Why else would she have begun her move at the very moment the news of Garekyn’s capture and escape had been broadcast?

Fareed had returned from Geneva anxious to use the powerful human resources of the Court to trace the two non-humans.

But in the meantime, the DNA material in the records of Collingsworth Pharmaceuticals for Dr. Karen Rhinehart—her faked health records—had led Fareed to a remarkable story, which he shared now with the others in bursts of reading aloud and wild verbalized speculation. He never forgot for a moment that Seth couldn’t read his thoughts, or that Gregory seemed unreasonably skeptical with regard to the missing doctor, and really had to be convinced of how extraordinary was all this talk of non-humans.

As Dr. Flannery Gilman had discovered, the DNA match for the blood samples had proved to be a woman in Bolinas, California, owner of a famous bed-and-breakfast hotel. Her name was Matilde Green. Old newspapers, now available online, recounted how Matilde Green had found two people unconscious on the beach one night near her hotel in 1975. It had been in the aftermath of a great storm.

The woman and the man, severely emaciated, naked, and unconscious, had been locked in each other’s arms as if they’d been “sculpted out of stone together,” until revived by Green, who had built a fire of driftwood to warm them while rushing up to her hotel for brandy and blankets to aid in the salvation of the pair.

In the dark ages of 1975, the only telephone connection at the bed-and-breakfast hotel had gone down during the worst of the gale.

For twelve years the woman and the man, known as Kapetria and Welf, lived with Matilde Green in her large ramshackle hotel, providing invaluable aid to her in the restoration of the old building and its management. They had also been Matilde’s devoted caretakers during several severe bouts of illness that landed Matilde in the hospital for extended periods. The bed-and-breakfast became a legend on that part of the coast, and so did Kapetria and Welf, and Matilde Green.

Cheerful stories in small regional newspapers, and a couple in the San Francisco Examiner, told how Welf and Kapetria were experts in homeopathic medicines, and medicinal teas, of how they gave as good a therapeutic massage as any to be found anywhere, and painted and roofed and repaired the old hotel with boundless gratitude and zeal. Matilde who has suffered all her life with juvenile diabetes credited her two friends with keeping her alive when doctors had pretty much given up on her. Indeed, she was alive now, against all odds, at the age of one hundred and three, and was still visited by the mysterious pair on a regular basis.