Then pandemonium.
In the heat of the skirmish, she failed to feel the impact of the tranquilizer dart. With her blood heated, heart pounding, the sedatives took fast hold. The fighting slowed in a hazy fog. Hands subdued her, weight dragged her to the floor.
One voice followed her down.
Careful of her stomach. And no more tranqs.
From the kitchen, she heard the clatter of pans, shattered dishes.
Kat . . . fighting to defend herself . . . to protect the girls.
Then darkness.
Awake again, with her eyes still closed, she tried to imagine who had attacked them. The raid had been too coordinated, too well planned. A strike team with military training. But who? Her list of enemies was long and ran deep. Even the Israeli Mossad still maintained a kill-on-sight order on her.
She kept her body slack and stretched her senses. She felt a thin cot under her. She heard no voices, no whisper of movement. The air was warm, but smelled damp, of mildew. A basement? She made imperceptible movements of her arms and legs. With no chafing at her wrists or ankles, her limbs appeared unbound.
As the drugs cleared further, she heard the faintest of breath—no, breaths.
She risked cracking her eyelids open.
The only light flowed from under a metal door near the foot of a steel-framed cot. The walls were cement block. No windows. She lolled her head slightly to one side. Two other smaller beds shared the tiny space. Blankets bunched over small figures. A thin arm rose like a flag from one bed, as if surrendering. Then drifted back down.
She recognized the dancing reindeers on the sleeve.
Penelope . . . Kat’s six-year-old daughter.
Which meant the other child must be Harriet.
She opened her eyes wider, using her peripheral vision to scan the remainder of the room. There was another bed in the room, but empty, with a pillow resting atop a folded blanket.
It was just the three of them.
Where’s the girls’ mother?
She remembered the intense sounds of battle from the kitchen and feared the worst. Worried for the children and recognizing there was no further advantage in pretending to still be unconscious, she rolled from the cot. She crept low to the beds. She checked each child, enough to know they breathed steadily, but not to wake them.
Drugged, too.
She crouched between their beds.
Fury stoked inside her.
No matter what, she intended to protect these girls.
But from whom or what?
The answer came as a tiny window in the steel door slid open. Light from beyond the cell blinded her to who stood out there.
“She’s already awake,” a man said, sounding surprised.
“I told you she’d be.”
Seichan tensed, recognizing who answered. She knew this person all too well, confirming what she had already suspected.
I am to blame for all of this.
But it made no sense. She listened for some explanation but overheard only a timetable and a threat.
“At dawn, we’ll set things in motion.”
“Who first?” the man at the door asked.
“One of the girls. That’ll have the most impact.”
5
December 25, 9:22 A.M. WET
Lisbon, Portugal
Now maybe you’ll be quiet.
Mara placed the saucer of milk on the windowsill. A bony black cat hunched in a far corner of the rickety fire escape outside. As Mara shifted the saucer closer, the feline hissed a warning, its tail lashing the air.
Okay, got it . . .
She backed away but left the window open. The morning was already warming, with a sultry breeze smelling of salt from the nearby sea. It certainly did not feel like Christmas here. Back in the mountain hamlet of O Cebreiro, where she grew up, it snowed throughout December, bestowing a white Christmas upon the village every year. As a girl, she had chafed against the limited opportunities afforded those living there, but with each passing year at the university, she grew to miss its simplicity, the rhythms of everyday life, which were much more tied to the natural world there than in a big city.
Still, she hadn’t been back home in more than a year, her project all but consuming her. Even her calls to her father had grown less and less frequent. Every time she phoned, she heard the love in his voice, which flooded her with guilt. She knew how proud he was of her. As a deeply religious man, though, who mostly tended to his dogs and a pasture of sheep, he barely understood her work. Even now he only spoke Galego, a fusion of Spanish and Portuguese. He had little interest in the rest of the world. Unlike her, he seldom watched television—which currently droned in the corner of her room—and never read the news.
She did not know if he was even aware of what had happened at the university, though she suspected the police might have questioned him. Still, she hadn’t dared call him, not even to let him know she was okay. She feared drawing him into the danger.
The black cat slinked over to the bowl on the windowsill, staying low. As it lapped at the milk, it growled continually, both cantankerous and threatening.
“Merry Christmas to you, too.”
When the stray had come to the window earlier, it had howled at her through the glass, demanding attention and refusing to be ignored. For a moment, she had imagined the cat—appearing as if out of thin air—was some ghostly apparition, perhaps the soul of Dr. Carson come calling, taking the form of a witch’s familiar.
She shook her head at such a silly superstitious thought and turned her back on the window, which overlooked the Cais do Sodre district, a seedy corner of Lisbon that was filled with late-night bars and Internet cafés. Her hotel sat along Pink Street, named after the stretch of pastel red pavement down its center. She had chosen to hide here because of the hordes of trendy young tourists who flocked to this district, making it easier for her to blend in. Plus, local establishments had a notorious lack of interest in asking questions of visitors who paid in cash.
She returned to her laptop to check on the progress of her work. Before tempting the cat with milk to quiet its insistent cries, she had dropped the second subroutine module into the Xénese processor. The device shone on the floor, the laser array glowing through its hexagonal sapphire plates. Somewhere inside, something new to this world continued to grow and mature, nurtured by each subroutine Mara added.
She sat back down at the desk. Most of the screen still displayed the virtual Eden, a garden of earthly splendor. The amorphous ghost who had first appeared when Mara had brought Xénese back online moved about the digital world. The shape had been sculpted by the first subroutine—the endocrine mirror program—into a physical beauty.
At this stage, Mara had encoded this incarnation with a name, so it could begin to have a sense of self, of individuality, even of gender. There was power in naming something. According to mythology and folklore—like the story of Rumpelstiltskin—knowing someone’s true name granted power over that person.
For the program, she had chosen the name “Eve.”
How could I not?
On the screen, Eve walked naked through the garden, delicate fingers brushing flower petals. Her shapely legs rose to hips curved in perfect symmetry. Her breasts were small. An ebony drape of hair reached to the middle of her back, swaying with each step. Her features were familiar, painfully so. Mara had needed a model for her creation and stole the face from an old photo of her mother, digitizing and re-creating it, an homage to the woman who gave birth to her.
Her mother had only been twenty-six when she died of leukemia. The photo came from several years before, when she was twenty-one, the same age as Mara now.
Mara studied the figure on the screen, seeing glimpses of herself, the genetic heritage passed from mother to daughter. The figure’s skin was several shades darker than hers. Her mother’s lineage traced directly back to the ancient Moors, who crossed the Strait of Gibraltar from northern Africa to Spain in the eighth century. Eve appeared like some goddess out of those times.
A black Madonna come to life.
As if sensing her attention, Eve turned. Her eyes glowed from that dark countenance, staring back at Mara. She imagined the reams of code flowing behind those eyes and shivered.
She had to remind herself.
This is not my mother.
It was but an avatar of a growing, nearly alien intelligence.