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I went back and forth between the two.

“See the difference?” he asked.

“Not really. Just tell me, is it cancer?”

“No, nothing like that. Did you ever break a bone when you were younger?”

“My clavicle when I was thirteen.”

“And you just broke some ribs back in October in Denver.”

“Right.”

He took another X-ray from my file. “This is an image of your broken ribs taken at Denver Health. Other than the fractures and breaks, these bones are normal.” He pointed at the recent X-ray of my right arm. “These are not.”

“What’s wrong with them?”

“Nothing’s wrong per se. There’s a metric called the z-score, which measures bone mineral density. Anything between ?1 and 1 is within the range of normal. Your z-score is 2.75.”

“Is that high?”

He chuckled. “In my entire career, I’ve never seen bones this dense. This could explain the deep body pain you’ve been experiencing if they were undergoing a cycle of densification.”

“What would cause an uptick in bone density?”

“Bad things. Diffusely metastatic prostate cancer, Paget’s disease, pyknodysostosis, osteopetrosis…It’s a long, scary list. But here’s the thing. You don’t have any of those.”

“You’re sure?”

“I screened you for everything the AI could think of. You’re otherwise completely healthy. You just have superdense bones now. Far less prone to breaks and fractures.”

I felt a sudden rush of fear.

My heart was thudding in my chest.

I looked at Jeff, a slight man with a bushy beard and somber eyes.

“How much of my medical history are you sharing with my employer?” I asked.

“You signed a release allowing me to send over reports following your Denver incident. It’s so they know when to put you back on active duty. Why?”

“Have you shared these X-rays and your findings with them?”

“Not yet.”

“Don’t.”

Jeff looked uncertain.

“What’s the concern?” he asked.

“Could you do one more DNA work-up for me?”

“I thought your Denver test was negative for changes.”

“It was.”

“Why would it not have shown any changes if your genome had been altered?”

“Any number of reasons,” I said. “We know those ice bombs contained a gene-editing package. It may have only targeted cells in certain organs. Or the viral vector could have been programmed with a delay mechanism, allowing it to sit dormant and modify my genome later.”

Jeff came to his feet. “I’ll send your DNA off for a new round of genome sequencing. We’ll compare it to your last test.” He started putting the X-rays back into my chart. “If there is an anomaly,” he said, “I’m required by law to report it. Of course, you know this. But I will inform you first.”

Maybe I was just being paranoid, but if my genome had been altered in Denver, I wanted to know what other changes might be coming. The last thing I needed was the GPA thinking I’d done this to myself, or a story breaking in the New York Post or the Guardian, splashing out the headline that the disgraced son of Miriam Ramsay had been caught self-editing.

But more than anything, I didn’t want to become someone’s lab rat.



* * *



—

A cold front crashed through the D.C. metro at rush hour.

A violence of black skies, wind, and rain—the final nail being hammered through the heart of autumn.

As I drove the last few blocks toward my home in the Bluemont neighborhood of Arlington, the air was aswirl with dead leaves, and I could feel the pressure change like a vise ratcheting down on my ribs.

With Beth in New York City, Ava and I ordered from our favorite Chinese place.

I built a fire.

First of the season.

And as a cold rain sluiced down the windows that overlooked the backyard, my daughter brought out our rosewood chessboard and began setting up the marble pieces. I thought I detected something in Ava’s body language—and a heaviness in her eyes.

“How was your first day back?” she asked.

“Fine. They put me on a desk in the Intelligence Division.”

“What do they do there?”

She held out both hands—a white pawn in one, a black pawn in the other. I chose her left hand.

Black.

She would go first.

“They keep tabs on all known scientists who used to work in genetics. Try to predict who among them might be willing to break the law.”

“How do you predict that?” Ava asked as she made her opening move.

Pawn to e4.

“An artificial intelligence program called MYSTIC.”

I brought out my king’s pawn to meet hers.

“Wow, Dad.”

“What?”

“You work for the man.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell her what I had only recently begun to come to terms with. I didn’t just work for the man. I was the man.

We went back and forth, bringing our knights forward.

Ten minutes into the game, neither of us had lost a piece.