“Yes, it does,” Betsy said, coming up behind them. “I’m calling the police.”

“Is that such a good idea?” Patrick said.

Romy smiled. “I think it’s a great idea. If theyknew something, they’d havedone something. Betsy left SimGen with a roar, so it’s no surprise they’re watching her. Probably watching a number of ex-Natal-Center people. But why should we let them have an easy time of it? Let’s make them explain to the local constabulary what they’re doing out there.”

17

“Here’s what we’ve got on her,” Lowery said, unfolding his notes behind the wheel of the surveillance car.

Luca stared at Dr. Cannon’s two-story colonial from the passenger seat. He’d wanted a personal look at the lay of the land, and he didn’t like it one bit.

“Elizabeth Cannon, age forty-eight, never married, no kids, lives alone. In solo obstetrics-gynecology practice. Works out of a home office, on the staff of Nassau County Community Hospital.”

“Home office?” Luca said.

“Yeah. That extension on the left side there.”

“Where are her patients?”

“I called about that. Her answering service said she’d canceled her office hours from today through next week but would still be seeing her hospital patients and doing her deliveries.”

“Odd, don’t you think?”

Lowery shrugged. “Hey, it’s Christmas Eve. And she took Christmas week off. Do the same if I could.”

“We don’t find that sim,” he told Lowery, “you’ll have the longest Christmas vacation of your life.”

The scanner squawked—Lowery was tuned into the local cop frequency. Something about a fender bender on Maple Street.

“So far she’s been a good little girl. Made her hospital rounds this morning, then went grocery shopping.”

“Buy a lot?” Luca asked.

“Come to think of it, yeah. Watched her load six bags in the back of her wagon—a blue Volvo, by the way.”

Luca straightened in his seat. Interesting. “Six bags for one woman living alone?”

“Like I said, it’s Christmas. Maybe she’s planning a big family dinner.”

“Read your own notes—she’sgot no family.”

The more Luca thought about Dr. Elizabeth Cannon, the more he liked her as a real possibility. A loner with tons of experience delivering sims, she’d probably jump at the chance to shut down a place she thought of as a “slave factory.” Now here she was, stocking up on groceries—enough to feed a sim and the missing Cadman and Sullivan perhaps? Plus she had a home office, the perfect place to deliver a sim. Was that why she’d canceled her office hours? Wouldn’t do to have one of her patients spot a pregnant sim, would it.

He felt some of his fatigue lifting.

“All right,” Lowery said, “let’s just say this sim is in there. How—?”

“Sheis in there,” Luca said. “I feel it in my gut.”

“Okay. I’ll go with that, because my gut’s giving me the same message, but does your gut have any idea how we get her the fuck out of there? Look at this neighborhood, will you? It’sLeave It To Beaver -ville. There’s no room to operate.”

Luca had already noticed that. Neat, middle-size houses, most sporting Christmas decorations, nestled side by side and back to back on quarter-acre lots, with wide streets that nobody parked on. Sitting here like this, their car looked as alien as a flying saucer. Only a matter of time before—

Another squawk on the scanner, this one about a suspicious car parked on Cavendish Drive.

“Shit!” Lowery said. “That’s us.”

Luca slapped the dashboard. “Move. I don’t want any local heat seeing our faces.”

“So what do we do?” Lowery said as he put the car in gear.

“A raid. Oh-four-hundred tomorrow morning.”

“Are you kidding? On Christmas?”

“Can you think of a time it’ll be less expected? Six of us hit the place front and back wearing FBI jackets and full assault gear. If we find the sim we secure her, terminate everyone else, and take off. If we don’t find her, we apologize for raiding the wrong address, and disappear.”

“FBI?”

“Hey, it’s not like they never raid private homes and it’s not like they’ve never fucked up before either. Everybody still remembers Waco. It’ll take days, maybe weeks, before the feds convince the public they weren’t involved.”

Lowery grinned. “And by then we’ll be long gone. I like it.”

“It’s win-win,” Luca said. “If I’m right, we’ll have the sim. If I’m wrong, no more wasting time watching Cannon.”

But I’mnot wrong, he told himself. That sim’s in there. I can smell her.

18

SUFFOLK COUNTY, NY

“Even though it’s only Christmas Eve, we’ll call this our Christmas dinner,” Zero said as he opened the lids of the pizza boxes on his dining room table. “Because who knows where we’ll be tomorrow? No turkey for our sim Christmas, I’m afraid. Just two large pies—a plain and a sausage.” He glanced at his two guests. “Do either of you know what Christmas means, by the way?”

Kek didn’t even look up; he’d been lured away from one of the computers where he’d been engrossed inMortal Kombat XX , and now he grabbed a slice of the sausage pie and started wolfing it down.

But Tome smiled and said, “Lights and trees and presents.”

“Yes, that’s a big part of it. A time of peace on earth and good will toward men, I’m told. But what about sims? Does that include good will toward sims?”

Zero had made the mistake of allowing himself a glass of holiday cheer: one Scotch and water. Terrible tasting stuff, didn’t know how Ellis Sinclair had drunk so much of it all those years, but he’d forced it down—the season to be jolly and all that. Now he wished he hadn’t. Not used to alcohol, and though he wasn’t feeling much in the way of physical effects, it seemed to have untethered his thoughts, leaving them to wander. Now they were wandering into terra incognita.

“Tome not know, Mist Zero.”

Not know what? Oh, yes…about good will toward sims.

“Of course you don’t, Tome. Christmas has become a secular holiday for the most part, but it’s still a religious occasion for those who celebrate the arrival of their god to save mankind. But what of us sims? Are we included in that salvation? Or are we damned?” He toasted with a piece of plain pie. “Joy to the world.”

But he felt no trace of joy, felt instead as if he were standing on the brink of a precipice, gazing into the unknown. The world as he’d always known it was about to change. Radically. And with it his relationship to that world and all the people he knew in it. Nothing would ever be the same.

He tried to imagine what it would be like to come out of hiding, to wander about with his face exposed to the world, to be aperson . He could not.

He surprised himself by starting to sing: “We three sims of chimpanzee blood, wondering how we’ll ride out the flood…” He noticed Tome and Kek staring at him. “Come on, sing! You know the words!”

But then he couldn’t go on, not with his throat constricting around a sob.

What have I done? My race, my brother sims—what will happen to them when Meerm’s baby is shoved in the face of the world? By saving them will I doom them to extinction?

19

SUSSEX COUNTY, NJ

DECEMBER 25

“We leave at oh-three-hundred,” Luca told Lowery. The two of them had the SimGen security offices virtually to themselves. He checked his watch. “That gives you ten minutes to get the other four assembled by the cars and ready to go.”

“Got it,” Lowery said and trotted off.

Luca turned back to the printouts on his desk. This genetics stuff was so complicated. He’d done search after search before tracking down intergenomic and intragenomic competition, and then more searching before finding articles he could understand. Weren’t many of those, but he’d managed to glean some idea of what it all meant. He still didn’t see what was so frightening about it.

Intergenomic competition…a theory that arose back in the nineties about the maternal and paternal halves of the fetal genome competing for dominance during development. Luca understood it best when he translated it into combat terms. In a male embryo, the Y chromosome from the father directs the struggle against the maternal half of the genome. But in a female, with no Y to marshal the forces of the paternal genome, the maternal X has an easier time against the paternal X; it can then push more characteristics from its own underlying genome toward the front, thus showing more of its maternal DNA to the world.