A girl appeared, dropping into the seat beside Victor. “What have we here?” She mussed his fair hair with an ease clearly born of habit.

Interesting. Victor didn’t strike Eli as the type to welcome casual contact, but he didn’t pull away, only favored her with a bored smile.

“Angie,” said Victor, “meet Eli.”

She flashed him a smile, and Eli felt like a mirror turned toward the sun, relieved to have a source of light he could reflect.

“We were just discussing God’s place in medicine,” said Victor.

“Care to weigh in?”

“I’ll pass.” She plucked a piece of broccoli from his plate.

“It’s rude to steal food.”

“You never finish anything. Didn’t your parents teach you to eat your vegetables?”

“No,” said Victor blandly, “they told me to tap into my inner psyche and realize the truths of my potential. Vegetables never really came up.”

Angie shot Eli a conspiratorial glance. “Victor’s parents are self-help gurus.”

“Victor’s parents,” said Victor, “are hacks.”

Angie laughed, a small, affectionate sound. “You’re such a weirdo sometimes.”

“Only sometimes?” asked Victor. “I’ll have to try harder.” Those blue eyes flicked to Eli. “Normal is overrated.”

Eli tensed—a small, inward clenching that didn’t reach his face.

Normal is overrated. Spoken like someone who didn’t have to work so hard at it. Who hadn’t needed normal to survive.

Victor cleared his throat. “Angie here is the brightest light in our engineering department.”

She rolled her eyes. “Victor’s too proud to fish for praise, but he’s top of the pre-med class.”

“But you haven’t heard,” said Victor soberly. “Eli here is going to give me a run for my money.”

Angie eyed him with newfound interest. “Is that so?”

Eli smiled. “I’ll do my best.”

XXI

TWO YEARS AGO

XXII

EON

“YOU were right,” said Stell.

Eli rose from his cot. “Don’t sound so disappointed.”

“We pulled the execution-style killings, then ran those deaths through our system to see if any of them had EO markers.” Stell fed a piece of paper through the slot in the wall. “Meet Justin Gladwell.”

Eli took it, staring down at the sparsely detailed profile, the mug shot of a man in his thirties with a two-day-old shadow. “Gunned down nearly a year ago. Abilities unknown. He wasn’t even on our radar.”

“They’re outpacing you,” said Eli, spreading the three profiles on his table. Justin Gladwell. Will Connelly. Helen Andreas. “Congratulations.

You appear to have a new hunter.”

“And you,” said Stell, “appear to have a copycat.”

Eli bristled a little. He didn’t care for the idea of a surrogate. “No,”

he said, considering the series of corpses. “I would have tailored their deaths to suit. Would have made it look . . . organic. This person

. . .”—he rapped his fingers on the table—“is preoccupied by something else.”

“What do you mean?”