“It must have looked to Scott like my mother knew something,” he said. “He must have thought she suspected something about the clone. Something that could threaten this whole thing.”

Brent stared at him blankly.

Jeremiah said nothing but looked at Brent in a way that he hoped completed his train of thought.

“What? No. Jeremiah, come on! I mean, he loves the experiment and all, but come on. This is science. That’s crazy.”

“But all of this is so goddamn important to him. I mean, if he thought there was a chance that someone knew, that someone suspected, who’s to say how far he’d go to save the thing?” He stopped short of revealing to Brent what he knew about Scott’s illness. He couldn’t risk that. Not yet. “He needs that funding from those shadowy investors he keeps talking about. If that money dries up, it’s finished.”

“No way in hell.” Brent was adamant. “The people involved in this, those investors, I mean, Jesus, it goes up a pretty big ladder behind the scenes. They’d never stand for it. Scott wouldn’t risk it. No way. Put it out of your mind. This is crazy. You’re just emotional. You need some rest.”

Jeremiah looked Brent hard in the eye for a moment. It was obvious he believed what he was saying. He sighed and turned the blender off. Brent was right about one thing: he was exhausted. His head was pounding. He wanted this whole thing to be over. He wanted to go home. If he were at home right now, he’d have made some excuse to walk with Louie, which he knew would have calmed him down some. A long, quiet walk in the woods with a dog can do more good than most people know. Here, he had no such option. He wondered if that’s what the clone was doing at the moment. But no, Louie wouldn’t walk with him. Louie was no traitor. While that thought should have made him feel better, it didn’t.

“Why don’t you just try to get some sleep,” Brent said. “I’ll get you up in time for the viewing.”

Jeremiah nodded. In the bedroom, he fell heavily onto the bed, but thoughts of his mother—the way she’d get excited over seeing a blue jay, the glint in her eye when she smiled at him—kept swimming through his mind, keeping him awake. His growing conviction that Charles Scott was a monster finally drove him out of bed and into the shower. He stood under the water for a full fifteen minutes, hoping it might clear his head, but he emerged as groggy and distressed as before.

When he walked into the living room, Brent was gone. So was the considerable mess from the night before. Jeremiah went to the kitchen, deciding to go with strong coffee if he couldn’t get any sleep. Before he’d poured a cup, Dr. Young arrived at the apartment, coming in, as usual, without so much as knocking.

“I’m so sorry for your loss, Jeremiah,” she said, motioning him immediately toward the couch. “Let’s talk for a while.” Her demeanor and tone were such that Jeremiah was instantly skeptical of her sentiments. She was, in typical fashion, all business, and he had the sense that her desire to talk was more for the benefit of the experiment than for him. He didn’t trust her. He didn’t trust any of them anymore.