“Brody,” Ian said.
“Brody, fine. He’s dead. They’re all dead, except for you. And I don’t think you’re going to last much longer.”
“Brody killed her,” Ian said. “He actually did it.” He shook his head. His body was tense on the ground, a steel spring ready to be triggered.
Chapel took a step back, his aim on Ian’s forehead never wavering. He should just do it, he knew. He should shoot now and end this. He’d tried to convince Malcolm to come in peacefully and look where that had gotten him.
Ian started to sit up.
“I told you, don’t move,” Chapel said.
Julia appeared in the doorway of the building where the bears were hibernating. She looked scared.
“Stay back,” Chapel told her, and she nodded.
“You killed them,” Ian said. “All of them?”
“Three of them. Yeah,” Chapel said. “I had to. They would have killed me, otherwise. They would have killed a lot of people. You need to realize, right now, that you’ve already failed. That getting up right now, that fighting me, will get you exactly nothing. Just because I killed them doesn’t mean you need to fight me.”
“You must know a little about us,” Ian said. He held himself perfectly still. Probably biding his time. “Maybe you know how we feel about someone who can kill a chimera in a fair fight. We respect that.”
Chapel thought of Camp Putnam. Of four corpses mounted on a blackboard, and the words scrawled beside them. He remembered what Samuel had told him, about the gang that Ian had ambushed and destroyed. “I know about Alan, and what you did to him and his gang,” Chapel said. “So I know your respect isn’t worth a whole lot.”
“You probably also know I won’t make this easy on you. Why don’t we both back down? You leave here. I won’t kill you.”
Chapel squinted at Ian, wondering what to do. Then, over to his left he heard feet crunching on snow. He didn’t move, didn’t look away from Ian’s face.
Julia stepped out of the doorway. “Dad?” she said.
Chapel couldn’t help himself. His eyes flicked sideways, and he saw another man, an older man, standing twenty feet away. William Taggart. Alive and apparently unharmed.
“What are you doing with my new lab tech?” Taggart asked.
DENALI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE, ALASKA: APRIL 15, T+83:26
“Everyone just stay calm,” Chapel said, once they had relocated to the lab.
“Young man,” William Taggart said, “that would be a lot easier if you weren’t holding that gun.”
Taggart was in his midsixties but looked younger to Chapel. He had a wild shock of red hair that stuck up almost straight from his receding hairline, and bright eyes that never stopped moving. He talked elaborately with his hands and always seemed excited about something.
His lab was little more than a shack, much smaller and more cramped than the building that housed the three bears. Much of it was filled with equipment — centrifuges, racks of test tubes, piles of computer towers tied to laptops by thick bundles of cables. The rest was filled with cages. Cages full of bats and hedgehogs and squirrels in three different colors. Every animal in every cage was fast asleep, breathing so slowly it was hard to realize they weren’t dead. They were all hibernating, and like the bears they were being constantly monitored by electrodes buried under their fur.
“What — exactly — are you studying here?” Chapel asked. “And why is the CIA funding it?”
Taggart’s eyes went wide, and his smile lit up the room. “I’ve found the DNA sequence that codes for hibernation,” he said, grabbing a nearby cage and peering down at the sleeping hedgehog inside. “It’s so simple! For a long time we’ve understood the metabolic pathways involved in hibernatory behavior, but we’ve lacked the genetic understanding to know why some animals do it and some don’t. Just imagine what we could achieve if humans could hibernate. Can you grasp how useful that would be, to be able to program yourself to sleep that deeply, any time you wanted? The possibilities are enormous, from spaceflight to military applications—”
Chapel shook his head. “I don’t think the CIA has manned missions to Mars planned for this.”
“Well… no, probably not,” Taggart admitted. “They probably want to use it to torture people or something; that’s what they’re good at. But what if I could put you to sleep for four months, at the end of which you would have lost twenty-five percent of your body weight? We could end obesity and curb the diabetes epidemic!”
“Or turn Guantanamo Bay into a warehouse full of people the government doesn’t like,” Julia said, “asleep for as long as we wanted.”
“That’s a horrible thought,” Taggart admitted.
“The CIA is famous for taking horrible thoughts and making them realities,” Chapel pointed out. “Like, say, the chimeras.”
Taggart threw his hands in the air. “I knew it would come to this! That’s why you came here, isn’t it? To accuse me of doing bad things. Maybe you thought I would get all ashamed and start apologizing.”
“It would be a start,” Julia said. “Dad, we found out what you did to all those mentally ill women. We found out about their — their mothers.”
Every eye in the room turned to look at Ian.
The chimera was sitting quietly in a chair at one end of the room. He’d allowed Chapel to tie him to it with lengths of computer cable. Chapel had no doubt that when Ian was ready he could break those bonds without much trouble. But tying Ian up made him feel marginally better.
“Apologies and the like can wait,” Chapel insisted. “We actually came here to save you. From him.”
“As you can see,” Taggart said, “that wasn’t necessary. Ian’s been quite pleasant company, actually. He just showed up here about three days ago, and since then he’s been helping me with some of the more mundane tasks. Cleaning the place, at first, but now I’ve taught him to titrate samples and prepare them in a centrifuge. He’s an amazingly quick learner and—”
“Three days?” Chapel asked. “He’s been here three days?”
“Yes. He showed up even before I got that phone call saying I was in danger.”
Chapel’s eyes went wide. There was no way Ian could have gotten to Alaska that quickly on trains or even in a car. He must have flown directly to Fairbanks after escaping from Camp Putnam. The Voice must have helped with that. This whole time Chapel had been racing against the clock, trying desperately to get to Alaska before Ian could… and the chimera had been here the whole time.
But then something else occurred to him. “When Angel called you to warn you someone was coming here to kill you, you didn’t even mention to her that someone — that a chimera — had already arrived?”
“Ian and I had already come to our arrangement by then,” Taggart pointed out.
“Arrangement?” Chapel asked.
It was Ian who answered. “I had questions. I had a lot of questions. I needed to know why I’d been created, mostly. I needed to understand. So I made a deal with Dr. Taggart. I promised I would control myself, that I wouldn’t hurt anyone, if he would tell me what I wanted to know.”
“You’re a chimera,” Chapel pointed out. “You can’t make a promise like that. Any kind of frustration, any small thwarting of your will can set you off. I’ve seen it — I’ve watched your brothers go from reasonable to homicidal in seconds. You can’t control it!”
“Any kind of frustration,” Ian said, smiling. “Like, for instance, having a gun pointed at my face and being threatened with death right when I’m about to find out the answer to the most pressing question of my life? You mean a frustration like that?”