“The stupid Curly ring, and now this.”

She put the car in gear, hung a U-turn without driving over the Bucky replicant, switched the headlights to low beam, drove across the mangled park gate, hoping not to puncture a tire, and turned right onto St. Charles Avenue.

“So … I’m not going to get the silent treatment, am I?” Michael asked.

“You should be so lucky.”

“Another prayer unanswered.”

“Here’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.”

“I can’t afford it,” he said.

“Do you think I eat too much?”

“It’s none of my business what you eat.”

“You think I’m going to get a fat ass, don’t you?”

“Uh-oh.”

In the backseat, the shepherd panted but not with anxiety. He sounded happy. Maybe he’d heard so much replicant-speak lately that he delighted in real human conversation.

“Admit it. You’re worried I’ll get a fat ass.”

“I don’t sit around thinking about the future of your ass.”

“You were so hot for the Janet monster’s tight butt.”

“I wasn’t hot for it. I just noticed it, you know, as a nice work of nature, like you’d comment on a great wisteria vine if you saw one.”

“Wisteria? That is so lame. Besides, Victor’s people aren’t works of nature.”

“I don’t have a chance here if you’re gonna parse my every word.”

“Just so you know, my butt is as small as hers was, and even tighter.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“You’ll have to take my word for it because there isn’t going to be any exhibition. If you dropped a quarter on my butt, it would bounce to the ceiling.”

“That sounds like a challenge.”

“Let me tell you, partner, it’s gonna be a long time before you get a chance to bounce a quarter off my butt.”

“Just in case, from now on, I’m going to be sure I’ve always got a quarter in my pocket.”

“Bounce it off my butt,” she said, “you’ll get back two dimes and a nickel in change.”

“What does that mean?”

“I have no idea.”

He said, “Two dimes and a nickel in change,” and he broke into laughter.

His laughter was contagious, and when the dog heard them both laughing, he made sweet mewling sounds of delight.

After a minute, Carson settled to serious once more and said, “Thanks, pal. You saved my ass back there with the Bucky thing.”

“De nada. You’ve saved mine often enough.”

“Each time we have to throw down on one of these New Race,” she said, “seems like we squeak by with less room to spare than before.”

“Yeah. But at least we do keep on squeakin’ by.”

CHAPTER 28

AT 2:15 A.M., at Victor’s stylish workstation in the main lab at the Hands of Mercy, as Deucalion completed his electronic fishing and backed out of the computer, he thought he heard in the distance a scream as thin as the plaint of a lost child.

Given some of the experiments being conducted in this building, screams were not likely to be infrequent. No doubt the windows had been bricked up not solely to foil prying eyes but also to ensure that disturbing sounds would fail to reach passersby in the street.

The staff here, the subjects of the experiments, and those who were growing in the creation tanks were without exception victims of their lunatic god, and Deucalion pitied them. He hoped eventually to free them all from their anguish and despair, not one at a time as he had freed Annunciata and Lester, but somehow en masse.

He had no way to free them right now, however, and as soon as he heard from Michael, he would be leaving the Hands of Mercy in a quantum leap and joining the detectives. He could not be distracted by whatever horrors might be unfolding elsewhere in the building.

When the sound came again, marginally louder and longer than before but still distant, Deucalion recognized that it conveyed neither terror nor physical pain, and therefore was not a scream at all, but instead a shriek. He could not tell what the crier of this cry meant to express.

He stood listening—and only realized after the fact that he had risen from the workstation chair.

The silence following the wail had an expectant quality, like the mute sky during the second or two between a violent flash of lightning and the crash of thunder. Here, the sound came first and, though faint, managed to be as terrible as the loudest thunderclap.

He waited for the equivalent of the flash, cause after effect. But what followed a half minute later was another shriek.

On the third hearing, the sound had significance, not because he could identify its source but because it recalled to him cries he heard in certain dreams that for two hundred years had haunted him. They were not dreams of the night he came alive in Victor’s first lab, but of other and more dreadful events, perhaps of events that preceded his existence.

After his first hundred years, decade by decade, he needed less sleep. This meant, thankfully, fewer opportunities to dream.

Deucalion crossed the main lab, opened a door, stepped across the threshold, and found the hallway deserted.

The cry came again, twice in quick succession. Louder here than in the laboratory, the sound was still distant.

Sometimes Deucalion dreamed of an old stone house with interior walls of cracked and yellowed plaster, illuminated by oil lamps and candle sconces. When the worst storm winds blew, from the attic arose a disturbing click-and-clatter, like the fleshless body of Death rattling in his cowled robe as he walked the night. Worse than what might wait above was what might wait below: A narrow turning of stone stairs descended to an ironbound door, and beyond the door were the rooms of a forbidding cellar, where the stagnant air sometimes had the acrid taste of spoiled suet and at other times the salty taste of tears.

Here in the old hospital, the latest two shrieks had come from another floor, whether from above or below, he could not tell. He walked to the stairs at the end of the corridor, opened the fire door, and waited, feeling almost as if he might be dreaming that well-known scenario but in a new setting.

In the familiar nightmare, the horror of going into the attic or the desire not to go into the cellar was always the sum of the plot, an endless wretched journey through the rooms that lay between those two poles of terror, as he strove to avoid both the highest and lowest chambers of the house.

Now, the shriek fell through the hospital stairwell from above. Heard more clearly than before, it was pleading and mournful.

Like the miserable cries that sometimes haunted his infrequent sleep.

Deucalion ascended the stairs toward the higher realms of Mercy.

In the old stone house, which might have once been a real place or just a structure of his imagination, he had dreamed his way into the cellar many times, but never farther than the first room. Then he always woke, choking with a nameless dread.

Twice, with an oil lamp, he had gone into the dream-house attic. Both times, a fierce storm raged outside. Drafts blustered through that high room, and he was shocked out of sleep and into anguish by what the lamplight revealed.

Climbing the hospital stairs, Deucalion felt at risk of losing his balance, and he put one hand on the railing.

He was constructed from the parts of bodies salvaged from a prison graveyard. His hands were big and strong. They had been the hands of a strangler.

One floor above Victor’s main lab, as Deucalion reached for the door to the corridor, he heard the shriek again, its source still overhead. As he continued up the stairs, he watched his powerful hand slide along the railing.

His eyes had been salvaged from an ax murderer.

He sensed that what he was about to see in the higher halls of Mercy would be no less terrible than what the lamplight had shown him in the dream-house attic. On this fateful night, past and present were coming together like the hemispheres of a nuclear warhead, and the post-blast future was unknown.

CHAPTER 29

THE TORMENT OF PERPETUAL AWARENESS. The torment of cold. The torment of the transparent polymeric fabric. The torment of the glass door on the freezer.

Drifting in the saline solution, Chameleon can see the large room in which it is stored. A blue scene. The blue of cold vision.

Out there in the laboratory, work continues. Busy blue people.

Perhaps they are TARGETS. Perhaps they are EXEMPTS.

When not in cold suspension, Chameleon can smell the difference between TARGETS and EXEMPTS.

The scent of any EXEMPT pleases Chameleon. The scent of any TARGET infuriates.

In its current condition, it can smell nothing.

The walls of the freezer conduct the unit’s compressor-motor vibrations to the imprisoning sack. The sack conducts them into the solution.

This is neither a pleasant nor an unpleasant sensation for Chameleon.

Now the character of the vibrations changes. They are similar but subtly different.

This happens periodically. Chameleon is sufficiently intelligent to consider the phenomenon and to reach conclusions about it.

Evidently, the freezer has two motors. They alternate to prevent either from being overtaxed.

This also ensures that if one motor fails, the other will serve as backup.

Chameleon’s physical function is greatly inhibited by the cold. Its mental function is less affected.

With little to occupy its mind, Chameleon focuses obsessively on every minim of sensory input, such as motor vibrations.

It is not at risk of being driven insane by its circumstances. At no time was it ever sane.

Chameleon has no desires or ambitions other than to kill. The purpose of its existence is currently frustrated, which is the nature of its torment.

Out in the blue laboratory, the busy blue people are suddenly agitated. The standard pattern of activities, which Chameleon has long studied, is abruptly disrupted.

Something unusual has come into the lab. It is busy and blue, but it is not a person.

Interesting.

CHAPTER 30

IN VICTOR’S MASTER-BEDROOM CLOSET, all foldable clothes were stored in banks of drawers, and all hanging items were behind cabinet doors, leaving the room sleek and neat, as he liked it.

In his clothes collection were 164 custom-tailored suits, 67 fine sport coats, 48 pairs of slacks, 212 shirts including dress and casual, drawers and drawers full of perfectly folded sweaters, and shelf after shelf of shoes for every occasion. Especially fond of silk neckties, he had lost count when his collection passed three hundred.

He enjoyed dressing well. Considering his exemplary physique, clothes hung beautifully on him. He thought he was nearly as pleasing to the eye when dressed as he was when nude.

After the phone call from Erika Four, Victor counseled himself to linger in the spa over another glass of Dom Pérignon. His former wife was trash, figuratively and literally, and though she may have somehow been resuscitated, she was no match for either his intellect or his cunning.

As prudent as he was confident, however, he had stepped from the spa after taking only two sips of the second glass of champagne. Until the problem of Erika Four could be understood and resolved, he ought to have a suitable weapon on his person at all times.

In a sapphire silk robe with scarlet piping and matching silk slippers, he went to the back of his deep walk-in closet and opened a pair of tall doors. Before him was a double-hung selection of shirts, twenty on the upper rod, twenty on the lower.

He placed his left hand flat against a sidewall of the cabinet, a concealed scanner read his fingerprints, the rods and shirts rolled up and out of sight, and the back wall slid aside. Lights came on in a fifteen-foot-square room beyond.

Victor stepped through the cabinet, into his small armory.

Like the clothes in the closet, the weapons were not in view. He would have found such a display garish, the kind of thing a too-enthusiastic militarist might have done.

Victor was not a member of the National Rifle Association, not only because he was not a joiner, but also because he didn’t approve of the Second Amendment. He believed that, in order to have a well-managed population and to prevent the people from acting on the delusion that the government served them, only an elite class should be permitted ownership of firearms. The masses, in matters of dispute among themselves, could make do perfectly well with knives, fists, and sticks.

The machine guns and the custom-machined automatic shotguns were in racks behind upper doors. Pistols and revolvers were in drawers, nestled in molded foam finished with a spray-on velvet, which not only embraced the weapons but also displayed them as diamond necklaces might be presented on a jeweler’s velvet trays.

Fortunately, although the Erikas were strong and were intended to be durable, with full speed-healing capability as well as the ability to turn off pain, they were not as physically formidable as others of the New Race. They were designed with a few points of vulnerability, and their bones were not the dense armorlike quality given to others born from the tanks.

Consequently, he selected a 1911-style Colt .45 ACP, the Springfield Armory version, with custom 24-line-per-inch checking in the walnut grip, plus deep-cut and hand-engraved decorative scrollwork in the stainless steel.

On those rare occasions when he could not kill by proxy, using one of the New Race, Victor wanted his weapon to be as attractive as it was powerful.

After loading the pistol and a spare magazine, he selected a supple hand-tooled leather scabbard that would slip onto whatever belt he chose with his trousers, and he returned with everything to the clothes closet, pressing his hand to the cabinet side-wall again to conceal the armory behind him.

Sleep was usually a choice for him, not often a necessity, and he decided to return to the Hands of Mercy. The amusements that he had come home to pursue, after a long and curious day at work, no longer appealed to him.

From the lab, he would contact Nick Frigg, the Gamma who was the superintendent at Crosswoods Waste Management, the landfill in the uplands northeast of Lake Pontchartrain. Thoroughly strangled, Erika Four had been sent there for disposal; therefore, Nick would be the one most likely to know in which sector of which pit, under what garbage, she had been buried.

Watching himself in a full-length mirror, Victor kicked off his slippers. With the flair of a fine matador manipulating a cape, he stripped out of the sapphire silk robe.

He picked up the .45 pistol and posed with it this way and that, pleased with the impression that he made.

Now what to wear, what to wear … ?

CHAPTER 31

THE HANDS OF A STRANGLER. The gray eyes of an executed ax murderer. Of his two hearts, one had come from a mad arsonist who burned down churches, the other from a child molester.

As he reached the stairwell landing, a floor and a half above the main laboratory at the Hands of Mercy, his vision brightened for a moment, returned to normal, brightened….