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“Hopeworth still stands, so the quake and fire obviously didn’t destroy everything. Surely they had backups?”
“That’s the thing no one can figure out. There was a good fire prevention system in place, but none of it worked. Everything was destroyed. The buildings, the computers, every scrap of data on Penumbra—backup systems, storage areas, everything—including the personnel who were in the buildings at the time. Nothing escaped.”
“Nothing except five men.” If the motive was revenge, why leave five alive? She glanced at Gabriel. “Maybe someone’s making amends for a past miss?”
“But why wait fifteen years? It makes no sense.”
“That it doesn’t, lad. Especially when whoever set fire to Hopeworth managed to get in and out without ever being seen. If they could do that, they could finish it off properly.”
“Could it have been an inside job?”
“Doubtful. Everyone in Hopeworth is microchipped. Every move is tracked.”
Someone had microchipped her. Was that confirmation that she’d been a part of Hopeworth?
“Were there many families at Hopeworth?” Gabriel asked, obviously following her line of thinking.
Allars snorted. “Hopeworth is no place for kids, believe me.”
“Then why do they employ an obstetrician?”
The old man shrugged. “The military has many strange ways.”
“What about you, Mark?” she asked. “Did you ever have kids?”
Allars’s smile held more than a little bitterness. “I couldn’t. Some of the tests they did on us back then made us sterile. They
compensated us, of course, but I know the women—and Meg in particular—were real resentful.”
There was an edge in his voice that made her ask, “Just how well did you and Meg know each other?”
“We might have gotten married if we hadn’t been in the military. Marriages between personnel weren’t allowed. Once we’d left the military, things seemed to change.” The old man shrugged, yet the sudden grief in his eyes belied his casualness. “Meg changed. She just wanted to be friends. We lived together, you know, here in this house.”
“What about Emma Pierce, then?” Sam asked, feeling sorry for the old man. His life certainly hadn’t gone the way he’d planned—but then, neither had hers. And at least he could remember his life. “Where does she fit into all this?”
“Emma was a friend of Meg’s. She came to Hopeworth about three years after us.”
“What sort of project was she involved in?”
Allars shrugged and dug a handkerchief out of his pajama pocket to wipe his watery eyes. “We didn’t really share information. It was code-named Generation 18, and I do know that everyone involved was either a shifter or a changer.”
“Did they take cell samples from Emma, as well?”
Allars snorted. “They took a damn sight more than cells. They took her damn ovaries.”
Sam blinked. “They what?”
“Yeah, real nice of them, wasn’t it? Emma wasn’t aware of it until much later, of course. At the time, all the women were on medication to prevent ovulation, anyway.”
“But how could you not know you’d undergone major surgery like that? Surely there would have been a scar, at the very least.”
“They were cutting into her, and the others, all the time. Taking little samples of skin, pieces of this, pieces of that. It was part of the job. Emma had volunteered to be a lab rat, like me and Meg. The pay and living conditions were top rate, even for Hopeworth. But so were the costs, as we later discovered.”
“What price did you pay, Mark?” Gabriel’s voice was soft and held a hint of compassion. “Besides losing Meg, I mean?”
“I’m barely sixty, and look at me. Shifters have a life span almost double that of humans, and here I am, ready for the scrap heap. But I’m luckier than some. Many developed cancers. Meg—” Allars hesitated, his gaze drifting to a photo on top of the TV of a gray-haired woman. Sam could see nothing of herself in that photo, despite Allars’s earlier statement. “Meg developed skin lesions all over. It wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t quick.” He hesitated and wiped his eyes again. “I never saw her die, you know. The military came and took her away from me.”
“What about Emma?” Sam asked softly, and rubbed her aching head again.
