Fang had gone to recover the largest of our trucks from the garage where it was concealed, far enough from the bowling alley that it wouldn’t lead USAMRIID to us if they found its heat signature after it had been used—and ironically, far enough from the bowling alley that Sherman and his men wouldn’t have seen it during their sweep for assets. Fishy, who understood weapons better than I did, had gone to see what we had left, leaving me to the unpleasant task of sweeping the apartments for people who had not been at work when the raid occurred.
Sherman had been created in the bowling alley. He must have been acting on what he remembered about the lab and its environs when he planned the raid, because none of his people had gone anywhere near the apartment buildings we had repurposed for our use. If I had only encouraged Adam to hold Juniper’s lessons at home, with the dogs, they might still be with us. I could have saved them. I could have—
No. Following that rabbit wouldn’t lead me to Wonderland: It would take me down an increasingly dark series of tunnels, until there was no way for me to find the light again. I couldn’t live my entire life waiting for the darkness to come and claim me. Adam had enjoyed holding Juniper’s lessons at the garden center. Everything we’d had access to had told us it was safe, and since both of them were happy, what was the harm? It didn’t matter that the harm had shown its face, and proven itself more dangerous than we could have ever guessed. We’d allowed them to make choices. We’d allowed them to live.
That was all that any of us could ask.
I knocked on doors, waited for a count of ten, and then moved on to the next apartment, both glad that I didn’t have to explain what had happened, and aching from each successive bout with silence. Had Sherman and his men really taken everyone? Were Fishy, Fang, and I all that remained? It seemed impossible. I’d known Dr. Cale for less than a year, but she had already become one of the fixed points around which the universe revolved, untouchable and unimpeachable and indestructible. But here we were.
I was halfway through the neighborhood when a door opened in answer to my knocking. The technician on the other side—a slim, dark-skinned woman with black hair and long-boned hands that were currently occupied in clutching a sheet around her body—blinked at me. I blinked back.
“Er, Sal, yeah?” she said. “Please don’t tell me there’s another chemical fire. I just got the smell of the last one out of my hair.”
“It’s not a chemical fire,” I said. I hadn’t been expecting to find anyone, even though I probably should have been: The night shift would have had no reason to be in the building. I just didn’t know how big the night shift was. “Um, Heina, right?”
“You remembered,” she said, sounding pleasantly surprised. Her smile was quick, bright, and filled with teeth. “Wasn’t sure you would. We’ve met a few times, but I get up around the time you’re going to bed, and you always look like you’re dead on your feet.”
“Sorry about that,” I said. I tried to keep talking, to tell her what had happened to our friends and colleagues. My lips refused to move. “I guess I’m sort of a morning person most of the time. I. Just. I…” I took a deep breath, and then spilled it all out in one great, indigestible chunk: “Sherman and his people raided the bowling alley, they took Dr. Cale and Adam and all the equipment and all her research, they’re probably planning to use it to make the worms in the water even better at doing what they do, and then we’re all going to be in big, big trouble, no matter what we are, so Fishy, Fang, and I are going to USAMRIID to tell Colonel Mitchell what’s going on and try to convince him to join forces with us and make Sherman stop. Only I came here to see if anyone from the night shift had managed to miss the whole thing, and it seems like you did, so now I guess I have to ask you whether you want to come with us or stay here and hold down the fort.”
Heina blinked. Slowly, once, twice, and then a third time, the animation draining from her face more with each small motion. By the time she was done, she looked like a brown wax figure of a woman, perfectly still, filled with waiting.
“They got everything?” she asked.
I nodded.
“There’s a transmitter just under the roofline. Did they take it? Do you remember seeing it after they came through?”
“I… where would it have been?”
“Near the front door.” Heina took a step forward, eyes suddenly intense. “It would have been tucked next to the sign, where it wouldn’t have been super obvious to someone who didn’t know the place. Taking it down would have probably required breaking the sign away from the wall. Was the sign broken?”
That question I could answer with confidence. “No. The door was off its hinges, but the sign was still intact.”
“Did they cut the power?”
Tansy’s life support had continued to operate throughout the entire fight. “No,” I said again.
Then, to my surprise, Heina smiled. It was nothing like her quick, easy expression when I’d remembered her name. This smile was slow, and dark, and filled with the simple joy of a techie who had managed to get one over on the world. I’d seen a similar smile on Fishy, usually right before he did something irresponsibly dangerous. “Then I’ll stay here. I’ll get the rest of my team on it.”
“On what?” I asked.
“Sal, please don’t take this the wrong way, but you’ve never struck me as the most tech-savvy person around. Is that accurate?” Heina waited for me to nod before she continued: “That antenna was feeding everything from the servers in the bowling alley into the cloud, which is local and sustained by machines in the spare room of this apartment and in the entire floor space of the apartment underneath me. If the local network was disrupted, then those machines I just mentioned? They sucked everything out of the cloud, and turned it into solid, stored, salvageable data. And if Sherman’s men were unplugging things all willy-nilly? Oh, poor them.”
“Why?” I asked blankly.
“Because they just carted off a bunch of empty hard drives with nothing interesting for them to look at.” Heina’s smile was virtually feral, and seemed to contain more teeth than a single human head could hold. “As soon as those machines were uncoupled from the network without appropriate protocols, they started wiping themselves. It was a counterespionage measure we decided to put in place when it became clear that Dr. Cale didn’t know jack about computer security. As long as everything turned on when she told it to, she was perfectly happy to carry on with minimal backups and no off-site. Love her to death, but that woman is lucky she made it this far.”
“I don’t understand.”
Heina’s smile grew broader still. “I’m saying we have all her data—everything—and that Sherman may have our people, but he only has the research they bothered to print out.”
I blinked again. “Oh,” I breathed. Then: “Can you come with me? We need to tell Fang about this.”
“Can I put some clothes on first?” asked Heina.
I nodded.
Fang was back with the truck by the time I returned to the bowling alley with Heina. It would have taken longer, but she had promised to finish going through the apartments, since she knew which ones were supposed to be occupied. “Besides, Princess,” she’d said, once she was clothed and willing to step outside. “We’re all fun-and-frisky folks, and you don’t know us well enough to be walking in on some of those scenes.”
Modesty about nudity and sexual situations was a human trait, one I had learned how to mimic reasonably well, but had never quite managed to internalize. Still, it seemed somehow important to Heina that she be shocking me, so I did my best to look embarrassed. Mostly, I think I just managed to look anxious, which nicely matched my actual mood.
Fang turned at the sound of footsteps, his shoulders locked in the way that usually meant someone was about to get punched. When he saw me, he relaxed. When he saw Heina, he actually brightened. “You found someone!” he said, jumping down from the truck’s rear bumper. “Heina, you old goat. I should have realized you’d still be asleep at this unreasonable hour of the afternoon.”
“I was getting my beauty rest while you were all getting shot.” Heina scanned the front of the bowling alley, looking sad when her eyes skated over the bodies lying in the gravel. She brightened at something, and I assumed that meant her transmitter was still in place, doing whatever it was that hidden transmitters were supposed to do. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here.”
“I’m not,” said Fang firmly. “If you had been, you’d have been shot along with everyone else, and I’d have missed your smiling face.”
I was starting to wonder whether there might be something more than workplace friendliness between the two of them. That would have been nice. Fang needed more people he actually liked well enough to relax around. Still, this wasn’t the time to deal with that. “Heina says she has cloud backups of all the data from the bowling alley.”
“They didn’t knock out my transmitters,” she said in a tone that implied confirmation of what I had just said. “Amateurs. Evil amateurs, which is the worst kind. Couldn’t we have had the villains we deserved?”
“You’ll forgive me if I don’t sit around wishing for more competence on the part of the people who killed Daisy,” said Fang. “Can you prepare a quick sampler platter of data? Not enough to give our location away to someone who doesn’t already have it, but enough to make it clear that we have some valuable information to barter with?”
“Sure, but why?” asked Heina.
“Because we’re going to USAMRIID,” said Fang.
“Even if all those computers wiped themselves, Sherman still has Dr. Cale, and Nathan, and everybody,” I said. Juniper, he has Juniper, he’s going to see what she means for everything, and then he’s going to take her apart. The thought was a constant chant at the back of my mind, almost dismissible when it wasn’t allowing myself to focus on it. “He’s going to be able to re-create their work, and do work of his own, until he figures out how to make the DNA do what he wants it to do. We have to get Colonel Mitchell’s people on our side.”
And then there was Tansy. I didn’t want to look in the back of the truck and see whether Fang had already transferred her over. I couldn’t hear the beep of the heart monitor or the whistling hiss of the intubation, so I supposed that she was probably still inside. Without a full team to monitor her around the clock, she wasn’t going to be able to stay alive for much longer.
Without someone to drive the bus, neither would Joyce. They would both die, both of them broken beyond repair by bad people and bad science. But together, they might stand a chance. If we could get Tansy to Oakland before she gave up. If I could convince Sally’s father that my life honored hers, and didn’t shame her death. It was a lot of “if.” It was all that we really had left.
Fishy came trotting out of the bowling alley with his arms full of small firearms and large pieces of metal rebar. He stopped when he saw Heina. Then he brightened, and called, “Hey, Bonus Player! You didn’t die! That’s awesome.”
“Hello, Fishy,” Heina replied. “Fang tells me you’re heading for USAMRIID? You sure that’s a good idea?”
I wanted to rankle over how quickly she had dismissed me from the decision-making process, but I couldn’t: not really. These three were coworkers, and I was someone who just happened to live there, and more, had accidentally become a miracle of science. That didn’t mean I’d let her undermine me—if she started really trying to convince them that we shouldn’t go, I’d step in—but it meant that she would take this better if she heard it from one of the people whose work she actually respected.
“Nope, but Sal’s the main PC of this run, so I’m going along with her,” said Fishy. Then he paused, and straightened, his posture shifting so completely that for a moment, it was almost like I was looking at an entirely different person. “It’s a bad situation, Heina, and it’s going to get worse from here. USAMRIID has men, they have resources, and they have the sort of firepower we can only dream of. So we go to them, because it’s the last good option we have. Maybe we’re all going to get gunned down. Maybe we’re going to be arrested for crimes against the US government. I don’t know. But it’s better than sitting here and waiting for the world to fall down.”
“You get the network stable, and shift everything over into the apartments,” said Fang. “Have your people feed the sleepwalkers, but don’t do anything else around this shopping center. If Sherman sends a crew back to check for stragglers, I want them to think that they killed us all.”
“That means we can’t bury the dead,” I said quietly. The other three turned to look at me. Fishy and Heina both looked shocked. Fang looked almost relieved, like he had been hoping someone else would come to that conclusion before he had to be the one to say it. I wanted to be angry at him for that, but I couldn’t. These had been his friends and colleagues long before they had been mine. He could seem stoic sometimes, but his situation was just as bad as everyone else’s.
“What do you mean?” demanded Heina. “We can’t leave them out here to rot.”
“They won’t,” I said. “There are coyotes around here, and raccoons, and feral cats. The bodies won’t last very long once night falls.”
That didn’t seem to help much. Heina scowled, and even Fishy looked faintly nauseated. Only Fang’s face remained neutral. I was saying things he’d already considered, and while that didn’t mean he had to like them, it did mean there were no surprises hiding in my words.
“That’s disrespectful and unhygienic,” said Heina. “How are we supposed to work with a bunch of bodies rotting outside the door?”
“You’re not supposed to be working in the bowling alley at all, remember?” I was so tired. I needed to be moving, running, racing against time to get my people back, and instead I was standing here arguing about the dead. How much time were we going to spend arguing about the dead before we started to understand how unimportant they were compared to the living? The dead were nothing. They were food for worms that had never been uplifted by science. The living, the survivors… that was what we needed to be concerned about. “You’re going to shift everything to the apartments, and you’re going to leave the bodies here.”
“I don’t take orders from you,” said Heina.
“Why not?” I asked. “I’m the last chimera standing. I’m the boss’s genetically engineered daughter, and I’m the one who’s marrying her biological son. No matter how you slice it, I’m technically in charge now that she’s gone, and I say we’re wasting time.”
“Cat’s got claws,” said Fishy. He sounded surprised and pleased, like this was the best possible outcome.
“Sal is correct,” said Fang, not giving the argument a chance to continue. “We need to leave if we’re going to reach USAMRIID before the sun goes down. Heina, you have to get the equipment transferred over, and more importantly, you have to leave the bodies where they are. They’re essential camouflage.”
“But they’re our friends,” she said softly.
“I know,” said Fang, his tone echoing hers. “I am going to miss them forever. But they wouldn’t want us to die because we were unwilling to let them protect us one last time. Leave their bodies where they fell. They’ll keep you safe by keeping the wolves away.”
“How did it come to this?” asked Heina.
Fang shook his head. “I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “I really don’t know.”
Working together, the four of us had been able to transfer Tansy and her life-support equipment into the back of the truck without jostling her more than was absolutely necessary. Her heart monitor beeped once, signaling an increase in her resting vitals, before calming again.
Fishy had managed to secure a generator in the corner of the truck, small enough to be unobtrusive, large enough to power the machines that were keeping Tansy’s host—and hence Tansy herself—alive. One by one, he plugged in her life-support components, swapping them from the lab extension cord with a speed and grace that spoke to a lifetime spent doing similar work, albeit with less potentially fatal consequences.
We had food for a day, in case we got held up on the way to USAMRIID; small weapons enough to get us through whatever dangers we encountered; and all the medical supplies Fishy and Fang had been able to scrounge from the bowling alley. If anything went wrong during transport, we’d be in the best possible position to try to put Tansy back together. Not that it was ever going to work completely. Until she got a new host, this persistent vegetative state was the most that we would have to hope for.
Heina was going to take care of my dogs until we got back. I didn’t like the idea of leaving them with a virtual stranger, but I liked the idea of taking them with us even less. There were no animals inside the quarantine zone, save for the ones that had been there before USAMRIID moved in and hadn’t been hunted down and euthanized yet. Beverly might have been okay with the trip. Minnie wouldn’t have been. And I wouldn’t have been okay with the stress of looking out for either one of them. Better to leave them here, where they would be safe, even if they would also be lonely. It wasn’t like I needed them to detect sleepwalkers for me anymore. My pheromones had evolved. I could detect the sleepwalkers for myself.
I sat on the truck’s back bumper, watching the sky and wishing we were already in motion. The waiting was killing me. Sherman wasn’t waiting. Whatever he was going to do to our people, he had probably already started. Maybe he hadn’t realized yet how special Juniper was; maybe he thought Dr. Cale had just decided to implant one of her babies in an actual baby and see what happened. But Sherman was smart, and if he didn’t know already, he was going to figure it out. He had to figure it out. Once that happened…
The clock was ticking, and we needed to move.
There was just one problem: We were the good guys. We were the ones who were still trying to hold on to empathy and compassion—things that it would be easier to call “humanity,” but I had them too, and I wasn’t human. Sherman could roll in and roll out like a hurricane, destroying whatever happened to be standing in his way. Colonel Mitchell could run the world like it was an extension of his army, letting everything be sacrificed in the name of a “greater good” that many would never live to see. Even Dr. Banks had his excuses. He’d never cared about anyone but himself, so why should he start now?
We couldn’t do that. If we wanted to hold on to the only things that made us better than they were, we had to take the time to say good-bye to our people, no matter how much I wanted to be moving. We had to remember that everyone mattered. That was going to keep us from losing sight of ourselves.
But oh, how I wanted to move.
Fishy walked into my frame of view, boosting himself up onto the truck’s bumper next to me. “Fang and Heina are almost done,” he said. “I’m driving. Will you ride up front with me? I know you’re not super big into cars and all that, but you’re the only one who’s actually been to USAMRIID before. I figure you can give me directions.”
“They might also be less likely to shoot first and ask questions later if they see me in the front seat with you,” I said.
“So very, very true,” said Fishy amiably. “Fang can monitor all the beeping things in the back. He’s good at that. Way better than I am. I’m an engineer, not a neurosurgeon.”
“Yeah,” I said. I hesitated and then asked, “Fishy? Do you think we’re doing the right thing?”
“Honestly, Sal, I think ‘the right thing’ sort of fell by the wayside when the cities started burning,” said Fishy. He looked morosely out over the parking lot. His eyes fell on one of the corpses, and he flinched, looking away. “At this point, we’re doing the best that we can. USAMRIID has bigger guns and better resources. If we get them on our side, we’ll be in a much better position to take on Sherman. If we can’t, we’ll figure something out.”
“It’s not that easy,” I said.
Fishy smiled and nudged me with his elbow. “Sure it is. You managed to get away from them twice, right? Three times, if we count that horrifying story Dr. Cale tells about you and your sister and the Colonel back before shit got real. We’ll just follow you, and you’ll know what to do.”
I wasn’t so sure. I didn’t want to disillusion him when we were already getting ready to march into danger. So I just smiled thinly and didn’t say anything.
Fang came walking around the corner of the truck. “Heina has gone to wake the others and start her work. We should go, if we don’t want to be stuck here while we explain everything again.”
I slid down off the bumper. “Let’s get moving.”
“Yes,” said Fang, swinging himself up into the truck and moving toward the back to check on Tansy. “Let’s.”
He was bending over her cot when Fishy pulled the truck’s door down, and cut Fang off from view. Together, Fishy and I walked around to the cab, and climbed in. I fastened my seat belt. Fishy didn’t. Maybe believing that life was a video game made personal safety seem less important.
I watched out the window as we drove out of the parking lot and back onto Willow Pass Road. No one watched us go.
No one but the dead.
Sherman and his people had taken advantage of the relatively clear road outside the bowling alley to make their approach. They would have needed to move very little aside in the way of blockages: While Dr. Cale’s people had worked to keep the area looking realistically deserted, they had also needed to rearrange the crashes and abandoned vehicles to make it possible for supply runs and scavenging parties to move freely. We were using those same streets now, following them back to I-4. We didn’t dare clear a new route. Like the bodies outside the bowling alley, the unmoved vehicles littering the streets would make it seem like we had never passed through here.
Fishy took it slow, moving around the blockages and swerving to avoid spills, all while trying to keep the ride steady enough that it wouldn’t jostle Tansy and Fang more than absolutely necessary. I admired the artistry of it all, even as I tried to focus on the drums pounding in my ears, forbidding myself to listen to the small, gnawing voice of my own panic. I had no reason to be afraid of riding in cars. There was no traffic to contend with. There was no way Fishy was going to lose control of the truck. All I had to fear was fear itself, and honestly, I didn’t have time for that.
“I miss the radio,” said Fishy after taking a quick scan through the available frequencies and confirming that everything was off the air. “I used to have this old junker I inherited from my dad. It was a piece of rust that drove like a car, you know? Actual ferrous frame, weighted like a personal tank. It had a CD player instead of a proper satellite radio hookup. Man, I hated that thing. If I wanted music, I either had to play it through my phone or remember to grab a bunch of actual discs before I got in the car. I guess the joke’s on me, though. I’d kill for a CD player now.”
I didn’t even know what a CD player was. I stayed quiet.
“It’s weird how technology changes everything, isn’t it?” Fishy drove around an overturned semi. “Once, there were CD players everywhere. Before that it was tape decks, and before that it was these weird things called eight-tracks that looked like video game cartridges from the eighties and only held like two songs. But every time, it was a revolution. More control, more content, more choices. And now here we are, back to silence, because we got rid of all the physical media and then we lost the radio.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I admitted.
“That’s cool,” said Fishy. He smiled, and there was something terribly sad about the expression, like he had always known that he was speaking into the void. “Sometimes I just talk so I’ll know I still exist, you know?”
“That, I know,” I said quietly.
The landscape outside the truck windows was oddly blasted. It had been a low-rain year—normal enough, although according to the Mitchells, California used to experience heavy rains during December and January, back when we were the greatest produce supplier in the United States. The climate had shifted since then, enough that rain was rare and fires were common. Enough that the brown, dry hills around us didn’t seem so unusual, although they were more overgrown than they used to be, thanks to the relative absence of cows. Oh, there were a few here and there, dotted around the hills like bruises on a banana. Horses were more plentiful. They were smarter, and didn’t have the same milking requirements. Even more important, they were better at getting out of their stalls.
In a similar vein, goats were more common than sheep, and cats were more common than dogs. Birds of prey roosted atop telephone poles, watching us pass with their cold avian eyes. They wouldn’t care if we never managed to resolve this conflict. Sherman could kill us all, and the hawks and falcons and crows would inherit everything.
“Sorry, birdie, but we’re not ready for that,” I muttered as we rolled under yet another red-tailed hawk. Fishy shot me a faintly confused look, but didn’t say anything. I suppose he was so accustomed to being the one who didn’t make sense that he was willing to let me take a turn.
“The freeways are open this way, you said?” he asked.
“They should be, unless things have changed since Carrie and I got out of the Coliseum,” I said. “Did anyone see which direction Sherman’s people came from? I wouldn’t put it past them to have collapsed some wrecks over their path, just for cover.” In this context, “anyone” could only mean Fang, since Fishy and I had both been inside the Kmart when everything went wrong.
Fishy shook his head. “Not enough survivors, and there wasn’t time to check the security footage. You think we’re going to catch up to them?”
“No. They’d have to be holed up in Albany or Emeryville if they drove down this road to reach us, and neither of those has anything like the big abandoned mall Sherman was using as his headquarters. I’m almost positive.” Almost wasn’t good enough—had stopped being good enough before I was engineered in the SymboGen lab that made me—but it was all we had left, and I was clinging to it as tightly as I could.
Besides, Sherman was smart. Smart enough to know that Dr. Cale, when driven out of Vallejo, would have gone back to familiar ground; smart enough to check the bowling alley. He had been smart enough to build an army of chimera under everyone’s noses. He must have hid the disappearances in an untold number of counties, burying the Missing Person alerts in a dozen local news reports. He wouldn’t have stayed in a hideout that was equidistant between his creator and his enemies at USAMRIID. There was too much chance that one day Dr. Cale would go too far and bring the Army down on her head, and he wouldn’t have wanted to be in the path of that.
We drove amongst untouched hills, under the watchful eyes of hawks. For maybe the first time since this freeway was built, there was no roadkill anywhere; the pavement was free of blood. Cars sat on the shoulder, and glass glittered on the blacktop, but as far as the natural world was concerned, the age of man was over. It had come to an end when the last raccoon was struck by a car’s bumper, when the last deer was left to rot on the median.
Speaking of deer… a whole family raised their heads from cropping the grass by the side of the road, watching us go by. I had seen deer before, but never so many of them, and never so bold. I pressed my face against the glass and watched them until they were out of sight. None of them jumped into the road. We killed nothing, destroyed nothing, as we sailed down the black ribbon of the highway and into the devouring distance.
Clayton dropped far behind us, a forgotten dream of a place where we’d been happy, for a time; where we’d allowed ourselves to feel like we were safe. Other cities followed, until we were moving through the thicker traffic on the approach to Oakland. It wasn’t quite gridlock: There was space between the abandoned cars for Fishy to maneuver the truck, as long as he took it slow and didn’t worry about scratching the paint. We had just squeezed through an opening between two electric cars when I realized that I hadn’t felt the need to drop down into the hot warm dark once during this drive. I was getting better, or at least I was learning to swallow my fear more efficiently, leaving myself capable of riding in a motor vehicle without hyperventilating.
I guess after you’ve been in a car that was intentionally driven into the ocean, and raced the sunset to find your way home, normal vehicular transportation loses some of its sting.
The shape of the Oakland Coliseum loomed up ahead and to our left. Fishy looked toward me, eyebrows raised.
“Well?” he asked. “How do you want to play this?”
I took a deep breath. “Follow my lead,” I said.
We pulled up to the gate that blocked the Coliseum parking lots from the road. It was manned by four men in fatigues, each of them holding an assault rifle. My stomach unclenched when I realized that none of them had a cattle prod. This was going to be much easier if I wasn’t living in fear of being separated from myself.
One of them walked to Fishy’s window and rapped on it with his knuckles. Fishy obligingly rolled the window down, smiling his customary, toothy smile at the officer.
“Afternoon,” he said. “I guess maybe it’s technically evening? Sun looks like it should be going down any minute. How strict are we being with the day divisions now that most of the clocks are toast?”
“Sir, this is a restricted area,” said the officer. “We’re going to have to ask you to turn around.”
“Sorry, no can do. I’m here on a mission of medical mercy, and turning around would sort of go against the whole purpose of driving here. Besides, aren’t you supposed to be rounding up survivors like me and making sure that we’re comfortable in quarantine, not being snacked on by tapeworm-zombies all the damn time?”
The officer looked uneasy. That was the first inkling I had that things had gotten worse in Pleasanton after Paul’s death: that we might, in fact, have lost the entire quarantine zone.
I leaned forward, tucking my hair back behind my ears so that the officer who was talking to Fishy could see my face. Sally had always taken after her father: Her features were Colonel Mitchell’s, softened by genetics and estrogen into the face of a reasonably pretty woman. Now they were my features, and I was going to put them to good use.
“Hi,” I said. The officer went very still. “Can you tell my father that I’m back?”