EPILOGUE

IF THIS IS YOUR FIRST VISIT TO THE REDEEMER’S LAW PROJECT, YOU ARE COMING INTO THE STORY ALREADY IN PROGRESS. YOUR EXPERIENCE HERE WILL BE FAR LESS CONFUSING IF YOU USE THE CHAPTER INDEX ON THE RIGHT TO GO BACK TO THE INTRODUCTION. OR AT LEAST TO THE PROLOGUE.

EPILOGUE

Two days later.

8:30 p.m.

Dressed in a baggy sweatsuit, wearing a thick cast on his leg and walking on crutches, Matt flickered into Diedra’s room at Gavring Medical. Her mother, Kay, back from Chicago, had left only a short time before, most likely to get some much-needed sleep.

Diedra lay still on the bed. They’d put a body cast on her, and her left arm hung in traction, and bandages covered most of her head. An IV sprouted from her right arm. Matt could tell her thick, lustrous hair had been shaved. Her eyes were closed.

The room was mostly dark. A small light burned in the bathroom near her bed, just enough to drive away Matt’s night vision, so he couldn’t see her as well as he would have liked. Squinting, wincing from the pain in his leg, Matt moved carefully to her side. She lay so still.

He felt the tears accumulate, and didn’t try to stop them as they ran down his welt-covered face. Diedra’s lips had taken on a gray cast, her cheeks were sunken, and both her eyes were severely blackened. Bandages covered her nose. Matt balanced himself on one crutch, reached out and let his fingertips brush her face, barely enough pressure to feel. She gave a small sigh and turned her head.

Matt’s leg ached, and twinged hard enough to make him grunt.

He hadn’t been able to ask a doctor about Diedra’s condition, but she was placed in a normal room, not in ICU. That was something, at least. It must at least mean her condition was stable.

Footsteps padded down the hallway outside, probably a nurse, and Matt watched the door, ready to vanish in a second if it began to open. The footsteps faded.

“Diedra,” he said softly. “Can you hear me? It’s Matt.”

She stirred, slightly, and after a few seconds her eyes opened just a fraction of an inch. Her lips parted, and she tried to moisten them. Matt saw a plastic cup with a giraffe-neck straw beside the bed and poured some water into it, held it to her lips. She drank a little.

When she released the straw her eyes opened wider, and Matt saw fear in them; they darted around the room.

“He’s gone,” Matt said. He took her hand. “He’s gone. He’s dead. I killed him.”

Her eyes closed again, and her face relaxed. She whispered, “I thought you would.”

“Diedra...I’m so sorry. All this is my fault, and I never meant...I never meant for you to get hurt...I’m so sorry...” One of his tears splashed on the sheet next to her. “I wanted...I wanted to protect you...I’m so sorry...”

Diedra squeezed his hand, a tiny, trembling pressure. “We’ll talk...” She swallowed carefully. “...We’ll talk about this. Later."

Her hand eased in his, and he said, “I love you,” but she had already fallen back to sleep.

Matt stayed there by her bed, listening to her steady, shallow breathing, until a nurse came to check on her. As the door opened he flickered away into the dark.

# # #

8:30 p.m.

A tiny article had appeared in the Chronicle, providing sparse information about an unidentified woman found dead on the shore of Lake Lanier. The article only made the paper at all because of an unusual feature of the corpse. “Worst case of frostbite I’ve ever seen,” were the words of the medical examiner. “Damned peculiar.”

Lying in bed in a shabby motel room, very close to the middle of nowhere, Scott Charles set the paper down beside him and used the remote to click on the TV. An old Wheel of Fortune had just started. Maybe that would keep his mind off how hungry he was.

The headband lay beside him on the bed. He’d been experimenting with it when Vessler wasn’t there, seeing how long he could stay off it. So far he’d gone about an hour—twice as long as the group doctors’ prescribed maximum. He wondered if he might grow out of his need for it, the way some people grew out of allergies.

Vessler was out at the moment, gone to get Chinese food. Scott had never had Peking chicken before, but he’d agreed to try it on the strength of Vessler’s recommendation. His stomach growled.

They won’t find us, Vessler had said. I’ve got plenty of tricks up my sleeve yet. Scott couldn’t really wrap his mind around everything Vessler had promised. He’d used the term “normal life” a lot. Scott wasn’t entirely sure what Vessler meant by that, but he was certainly willing to find out.

A heavy truck roared past the motel. It made Scott shiver, and for a second he thought about jumping down and crawling under the bed. But just for a second. The sound wasn’t really that bad. Not really. Just a matter of breaking old habits.

A key turned in the lock, and Garrison Vessler walked in, holding a small cardboard box filled with white cartons and Styrofoam cups.

“Hi...Dad,” Scott said, and self-consciously tugged at the hastily replaced headband cable. Dad. The word tasted strange and good.

“Hello, son,” Vessler said. “Do you like duck sauce?”

“I don’t know.” Scott smiled. “But I guess I can try it.”

The lights on the filter pulsed.

# # #

8:30 p.m.

Detective Zach Feygen leaned back in his chair and eyed the thick stack of paper on the corner of his desk in City Hall East. On the first sheet was scrawled a name in Feygen’s writing: Matthew Gable Sinclair. Below that a horizontal line, and below that, again in Feygen’s writing, the word Redeemer.

For forty-five minutes Feygen stared at the papers. In that stack he had what any jury would consider proof of the Redeemer’s identity, where he lived, what he did for a living...for that matter, who his parents had been and how much he made in a year. As a painter. Feygen laughed a little, but his shoulders slumped.

He remembered the night in the Hargett Theatre when Matt Sinclair prevented Maurice Tell from making hamburger out of him. He remembered the Latino clerk in the hospital, and what he said the Redeemer did for him. But foremost he remembered Tracy Jean Troland, chained there in her parents’ cellar like an unwanted dog, with big blue eyes that sparkled up at him over the thick rusty chain.

Matt Sinclair was making a mockery of the American criminal justice system almost nightly. He was taking everything Feygen had been taught to believe, everything he’d sworn to uphold, and tossing it in the toilet. He was thumbing his nose at the Atlanta PD.

With what he had there in that stack of papers, Zach Feygen could put the Redeemer behind bars for the next two hundred years.

Heather’s voice came to him. I know what he’s doing is illegal. ...But is it wrong? Then Sinclair’s, from that ballsy TV appearance: No one can stop me. No cell can hold me.

Feygen knew a lot of cops who’d taken that as a challenge. Feygen figured Sinclair was probably just telling the truth.

“Jesus Christ,” he said to the empty air. “I need to have my head examined.”

Feygen picked up the papers, opened the bottom drawer of his desk, set them far in the back, and covered them with two out-of-date telephone books and a box of crackers. He locked the drawer, picked up his jacket and left the office.

# # #

8:30 p.m.

On his farm in the fading daylight, just as Scott Charles took his first bite of Peking chicken, the Plowman finished washing his tractor. He stepped back from it, stretched and popped his back and shoulders, eyed the machine critically, and strolled into his barn. He came back out with a Bag o’ Rags and a good-sized canister of Turtle Wax and began applying the thick paste to the tractor’s left rear fender.

“I don’t know for sure,” Ichabod said unexpectedly from behind him, “but I don’t think it’s normal to wax a tractor.”

The Plowman kept working. “I guess now we know who’s stable and who’s not.”

“Yeah. Who’s stable and who’s dead. So? Did that do it? Can we grab Sinclair and go home?”

The Plowman’s hand slowed, then stopped, and he turned to face his brother. “I sent off all the data last night. They didn’t respond until this morning, just a couple of hours ago.”

Flatly Ichabod said, “This sounds like bad news.”

“They agreed Grove was a total washout, that you would’ve had to terminate him in any case. But they were very interested in the effect Jorden had on him. They hadn’t anticipated one augmentation, to use Vessler’s word, affecting another like that.”

“Okay, so?”

“So...they want more observation. They said, ‘Clearly this species has more potential than we had at first thought.’ But they want to see new variations on existing abilities, and further interaction between second-stagers and first-stagers. They want all possible contingencies accounted for. They said until that’s done, humans won’t be a reliable commodity.”

“But...what, they want us to do this? It has to be us specifically? You and me? Sinclair’s viable, why can’t we just grab him and take him back? Let them replicate him all they want? We’ve done our job here, they can send somebody else!”

“The orders were clear.”

Ichabod’s projection shimmered and wavered, and finally threw up its hands in frustration. “Fine! Fine, we’ll stay! Great!” And he blued out and vanished, leaving his brother alone in the diminishing sunlight.

After a few moments the Plowman turned back to the tractor, determined not to dwell on the homesickness eating away at him. He tried humming a tune.

His yellow eyes gleamed through tears as night fell.

END