“You’re not saying . . . that I was the reason she—”

“No,” he says quietly. “She was already gone by then. And it isn’t as hard as you’d think to find others like you. Anyone wanting to know where they come from can get a DNA kit, upload the results to a genealogy site. The Scions have fingers in all of them. Most Progeny who know what they are stay away from computers, are careful to leave no digital imprint. Those who don’t end up dead. I’m assuming you don’t even own a computer or a cell phone.”

Keep your face off the Web.

“No,” I say, as the indifferent landscape slides by. But now my mind is roiling. “So what you’re saying about Luka . . .”

Rolan picks up his phone, unlocks it. With one hand on the wheel, he begins to scroll through his photos.

“This was taken last year.” He turns it toward me.

It’s a picture of me. I’m in a café somewhere, talking on a phone.

Sitting three tables away is Luka.

“Where is this?” I whisper.

“Trieste, Italy.”

He takes the phone from me and thumbs to another photo, holds it out. Also me, crossing a street. I scan the pixelated image. Farther down, standing near a street vendor, is Luka.

“He’s probably been hunting you for years.”

My throat is dry.

“Then why am I not dead? And why would I erase my memory if I knew I was being followed?” I can’t bring myself to say the word hunted. “If I needed to know that to stay alive?”

He clicks the phone off, shifts in the driver’s seat. “When I said you were different, I meant that there are things that set you apart. Things you can do that normal people can’t.”

This is not news to me. I’ve always seen the world differently, in snapshots and shapes and symbols. Shuffling them, repeating them in my mind like an obsessive counting steps. Despite the procedure, this has not gone away. I’ve noted the curve of Rolan’s ear no fewer than eleven times in the last forty-five minutes, overlaying it with the image of a conch shell I collected once at some beach, and then each of the eggs in the refrigerator of the cabin, one by one, until I found the one that matched most closely. I’ve always been weird.

“Hunters are different, too,” he says. “Namely in their ability to retrieve key aspects of a Progeny’s memory in the moment of his or her death—assuming they’re close enough to touch their victims and haven’t blown the brain to bits.”

“That’s impossible.”

“No, it’s not. Hunters are sensitive to the last burst of activity in a dying Progeny brain, which has tremendous capability to project thought. Hence your ability to plant suggestions in the minds of others or demand their attention without speaking.”