I could get the money easily enough in this brave new world of computerized transfers and e-commerce, but I don’t like stealing. If I can drain the Centre I do it; I consider it a down payment on the price I will exact some day for what they did to us. Everywhere else is off-limits. Simple as it would be, I can't bring myself to rob innocent parties just so I can have little luxuries like clean sheets and a toilet seat that’s sanitized for my protection. When you live in twilight, sometimes it's hard to distinguish between the shades of gray, but I do the best I can. Mom may have raised a vigilante, but she didn't raise a thief.

I toss my stuff on a bedspread that might have been stylish when Nixon was still considered an asset to the GOP and sigh. The room smells like dust and mildew and illicit activity. I close my eyes and miss my mother.

Things were so much easier when we thought they were all dead. We had managed to drop off the earth with a fair amount of success. We had spent years living in a nice little town under assumed names, and I had a childhood so average it looked like a sitcom, as long as no one looked too closely.

When Mom had noticed me showing the same early signs of genius that Jarod and Kyle had, she knew she had to take action. Some of my earliest memories are of being told never, never to let anyone besides Mommy and Daddy know that I could already read, add, or understand things at a much higher level than I should have been able to. I rarely spoke around strangers, and when I did I used exaggerated baby talk. I think my pediatrician was a little concerned about my slow development. They were happy to let him worry.

Then came the rescue attempt. They were trying not to scare me, but I had already discovered the sound-carrying capabilities of air ducts, and I knew what was going on. Daddy was going to the bad place to rescue my big brothers. I remember lying on my tummy on the floor of my room the night before, pressing my ear to the vent and straining to hear what was going on. What I heard was the scariest sound in my life: my mommy was crying.

“What if something goes wrong, Charles?” she had sobbed. “I don’t think I could bear to lose you, too.”

“I know, Meg, I know,” he had said, so low I could barely hear. “I’m scared, too. But I have to try. This is our best chance to get them back. Our sons, Meg, our little boys. God knows what those people have been doing to them. You heard what Catherine Parker said.”

“I know. And I know we have to take that chance. But promise me—” she choked off a sob. “Promise not to leave us, Charles. You and Emily are all I have left now.”

“I promise, Meggie. I’ll do all I can. You know the meeting place. I’ll be there in two weeks with our boys.”

“And if you’re not?” My mother’s voice had been little more than a whisper.

“Then you take Emmy and the emergency fund and disappear. Don’t try to find us, Meg. If this doesn’t work I doubt we’ll be anywhere where we can be found.”

I hadn’t wanted to hear any more. I had crawled into my bed and as I had tightly clutched my Pooh bear in one arm and my Paddington bear in the other, I tried to pretend that we were like the families on TV. In my fantasy, my big brothers were asleep in the next room and my Daddy didn’t have to carry a gun. We had the same last name all the time, and I never had to worry about forgetting what we were being called this week. I had drifted off to sleep deciding that we would have two dogs and three cats and their names would be Jarod, Kyle, Mr. Tinky, Stripey and Democrat. I didn’t know what “democrat” meant, but I had read it in one of Daddy’s magazines; I thought it sounded grown up and important. I had a vague impression that it was something like an actor.

In the morning my daddy had come into my room while I was still asleep and picked me up and carried me to his big rocking chair, and he had held me and sung to me like he did when I was a little baby. Then he read me my favorite story. It was about a princess whose brothers had been stolen and turned into swans. She had saved them by weaving coats out of nettles, even though she had to live all alone in a cave and the nettles had stickers on them and they hurt her hands. Then he hugged me so tight it was hard to breathe. I felt him crying on my neck a little.

“I love you, Emmy,” he whispered. “I’ll always love my baby girl.”

“I love you too Daddy,” I had said. “And Daddy?”

“Yes, baby?”

“If you don’t get my brothers back today I promise I’ll rescue them when I get bigger,” I said. “Just like the princess in the story.”

He made a sound that could have been a laugh or a sob. “I know, baby, I know.”

Those were the last words he ever said to me.

Two weeks later we had gone to the meeting place to meet Daddy and the boys. We waited for three days, and with each one Mom got more and more tense and I got more and more scared. On the morning of the fourth day, a priest showed up at the door. Mom had told me to go to my room but I hid behind the door so I could hear what they were saying.

The rescue had been a disaster. Catherine Parker was dead, shot in the back. Centre security was on highest alert. And while speeding along King's Highway away from Blue Cove, a small car had been run off the road into a ravine, where the gas tank had exploded. The car had stolen plates and the police had so far been unable to identify the three charred bodies found inside.

The bodies of a man and two small boys.

When Mom came to get me she wasn’t crying, but she looked smaller, somehow, white and tired. When she picked me up her hands were icy cold.

The priest helped us hide. For three years after that day we lived in churches and convents, with nuns and clergy. The massive organized structure of the Catholic Church was our Underground Railroad. We went by so many different names that I couldn’t remember which one was really ours. We passed the time reading and talking. Mom was worried about sending me to school, so she taught me herself. In some places she would ask the people who were helping us to teach me.

I learned Spanish when we lived in Miami, pure French and Cajun when we were in New Orleans, and German in Pennsylvania. Everywhere we went the priests would tutor me in Latin. Once—I forget where we were living then—a community of Indians taught me the rudiments of Urdu and Hindostani.

When I was six we finally decided to settle down somewhere. We found a little town in rural Colorado and stayed there for nearly nine months before Mom saw a group of men in suits getting out of a Town Car downtown. We were gone the next day.

Eventually we got a little less skittish. By this time I was old enough to start school, and Mom knew that if she wanted to live anywhere for very long we’d have to enroll me. She was terrified to put me in school. It’s understandable; it wasn’t until after Jarod’s teachers had identified him as a genius that he had been taken. We had been successful at hiding my precociousness until then, but she was worried that I would let it slip. Finally, when I was seven, she decided to enroll me in first grade. The week before school started, she sat me down for a serious talk.

Mom had kept me entertained and quiet during the long hours of hiding and running by teaching me, drawing from her extensive reading as well as her school years. I had rarely played with other children, but I was intimately acquainted with my books and language tapes. In the years since we went underground, I had learned to speak four or five languages. I had done self-study math up to algebra, and I could read just about anything I wanted. My favorite author then was Jules Verne. All in all, I was not your average first-grader.

Mom told me that once I started school it would be very important not to let my teachers know how much I already knew. She told me that if I let them find out, they would try to put me in the special classes, and then the Centre would take me like they had my brothers. So I had to pretend not to know the things I knew. We spent that week practicing. Mom had gotten copies of the curriculum of the first grade at Aaron Burr Elementary in Johnsonville, Tennessee, and we practiced the things I would need to know: making pronunciation mistakes while reading aloud, writing with the uncertainty of someone who had been doing it for months instead of years, making computational errors while adding and subtracting, never using “big words” at school. Mom told me to pick out the fourth smartest person in my class, and try to do things like they did.

And so I started school with one goal: unobtrusiveness. Mom’s advice had been good; by modeling myself after the fourth smartest person in my class, I was passed over for both gifted classes and remedial ones. I led a strange life, as a child. We moved every year or two, afraid that staying too long in one place would be tempting fate. At school I honed my skills at feigning normalcy. I was utterly bored by all my classwork, so I amused myself by making a game of it. Whenever we were given tests I would set a goal for myself, a specific score that I wanted, and try to see if I could get it. I purposefully scored in the eighty-seventh percentile of every standardized test of every school I attended. I worked at being well-liked but not wildly popular; I was involved in a few activities but not too many. I was proud of my ability to be extraordinarily average.

At home, things were completely different. After being bored to death all day in school, I craved something interesting to do. I threw myself into advanced studies. Eventually I had exhausted my mother’s resources. There was nothing left for her to teach me. For nearly six months I moped around the house, driving Mom crazy, until she got a brochure in the mail for correspondence courses through a local university.

Mom registered for the courses and I took them. By the time I started high school, I was halfway to a bachelor’s degree. I was excited about high school, mostly because Mom had promised me that we could stay in the same town for all four years. I would finally have the chance to stay at one school for the duration. We had decided that with a lifetime of high-normal academic achievement behind me I should be safe letting go a little more in high school. I had permission to be an honor student, to gradually improve until I was competitive for college scholarships and academic awards. I decided that I would be third in my senior class; high enough to look good, but not enough to have to draw attention to myself by making a speech.

For once in our lives, things went as planned. I was closer to normal in those years than I had ever been before. I started to do more out-of-class activities, to have more friends my own age. I took all four years of high school to finish my correspondence degree. I was happy with my life, on the whole, though it was lonely. I still missed my father, and, as strange as it might seem, my brothers too. Even though I had never met them, Mom had made them real to me. She told me all the stories she could remember about them. We kept their pictures prominently displayed in her bedroom. I had a locket with places for four pictures; it had Mom, Daddy, Jarod, and Kyle. We celebrated each family member’s birthday as if it were a regular holiday; I remember every year we would go shopping together in January and buy a calendar on sale, and take it home and write the important dates with a fat red marker: Mom’s Day, Daddy’s Day, Jarod’s Day, Kyle’s Day, and Emily’s Day. On my day and Mom’s Day we would just have a party or a fancy dinner, but on each of the others we had a special ritual. I would go straight home from school and we would go to church and light a candle for each of them, and then go to the park and tell our memories about them. Then we would go home and eat the favorite meal of whomever’s day it was. On Daddy’s Day we had pot roast; on Jarod’s Day we had chicken and mashed potatoes; on Kyle’s Day we had spaghetti and meatballs.

Our lives were, if not entirely happy, at least peaceful. It seemed we had finally escaped the sweepers, or they had lost interest in us. We lived from day to day stepping around the hole in our family. It was rare that we fell in, but Mom fell hard on her twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. I came into her room and found her crumpled on the floor. I’ve seen a lot of things, but nothing that frightened me more than that. For an eternal ten seconds I thought she was dead. Then I heard her whisper Daddy’s name. She didn’t know I was there, and I stood in the doorway torn between my desire to comfort her and my paralyzing fear of her grief. Ever since we heard about the explosion, Mom had been careful not to let me see her break down. I mean, sure we had cried together a million times, but never anything like this. It terrified me. And that night while my mother mourned alone I renewed the last promise I had made my father. I couldn’t rescue my brothers, but I could make the Centre pay. I could make sure that no other family ever had to endure the horrors we had. From that night forward I did everything with an eye toward my goal, and nothing could move my heart from its cold purpose.

After graduation we moved again, to Georgia this time. I had won a scholarship to Georgia Tech, and even though Mom was leery of straying so close to Nugenesis, we decided it was worth the risk. I already had a political science degree through my correspondence course, but to take on the Centre I needed technological skills, and Tech was on the cutting edge. I got my first BS degree there, in Electrical Engineering. After that I hopped from one university to another, doing increasingly technical work. I got a MS in Mechanical Engineering and a doctorate in Computer Science. I finished quickly; there was no longer any reason to hide.  I had been Emily Pennington for nearly seven years now, and had seen no signs of sweepers or sinister sedans trailing me on the street.

I spent my college years well. Despite what I knew my mother hoped, I hadn’t given up on my vow. After class and on weekends I spent countless hours training my body as intensely as my mind. I took classes in martial arts, kickboxing, various forms of self-defense; I trained myself for strength, endurance, and flexibility. I bought myself a gun and started going to the shooting range. Men used to come on to me at the range, but if they got annoying I’d just take out the groin area of the target against the far wall and smile sweetly. They always walked funny on their way out the door.

After I got the Ph.D. I knew that the things I had left to learn weren’t taught at any universities. It was time to go underground for a while. I sent my mom to a new town where she would be safe, and made arrangements to allow us to contact each other. I had a refuge of my own lined up. When my preparations were complete, Emily Pennington disappeared off the face of the earth.

After that, I never kept a name long enough to get used to it. I adopted a code name—“The Yellow Tulip,” after my favorite flower. It was cheesy and melodramatic, but effective. My new mission was to gather contacts and information: anything that could help me bring the Centre down. I had plenty of skills that were marketable in my new world of shadows. I never found out for sure—I didn’t want to find out for sure—but I think that I set up a state-of-the-art network system for the Mafia. They paid well, and taught me some very useful skills, as well as giving me a chance to brush up my Italian. Most of my jobs were on the barter system, though. Teach me to break into a building without leaving a trace; I’ll teach you to do the same to a computer system. Show me how to make false identification papers, I’ll help you with your Tae Kwon Do. I joined a militia group for a while and learned firsthand about munitions, explosives, and covert operations. I tipped the FBI after I left that bunch; they were truly dangerous. To this day four Domestic Terrorism agents all think one of the others sent the message.

I had spent three years underground, gathering knowledge and contacts and scraps of intelligence about the Centre. I knew that the odds were against me in this, and I needed to wait until I was ready before beginning my personal war.

Then I got the message that changed everything.

“Emmy—Explosion faked. Jarod alive. Meet me in fifth grade.”

I was on the next plane to Boston, to meet my mother at the playground of Anne Bradstreet Elementary School, where I had attended fourth and fifth grade.

I caught just a glimpse of him through the window of the cab. I remember thinking that Mom was right to say I look like him, when his joyful smile crumpled into horror as he saw our doom racing with screeching tires down the streets of Boston. The cabbie was a friend of mine, or we never would have made it out of there. As I pressed against the back window, watching through my tears as my big brother fled for his life, I realized with a flash of joy that it wasn’t too late to keep my last promise to Daddy. There was still one swan to save.

From my battered attaché I take a worn scrapbook, turning over the pieces of my family that I've unearthed over the years since a view from a cab gave my life new hope and purpose. Yellowed newspaper clippings, all speaking of a mysterious hero who saves lives and reunites families. A precious few have pictures. I linger over one, Jarod in firefighting gear. He had just saved the life of a child. I trace his face with a fingertip, staring into his deep sad eyes.

My eyes.

I sigh and stretch and put the album away. He is looking for me, and I am looking for him. One day we will find each other.

And when we do, all hell will break lose in Blue Cove.