This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2016 by Marcus Sakey
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
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ISBN-13: 9781477827642
ISBN-10: 1477827641
Cover design by Shasti O’Leary-Soudant
For Joss, who burns so very bright.
Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire.
This must be what God feels.
A single glance at my outstretched hand and I know the number of hair follicles covering the back of it, can differentiate and quantify the darker androgenic strands from the barely discernible vellus hairs.
Vellus, from the Latin, meaning fleece.
I summon the page in Gray’s Anatomy on which I learned the word and examine the diagram of a hair follicle. But also: The texture and weave of the paper. The attenuation of light from the banker’s lamp that illuminates it. The sandalwood scent of the girl three chairs down. I can evoke these details with perfect clarity, this utterly forgettable and forgotten moment that nonetheless was imprinted in a cluster of brain cells in my hippocampus, as every other moment and experience of my life has been. At a whim I can activate those neurons and scrub forward or backward to relive the day with full sensual clarity.
An unimportant day at Harvard thirty-eight years ago.
To be precise, thirty-eight years, four months, fifteen hours, five minutes, and forty-two seconds ago. Forty-three. Forty-four.
I lower my hand, feeling the extension and contraction of each individual muscle.
The world rushes in.
Manhattan, the corner of 42nd and Lexington. Cars and construction noises and throngs of lemming-people and cold December air and a snatch of Bing Crosby singing “Silver Bells” from the opening door of a café and the smells of exhaust and falafel and urine. An assault of sensation, unfiltered, overwhelming.
Like descending a staircase and forgetting the last step, empty air where solid floor was expected.
Like sitting in a chair, then noticing it’s the cockpit of a fighter jet going three times the speed of sound.
Like lifting an abandoned hat, only to discover it rests on a severed head.
Panic drenches my skin, panic envelops my body. My endocrine system dumps adrenaline, my pupils widen my sphincter tightens my fingers clench—
Control.
Balance.
Breath.
Mantra: You are Dr. Abraham Couzen. You are the first person in history to transcend the boundary between normal and abnormal. Your serum of non-coding RNA has radically altered your gene expression. A genius by any measure, you are now more.
You are brilliant.
People flow around me as I stand on the corner, and I can see the vector of each, can predict the moments they will cross and bump, the slowed step, the itched elbow, before they happen. I can, if I wish, screen everything down to lines of motion and force, an interactive map, like a fabric weaving itself.
A man jostles my shoulder, and I entertain a brief whim of breaking his neck, picturing instantly the steps to do so: a palm on his chin, a handful of his hair, a foot planted for leverage, a fast, sharp swivel building from the hips for maximum force.
I let him live.
A woman passes and I read her secrets from her sloped shoulders and the hair falling to screen her peripheral vision, the jump of her eyes at the taxi’s horn, the baggy jacket and ringless finger and comfortable shoes. The hairs on her pant legs are from three different cats, and I can picture the apartment she lives in alone, the train ride in from Brooklyn, perhaps, though not the fashionable part. I can see the abuse as a child—an uncle or family friend, not her father—that framed her isolation. The slight pallor and trembling hands reveal she drinks at night, most likely wine, judging by the teeth. The haircut indicates she makes at least sixty thousand dollars a year, the handbag assures she makes no more than eighty. An office job with little human interaction, something with numbers. Accounting, probably in a major corporation.
This must be what God feels.
Then I realize two things. I’ve got a nosebleed. And I’m being watched.
It manifests as a tingle, the kind fools attribute to notions of “the collective unconscious.” In truth it’s simply indicators gathered by the senses but not processed by the frontal lobe: a tremor of shadow, a partial reflection in a glass, the almost-but-not-quite undetectable warmth and sound of another body in the room.
For me, the original stimuli are easily examined, focused like a blurry image in a microscope. I call up my sense memory of the last moments, the texture of the crowd, the smell of humanity, the movement of vehicles. The lines of force tell a tale, much like ripples in water reveal rocks beneath the surface. I am not mistaken.
They are many, they are armed, and they are here for me.
I roll my neck and crack my fingers.
This should be interesting.
CHAPTER 1
They were running out of time, but even so, Cooper couldn’t stop staring.
There was nothing unusual about the rope, which was the kind of bright yellow synthetic cord used to lash down a tarp. What was unusual was that it had been tied in a noose and flung over a Manhattan streetlight.
What was unusual was that a corpse hung from it.
He’d been maybe seventeen. A good-looking kid, lean with strong features. He wore a McDonald’s uniform, and across the bright yellow shirt, whoever murdered him had markered the word TWIST. Not random, then. Lynched by neighbors, coworkers, maybe even friends. Somewhere along the line he’d lost a shoe, and that was what Cooper couldn’t stop staring at, the thin white sock, so exposed in the December wind.
“Jesus Christ.” Ethan Park panted the words; they’d been sprinting until they hit the crowd gathered around the body.
It had been two weeks since seventy-five thousand troops were massacred by their own equipment in the Wyoming desert, the result of a computer virus designed and implemented by abnorms. Humanity never took well to the exceptional. And liked it even less when the exceptional fought back.
He was just a boy, Cooper thought. The sky was pewter and pregnant with snow, and the body spun slowly in the wind. Scuffed tennis shoe, shock of white sock, scuffed tennis shoe.
“Jesus Christ,” Ethan repeated. “I never thought I’d see something like this.”
My whole life, I’ve been afraid of seeing exactly this. It’s why I’ve done all the things I’ve done: hunted my own kind, gone undercover as a terrorist, killed more times than I can recall. Taken a knife to the heart. Seen my daughter marked for the academy and my son in a coma.
And I still couldn’t stop it.
“Let’s go.”
“But—”
“Now.” Without waiting for a response, Cooper resumed his sprint. They’d covered half a Manhattan mile in the five minutes since the video hit had come in. Not bad, but not good enough. Not with Dr. Abraham Couzen only a few blocks away.