7
“I do not have time!”
Dr. Coutant’s assistant, Joseph, tucked his chin. All at once, the muscle-bound man looked like a puppy dog. “I’m sorry. He insists.”
“Does he understand everything I’m dealing with right now?”
Joseph remained equal parts embarrassed and insistent. “I know. But—”
“He insists. End of story.” She threw her tablet down on the desk, grabbed her lab coat, and headed toward the door.
She knew there were about a thousand other matters she should be dealing with. The Perfume situation. Monitoring Aura. Everything going on overseas. But when Dr. Simon Estes demanded your presence—end of discussion. At least as far as Estes was concerned. He had the ear of the powers that be. The ones who, among other things, paid the bills here at TYL.
He’d bought her soul, lock, stock and barrel, a good long while ago.
And to be fair, she needed him. For now. So she had to focus on the endgame. What really mattered. Some things were more important to her than all the others combined.
One in particular.
She walked to the stables, took the hidden stairs down and opened his door without knocking. She’d been against letting Estes have a satellite lab here, but as usual, he insisted. And got his way. Best to be near the data stream, he said.
She opened her mouth to give the scientist a piece of her mind—but never got a chance.
“Do you know what a Faraday cage is?” Dr. Estes asked, without looking up from his work.
“Something you use to imprison Shines?”
He grunted, which was his version of a chuckle. Why would she expect courtesy from him? She thought he was around sixty but he looked about a hundred-and-twelve. She forgave the rat’s nest hair, as she suspected he thought it made him look more like Einstein, thus making him seem smarter. “Not as such. Didn’t you take physics in school?”
“Yes. But I made a point of forgetting every word of it the day after they issued my diploma. I chose applied psychiatry because I was more interested in people than particles. So what do you do with a Faraday cage?”
“You use it to absorb electromagnetic energy.”
“So? Shines don’t emit EMPs.”
“Are you sure about that?”
She thought a moment. She’d never heard anyone suggest it. Did this mean Shines used some form of electronic telepathy? Directed brain waves? Disturbed gravitonic fields? “Are you saying Shine ability relates to EM?”
“Mechanical EM, no.” Estes fiddled with his watch, pulling images up on his tablet faster than she could register. “But could there be such a thing as a biological EMP? One that somehow affects, disrupts, or destroys the normal human electromagnetic field? And if so, could we learn to scan for it, so we could detect Shine manifestations?”
“That would be more efficient than the cameras and listening devices we have scattered around this so-called rehab. Is it possible?”
“We all emit EM pulses, you know. Some much stronger than others.”
“Is that what causes Shine? EMPs?”
“I didn’t say that. But it’s an interesting idea, don’t you think?”
She sighed, since she couldn’t shoot him in the head. “Is Shine genetic?”
“My dear Dr. Coutant—everything is genetic, when you get down to it.”
“Apparently not Shine ability. They don’t get it from Shine parents, because there aren’t any Shine parents.”
“So far as we know.”
“Nor is there any evidence of lateral genetic transmission.”
“Which doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. It just means we haven’t detected it yet. We don’t know how to look. We don’t even know what branch of scientists should be investigating this. We don’t—”
“I get the idea, Dr. Estes. And this has been a busy day that is far from over. We discovered that one of the patients is—”
“I know all about that.”
He did? How? Somewhere beneath the gray hair and the thick glasses and the absent-minded professor persona, there was a calculating brain that never ceased to surprise her. Or terrify her.
“And let me tell you,” he continued, “that pales in comparison to the reason I’ve called you here. We have our marching orders. Certain events that I probably do not need to detail have forced everyone to escalate their timetables. I’ve been given the go-ahead.”
“For what?”
“Phase Five.”
Coutant felt as if someone sucked the air out of her lungs. It was really happening, then. Everything she had feared for so long. She wasn’t ready.
Estes pushed his glasses up his nose. “I think this cage can be modified to detect, restrict, and possibly even absorb Shine energy. If my data is correct, it will be a great technological step forward.”
“Because we’ll be able to control them.”
Estes’s lids hung low over his eyes. “Because we’ll be able to drain them dry till they’re dead.”
She tried to control the trembling in her hands. She was supposed to be the cool calculating scientist, the objective observer, a role she’d never been good at faking.
She averted her eyes, glancing at the papers spread across Simon’s desk. Mostly computer printouts of data logs and endless DNA streams.
“Have you unlocked the Shine genome?”
“As if that were anything.” Estes made a snorting sound. “Did you know the entire human genome can be copied and stored on a 2-gig flash drive? It’s no different for these Shines. In fact, I can record the genotype of every confirmed Shine in less space than the simplest tablet app consumes. But printing it out isn’t the same as understanding it. Or duplicating it.”
“What are you saying?”
“We’ve been charged with devising a defense strategy. An anti-Shine approach. Did you think that was going to be some secret formula? An immunization? A Shine emergency broadcast system?” His expression was something irritatingly close to a smirk. “Then you haven’t thought very hard about who we’re working for.”
“They said—”
“Doesn’t matter what they said. There’s only one thing they want. Which is why I called you here. We need to kick this project into high gear. Perfume is a problem? Fine, give her to me. And anyone else who won’t be missed. So we can deliver what they want before it’s too late to help.”
“And that would be…a defensive strategy?”
“Don’t make me laugh.” Estes looked at her as if she were the dumbest Ph.D. on the face of the earth. “They don’t want a shield. They want a weapon.”