle. Apparently one of his closest friends was on the Board of Directors at Georgetown University, a well-known Catholic university. And somehow, before she knew what was happening, she was admitted and enrolled. And though she was seven years older than all the other first-year students in Darnall Hall, they’d all made her feel welcome.

Turning to the pile of textbooks on her desk, she grabbed the one with a purple cover that had Genetics printed on its spine. She wouldn’t be taking the class until next semester, but it was a subject that she wanted to familiarize herself with… for personal reasons.

She pulled out the printouts she’d tucked into the textbook and looked them over for the hundredth time.

Other than the pink scars all over her body, this data—all two hundred pages of it—was her only solid proof that what happened to her on that island was real.

The printouts, of course, came from the USB flash drive she’d smuggled out of that strange lab. She’d printed it all out at the earliest opportunity, and had, at a minimum, skimmed every last page. Unfortunately, it made little sense. It didn’t help that half of it was in German.

All she could discern was that the scientists on that island were doing some kind of genetic research. And that it was secret. This was made clear by the fact that every page had COSMIC TOP SECRET #53823 printed diagonally in large red cross-hatched letters. The pages written in English typically also had ominous markings like TOP Secret//SI-G DRWN//TK. Internet research told her that these were either NATO or US government classified markings.