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“Pull over,” I said.

Nadine whipped the Edison to the curb, its auto-system chiming and grumbling.

I threw the door up, leaned out, and spewed my guts onto the street.

Hart came over the radio again. “Everything okay back there? We lost you.”

“All good,” I heard Nadine say. “Be right there.”

I wiped my mouth, spit a few times, and pulled the door back down.

Nadine didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. My vomiting up my nerves was the closest thing we had to a pre-raid ritual.

It meant we could go to work now.

Nadine toggled the accelerator.

The back of the SWAT vehicle raced toward us.

As much as I hated going on the raids, I always reminded myself that the fear was a necessary part of my penance.

Most of the outlaw scientists we targeted were criminals, plain and simple. With the black-market demand for synbio products growing exponentially with each passing year, there was plenty of cash to be made—on designer ultra-pets, spidersilk clothes, exotic GMO foods, even an entirely new life-form invented in a lab in Vancouver, B.C., that resembled a tiny, pink gorilla and that had become a kind of status symbol for the Russian oligarchs.

Black-market services and products had been enhanced as well.

Hacked cannabis and heroin.

Sex dolls wrapped in synthetic human muscle and skin.

A dark gene lab in Mexico City busted by the federales had been constructing “revenge wasps” for the cartels. These yellow jackets could target any person based on their genetic fingerprint. They also carried a primitive Scythe system capable of modifying entire gene networks, leading to brain damage, insanity, and excruciating death.

For others, genetic fuckery was just to show they could do it, like the four biology undergrads at Brown who had simply wanted to see if they could make a dire wolf.

But for a select few, the endeavor was deeply personal—like the socially isolated but brilliant sixteen-year-old who attempted to engineer an antibiotic-resistant, flesh-eating bacteria to infect a bully at school.

Or the rogue geneticist we’d caught attempting to clone an improved version of his dead wife using black-market, enucleated human zygotes.

The desperate parents with no health insurance who tried to somatically edit muscular dystrophy out of their son’s DNA. They actually cured him, but the off-target mutations they inadvertently created changed his medial frontal lobe network. He became psychotic, killing them before taking his own life.

Then there were the labs of my nightmares, where terrorist organizations engineered pathogens and weaponized life-forms of destruction, like the group in Paris that was on the brink of releasing a synthesized ultra-smallpox relative when the European Genomic Safety Authority dropped a thermobaric weapon on their warehouse.

Busting up those operations never troubled my conscience.

The ones that hurt were the raids on real scientists. Those who’d been doing groundbreaking work, for all humankind, when governments panicked and made it practically impossible to be a genetic engineer.

People like Anthony Romero.

I still thought of him sometimes. He’d built his lab on a ranch in the Bighorn National Forest outside of Sheridan, Wyoming.

Before the Gene Protection Act had effectively ended all private and university-based genetic research, Dr. Romero had been at the forefront of gene therapies for cancer treatment. He’d been rumored to be on the Nobel Prize shortlist for medicine or physiology. But his New York Times editorial decrying the Gene Protection Act for its extraordinary overreach had ended any chance of him being added to the list of government-approved geneticists.

We’d arrested Dr. Romero peacefully at 2:30 A.M. as a light snow fell on the stand of Ponderosa pines outside his cabin. I felt physically ill as I handcuffed him and put him into the back seat of our car. I wasn’t just arresting a hero—a man whose life and career I aspired to and envied. I was condemning him to a life sentence, because I had no doubt that our DOJ would throw the book at him.

Then again, he’d broken the law. Right?

As we handed Dr. Romero over to U.S. Marshals at Sheridan County Airport, the scientist had looked at me and said something I would never forget.

“I know you’re trying to do the right thing, but you can’t put this knowledge back into the box.”

Watching the marshals take him onto the jet as the snow fell and melted on the tarmac, I had never felt so low.

Like a traitor to the future.



* * *



—

The SWAT vehicle pulled into an alley, and Nadine tucked in behind them.

I took in our surroundings through the gray-green of the NightShade glass, expecting to see the buildings of an industrial district. Instead, down the alley, I saw leaning fences and garages that backed up to Victorian houses, their steeply pitched roofs profiled against the starry sky.

“This area’s residential,” I said.

“Weird, right?”

We’d raided plenty of labs that were hidden away in basements or garages of people’s homes. The technology, in its simplest inception, was that easy. But for an operation on the scale and complexity of what I was expecting tonight—one that had done business with the Henrik Soren—I would’ve bet good money that we’d be raiding a warehouse. Not a Victorian in a historic district.

I switched our radio’s transmission from the comms rig in the center console to our earpieces. “Logan here. Sure we’re at the right address?”