Grady guessed they were at least a hundred fifty thousand feet up. Maybe higher. It didn’t feel like they were moving, though he could see the lights of metropolitan sprawl gliding by far below. They must have been doing three or four thousand miles an hour. Maybe more?

Down there was the entirety of the human race. His eyes followed the curvature of the horizon. Unlike with a photograph, the harder he looked, the more there was to see. He hadn’t expected this—that the most magical moment of his life would be given to him by his enemies. Grady couldn’t remove the grin from his face.

After a while he tried to orient himself to the globe—deduce where they were. But “up” didn’t appear to be north. He couldn’t see a recognizable polar ice cap—they weren’t that high. The modified gravity field disoriented him further. It was nearly impossible to tell what he was looking at in the darkness below.

The gravity field was a stable one Earth g. But then again, that might be his technology erasing all sensation of falling. Most people didn’t know that astronauts on the space station were experiencing almost a full g of Earth gravity; it was the fact that they were falling around the Earth that gave the sensation of weightlessness. In fact, it was gravity that was causing their orbital fall—and so the zero gravity sensation was actually being caused by gravity.

Not on this incredible machine. Everything was stable and normal here—like he was sitting in some millionaire’s home theater.

Grady turned to face the uniformed BTC officers seated across from him—young Morrisons both. “I didn’t feel any acceleration—not even when the scramjet kicked in.”

Neither of them answered.

“It’s my gravity technology, isn’t it? You’re canceling out the force of acceleration in the passenger compartment?” He beamed at them. “Amazing.”

He looked again out the window. Too bad this was an evil conspiracy. Otherwise this would really be fun.

“Are we in the mesosphere? We are, aren’t we? You could probably make use of the gravity fluctuations in the mesosphere for additional propulsion. Maybe even stabilization. Is that what you’re doing?”

The Morrison clones just stared back at him.

“I’m right, aren’t I?”

The pilot’s cockpit wasn’t visible from this cabin—in fact, there wasn’t even a door leading to it from where he was. The craft had only been traveling for an hour or so when the glass faded into an opaque surface. Materials science again? It looked like the glass itself had changed from clear to opaque. What innovator was doing time in Hibernity for that breakthrough?

He turned again to his guards, but they stared back at him like statues. No point in asking.

Frustrated that the window shield had come down again, Grady tried to get his head back in the game. It was distracting. It really was. They were rolling out all the stops. Beyond first class. This was infinity class. A private hypersonic jet with a front-row seat to the cosmos. His gravity technology had made it possible. God, he wanted to be working on this.

But there was no way. He remembered all too clearly the cruelty of his captors. The life they had stolen from him and from others. And only a vague sense of the lost memories he’d never get back.

His fellow Resistors had put their faith in him. He would not fail them.

Grady looked around at the burled walnut millwork and the fine leather all around him. This, too, was a gilded cage. He raised his flute of champagne to his guards. “To human ingenuity.”

They stared like Sphinxes.

 • • •

The landing a half hour or so later was completely silent and without the sensation of acceleration or deceleration. It was as though they were in a hotel courtesy suite, not an aircraft. Before long a pleasant tone sounded, and his guards removed their seat belts. Not that anyone had needed them.

A black door slid silently upward, then aside, and the guards ushered Grady into a brightly lit hangar. He stood for a moment at the top of the metal stairs. A midnight-blue Cadillac Escalade with diplomatic license plates stood idling below. Dozens of guards patrolled the hangar perimeter, dressed in plain clothes, with long guns slung at their chests. It looked like regular twenty-first-century technology. Grady knew the BTC had outgrown firearms decades ago. These seemed oddly out of place given everything he now knew.

He stepped down the stairway and felt balmy summer air wash over him. The fragrance of mown grass brought an onslaught of memories—hazy and indistinct though they were. He felt so alive. He spotted painted numbers on the hangar door. They glowed in magenta and violet. He felt their invisible geometry. His synesthesia, he knew, but it felt good to be surprised by numbers again.

He turned to a guard. “Where are we?”

“Keep walking.”

Grady glanced back at the cobalt-blue hypersonic aircraft looming over him. Its lines were slanted in antiradar angles, giving it the look of an Aztec sacrificial knife. It was a remarkable machine. Silent. Invisible. Fast. He guessed they’d just traversed half the world in under two hours.

A strong hand grabbed his elbow, and he was soon handed off to a new set of Morrisons standing next to the open door of the Escalade. From the door’s thickness he guessed the vehicle was armored—but crudely. Again, early twenty-first-century technology. No doubt this machine was intended for the public streets. To blend in.

He gestured to the aircraft behind him. “You know, my invention made that gravity propulsion possible.”

“Good for you. Now shut up and get in.” The guard shoved Grady into the SUV.

That meant it was showtime. Grady had roughly thirty minutes to escape once they were under way.

There were a total of six guards in the vehicle, only two of them Morrisons—one on either side of Grady in the middle seat. He guessed the BTC didn’t want to have too many Morrisons in one place in public. Twins were one thing—clones something else entirely.

The two guards up front looked beefy, though. As did those in back. No doubt steroids were as crude as leeches to the BTC. They probably had something much better to pump up their soldiers. The security detail wore blue blazers and slacks—no ties. No guns visible. They looked, in fact, just like diplomatic bodyguards.

There was Scotch and wine on the console in front of him, along with what now seemed like an ancient flat-screen LCD television—no holographic units here apparently. He was sorely tempted to have a belt of booze to settle his nerves, but if he could survive Hibernity, this escape should be no big deal. They couldn’t shoot him. Hedrick needed Grady alive. That’s why they were bringing him to headquarters. He just had to make sure they didn’t nox him before he pulled this off.

Grady nodded to the men up front. “So we’re slumming it in the twenty-first century for the last leg, I see.”

The driver gave Grady a dismissive glance in the rearview mirror.

And then they were under way. With a rude jolt of acceleration that now seemed annoying, the vehicle moved through the hangar doors and out into the night. Before long they were rolling through forested countryside. Lots of deciduous trees and lush undergrowth silhouetted against a moonlit sky.

Grady leaned to the side to look for landmarks in the darkness. “Where are we?”

“Earth.”

The guards cracked up. The one to Grady’s right gestured to the television. “This thing get ESPN?”

The driver nodded. “Yeah. Remote’s next to it.”

Moments later the TV came to life.

“What channel?”

“How the hell should I know? I don’t sit back there.”

Grady watched in bewilderment as a commercial for dish soap came on-screen. It was surreal under the circumstances to watch a CGI sponge dancing across a gleaming kitchen countertop. Given everything that had transpired, it all looked so trivial.