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  My heart screamed at me to comfort her, but now was not the time. I leaped through the door after the disappearing Elites and sprinted into the parking area, where they were spreading out toward their vehicles.

  I immediately spotted my mark, President Jacklin, running a good dozen yards ahead of the others. My God, he was running fast. Top-of-the-line-Elite fast.

  He must have been doing forty miles an hour-and was just a split second from his stretch limo when I dropped to a knee and took the surest shot I could manage, right at his center of gravity.

  The burst of fire hit him in the small of his back and knocked him sprawling, but I hadn’t delivered anything near a fatal blow. He must have been wearing body armor. I was actually glad for it-I wanted him alive.

  I cast aside my assault rifle and quickly closed the gap. He wheeled to meet my tackle in a neat blocker’s stance.

  And oh, how he met me. It was like running into a pile of steel rebar… that really didn’t like me.

  We grappled and rolled in the immaculate genetically modified grass of the presidential mansion.

  I quickly discovered that Jacklin was enhanced more than any Elite I’d ever encountered. With some sort of double-jointed throw that sent me sprawling, he freed himself and backed up against the presidential transport, feeling for the door.

  “So, my knuckle-dragging friend,” he said. “You see, you aren’t the only one allowed to have secret implants. In fact, I’ll let you in on a little piece of classified information: I’m the most enhanced being ever to walk the face of the earth-the docs tell me I’m eighty-seven percent tech, by body mass.”

  “Judging by your general psychology, I’m guessing one of the first organs they ‘upgraded’ was your dick,” I quipped. I was hoping to get under his skin and cause a distraction. But his reply rendered me the more distracted party.

  “Your Jinxie could straighten you out on that matter of speculation,” he said. “Personal experience and whatnot.”

  I tried to will my mind silent, but it was no use. How had he known her nickname? Sure, he could have gotten that fact somewhere other than from her, personally. Who knows what kind of information our fellow agents may have kept on us. But was there anything to his innuendo? I didn’t want to care; I shouldn’t care-there was no time to care!

  But even as I tried to compose myself, he yelled out, “Evac!”

  His security-enhanced limo immediately recognized its master’s voice and sprang to life, hovering up off the ground as its doors flew open.

  Oh no.

  He leaped into its dark interior, and the vehicle lurched skyward. I barely managed to hurl myself after him in time to have the automated doors slam down on my hands.

  Chapter 113

  Thank God for safety features: the car was programmed not to injure any high-tech Elite hands, and the door politely refrained from severing my fingers.

  “Foreign object occluding rear starboard hatchway. Please clear immediately,” chirped the autopilot.

  Expecting one or both of Jacklin’s immaculate Italian leather shoe soles to come down on my hands, I did the most energetic pull-up of my life, heaved the door wide, and sprang into the passenger compartment.

  Fortunately, the vehicle was so large that Jacklin-assuming I had missed the departure-had moved forward in the cabin to a control console of some kind. He managed to wheel around just as I tried to tackle him again, demonstrating that patented human inability to learn lessons.

  “You’re doomed,” he said, easily dodging me. I slammed into a credenza covered in crystal goblets and decanters, all of which probably had been pirated from some human antiquities museum.

  I struggled to stand as the vehicle lurched into a steep climb.

  Meantime, Jacklin began to yell. “Require immediate airborne tactical assistance, alpha priority-and all forces reclaim presidential mansion im-”

  Something banged into the roof of the limo and sent us both to our knees.

  “You hear that!” he screamed. “You thought somehow my defense department might not manage to notice your little insurgence on the fucking presidential grounds? That’s a commando squad, and I’ll say it again-you, Hays Baker, are doomed! You and your whole filthy cave-evolved species!”

  Just then the passenger door, which had by now resealed itself, peeled back-the wrong way! The noise of the twisting metal was quickly lost in the roaring wind and the noise of the jet engines outside.

  A wicked-looking segmented grappling hook plunged into the cabin and dug its sharpened fingers into a leather seat. And then, as I vainly looked around for something beyond antique glassware to use as a weapon, the first commando burst through the open hatch, two pistols leveled, and began blasting away-

  At Jacklin!

  Chapter 114

  Back on the ground, Lucy and I stared down at the wounded Elite president, whose fear and disbelief were waging an epic battle on his artificially perfect face while synthetic blood and lymph oozed from the torn biotech conduits of his flesh.

  Lucy covered him with a pistol as the soldiers-human soldiers-loaded him onto a gurney and strapped him down.

  “We demand unconditional surrender!” Lucy snapped as soon as he was secure. “Right now, right here!”

  “We?” he answered, regaining some composure. “You mean you represent this stinking pack of forest animals?”

  I might have admired something in his defiance, except that it wasn’t born of courage. Just sheer egotism and ignorance. He believed the world had somehow selected him and his kind, that somehow-despite the ludicrousness of the very idea-Elites were a natural evolutionary progression.

  Clearly, he felt no remorse for Elite crimes against humanity, no compassion for the suffering he had caused, no accountability for the horrors he’d unleashed against us and the world in general.

  “Yes, these skunks are exactly who I mean,” Lucy said.

  “You’re doomed!” he screamed. “You already nearly destroyed the world and, without us, you’ll do it all over again!”

  “Shut up!” I screamed as I clamped my hand onto his throat, making sure he obeyed my command.

  I leaned my apoplectic face over his and continued.

  “Now listen-and I’m talking here to that thirteen percent of you that is still biological, Jacklin-because what’s going to happen to you in the next weeks is going to make you wish you’d been born a tick on a skunk’s ass rather than whatever in hell you think you are.”

  And then I told him what we were going to do.

  It was probably needlessly cruel. And needlessly human. But hey, when I was finished, Jacklin had gone completely white with terror.

  Which, I confess, made me feel pretty good.

  And then I got a hug from Lucy.

  And that made me feel even better.

  Chapter 115

  Slow death equals slow torture.

  That was what former President Hughes Jacklin must have been thinking one morning, three months later. He lay in an operating theater inside the vast and ultramodern New Lake City Hospital, waiting to be punished for his role in crimes against humanity. And he certainly had a very good idea what to expect next.

  There was no arrogance on his face now. After all, he was the one in a prison jumpsuit and shackles. He was the one staring at the stainless steel slow death machine that was set up at center stage in the operating room.

  Lucy and an impressive assemblage of human leaders, his judges and jury, stood facing him, ready to watch his sentence be carried out.

  In fact, over two billion humans would be watching from all around the world.

  Me? I was right there too. I was the appointed executioner of the president’s sentence. And I didn’t mind that duty at all. Justice is a wonderful thing-a human idea, one of our very best.

  “All right, it’s time,” President-elect Chantal Dugare said to Lucy, embracing her and kissing her cheeks. “The world is watching to be certain that justice is delivered here today.”
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  The world really was watching. The war was all but over, and though there would be strong pockets of Elite resistance for some time to come, they currently had no central leadership to organize them, their seemingly invincible military was severely crippled, and they were outnumbered.

  The Elites began to crumble fast without having humans to serve them. They were fine overseers as long as we were doing all the labor, but when it came to things like simple maintenance, even feeding themselves, they turned out to be surprisingly helpless.

  Lucy stepped forward to address the former president a final time. She was wearing a simple black dress, and it struck me that I’d never seen her in a dress before. She looked very elegant, but somber and also restrained-especially for Lucy. It was as if she was attending a funeral, a state funeral, which I suppose she was.

  “You stand convicted of plotting the most heinous crime in recorded history, the managed extinction of the human race,” she declared, her voice ringing out strong and clear. “Have you anything to say in your defense? I cannot imagine that you do, but this is the time, war criminal.”

  Hughes Jacklin tried to put on an air of authority and Eliteness, but it was difficult to do so in manacles and with the certainty of slow death coming down on him like a falling ax.

  “Humans would have destroyed the planet,” he finally said in a hoarse whisper. “Elites saved it. I cannot be ashamed of that. We saved you- from yourselves! If Elites are guilty, that is our only crime.”

  Lucy wouldn’t let him get away with that.

  “But that was long ago. And then, instead of helping us become better citizens, you enslaved and degraded us. Elites also ignored the tremendous work we’ve done building civilization-including the creation of Elites. Without us, you wouldn’t even exist.”

  “We were trying to prevent another irreversible disaster,” Jacklin said, his voice rising in desperation.

  “So are we,” Lucy retorted. “And we’re going to do it in exactly the same way-by ridding the world of your kind. Not extinction though. Something even better.”

  She turned to me. “Let the sentence be carried out. May God have mercy.”

  With Hughes Jacklin’s dread-filled eyes fixed on my every move, I walked to the slow death machine. He almost looked human now, and that made this a little more difficult, but not impossible. Justice had to be carried out, and here, too, we humans had learned and grown.

  My hand touched the controls, and the laser probe began its work.

  Chapter 116

  When I finally stopped the terrifying machine-after only forty-five seconds-the onlookers were so quiet, it was as if no one were in the operating theater. And yet billions were watching, in every country, on every continent.

  Hughes Jacklin’s face was still fixed in a stare, but now his eyes were glassy and he seemed to be looking at something that only he could see.

  Then he recovered slightly, like he was waking up from a light sleep. His gaze focused on Lucy, and some kind of recognition finally dawned on him.

  “Good morning, ma’am,” he said with almost excessive politeness. “May I assist you in any way? Anything at all?”

  Lucy answered, “Tell me your name and your job description.”

  Hughes Jacklin started to speak, but suddenly his forehead wrinkled with confusion and alarm.

  “I–I’m sorry, ma’am. I don’t-I’m not really sure.” Then he looked in dismay at the shackles on his ankles and wrists. “Have I done something wrong?” he asked, as a child might.

  “Let’s just say that you have a debt to pay to society. And you’ll have the rest of your life… to serve.”

  Epilogue

  A BEAUTIFUL TIME TO BE ALIVE

  Autumn was always a beautiful time in the city. The mornings had a delicious chill, but warmed into mellow afternoons; the trees turned a magnificent red and gold; and the sky was more often than not a crisp, clear robin’s-egg blue, which filled me with optimism and goodwill toward my fellow humans.

  As Lucy and I strolled along the lakefront, I thought about my parents living here once upon a time, when they were still young. They must have done this same kind of thing and felt the same way about the natural beauty along the water. The fullness of their lives seemed to lie ahead, keen with promise, because they were poised to make a great leap of faith toward each other-what we humans call love.

  “I just had a stroke of genius,” I said. “Rare, I know. But bear with me.”

  Lucy smiled. “You finally succeeded in integrating quantum mechanics, relativity, and calculus into a single equation? Well done, Hays. I am impressed.”

  “Not quite that lofty, but perhaps with more of a charm factor. Let’s wander downtown and find ourselves a good bottle of wine and dinner.”

  “Brilliant concept, maestro! Just one addendum to your theory-the food has to be loaded with calories.”

  The city was still somewhat unsettled from the war and the political and social upheaval that had inevitably followed. But the sterile, Elite-dominated atmosphere was slowly becoming infused with new life-human life at its best. The people on the streets didn’t all look picture-perfect anymore. The rich smells of cooking spilled out from restaurants, and taverns were serving real wine and beer. There was music, boisterous laughter, occasionally a bit of disorderly conduct, and even public displays of affection.

  It was like watching someone who’d been completely bland start to acquire a personality-a messy one with some bad habits, but interesting and with unlimited potential.

  Then Lucy and I turned a corner, and the pleasant little cloud I was drifting on crashed against a wall of reality.

  “OK, Hays. Oh dear,” said Lucy. “Let’s turn around. We can go another way, just not this one. C’mon, Hays-look away!”

  A female maintenance worker was cleaning up loose newspaper pages and other trash on the street a few yards ahead of us. Even in her khaki uniform and without makeup or adornments, she was very attractive, and her lush violet hair stood out from a block away.

  It was Lizbeth.

  “Can you handle this, Hays?” Lucy asked. “I don’t know if I can.”

  I nodded that I was OK, but Lucy slipped her hand into mine anyway, as if I were a nervous or frightened child seeking aid and comfort.

  In reality, there were no worries here, nothing to fear. Lizbeth wouldn’t have a clue that she’d ever even seen us before. Lucy, true to her promise, had reversed Lizbeth’s brain surgery. But then, like the other top Elites, Lizbeth had undergone a memory purge and been assigned to menial labor for the rest of her days.

  Still, it was as eerie as a loved one’s wake, encountering her in the street like this. I’d known in the back of my mind that it might happen, but I suppose I’d put off dealing with it. I had even considered having Lizbeth relocated to another city-because of Chloe and April. The girls were just getting used to her absence, and if they saw her, it could be confusing and possibly traumatic. They clearly loved Lucy and me, but I had doubts about whether they were ready for this.

  As Lucy and I got closer to Lizbeth, she paused in her work to give us a polite worker’s smile. She had the same bearing as the other reconditioned Elites I’d seen-efficient but placid, with no apparent concerns beyond the minimal task at hand.

  “Good evening, sir, ma’am,” she said in a voice that was all too recognizable and, therefore, chilling to me.

  “Good evening,” we murmured, walking on as if nothing had happened.

  That was that.

  But then we passed an angled shop window. It gave me a brief, blurry glimpse of Lizbeth’s reflection.

  Maybe I only imagined that she was staring after us with her gaze suddenly gone steely-and that her hand had formed a make-believe pistol, aimed directly at our backs.

  And that then, she pulled the trigger.

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