“Neurological, not genetic. Your genes are perfectly ordinary, I’m afraid. Do you resent it—being what you are?”

John shrugged.

Max said, “I rescued you from mediocrity.”

“You rescued me from the human race!”

“It amounts to the same thing.”

“Jesus, Max, how pathetically unimaginative!”

His rage took him by surprise: it was a sudden huge pressure in his chest. He said, “I’m more than you ever dreamed of. I could kill us both, you know. It’s been seven years. Things have changed. If I wanted you to you’d drive right off the retaining wall of this freeway. You don’t believe it? But just think, Max. Think how nice it would be. Like flying. Flying out into the void. A little gas, a little twist of the wheel. Like flying, Max—”

The words had spilled out of him. He stopped, aware of the sweat beading on Max’s brow, the way his fingers trembled on the wheel.

My God, he thought. It’s true. I could do that.

He felt suddenly cold.

“You can drop me at the off ramp,” he said.

Max pulled up obediently near a bus stop, wordless and wide-eyed. John climbed out without saying goodbye. He watched as the black Ford shuddered away from the curb and merged uncertainly with the traffic.

Twelve years old.

Alone on this empty, wide boulevard.

It was nighttime now, and very cold.

A week later, John retrieved the journals from Max’s safe.

He told the Woodwards he was sleeping over at a friend’s house. They were pleased to hear that he had finally made a friend and didn’t press him for details. He took the night bus into town and waited until the research unit was locked and dark. Then he shinnied up a maple tree and through one of the high access windows, hinged open to moderate the fierce heating system.

He took the documents from the safe under Max’s desk, photocopied them on the Xerox machine in the adjoining room, then returned the originals. He folded the copies and tucked them under his belt in order to keep his hands free.

In the corridor outside Max’s office he was surprised by a security guard.

The guard was a fat bald man in a blue suit with a pistol at his hip. He came around an angle in the hallway and stood gawking at John for a long instant before dashing forward.

John discovered that he was calm, that he was able to return the guard’s stare and stand his ground. He should have been frightened. Instead, he felt something else … a heady combination of power and contempt. Because the guard was transparent: every twitch betrayed his thoughts. He was a machine, John thought. A noisy engine of belligerence and fear.

He spoke up before the guard could find words, made his own voice calm and uninflected: “I want to leave. No one has to know I was here.” Then watched the wheels turning as the imperatives registered, uncertainty turning down the corners of the man’s mouth and narrowing his eyes. If I phone this in I’ll have to fill out a fucking report; it was as good as reading his mind. “I ought to kick your ass,” the guard began, but it was not so much a threat as a question: can I say this?

“Don’t,” John said.

The guard backed off a step.

Amazing. John knew about suggestibility and the phenomenon of hypnosis, but he was surprised at how effortless it was, how utterly pleasurable. He had bypassed all the barriers; he was talking now directly to the delicate core of self behind this uniform: he pictured something wet and pinkly quivering, an “ego.” It was an easy target.

He said, “Open the door at the back.”

The guard turned and led him down the hallway.

At the door the spell seemed to falter. “Thieving little bastard,” the guard said. “I ought to—”

But John silenced him with a look.

He transferred the thick manila folder of photocopies from his belt to his hand. The guard was standing directly behind him, but didn’t see—or didn’t want to.

John closed the door and listened as the lock slid home.

The night air was cold and bracing. He stood for a moment in the shadow of a tree, smiling. He felt good. Felt free. Freer than he had ever been before.

Reading the research notes, he was shocked to find Marga described as “an unemployed, gravid white female of doubtful morals”—shocked in general by the tone of callous indifference Max had assumed. But he supposed Max had already cast his lot with Homo Superior. This was contempt by proxy, the exploitation of the old order for the sake of the new. Max did not believe in “the people.” Presumably Marga was a thief and a torturer manqué.

The story of his genesis, however, the intrauterine injections and the forced cortical growth, made perfect sense. He had guessed much of this before.

In a way, the theft had been more revealing than the notes themselves. His commandeering of the security guard, his intimidation of Max a few days earlier, had forced a new discovery:he was not weak. He had allowed himself to be dominated by Max’s fears, by the idea that he was different and therefore vulnerable. How intoxicating now to suspect that he might be more than a freak: that he might be functionally superior, better at the things human beings were good at.

A better hunter. A better predator.

“But you still cared about the Woodwards,” Susan said.

Night had fallen. The window was dark, though the snow still beat against it. Susan switched on a lamp.

“I kept them separate in my mind,” John admitted. “I made a special exception for James Woodward. He was an ordinary man and there was nothing I owed him. But I harbored fantasies about pleasing him.”

“It mattered to you.”

“It shouldn’t have.”

“But it did.”

“I think—” He hesitated. “I think I just didn’t want to be disappointed again.”

They had missed lunch altogether, and now it was past dinnertime. Susan went down to the kitchen, fixed a couple of sandwiches and carried them upstairs.

After coffee, John switched on a portable radio for the weather forecast. The news wasn’t good. Record snowfall, schools closed until further notice, City Hall begging motorists to stay off the roads. John shook his head. “We can’t wait much longer.”

To find Amelie, he meant. As if it would be that simple.

But Susan sensed the urgency in his voice.

“No more talk,” he said.

The streetlights were a distant blur through the snow-crusted windows. A gust of wind rattled the panes, and Susan stood up to go to her room.

John reached for her hand.

She hesitated.

“Stay,” he said. “Please stay.”

It was a request, Susan thought. It was not a compulsion, not a demand. She could have left.

She didn’t.

20

It was his life. But not all his life.

He lay beside her in the darkness and wondered whether his sudden surfeit of conscience was actually Benjamin’s: a wisp of that other self. The touch of Susan’s skin against him was a rebuke, almost painful. She was asleep. He moved against her. She was warm and there was snow against the ice-laced window. He had gone cotton-mouthed laboring at the day’s intimacy, an intimacy of words; honest as far as it went … but oblique, polished, limited.

He hadn’t told her, for instance, about that first act of seduction, the act that had haunted him ever since—most recently in a motel room in Alberta. Seduction as bestiality—making love to the Look. Skin fucking skin, souls in absentia. The story of his life. Except for tonight, with Susan; tonight had been different.