they have the same ones?”
“Maybe their DNA doesn’t work in us exactly the way they thought it would. How would they know for sure, anyway? They’ve never been successful with this adaptation thing before us.”
Reese looked out across the water. If the adaptation procedure had changed them in a way the Imria hadn’t expected, what would happen when they began adapting other human beings? “Do you think we should tell Eres about our telepathic stuff?”
“I’m not sure.”
She glanced at him. “Why?”
“They have so much power over us. They know so much that we don’t. This is the only thing they don’t know.”
She thought back. “Lovick and CASS don’t know, either. They think we have the same abilities as the Imria.”
“Nobody else knows,” he said in sudden realization. “We never told Sophia Curtis. We never got that far because Jeff Highsmith stopped us. They all think we have to be touching someone to know their thoughts.”
“We didn’t tell anyone about the crowds thing either, did we?” She tried to remember what had happened the day the gunman had been arrested at Fisherman’s Wharf. She had been overwhelmed by the emotions of the crowd, but she didn’t think anyone had really understood why. At least, nobody but David. “Did you tell your parents? The last time I talked to mine about our adaptation, I’m pretty sure I only told them about the touching thing.”
“No, I haven’t talked to them about it since we got back from Nevada, and I couldn’t figure out how to explain everything without sounding crazy, so I didn’t tell them about the telepathy stuff.” His gaze on her sharpened. “Are you sure you didn’t tell anyone? Not even Julian?”
She tried to remember all the conversations she’d had with Julian about the adaptation. “I don’t know,” she admitted finally. “I might have said something. But I think it’s okay. Julian won’t say anything. I know he won’t.”
David nodded. “All right. So we keep this to ourselves for now.”
A tense excitement gripped Reese. Could she and David finally have an advantage, however small? “Right. We don’t tell anyone else.”
“Not until it’s absolutely necessary,” David said.
The thought of what their government might do with two telepaths—even if the telepaths didn’t really know what they were doing—was deeply unsettling to Reese. “On Monday, Mr. Hernandez is going to make us report in. What are we going to tell him?”
“We can tell him what Eres taught us, can’t we? If we’re only keeping our telepathy a secret, we might as well tell him the rest.”
“Okay. I guess that makes sense.” She turned around so that the railing was behind her and she could see Angel Island receding in the distance. Half a dozen seagulls lifted off from their perches on the pilings in the harbor, their white wings a blur of motion as they took to the air. She had gotten so used to not seeing birds around the city anymore that the sight of this flock was startling.
David said, “And we have to agree on when to reveal it.”
“Yes,” she said, her gaze still on the flying birds.
“Reese.”
There was something in the tone of his voice that made her look at him. “What?”
“What was that about with Eres Tilhar at the end?”
“Nothing,” she said, surprised by the change of subject. She saw a flash of disappointment in David’s eyes. She rushed on: “It was too much for me, that’s all. It was too intimate. I didn’t want Eres to know everything about me right away.”
He moved to stand in front of her, hands in his pockets. The wind was at her back now, and it blew her hair forward over her face. She tried to comb it back with her fingers, but it didn’t stay in place. He reached out to tuck a lock behind her ear, and the trail of his fingertip over her skin made her shiver. She caught his hand in hers, and she immediately felt the tension inside him. He was anxious about what she wasn’t telling him, but he didn’t want to push her. She was filled with a combination of relief and shame.
He closed the space between them and kissed her gently. She wanted to pull him closer, but underneath the spark that lit inside her, she felt something else: a thin, wavering sadness. David stepped back, breaking contact, and gave her a brief, hollow smile. “We have to restrain ourselves, right?” he said.
She stared at him, uncertain. “Yeah,” she agreed finally. “Right.”
CHAPTER 19
On Sunday afternoon, Reese’s mom drove her to UCSF Medical Center to meet David and his dad. It was a very different experience from the exam she had received against her will at Blue Base. It took all of ten minutes. She didn’t have to get undressed, and her mom stayed in the exam room with her. There was a poster of the circulatory system on the wall, like something out of a biology classroom. A nurse in blue scrubs came in to take her blood and swab the inside of her cheek with a Q-tip. She was accompanied by a gray-haired doctor who introduced himself as Dr. Alan Nadler.
“How long will it take to sequence our DNA?” Reese asked after her blood was drawn.
“Not long,” Dr. Nadler answered. “It can be done in a matter of hours these days, but we’ll need more time to analyze it and compare it with normal human DNA. We’re hoping to work fast, but we’re still in the process of assembling our team and we want to make sure nothing is contaminated. We hope to have preliminary results in a couple of weeks.” As the nurse finished up, Dr. Nadler took the samples from her and placed them in a locked case. “I’ll be overseeing the process from my office here at UCSF.” He removed a card from his pocket and handed it to Reese’s mom. “You can contact me if you have any questions.”
Later that night, Reese was sitting on the couch with her laptop, reading an article about the Imria—“Vatican Believes Imria Are Children of God”—when the landline rang in the kitchen. She heard footsteps, and then her mom’s muffled voice answered the phone. Reese scrolled through the story; the pope had declared that Akiya Deyir’s statements about the miraculous resemblance between humans and Imria proved that God’s hand was at work. During Sunday mass in Rome earlier in the day, the pope had said, “God is great, and there can be no greater proof of this than the fact that He has created another people also in His image.”
“Reese, do you know where Julian is?” her mom asked.
Reese looked up. Her mom was standing in the archway to the living room, phone in hand. “No,” Reese said. “Why?”
Her mom put the phone back to her ear. “She doesn’t know, Celeste.”
“What happened?” Reese asked.
“Julian’s late,” her mom said.
Reese glanced at the time on her laptop. It was almost ten thirty. She hadn’t talked to Julian since school on Friday, and even then it had been only perfunctory. They still hadn’t made up from the fight they’d had earlier in the week. She had no idea where Julian could be on a Sunday night. “It’s still early,” Reese said, but her mom wasn’t paying attention.
“Why don’t you give him another hour or so,” she said into the phone. “It’s not the first time he’s been late.” A pause, and a worried expression crossed Cat’s face. “I know. But there are police everywhere these days—and those soldiers. I’m sure if he ran into any trouble with the protesters, you’d know by now.”
Reese closed the laptop and went to the windows, peeking through the curtains at the street below. She saw the sedan where her government agents were sitting across the street, but otherwise the block was quiet. Every once in a while protesters or tourists still swung by her house to snap photos, but the primary demonstrations took place across from Kennedy High School and at Fisherman’s Wharf. The rest of the city was crawling with cops and the National Guard.
“Call me when you hear from him,” Cat said. “I want to know as soon as you know. Bye.” The phone beeped as the call ended. “Honey, are you sure you don’t know where Julian is? He didn’t tell you anything?”
