The numbers locked themselves into Jenna’s consciousness, and with that realization, a door opened in her mind. Yet as she mentally stepped toward that door, she heard the distant voice answer Soter’s question.
The spell broken, she surged to her feet and crossed the room in three steps, heedless of Mercy’s cry, “Jenna, no!”
Some part of her wondered if Mercy had heard as well, and if the purpose for her warning was to safeguard Jenna’s emotional health as much as her physical. It was a fleeting thought. No force on Earth could have stopped her.
She burst out onto the balcony, right behind Soter. Cray saw her and made a half-hearted attempt to restrain her, but he was already too late. Jenna’s eyes met those of the man who had just a moment before shouted: “I want to talk to my daughter.”
Standing on the rain-soaked grass less than fifty feet away was Noah Flood.
47
Jenna had not thought it possible for her world to be shaken any more than it already had, but Noah’s appearance was another roller coaster plunge into the impossible.
Rivulets of rain dripped from his hair and nose. His eyes found her and his craggy face broke into a relieved smile. His lips formed her name, but she couldn’t tell if he had said it aloud.
A dam broke inside her. Every emotion she had experienced in the last two days in connection with this man — admiration, grief, rage, acceptance — deluged her. She wanted to scream at him for taking away an existence that had never truly been hers. She wanted to rush down the fire stairs and hug him, and never let go.
My daughter.
That was what he had said, and she desperately wanted to believe he felt that way. And yet, the very fact that he was here, that he had tracked her down, told a different tale. He was working with Cort. It was the only explanation. And that meant he was trying to draw her out so that the government agents could finish their deadly assignment.
She searched his face, looking for some hint of what to believe, knowing even as she did that he was too skilled in the arts of deception to ever reveal the truth. A thousand questions ran through her mind, but all she could say was, “I thought you were dead.”
His smile became a grin. “I’m too ornery to die,” he called back.
Jenna realized now that her assumption about his fate had been made at the start of the nightmare, when all she knew about violence was what she had seen in Noah’s movies, where people dropped dead from a single gunshot, because that’s what the script called for. Her own experience had revealed just how much punishment a human body could actually take, yet at no time had it occurred to her that Noah’s wound might have been only superficial.
Soter turned on her. “Go back inside, Jenna. This man is not your father. He’s here to kill you.”
Noah spoke quickly. “Jenna, you have to listen to me. I know what you’re thinking, but remember what I taught you. Listen to your gut…”
“But make up my own damn mind,” she finished, repeating it like a mantra. Her guts were so twisted, she had no idea what they were trying to tell her.
“He hasn’t told you the whole truth,” Noah continued.
And just how would you know that? She didn’t say it aloud, and despite the fact that she did not want to trust this man who had lied to her about everything, she knew he was right. Soter was holding something back.
“He told you some story about aliens with a message of peace, right? There are no aliens, Jenna. He lied to you about that.”
Jenna shook her head. “He wasn’t lying.”
Noah inclined his head. “Okay, not lying. Maybe he believes that’s what happened, but it’s not the real story. That message didn’t originate from deep space. It was from Earth, bounced off a piece of orbiting space junk.”
“Preposterous,” snarled Soter. “Who’s trying to deceive you now, my child?”
“The Soviets created the whole thing as a disinformation campaign. They wanted us chasing our tails, wasting resources looking for aliens where there weren’t any. And it worked. He spent millions — the equivalent of billions today — on a hoax.”
“A hoax?” Soter was incredulous. “A hoax that contained the entire human genome more than a decade before geneticists were able to even begin unraveling the mysteries of DNA?”
“You saw what you wanted to see,” Noah countered, then turned his gaze back to Jenna. “But that’s only half of it. His clones — Jenna, it kills me to say it — they’re not stable. There’s something wrong with them.”
He kept speaking, talking over Soter’s protest, pushing past the unpleasantness of his revelation the way a parent tears off a Band-Aid in one quick jerk. “I know you know about this Jenna. About the SARS virus in China and the cyber-attack here in America. The DNA recipe he cooked up gave the clones extraordinary abilities, but it also took something from them, something that made them human.”
“You don’t think I’m human?” Jenna’s voice sounded very small, as if her breath could not quite get past the hurt and rage she now felt. She was angry at Noah for saying such horrible things, but she was also very afraid because she knew he wasn’t lying.
“Oh, Jenna.” Noah’s pained look appeared genuine. “I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone. You have to believe that. We can get through whatever comes. I believe that, and I want you to believe it, too. But you have to know the truth, and he’s not going to tell it to you.
“It’s something that happens to the clones when they reach adulthood. It’s like a switch gets thrown. I’ve seen the evidence, heard from the people who worked with Jarrod Chu and Kelli Foster. They changed.” He snapped his fingers. “It’s like something was hardwired into their DNA. It’s in you, too.”
Like a switch gets thrown.
The words slammed through her and brought to mind Soter’s reluctant explanation of his plan to show her the signature portion of the message.
Seeing the message for yourself might have a stimulating effect on that part of your brain where the genetic memory is stored.
It was important to allow your abilities to fully develop…to reach maturity.
She could not tell if Noah was being truthful, but Soter was an open book, and she saw the truth of the accusation in his eyes. He seemed on the verge of boiling over with righteous indignation, but his expression told a different tale.
He knows.
And I read the message.
Unbidden, the entire binary sequence flashed before her eyes, a siren song in ones and zeroes, irresistible. Look, it sang, all you have to do is look, and all will be revealed.
Jenna’s knees went weak, and she staggered back against the wall. Through the rush of blood in her ears, she heard Soter’s insistent denial. “It’s not true, Jenna. He’s lying.”
Even in her state of shock, she knew that it was Soter, not Noah, who was hiding the truth, and not just from her.
He must have known all along that there was something defective in their — in our — DNA. No wonder he kept going, year after year, tweaking the genome, trying to figure out why his ‘children’ were turning into sociopaths. She doubted that it was Soter’s intention to unleash monsters on the world. He seemed to care only about making contact with the extraterrestrial architects of the message.