Bloodline

For now, she wanted to hold that detail close to her heart, and he let her.

“What’s the matter?” she asked, leaning against him.

“I think we’re still missing something.” He shook his head, not knowing how to put this into words. “Something feels… incomplete.”

“Then figure it out. That’s your job, isn’t it? To put pieces together that don’t fit-but actually do.”

Easier said than done.

And maybe this time the pieces didn’t fit.

He closed his eyes and leaned his head back, sighing deeply. Her head touched his shoulder. Somehow his hand was back in hers, his thumb gently brushing the tenderness of her inner wrist. They’d never said the words to bring them to this place, but both knew it to be right.

These pieces fit.

He was relaxed, content for the first time in months, more at peace-and things fell perfectly into place in his head, fully formed as if they’d always been there.

He jolted upright in his seat.

Seichan stared up at him. “What?”

“The Jewish tradition. Robert told me about it. We’ve been wrong all along. It’s not the Gants… it never was the Gants.”

He stood up, drawing Seichan with him. He hurried over to Painter, who was working on his laptop.

Gray slid next to him. “Can you bring up that Gant family tree that you showed us earlier? And I’ll need Jason Carter’s help to check something.”

Painter nodded, not asking why, knowing this was Gray’s wheelhouse.

The others gathered closer.

In a few seconds, the schematic bloomed again on the screen, detailing the rich lineage of the Gant family. The map was done up as data points, detailing every branch, twig, stem, stalk, root, and tendril of that family tree. The central mass, the densest cluster of data, represented those that carried the actual Gant name.

But Gray wasn’t interested in them.

Painter spoke: “Here’s Jason.”

The analyst’s voice rose from the laptop’s internal speakers. “How can I help, Commander Pierce?”

“I need you to zoom down and show me the outer edges of the family tree.”

“Got it.”

The schematic swelled and swept into the outer spiral arms of the galaxy, to that hazy fog of genetic trails at its edges, made up of lines that spun out and then back in again. Over and over. Threading a weave at the edge of the Gant clan. Those arcing curves delineated where stray members of the family abandoned the main clan, carried other names for a few generations, until some future offspring ended up remarrying back into the family.

Painter had called these extraneous lines outliers, the outlying part of the family tree, those living at a distance.

“What are you looking for?” Painter asked.

“You mentioned you suspected a pattern out here, something you could sense but not grasp.”

“Yes, but why does it matter now? Robert is dead. We can clean things up from here.”

“Robert’s not the problem-he never was. He thought he was a king, or at least a high-ranked lieutenant, but in the end, he was a puppet as surely as anyone else. Used by the Bloodline until they cut his strings.”

Gray realized something else in that moment, his mind filling in those final pieces. “I think Robert was already chafing against those unknown puppet masters. I believe he was the one who sent that note to Amanda to run.”

He remembered Robert’s last words.

No father should lose a daughter…

He was talking about the president as much as himself. Robert knew what a personal hell it was to lose a daughter. He could not let his brother suffer the same fate, so he tried to protect Amanda.

“Then what are you thinking?” Painter asked.

He pointed to the screen. “You were right, there is a pattern here. But we were all looking for a pattern with biased eyes, from a patriarchal viewpoint, where lineage is determined by the male offspring, where boys carry on their fathers’ names. That’s what is mapped here.”

“Okay.”

“But there’s a mirror to this, another way of looking at a family’s genetic roots. Robert mentioned how the Bloodline traced its roots to the clans that were cast out by Moses. True or not, he said they still kept certain Jewish traditions alive.”

Gray twisted and pointed to Lisa. “You mentioned how the triple helices could only pass down a female lineage. From egg to egg to egg, due to the cytoplasmic nature of the PNA strand.”

She nodded.

“That’s why they cast aside all other paths to immortality and concentrated solely on this one. It had a direct correlation to the images on the staff of Christ, but also because it fit what they wanted. A trait that matched their traditions and goals.”

“Which was what?” Painter asked.

Gray pointed to the screen. “The mirror image to a patriarchal view of heredity is a matriarchal one. According to the Mishnah, the oldest codification of Jewish tradition, you must be the child of a Jewish mother to be considered Jewish. The father doesn’t matter. The Jewish heritage is passed only through a woman’s bloodlines.”

But Gray needed proof. “Jason, can you separate out the two genders on this map? Tagging which are males, which are females.”

“Easy. The data is already in place… let me plot in the algorithm.” Then a few seconds later, he returned. “Here are the male lines of the family.”

As they all watched, blue lines sprang to life and illuminated that genetic galaxy-but a clear pattern appeared. Most of the blue threads remained tangled and clustered down the center, only a few coursed into the outlier sections, that hazy edge of the family.

“Now the female bloodline,” Gray said.

The blue fire vanished, and crimson lines blossomed. The outer fog around the central clan lit up with a rosy glow, a crimson cloud of heritage wrapped around the Gant clan.

A small gasp rose from Painter. “Almost all of these outlier lines are women.”

Gray stared closer and traced one of those crimson lines. “A woman leaves the Gant clan-and, in a handful of generations, it’s a woman who returns to marry back into the fold. Seldom a man.” He had another idea. “Jason, can you tag only the outlier lines, see how deeply they mesh with the main Gant clan?”

“Give me a few… done. Here you go.”

On the screen, everything fell away, except for the crimson haze at the edges. Another pattern became clear. Only a few of the red lines ever delved deeply into the main genealogical center. They only stayed for a generation or two-then darted back out again.

Painter saw it, too. “It’s like they’re sticking their toe in the gene pool, then pulling it back out again.” He turned to Gray, realization dawning in his eyes. “They’re like parasites on the Gant family. Bloodsucking flies. They hover near the well of the Gant wealth and power, tap into it regularly, feeding off it to sustain themselves, but mostly they live apart.”

The very definition of outlier.

Painter pointed to the screen. “This is not chance. This was done purposefully. A breeding plan to sustain a female lineage.”

“But why?” Lisa asked behind them.

Gray answered, “It’s likely the only way they can sustain such a lineage, to keep it from fraying away in a world where wealth is passed down to the first son, where most power has been wielded by