Orphans were not supposed to be human.

Beneath her swim cap, her cell phone vibrated against her skull. A girl punk band’s cover of Whitney Houston’s “I’m Every Woman.”

The melody of employment.

She untucked the phone and answered. “Yes?”

“Is the package neutralized?”

The voice on the other end wasn’t so much a voice as a collection of words and syllables recorded from various TV shows and commercials—male and female, old and young, accented and not—hashed together, the audio equivalent of an old-timey ransom note fashioned from words clipped out of different newspapers.

Charles Van Sciver redefined paranoia. Though the calls were encrypted, he took this added step to dodge voice-recognition software. He was a ghost, a whisper in your ear. She’d met him only once, though she hadn’t seen him clearly, not even then. She knew him mostly through secondhand stories.

The upside of Orphan X’s efficiency was that he had knocked out the middleman. Now she could communicate with Van Sciver directly. Or at least with whatever software was proxying for his voice. She imagined him clicking away on his keyboard manically, Lon Chaney hunched over the organ in Phantom of the Opera.

She flopped down the unit door to gauge the progress of the flames, a housewife checking her pot roast. “The package is cooking as we speak.”

“I have a POTENTIAL lead on ORPHAN X,” the mosaic of voices informed her.

She rolled her lush lips over her teeth and bit down. Throughout the past year, there had been countless potential leads, all turning up nothing. And yet each time Van Sciver called with a juicy new morsel, her breath quickened. The only thing she found more stimulating than sex was the prospect of revenge.

Orphan X had defaced approximately 40 percent of her glorious surface area. What got her through the excruciating surgeries, the torturous recovery periods, the needle-stab showers and sleepless nights tossing in sandpaper sheets was one thing and one thing only.

The fantasy of what she was going to do to his body when she got ahold of him.

Van Sciver shared her enthusiasm. For him, too, nailing Orphan X was profoundly personal. She’d heard once that his relationship with X went back to when they were kids, but she knew nothing beyond that.

That’s how they had a first name, Evan. His original surname had long been abandoned. Though Evan operated now under his alias, the Nowhere Man, Van Sciver insisted on referring to him by his Program code name.

Van Sciver was Orphan Y.

She was Orphan V.

The code names bound them.

With a stainless-steel brush, Candy swept the remains from the crematory unit into an aluminum hopper to cool. “What’s the lead?” she asked, trying to keep the eagerness from her voice.

“The PHONE service for 1-855-2-NOWHERE was moved RECENTLY, PARKED at a company outside Of Sevastopol.”