“I don’t really care how we do this,” he said. “I’m just an underling and I’m doing what I was asked to do. Telling us things can only help you. You’re not the enemy to them. And they shouldn’t be the enemy to you. It’s—”

She interrupted him. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Something like that?”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

“So who’s the enemy? Who’s your enemy? And mine, apparently?”

Minho had to tread carefully. “The Godhead. Heard of them?”

Jackie showed a crack in her shell for the first time.

“So you have,” he said. “Listen, that’s what this is all about. The Godhead. You talk to me, and I’ll talk to you. It can only help the both of us.”

She didn’t answer at first, eyeing him long and hard. Finally, she appeared to come to a decision, although he wasn’t so sure it was a decision that either he or those watching would like very much.

“What would you like to know?” she asked, her smile now genuine.

It was that smile that worried him.

At least a half hour had passed since Sadina or Trish said a word. It was as if they’d come to the same realization as he—talk all you want, but when you’re chained to bed railings there’s not a lot of good it’ll do you. He lay with his shackles, staring at the low, gray ceiling, trying to ignore the very real fear that slowly gripped his stomach in an ever-tightening vise.

What was the Evolution that Letti had told him and Sadina about, keeping most of the details a secret. Who was the Godhead? Were the Godhead? He couldn’t even ask the question correctly in his own mind.

A door opened and two young people came into the room, one boy and one girl. Both of them were dressed exactly the same, in the oddest set of clothing Isaac had ever seen. Black from top to bottom, with a sparkle to it that almost made it seem wet, one-piece suits clung tightly to their skin, broken up by bulges of pockets along their arms and legs, chest and stomach. These pockets were stuffed tightly with something unknown, as if they had to carry their every last possession wherever they went. It looked neither natural nor comfortable, and Isaac wanted desperately to ask them about it.