She studied him, her pretty face serious. “This has to do with Kobinski?”

He nodded.

“What about your work, your classes?”

His classes? The thought gave Aharon pause. He had been “talked to” twice more by Dean Horowitz. But what could he do? Horowitz would do what he had to do, Aharon also.

“Tell them… there was a family emergency.” He colored at how easily the lie came.

She said nothing.

“It’s only for a day or two.”

She gave him a measured look, long and sad. It was a look he would carry with him to America and far beyond. It said, And maybe you’ll never come back at all. And maybe you’ve already been gone so long this is only a formality.

“I’ll pack your bag.” She headed for their room.

Hannah put the sleepy children in the car and drove him to the airport. When he got out he kissed each of the little ones on the head. Devorah asked, “Where are you going, Papa?” and he said, “I have some business. I’ll be back soon.” Yehuda turned his head away when Aharon kissed him.

Hannah managed both worry and coldness as she hugged Aharon good-bye. She took a paper from her pocket and pressed it on him.

“Samuel got this through a chat room for survivors. The address and phone number are there.”

Aharon took it, frowning, and put it in a pocket for later. He stood, awkwardly, knowing he should say something more, much, much more, but not knowing where to start.

“You’ve tried so hard to shut me out, Aharon,” Hannah said. “So I guess I have no right to know where you’re going.”

“I never shut you out.”

“I hope you can find something that will let you put all this behind you.”

He did not like what he saw in her face. He patted her arm reassuringly. “I’m going to Seattle, Hannah. Why wouldn’t I tell you? And it will only be for a few days. You’re my wife, the mother of my children. You don’t have to worry.”

She pecked him on the cheek and drove away. Aharon opened the note.

Hannah had found Anatoli Nikiel.

10.3. Jill Talcott

There was a loud battering in her head that Jill took for just another new and fun-filled phase of her massive headache. She had been so sick all night. Now she was in a place that wasn’t so very bad. The pain was still there, but she felt detached, as though it were happening to someone else, as though she were in a cage and there was a tiger prowling around outside, but he couldn’t get in. She floated in this space, slept. She thought the phone might have rung, several times. She could ignore that, but the battering noise disturbed her. And it gradually dawned on her that someone was calling her name.

Nate.

She managed to get her head off the pillow and look at the clock. It was almost ten. She’d slept in. Lifting her head was a major effort and she would have gone back to sleep, but the banging continued. She wanted to tell him to knock it the hell off, but she’d have to get to the door first.

Her feet perhaps hit the floor by the bed. She couldn’t feel them and she wasn’t quite sure. She stumbled forward. When she finally pulled the front door open, Nate was on the doorstep, his face wild.

“My god! I saw your car and I hoped… ! Christ!”

He assaulted her, black leather arms wrapping her in a child’s hug. He squeezed and it felt like she was a tube of toothpaste—all the blood rushed from her middle to her head, making the dull pain scream.

“S-stop!” she gasped, pushing him away. She lurched to the couch and collapsed there. He came and knelt beside her, provoking a dim, heart-thudding memory of that day their positions were reversed.

“You’re burning up!” he claimed, though she barely felt his hand on her head. “Oh my god. You turned it up, didn’t you?”

She didn’t answer.

“You didn’t call in sick today. Everyone thinks you were in the lab.”

“ ‘sonly ten o’clock,” she said crankily. Then she recalled that when she’d opened the door it had been night. Ten o’clock at night? She must have gone to bed leaving all the lights burning. She’d slept through an entire day.

“Jill…” The look on his face was scaring her.

“What?”

He turned on the TV, flipped to the local news.

“…terrible scene. The explosion occurred at approximately seven o’clock this evening. Fortunately, no classes were in session at the time.”

Despite the sense of floating detachment and her pounding headache, this brought Jill to as much consciousness as she was capable of.

“Nate?”

“Smith Hall.”

“No.”

Tears were on his face. “There was a massive explosion.”

“The police will not comment, but sources at the university have estimated that there were at least twenty to thirty people in the building.”

“Ohmigod.” It was too much to grasp—that she might have been in there, that those poor people were in there, that her lab was gone.

“I was at the restaurant,” Nate panted, his cheeks wet. “I came over as soon as I heard. We always do the control group here in the afternoons, so I hoped…”

On the screen her building was burning, and she couldn’t quite make herself believe it. Their computer. Their data. When was the last time she’d made a backup? Their research subjects, which she was hoping to postmortem—gone.

“Jill…” There was something on his face, a high color at the tops of his olive cheeks, a weird shininess in his eyes. He took one of her hands.

“At this time we know that there was a lab down in the basement of the building, run by Dr. Jill Talcott. Officials think this was the source of the explosion but have not revealed the nature of the experiments.”

It was like a slap in the face, hard, stinging. This wasn’t just any explosion. This wasn’t going to work and finding something had happened to her building, her lab, something terrible and inconvenient as hell but not her fault. This was her explosion.

She sucked in air. She was still floating, still remote, still held at arm’s length from life by the fever’s grip. But this thing came through all that like a speeding bullet.

Dead. My fault.

She heard sirens from the distance, growing louder.

“Jill?” Nate’s face, streaming with tears, floated in front of her eyes. She pushed off it, like a swimmer pushing off a raft, and willed herself back into unconsciousness.

11

You thought in your own mind, I will scale the heavens; I will set my throne high above the stars of God, I will sit on the mountain where the gods meet in the far recesses of the north. I will rise above the cloud banks and make myself like the Most High. Yet shall you be brought down to Sheol, to the depths of the abyss.