“Don’t,” a voice says.
I look up, expecting to see the woman from the shower standing above me. But she’s still singing in a distant room. The female voice is below, a much older woman dressed like a bodyguard. Her gun is the handheld kind. “Carol, don’t say it. Listen first.”
A bodyguard shouldn’t know my name. And I shouldn’t take time to listen. She’s too late to stop my verbal command to my gun, and that’s all that matters. It never mattered whether or not I got out.
“Don’t say your gun codeword because we’re going to get him anyway. The government is. Yes, we know who you are, ever since you tried to use Bent to decode Red Goldfish Trucking. We went back and put it together then. We’ll get Wells, I promise you. But if you kill him now, there’s a lot of information we won’t get. Don’t say the codeword. Just come down the stairs and I’ll deprogram the gun.”
“No.”
“Carol, if you kill him we’ll prosecute you. We’ll have to. But if you leave, I’ll get immunity for you. And your father, too, about the sleepless dog embryos. Come down.”
“No.”
“I know about your little sister. But our chances of getting the right evidence against Wells are stronger if we have more time with him. It will make all the difference to our case.”
“Fire,” I say to the gun, and close my eyes.
Nothing happens.
My eyes fly open. The gun still sits on the windowsill, swiveling to follow the back of Wells’s head. The FBI agent has climbed the stairs between us. She puts a hand on my arm. I feel the biometal joints augmenting her grip. Her eyes are sad. “I gave you the chance to get out. Now please come quietly.”
“What… how…”
“We have counterfields you couldn’t possibly know about. Don’t you realize you’re way over your head? Weapons get more complex every day. And you’re not even a pro.”
I let her lead me quietly out of the house, into an aircar marked BLAISEDELL BODYGUARDS, INCORPORATED. Nobody pays any attention to us. As we lift above Harpercrest Lane, the last two things I notice are Wells, bent happily over his garden, and a dog, a collie, lying on the bright green genemod grass on somebody’s front lawn, asleep.
The FBI agent turns out not to be an FBI agent after all. She works for something called the United States Genetic Standards Enforcement Agency, something new, something created because of the eruption of genemod, legal and illegal. The GSEA is going to prosecute me. They have to, my new lawyer says. But they’ll do it slowly, to give themselves more time to nail Wells and Mountview Bionetics and Bent and all the other companies woven together with underground labs. The government will get Wells eventually, my lawyer says. The GSEA agent was right about that.
But she was wrong about something else. Every day I sit in my cell, on the edge of my cot, and think about how wrong she was.
Nothing makes all the difference. To anything. The systems are too complex. You genemod dogs for sleeplessness and you destroy their imagination. You genemod people for sleeplessness and you get super-people, who can imagine everything and invent anything. But Tony Indivino was killed by the lowest scum there is, and Jennifer Sharifi is taking Sanctuary from purposes of safety to purposes of revenge. Donna chooses to deny anything that makes her unhappy, but the deep black frozen place is in her just as much as in me. Daddy survives his wife’s death but breaks down at his daughter’s. Sleepless mice have great immune systems; sleepless sparrows starve to death; Sleepless humans regenerate tissue. Genemod algae will end world hunger. Dogs genemod for IQ go catatonic, and guard dogs with the best training in the world will revert to pack pecking order if the omega animal smells right.
No one factor can make all the difference. There are too many different factors, now. Maybe there always were.
So I’ll let my lawyer, who is a Sleepless named Irving Lewis, defend me. He wants the case for what he calls “the eventual chance to set significant Constitutional precedents.” Except for court appearances, he does most of his work inside Sanctuary.
Maybe he can get me off, maybe he can’t. Either way, I don’t know what will happen next. Not to me, not to anything. I can only try to make things come out my way: get a job, make up with Donna, go to college. Someday I’d like to work for the GSEA. That wouldn’t make up for Precious, or for anything else. But maybe it might make a small, slight, necessary difference.