Every face at the table turned to him. Ruche seemed more surprised than most. "What?"

"Or, rather, not any type Gen we've seen before. Not a conventional martial-arts expert either."

Ruche scoffed. "Come on, Frank. She went through them like a scythe."

"Gerry, will you allow that I have some expertise in this subject?"

That shut him up. Operations hosted an annual combat-skills tournament, and Colby's glory wall contained a dozen trophies from the unarmed-combat competition. Most were second-place awards, but the most recent two were first-placers. It was generally conceded that the competition really started at second place, because Colby owned the event.

"I'm sure she's well-trained if she's working with John Lynch," he continued. "Frankly, I can hardly imagine how dangerous a Gen trained by him would be in a fight." Before Lynch's 'retirement,' the competition had started at third place; Colby's formidable skills and two-decade age advantage hadn't been nearly enough to wrest the top spot from his boss. "But no matter what discipline you're into, good technique requires balance and focus. When you deliver a blow or a kick, you strive to concentrate a maximum amount of force at an opponent's area of weakness." He looked at the image on the screen. "We've all seen this in movies, but it's the only place it works. You can't deliver more than a fraction of your body's strength to your target. It only worked because she had so much strength to waste. It showed no more expertise than swatting a fly."

"It impressed the hell out of me," Diehl said. "I haven't competed in the tourney in years, but even at the top of my game, I never would have seen that coming."

Colby shrugged. "Like I said, it's a move that would only work for a special type of Gen."

"'Special Gen.'" Ruche's eyebrows rose. "That's a bit of a redundancy, don't you think? Stop dropping hints, Frank. Do you know something or don't you?"

He faced Ruche squarely. "I know that whether this dustup was planned or improvised, our girl here gave us a startling demonstration – of speed, power, tactical sense, and situational awareness." He saw Diehl and Phillips nodding slightly. He shifted his gaze from Ruche to the image of the chameleon. "And I'll bet she's a good dancer."

Ruche scoffed. "Gee, Frank. If you find her first, are you going to ask her out?"

The room stirred. Men all around the table, and in the back rows as well, traded looks and hid smiles – or didn't hide them. Colby fumed. I'm a decorated combat veteran. I was a cop on one of the roughest beats in the country. I was an X-Team grunt for four years, and was in some of the biggest ops in IO's history. I made Assistant Director of Operations quicker than John Lynch, the Living Legend. No more than a couple guys in this room would face me in a fight, armed or unarmed. But when my name comes up around the water cooler, I'm just the schmuck with all the crazy girlfriends.

The mirth in the room faded away as its occupants met his eyes, one by one. When the room was silent, he said, his voice even, "If you study her approach, you'll see that the top of her head is even with his eyes. But when she completes her turn and starts shooting, her head is under his chin, even though she's standing upright. That's a drop of six inches. Considering her size, she had to have come down off her toes. Not the balls of her feet – her toes. I don't have much hope for tracking her through her teachers, but if we do, we'll find them in a ballet school, not a storefront dojo."

"Why did you say she's not Gen?" Ivery's tone was curious rather than confrontational. "She looks like an FDM to me."

Colby shook his head. "If she were, she wouldn't have handled the gun like that."

"We've never seen an FDM handle a firearm." Ruche's jaw muscles jumped for a moment. "Have you? Where did you get all this expertise, Frank? Two years ago, you didn't know Genesis existed."

Colby looked around the room, remembering all the blank looks. "I think that whatever insights I have on this subject would best be discussed in a tighter group at this point."

"Oh. You want a smaller audience for your performance, Frank?"

It was the last straw. Colby's vision shrank to a tunnel, with Ruche's face at its end. The pressure of the seat under him lessened as he got his feet under him. "You asked for my input. If you want to discuss facts instead of feeding half the people in this room bullshit, you'll clear them out of here, or else they're going to hear what Genesis is really about."

Ruche went white. Ivana said, "Mr. Colby." Her voice was low, in volume and pitch, and dangerous as a rattlesnake's warning buzz. Like a bucketful of ice water, the shock of it quenched Colby's anger immediately, and left him feeling sick and cold.

He rose unsteadily. "My apologies, Mr. Ruche. And to everyone. My conduct was unprofessional." He sat, thinking he might have pulled his head from the noose in time.

Ruche sat back in his chair, his color returning. Colby could almost see him rubbing his hands together at having wrung such a show of humility from him. Then the Security Advisor glanced at his terminal, and his face blanked as he studied it. He cleared his throat. "I, I owe you an apology as well, Mr. Colby. I asked for your input, no matter how unorthodox, and then I disparaged it. Please believe that I hold your observations in the highest regard, and I hope you'll feel free to contribute further."

"Gentlemen," Ivana broke in, "I think we have enough information for a preliminary decision. I regard this threat as serious, credible, an immediate. I want armed escorts for all department heads and above. Cancel leaves, pay overtime, whatever it takes to get our people covered. And I want those officials to get their range qualifications up-to-date. A pistol may or may not be effective against a Gen, but a little firearms proficiency may get our bureaucrats thinking like combatants instead of easy prey. And recall all our teams out in the field hunting runaways, except the Lynch group. Assign that group as much manpower as they request." She favored the group with one of her famous Mona Lisa smiles. "If my people are casting glances over their shoulders, I want it to be me they're looking for."

The chuckles that followed were few and forced, Colby thought. On his terminal, the chameleon's face was replaced with a list of names. "These people will please remain," Ivana said. "All others are excused."

He studied the list, which looked to include about a third of the people present. He recognized most of the names: senior people sitting at this table who probably knew about Gens already, and a few others, like Diehl, with previous experience in IO's rougher pastimes. Phillips was included, he noted. A few others he didn't recognize; he supposed they were support personnel for the principals and couldn't reasonably be excluded. It was the 'tighter' group he would have requested if he'd been asked. Ivana might not be a good judge of character, but she was a great judge of talent.

This is why Ruche did the one-eighty, Colby thought. She gave him a preview of this list before she posted it, a clear warning she was coming down on my side for now. Guess Gerry's something of a chameleon too.

Phillips stood as if he were one of those dismissed, and in fact looked ready to leave. "Ma'am? I know I'm only here to give information. But if my people and the other Security teams are going to protect staff from these Gens, I think we need a solid brief." He looked at Ruche. "I'm sure my people would have given a better account of themselves in the mall if they'd known what they were up against."

Colby watched Ruche's ears redden. Not only had the Security Director's control of the meeting evaporated; now the help was going over his head to their boss. Colby decided that Phillips was going to need a friend if he didn't want to end up patrolling the parking lot until he retired. And Colby couldn't think of a better new friend than the man running his security detachment. Before Ruche could find his voice, Colby said quickly, "I'd have to agree, ma'am. We've seen what happens even to highly trained men who go up against Gens not knowing what they can do."

"That," Ivana said, "is precisely my intention. For a start." She gestured to the second-tier men seated against the walls. "I'm sure there are enough places at the table now, gentlemen." When the door closed behind the excusees and everyone was seated with the appearance of equality, she said, "All right. The children are put to bed, and it's just us grownups. Some of you are about to be introduced to very sensitive information. You can expect your security clearances and pay rates to be adjusted accordingly. Do not discuss this information outside of this room, even among yourselves, without prior authorization. The penalties for disclosure, deliberate or accidental, will be severe."

Pity the man who doesn't understand Ivana's definition of 'severe penalties.'

Ivana turned to him. "All right, Mr. Colby. Thirty words or less. What do you think she is?"

"I think," he said carefully, "she's what Genesis was originally looking for and never quite got: a human with enhanced speed and strength, resistance to injury and disease, with above-average aggressiveness and smarts."

She smiled thinly. "Does 'above-average' count as one word or two?"

"Beg pardon?"

"Never mind. I'm sure no one told you about the original aims of Project Genesis. How do you know about it?"

"With all due respect, ma'am, it's an open secret among the Expeditionary Teams. Everyone knows the odd-numbered squads were lab rats of some sort in the mid to late Eighties. The X-teams split into two groups that didn't work or train together anymore. The odd-squad guys hardly mixed socially, and usually stuck together when they were at mixed gatherings of IO people. And they started getting sent on suicidally risky missions, missions that couldn't have got accomplished by a force ten times their size. Only they did accomplish them; not without casualties, but they completed missions that nobody should have come back from. A dozen or so of those troopers are still around, and they've moved on to other jobs that nobodytalks about. John Lynch was a Team Seven member around that time, and I've faced him on the mat, so I've got a pretty good idea what IO got when it ran Test Series Twelve."

Colby looked at the chameleon's picture on the billboard. "I also know how different the Thirteens are from their parents. Our girl lookss about the right age for a Thirteen, but she's not like any Thirteen we've seen before. And before Mr. Ruche says 'FDM' again, maybe everyone should be made to understand what an FDM is."

"Doctor," Ivana said to Ivery, "You're our resident Gen expert. You give the orientation lectures to Special Security recruits. Would you give Mr. Phillips and the other… uninitiated… a brief explanation of what we're talking about?"

"Glad to." Ivery rose to address the group as if he were in a lecture hall. "I don't know what Mr. Colby's getting at. Frankly, I know nothing about firearms. But I know Gens." He cleared his throat. "Up till now, we've been rather vague about these 'amazing abilities' of theirs. We're not talking about psychics or spoon-benders here, people who can guess which card you're holding three times out of four. Genesis subjects, and Thirteens especially, can perform acts that quite obviously set aside the laws of physics. Case in point: FDMs.

"About half of the hundred or so known Gens can be grouped into half a dozen broad categories, grouped by whatever physical laws they can choose to ignore. The largest of these is the Force and Density Manipulator group, FDMs for short, who play fast and loose with the laws of momentum and energy transfer. Caitlin Fairchild is the most powerful known member of it. She's been observed to lift and throw objects weighing several tons." Ivery raised a finger. "It's important to understand that we're not talking about muscular strength here. Human tissue couldn't handle such stresses. She, and others like her, surround themselves closely with a…" He paused. "A field, perhaps, or a spacetime anomaly, a gateway into an alternate universe where the laws of physics are impossibly different. However you choose to conceptualize it. What we observe is that those laws are… optional for this girl and anything she touches. Let me give you an example. Imagine a steel bar set horizontally in a concrete wall, about eight feet up. Caitlin can reach up and chin herself on it, or reach up and tear it out of the wall, her choice. Or she can grab a car by its bumper and pull, and whether she drags the car or tears off the bumper depends on what she wants. She's been shot at: sometimes the bullets bounce off, deformed, as if her skin were tank armor; other times, they touch her skin and drop to the ground, intact, and no one knows where the energy goes. And on one occasion, she's jumped from an airplane without a chute, fallen a mile to the ground, climbed out of the crater, and walked away."

People at the table were looking all around with raised eyebrows: at Ivery, at each other, and especially at Ivana, who returned their looks coolly. Colby studied Phillips' reaction. Instead of wearing the you've-got-to-be-shitting-me expression most of the others wore, Phillips' face was creased of worry. As if he's already seen these kids do the impossible, Colby thought, and he's just learning how bad it could get. What the hell happened at that mall?

"Mr. Colby," Ivana said, "Is that sufficient explanation for us to continue? I'd like to move forward soon. We still have a lot of ground to cover."

"Yes, ma'am. Thank you." He waited for Ivery to sit, then went on. "Going back to the chameleon. I said she couldn't be an FDM, and her gun handling gave it away." He pointed to the image on the billboard display, the chameleon almost in the agent's arms, looking rather like a girl whose boyfriend was teaching her to shoot. "Look at the weapon she's holding. It's a Desert Eagle – the size and shape are distinctive. And, since Mr. Phillips told us it had a seven-round clip, I deduce it's the fifty-caliber version."

Phillips nodded assent. "Action Express cartridges."

Colby addressed the group again. "A Desert Eagle Fifty packs a tremendous punch, but it's very difficult to fire accurately. It's meant to be held two-handed in a well-braced stance, and nobody who tries shooting one-handed with one does it a second time. You might hang onto it, but you won't hit your target. It's got a big kick, and it torques to the left as well." He pointed at the billboard image again. "She took her first two shots pressed up against the gun's owner, borrowing his weight, while ignoring the resistance of his gun arm. When she lost him as a backstop, she crouched to lower her center of gravity and threw a leg back for a brace while she extended her arm and turned sideways to line up her mass behind the gun."

Diehl got it first. "The torque meant nothing to her. But she probably weighs a hundred pounds soaking wet. She was worried about getting pushed around by the recoil."

Colby nodded. "Which wouldn't bother an FDM."

"That would make her impossibly strong." Ivery looked thoughtful. "But… about four percent of Gens exhibit physical changes when they manifest. Fairchild doubled in size in six weeks. Are you suggesting some Gen-induced change to the chameleon's musculature?"

Colby shrugged. "It's a theory, Doctor. Shoot it down if you can. You're the expert."

"That's a relative term. Almost all the Thirteens ran off before we had an opportunity for rigorous testing. The ones still in our keeping are atypical, and the ones we've recovered mostly unsuitable for research."

'Unsuitable for research.' You're talking about the ones you've caught and tried to brainwash, who wear diapers now and have to be fed by hand. I'm surprised you haven't euthanized them.

Ivery went on. "Up till now, physical changes have only been a side effect. An impressive one, but typically coupled with some special talent. What's her big gun?"

"I don't know," Colby said. "If she's got one, we haven't seen it yet." He waited for the stir to die down. "But she's not a typical Thirteen. The super-soldier characteristics of Gen have bred true with this one. I think she's more like a refinement of Series Twelve than their offspring."

"A Twelve-Five," Ivery suggested. "But where did she come from?"

"I don't know. But a lot of the kids at the Project were illegitimate. For a bunch of guys in their late thirties and early forties, the Twelves sired plenty of children, in and out of wedlock. I doubt we found them all." He pointed a chin at the screen. "And I doubt she's unique. She told Hale that 'we' were organizing for a fight. Maybe she was just talking about recruiting Thirteens. But I don't think so."

"That gives us two hypotheses to explore," Ivana said. "They don't appear contradictory – in fact, Mr. Ruche's and Mr. Colby's notions about our little troublemaker may be complementary." She steepled her fingers. "A Genactive of heretofore unknown type, smart, hyperaggressive, amoral, manipulative, and physically threatening." She smiled thinly. "And working for the wrong side. Any chance of turning her, do you think?"

"It depends on what she really wants," Ruche said. "We just don't know enough."

She turned to Colby with raised eyebrows. He shrugged. "All right then," she said. "Let's move on."

On screen, the foursome jogged down the deserted hall, getting smaller with distance. "Normally, there's a security camera in the garage that covers the other end," Ruche said. "But all the security cams in the garage were down, from six hours previous till just after their escape. Another coincidence, I suppose. We couldn't even tell which car they'd come in, or if they'd come in a car at all. Otherwise, we'd have yanked the plug wires and met them there with a squad."

Just short of the doors, the Cheerleaders halted. The little brunette with the purple streaks bent over, clearly winded. The chameleon bent over her, and they spoke briefly, the little blonde bringing their foreheads together with a hand on the back of the younger girl's head. "Audio sure would have been nice right then," said Colby.

Ruche spoke. "Easy enough to guess. The little dye job was feeling left out. Our girl already got touchy-feely with the other two earlier. This looks like granting equal time to me."

Colby forbore to comment. Why stop at the girls? Do you suppose she's doing the boys too? Do they have a dog?

"This is the last bit of continuous feed we have before they break contact," Ruche said. The view changed to an outside shot, apparently from a pole-mounted camera in the mall's parking lot. The view covered the front of the parking garage, including its entrance, and the nearest three rows of cars. A black Suburban sat on the grassy strip fronting the structure, ready to roll in front of the entrance at a moment's notice. The vehicle was surrounded by a dozen men.

Suddenly the parking structure's second-story windows lit up like a thousand camera flashes going off at once. The picture darkened for a moment until the camera readjusted. The men on the ground below noticed the flare and drew sidearms from their jackets. Two reached into the vehicle and brought out assault rifles. Most of them looked up at the window, their tension evident even at this distance.

"That was Callahan taking out the two men in the garage," Ruche said. "Injuries were typical of a lightning strike. One of them will probably end up a medical retirement."

Before the stir in the conference room peaked, a figure appeared in the upper-story window and dropped, trailing a streamer of copper hair: Fairchild. She ignored the weapons trained on her and trotted towards the parking lot. The pavement and cars all around sparked and jittered with hundreds of bullet impacts.

"How can they miss at that range?" Diehl demanded.

"They're not, sir," said Phillips. "Those are ricochets."

Still ignoring the storm of bullets, the girl paused at the first row of cars and grabbed a Mercedes convertible by its bumper, pulling it out of its slot. Colby could see by the wheels that it was being dragged rather than rolled. She hoisted it like a refrigerator box, sighted, and threw it like she was going for a two-pointer. It arced through the air and smashed into the top of the 'Burban. She trotted up the row until she found a Hummer H1 parked diagonally across four spaces. She dragged it into the aisle the same way. But, as she seemed ready to pick up the massive vehicle, she paused, glancing back towards the garage, and contented herself with rolling it over, crumpling every panel on the body, before trotting back to the door, leaving it spinning slowly on its top.

"I could applaud the Hummer," Diehl said. "But why the Benz?"

"Parked in a crip spot with no sticker," Ruche said. "Lady was late for her aerobics class."

Diehl raised his eyebrows. "That girl might be a menace to all mankind, but she's got style."

"How on earth are we going to damage-control this?" A new voice, rather young. Colby checked his name: Adams, one of the senior people on the Keeper team tasked to Lynch and his kids, here to support his boss Ivery, no doubt. "If we're not ready to stop trying to bring them in on the quiet, how do we handle a riot in a crowded mall? Not to mention car-throwing."

"Already done." Ivana looked at the young man coolly. "Last night, we acquired a film studio. It turns out the mall was a shooting location for a big-budget action movie with lots of special effects. Since the scenes needed to be shot from several angles at once, the cameras were hidden to keep the scenes clean. But someone in Scheduling dropped the ball. They started filming in a hall crowded with shoppers, thinking they were extras. Very embarrassing, heads are sure to roll. Imagine, all those poor people scared out of their wits by actors firing blanks from fake guns. It's all over the papers this morning."

Adams' brow furrowed. "But… Ma'am, what about the business in the lot?"

"Well obviously, they're going to have to shoot the location all over again, including that wonderful car-throwing scene. We'll move a big crane into the back of the lot and leave it there for a few weeks. By the time we shoot it a second time, people won't remember it wasn't there for the first one. We'll put out a call for the bystanders to come back as extras for the second shoot, and that will give us a list of witnesses to keep an eye on. We'll settle all injury claims and property damage out of court. And if anyone questions why the film was never finished, we can say the liabilities dried up the financing." Ivana smiled thinly. "The least of our problems, Mr. Adams."

"At this point, Mr. Colby's security detachment withdrew and let the Cheerleaders exit the lot unmolested." Clearly, Ruche wasn't ready to let go of Phillips as a scapegoat.

"Mr. Colby's security detachment obviously didn't have the resources to stop them," Diehl said. Colby was glad to see someone else sticking up for the Security men. He marked Diehl as a possible future ally. "Did they follow?"

"For a while. We have momentary video clips of the fugitives blowing through rush-hour traffic like it wasn't there. One vehicle stuck with them for a few blocks, until Spaulding did this." The screens lit with a still photo of a Suburban that looked like a wrecking ball had been dropped on the hood. "Experts figure she briefly hit the car with six hundred gravities.

"They disappeared at that point. Once we'd identified the car they were driving, we tried using traffic video footage to backtrack their route to the mall. Turned out they were one step ahead of us again. About the same time they broke contact, there was an explosion and fire at a gated community in La Jolla. A thirty-million-dollar beach house. A lady walking her dog saw the whole thing. She said it started with a string of explosions, almost like firecrackers. Then the house simply collapsed into the basement and started burning, white-hot. She said it looked like a volcanic eruption. The building was engulfed in seconds. The fire crews arrived in time to hose down the ashes. And yet the only damage to the neighboring houses was a little scorched landscaping." Ruche turned to Colby. "Does Lynch have that kind of demolitions expertise?"

"He does," Ivana said. "No evidence left at the site, I presume?"

"No." Ruche was still looking at Colby. "Is he a super-hacker as well? Can he forge property records and utility bills well enough to hide under our noses in a freaking mansion?"

Colby shrugged. "If he can't, I'm sure he knows someone who can. It was a good location, actually. The sort of people who live in those gated communities value privacy. As long as he stayed on good terms with the neighbors, he was probably safer than in some low-rent neighborhood full of crime and undercover cops and snitches."

"It gets better. The dog walker is a neighbor, of course. Our investigators didn't know to ask questions about the little blonde…"

"Rectify that," Ivana said.

"Doing it now. But they showed the lady pictures of Lynch and the kids. Get this: she knows them all by their real names."