The Conclave had decided almost immediately that Ray White had been weak, that he would not have survived the initiation rite. They had concluded that expending any resources to find the boy would be a total waste, and forgotten about him.

Ray's father, Ames White, had not forgotten his son.

Despite the fact that he was now in hiding both from the U.S. government and his own people, Ames had refused to give up the search for his son. He knew Ray was still alive; he knew because Ray was his son, and because Michelle Olsen, his sister-in-law, had disappeared the same week that Ray had.

While still in the service of both his former masters, he'd devoted any spare moment he could find – which wasn't much – to trying to find them. But Eyes Only and 452 had done a very good job at hiding them. Every lead he'd looked into had come up dry, though for a brief time he thought he might have had a chance of finding them, when a team of techies had managed to trace an Eyes Only hack and it finally seemed they might have had the prick. Of course he'd gotten away. White had expected him to, just as he'd expected him to wipe his hard-drive before he rabbited. But Ames knew how fallible computers were, and had hoped the same team that had tracked Eyes Only might be able to recover his hard-drive – until that idiot Farris had gone nuts and his team had shot up the whole place, completely destroying every piece of equipment there. Ames had been close to breaking his neck for that.

It had been less than two months now since Ray had been taken from him, but he was already down to his last lead. Apart from Michelle, the only family Wendy had left behind was in Ireland, probably the most popular immigration destination following The Pulse. Even though The Pulse had been very much a global disaster, financially ruining the world's remaining superpower and destroying world markets in the blink of an eye, some places had, to White's great surprise and dismay, managed to come through the crisis with very little damage to show for it. What really shocked Ames was that Ireland was one of those countries.

The small island had been a hotbed for political and civil turmoil for years, from what had been tentatively referred to as 'the troubles' in the North in the late twentieth century – even though it had never really ended – to increasing immigration from all over the world for the fifteen years or so before The Pulse. In Ames' mind it had still only been a developing country at the time, with the highest crime rate in Europe, and severe racial tensions since the turn of the century. And yet, the Emerald Isle had managed to survive mass immigration from the U.S. and an almost total economic failure. The country should have wiped itself out in that chaos, but somehow they'd managed to come out on the other side, better for what had happened.

Well, Ames told himself, shit happens. With the time of The Coming rapidly approaching, this insignificant place wouldn't be much of an obstacle, nor would other states like it that had defied the odds. The Pulse had served the Conclave's purpose, and the majority of the world's once-formidable nations had been crippled beyond recovery.

Ames only hoped he could be so successful in his own purpose. But that hope was a thin one.

In remarkably little time, White had done quite well in altering his appearance. It was astonishing how much a little facial hair changed a face. He had also clipped his hair, stopped exercising, and had begun eating a disgusting amount of crap he usually would never have touched, which had given him a small paunch, and, finally, drastically altered his dress sense. In the space of a week he had gone from a clean, crisp U.S. government agent to just another Dublin scummer, complete with an unmistakable scummer accent. He himself had been sickeningly surprised with how quickly his body had changed, but knew the disgusting sight before him when he looked in a mirror meant little. He was still a far superior specimen, as anyone who screwed with him would learn, and when the disguise was no longer needed, he could be back to himself again in as little time as it had taken him to adopt this form.

Sitting by a ground floor window in an old house on the Rathgar Road, Ames peered across the street to where James and Margot Olsen could be seen in their living room. The pair hadn't started out on raising a family until they were already well into their late thirties, but had produced three girls over the next five years. Tara, Wendy, and Michelle were all – or in Wendy's and Tara's cases, had been - the spitting image of their mother; tall, and athletically slim, with very light brown hair and brown eyes. And, just like their mother, all three had eventually dyed blonde.

Now both parents were coming up on seventy, and with Margot seriously ill, the house was occupied pretty much all the time. For the past five days since Ames had arrived across the street, neither Margot nor James had left the house at all. Ames could have walked across the street and killed them both without making a sound, but that wasn't the best idea right now. With her mother dying of Leukaemia, there was a good chance that, even though in hiding, Michelle was probably in contact with them occasionally. Maybe Eyes Only had warned her about contacting them too frequently – or at all – and endangering herself and Ray.

As if I'd harm my own son!

Ames, however, was willing to bet Michelle thought he was no longer a threat. At least one good thing might have come out of the very public exposure of his actions. If Michelle was in touch with her dear dying mother, killing them now might alert her when next she tried to contact them, and she could be long gone from wherever the hell she'd taken his son by the time he could get there. Also, stealthy as he could be, sneaking into the house at night was a risk. James rarely slept, worry about his wife waking him at odd hours, which raised the risk of being discovered a little too much, even if the chance of James recognising him like this was decidedly slim. He needed the house empty in order to check it out properly. Phone bills, e-mail accounts, mail. Michelle was old-fashioned. She preferred to pen her letters as opposed to using e-mail, and this would no doubt be a safer option than risking a phone trace. Hopefully, given Margot's condition, she would soon need to go to a hospital, giving Ames the chance he needed to poke around.

A couple of weeks ago Ames White could've walked into any building on the planet and found out anything he needed to know about anyone. Hell, with a phone call he could've had their phone bills and email records in his hands as quick and easy as ordering a coffee. Now he'd been reduced to staking out his genetic-throwback in-laws. I'll make it up to myself when I catch up with the bitch. The thought made him smile a little.

"You still there? I found it." Picking up the printed pages and setting them aside, Logan read off his screen. "Ben Mitchell, born August 1988 in Chicago. Family switched coasts when he was a kid, and little Ben was sent to a prep school in Willoughby. That confirms he's a Familiar. It's the same school we found Ray White at."

"I can't believe you were right about this one," the girl on at the other end remarked. "Of all the places they'd wanna watch, why New World Weekly?"

"Well, apart from me, New World Weekly were pretty much the only ones covering transgenics before the mainstream media got a hold of it. And when I was under, they were the guys everybody was following. They actually managed some pretty accurate coverage, considering they like to report on cyborgs in public office and people giving birth to chimps and hellspawn. And our friend Mitchell joined the staff there the week after the first transgenic was caught on camera during the checkpoint shooting."

"So he was placed there in case the rag came up with anything really dangerous." Parked across the street from Jam Pony, a little hot in her bike leathers, she took a gulp a water. "Do you want me to go after him?"

"Not yet," Logan decided after a moment. "I wanna see how they react to this. They might even let the story run if they think they can follow the trail and grab me." Of course, the bigger risk was to Sketchy, but Logan had considered this and decided to try it anyway, trusting that she would be able to keep him safe. "For now, just watch out for Sketchy. If Mitchell or anybody else tries anything, you know what to do. For now, just let this play out."

"You're the boss. Or would be if I was getting paid."

"Are you sure you want to be at this alone?" he asked, not for the first time. "These Familiars are pretty tough, and this will come to a fight. If there are more than one of them, I really don't like those odds."

"There's nobody else. We don't have a line on any other transgenics outside of Terminal City, and anybody from in there would probably be recognised. And when this does turn into a fight, no way we wanna try matching Ordinaries against Familiars. Besides, nobody said this would be a walk in the park."

Sketchy emerged from Jam Pony and drifted off towards Sector Eight. "I gotta go. He's leaving."

"Alright. Be careful."

Logan had barely hung up, and was placing the dossier on Ben Mitchell in the file he was collecting on Familiars, when the phone rang again.

"Hello?" Hearing the voice on the other end instantly ruined the slightly elevated mood he'd been in since hearing that Max had survived the bombing unscathed. True, Alec hadn't been so lucky, but Logan was willing to bet that with a little help from Sam Carr, he'd bounce right back. Transgenics always did. "How the hell did you get this number?" he demanded.

"I'm fine, thank you," came the curt reply. "I'm sure you all grieved horribly when you thought I was gone."

"Yeah, we all had a good cry. The wake was a blast."

"Irish wake, I hope," Lydecker mused. "They always throw the best funerals, especially once the booze is being passed around. Their funerals are more fun than most weddings."

"Is there something in particular you wanted?"

"I saw the bombing. How is she?"

Logan had always been more than a little suspicious of Lydecker's sudden turnaround, but the clear concern in his voice almost made him wonder if maybe he should be more trusting. Almost. "She's dead," he told him, hoping he sounded as upset as he should.

"If she were dead, we wouldn't be trading bad jokes," Lydecker told him matter-of-factly. "Hell, if she were dead, I doubt you'd even have it together enough to remember trying to trace this call. Won't work, by the way."

Sure enough, as Logan glanced at his screen, a message appeared. 'Signal scrambler in effect. No solution available. Trace failed.'

"Max made it," he admitted. "She's fine."

"And 494?" He sounded as relieved as Logan had been at hearing this.

"Alec. He's in pretty bad shape. Head trauma. I've sent them some help."

"Then you know an easy way in and out of Terminal City?" Lydecker queried.

"If that's what you want," Logan spat, "you can forget about it."

"Just thought I'd try. How about asking Max to come see me? Some place public, if she can manage it." When Logan didn't answer right away, he asked, "How about the gallery where Joshua sent his paintings? I've yet to see them myself, but they've drawn quite a lot of attention, especially since it got out that the artist is a transgenic."

"Why do you want to meet her?" Logan asked, not really expecting an answer.

"That's between me and her," the once-colonel-once-spook-still-annoyingly-cryptic-pain-in-the-ass told him. "I'll be at the gallery tomorrow at four. Tell her I have answers for her."

Before Logan could ask him what he was talking about, Lydecker hung up on him.

"Great to hear from you again," he grumbled angrily to the dead phone line.