David nodded a solemn agreement. “Takes a lot of adjusting to, this stuff, even when you’re nuts about each other and have no question about your commitment. We do tend to self-censor when talking out loud, but not so much with the thinking. For instance,” he added to Brodie, “you might want to watch those random sexist-pig moments, no matter how fleeting.”

  Tasha lifted an eyebrow at Brodie again. “Do you have those?”

  “Probably,” he said a little dryly. “It’s pretty much stamped into the Y chromosome.”

  “I consider myself warned,” Tasha murmured, then said to the other couple, “Still, when it comes to what we’re supposed to do, I don’t at all understand how it’s possible.”

  “No way to know for sure until we do the thing,” David said, “but if you ask me, something critical was triggered in a whole lot of us when those women and babies were murdered. I don’t know what Duran—that’s his name, right?—was trying to do, what traits he believed would build a better psychic, but he may have done a hell of a lot more than he ever intended.”

  * * *

  • • •

  There were only four people in the cell tagged to move on the shadow breeding house on this side of Richmond, in part because there were two of them in the city, and others in the cell had been needed to move against the other one.

  Elijah, the calm, steady-eyed former military leader of the Richmond cell, wasn’t happy that his team had been forced to split up, even though he trusted Leo, another former military officer Elijah had named as leader of the other part of the cell. But splitting up had been necessary; both were soldiers, and both knew the importance of surprise.

  Both these shadow breeding houses had to be taken at the same time, the same time as all those in the rescue operation they were running before dawn today. Not only were the lives of Elijah’s people at risk, but the lives of women and unborn children—and any civilians who would need to be treated as noncombatants yet also rendered nonthreatening.

  Zara slipped up beside him, silent in the darkness of this moonless night, her exotic beauty oddly at home in the operation, and whispered, “I did a complete circuit around the property. Clear. No sign of any guards.”

  “So far, so good,” Elijah whispered in return, the clock in his head ticking off the seconds. “Where’s Patrick?”

  “Just finishing his check. The intel we were given made it easy for him to put all the cameras on a loop so they see what we want them to see. Virginia says the same goes for the rest of the security system; she’s got all the relevant lines cut or rerouted so there won’t be an alarm. Not here and not at their base. Until Duran is alerted and runs a security check, nobody on their side will know that anything out of the ordinary has happened.”

  “But he’ll know as soon as he runs the check?”

  “Yeah, as planned. A couple of deliberately triggered alarms will alert him, and his own system will inform him that his entire network was hacked. All the dominoes will fall exactly the way we want them to, in perfect timing.”

  She had barely finished the report when a slender, dark young man joined them, reaching for the backpack on the ground beside Elijah and slipping into it the laptop he carried. “We’re good to go,” he whispered. “Cameras are on a loop, and other security’s been defanged.”

  “We own the joint,” Virginia confirmed, her whisper as calm as the others as she handed another laptop to Patrick so it could be secured in the backpack. She was a stocky woman in her early forties, her pale hair gleaming even in what little light was present. “And the hackers took care of any neighborhood cameras that might have caught us. We’re clear, Elijah.”

  “Okay. Everybody remember what we’re here for. The women should remain asleep for the duration, but keep an eye out just in case. No infants or children on-site, according to our intel. The staff here should be noncombatants, but we put them out or help them sleep a little deeper with the tranquilizers. We split up, two going in the front and two in the back. We take care of this fast, quiet, and by the numbers. Got it?”

  His three team members nodded, automatically adjusting the tranquilizer pistols on their belts, the other more lethal handguns that would only be used in case of dire necessity, and double-checked pockets to make sure they had the loaded hypodermics they would use if they found the caretakers sleeping peacefully—which was the preference.

  “Let’s move,” Elijah whispered, and his team moved out through the predawn darkness of the quiet, peaceful neighborhood.

  * * *

  • • •

  Leo made a last pass through the comfortable house in Richmond, checking every room even though his team had cleared it. The caretakers slept in their beds, the male administrator snoring rather loudly, and Leo couldn’t help but smile a bit grimly as he closed that bedroom door.

  They were getting off lightly in his opinion, these “caretakers” of damaged women carrying babies whose very DNA or something even more basic had been manipulated to produce what the other side viewed as weapons. Leo trusted that decisions made far higher up the chain of command than the space he occupied were correct, that the caretakers likely didn’t know the part they had played in evil, but he didn’t have to like it.

  But he did his job and did it well, knowing for certain that they were both helping these poor women and their innocent offspring and throwing a sizable wrench into the plans of the other side.

  He could live with that.

  He made his way silently through the house, pleased that his team had done their jobs without doing anything to rouse the neighborhood. And when he reached the garage end of the house, he was pleased again that this part of the operation was proceeding just as silently. Even the normally noisy garage doors had been raised in near-silence, their tracks carefully oiled for the purpose.

  The only light came from inside the ambulance.

  The four pregnant women in this house, still sleeping peacefully, had been loaded gently onto stretchers and placed into the waiting specially-modified ambulance, its engine idling with a quiet that was unusual, and the medic was checking them over while the driver and the other three members of Leo’s team waited.

  Leo reached the open doors of the ambulance and waited until the medic looked at him. “All good?” He didn’t whisper, but his voice was low.

  “Yeah, they’re all fine. Good vitals. They should sleep through most if not all the trip.”

  “Okay, then. Let’s get moving.”

  He closed the ambulance doors quietly and stood with his team at the open mouth of the garage until the ambulance had pulled quietly out of the driveway and gone on its way, carrying the women and their unborn children to a place where they would be safe and cared for in every sense of the term.

  He wondered if any of them would ever be normal again, and could only hope that they would be.

  The sky was lightening in the east when Leo and his team slipped from the neighborhood as silently as they had come barely more than an hour earlier.

  * * *

  • • •

  “Okay, Jace.” Bella, her pleasant face and mild eyes hiding the brilliant mind of a security expert and former cop, looked less happy than she might have been, which was explained by her next words. “The ambulance holding the moms is clear, well on its way to the safe house. The rest of the team made it to their car and are out of here. We’re clear too, with no sign anybody in this neighborhood noticed a damned thing. So do we have to trip the alarms now?”

  A little amused, the leader of this Nashville cell said to his lieutenant, “Part of the plan, Bella, you know that. This whole thing falls apart unless Duran is alerted so he can check the rest of his network and alert his bosses. Our part in this is done, at least for now. We trip the alarms and get the hell out of here.”

  “But the other teams—”

  “We’re the last out.” Jace glanced toward the eastern sky, where spectacular colors announced that dawn was well under way. “I heard from base about two minutes before you got back to me; every other cell on the rescue operation has reported in, jobs done. Part of our job is to trip the alarm, so that’s what we do.” He grinned faintly, looking as so many genius IT guys looked, far younger than he should have, and added, “Hey, I hate it as much as you do, but at least everybody knows or will know it was deliberate and not a fuck-up.”

  Bella rolled her eyes, but looked a bit more cheerful. “Okay, okay. Give me two minutes and it’s done.”

  Jace checked his watch. “Perfect.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Murphy opened her eyes reluctantly, trying to ignore the pounding in her head long enough to focus on a small hand being held out to her. In the hand were several capsules.

  “For your headache,” Annabel said gravely.

  “Thanks, kid.” Murphy accepted the capsules and washed them down with a sip of cold latte. “Sarah—”

  “I know, I know. Sorry, Murphy. But it’s the quickest, most efficient way to keep track of all the cells and teams, and you know it. There’s at least one psychic on every team, and all of us are linked up now, so I didn’t even need bread crumbs. Everything hinged on this first part going as planned, so I had to make sure.”

  “Yeah, no argument.” Murphy frowned at the other woman, bringing her into focus. “But am I wrong in thinking you sort of . . . darted into the crossroads there at the end?”

  Sarah smiled. “It’s not really a place.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I just . . . needed to confirm in one more way that what your astrophysicist friend discovered is accurate. And try to get some kind of timeframe. Knowing a far more powerful and ruthless enemy is likely heading your way is bad enough without knowing how long you have to prepare for that.”

  Murphy nodded, unsurprised. “And the answer you got: generations. If we’re lucky. But even with time to prepare, we’ll need help. Need all that knowledge and tech stored at the labs. Need Duran and his people thinking about that enemy and what they’re capable of. And feeling the need to defend their homeworld—this homeworld now—from that enemy.”

  It was Sarah’s turn to nod, soberly. “We’ll need them and their knowledge. And our best minds working on it. Too many of our world leaders never bother to turn their eyes toward the stars.”

  “Well,” Murphy said, “we’ll just have to change that, won’t we?”

  * * *

  • • •

  It was a closely guarded secret among Sebring’s most trusted lieutenants that she never took an active role in a field mission. She planned it down to the last detail, and she was always close enough to see what unfolded—virtually always just as she’d planned—and to take the credit for success.

  She did not like failure.

  So when members of the “resistance” moved against one of her teams unexpectedly not far outside Chicago as they were about to take a rather gifted telepath, she was near enough to see.

  But not to intervene.

  She hadn’t actually been paying much attention, her mind on the psychic she’d sent to Charleston, the one who had failed to report in as he should have done by now. But all thoughts of him vanished as she heard gunfire and watched two of her lieutenants go down.

  It was an unwelcome shock, even worse a surprise that the resistance team was very deliberately shooting to kill in a clear escalation of their . . . conflict. She could tell from the way they moved that these people were former military, well trained and grimly determined to complete their mission, and she had to believe that this was a deliberate escalation.

  For the first time in her memory, those trying to keep them from taking psychics were on the offense.

  Something had changed.

  Sebring remained where she was long enough to watch as those grim people checked out her fallen lieutenants, probably verifying their targets. Watched as they communicated with each other using a bare minimum of words, and then melted away into the predawn darkness.

  She activated the headset she wore, angrily aware that her routine mission had been upended in less than four minutes. “Sark?”

  “What the hell happened?” His voice was tight but controlled.

  “I don’t know. Get a clean-up crew here. We leave nothing to interest the local police. Got it?”

  “Yeah, got it.”

  “Then report to base.” Without waiting for him to copy the transmission, she deactivated her headset, already on the move.

  Goddammit. Goddammit.

  * * *

  • • •

  What do you see, beloved?

  The schedules and diagrams were all accurate. Only one guard in that pretty, disguised gatepost, and only the two entrances.

  Miranda lifted her binoculars and studied the deceptively innocent building that looked like a small, innocuous company or merely a suite of offices, even if in a very remote location. Not very many parking spots, and nice landscaping that didn’t encourage people to get too close to the seemingly innocent building unless it was to clearly approach an entrance.

  They know all the tricks. The electronic security the place is practically bristling with isn’t visible. The exterior and landscaping look . . . ordinary. Just like a place where some blameless business is conducted. It isn’t even obvious this building has a second floor, far less an extensive underground space a lot larger than a simple basement.

  Easier for us. Bishop’s mind-voice sounded as clear to her as if he stood beside her and spoke quietly aloud, not like he was fifty-odd miles away at an almost identical innocuous building.

  You guys see anything unexpected? Sarah’s mind-voice, as distinctly soft and serene as her speaking voice.

  Miranda did a last thorough check with her binoculars, knowing her partner and husband was doing the same.

  Nothing unexpected, Bishop reported. But we need to reach out with an extra sense or two before we go in there. Four minutes. Do we have them?

  There was a brief pause, and then: You have them. Go.

  Neither Bishop nor Miranda actually moved, but both went utterly still, no binoculars shielding their gazes as each reached out and into their respective targets.

  With each of them as well, strategically placed around each building, were the other members of their teams. They had not been granted much time to get to know each other, but every person on each team recognized a pro in every other person. They were trained, armed, and utterly dedicated to their mission.

  And to these two remarkable leaders.

  Miranda caught her breath suddenly. Henry. Henry McCord. He’s here. In the underground structure.

  I’ve got Emma. And Katie Swan, Bishop responded. Underground as well. Can you reach Henry?

  Wait. Let me . . . Today, everyone seems to be a telepath. He’s waking up. He thought it was a dream, but . . . Okay. Okay, I’m pretty sure I got through to him. He’ll be ready. What about Katie?

  The same. She’s shaky, but . . . determined. They didn’t break her. She’s mad. She’s good and mad.

  And Emma?

  Scared. But relieved to hear from me.

  I’ll bet.

  Miranda could feel herself smile even as her spider senses probed a bit more, still searching. I think there’s another captive psychic, but can’t get a fix. Should be able to once I’m inside. Only a couple more psychics here. Theirs. All sleeping, but . . . Murphy may be right. These are damaged people. Not sure we’ll ever get them back. Not sure we ever had them.

  We’ll get them out anyway. Have to be sure.

  Of course. Those psychics are on the upper level. In their bedrooms. Can’t tell if they’re sleeping or meditating, but I’m certain they aren’t aware of any danger. There are healers here too. Four . . . no, five of them. Duran told the truth. Their sleep is almost like a kind of hibernation. They are really out.

  Maybe how they’re able to extend their life spans.

  Maybe. And those shadows they’re able to project may come straight from their unconscious minds, whether they’re awake or out, because I can feel them too. Cold, slimy, shifting away when I try to see them clearly. No wonder so many psychics find them terrifying. I know it’s only an illusion, and still they send chills through me. All five are on the lower level, same as Henry. We bring the building down on them, and this place will be their grave.

  Same here. Counting . . . six healers. All out, all in the lower level, same as Emma and Katie. And . . . four of their psychics. Two are awake for certain. Some kind of routine mental exercises they’re supposed to be doing. Bored, though.

  Six healers and four of their psychics in your building. Be careful, Noah.

  You know I will. You too, beloved.

  Four minutes. Sarah’s calm mind-voice. All the teams on the rescue operation have completed their missions and cleared the areas. The alarms deliberately raised have alerted Duran, and he’s alerted the suits. He also made sure the other faction’s suits were alerted when several of their field operations went south. As per their protocol, they’ll do a routine security check of the labs, and will discover all is well. All attention should remain fixed on the shadow house raids and the unsuccessful field operations.

  Copy, they sent in unison.

  Miranda? Pendragon.

  Yes?

  You have the lab belonging to Sebring’s superiors. It is a very, very dark place. Bad place. Sad place.

  Copy. On a part of her consciousness, Miranda had already begun building a tough inner barrier to protect herself as much as possible from the cold despair she could feel in this place. They knew some of the abducted psychics had been tortured and killed, and had been fairly certain this was the lab where the worst of those terrible acts had taken place.