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It happens all at once, in a swirl of light and shadow and movement, blurred and swift.

I flick on my flashlight and shine it into the eyes of whoever opened the door, hoping to momentarily blind him, perhaps give us a chance to push past him and escape, but he's quick and knocks it away. The flashlight goes spinning around the chamber, clattering to the floor.

Whipping, twisting shafts of light.

Dizzying in the darkness.

Directing his own flashlight into my eyes, he slashes the knife toward me, and as I avoid the blade he swipes it at Charlene.

She jerks backward but is too slow, and the knife slices through the sleeve of her shirt.

She gasps.

I see blood. The cut is deep. It's in her left forearm.

I go at the man, who's now in the chamber with us, and instinct and three years of TaeKwonDo sparring take over. I use an inner forearm block to knock his knife hand to the side. Then, despite the close quarters, I'm able to land a fierce front kick to his thigh. I aim a punch at his throat, but he's able to partially block it.

He feints at me, then swishes the blade in a figure-eight pattern in the air.

But he's holding the knife in his right hand, which is good for me because I'm on his right side. I avoid the blade, almost manage to trap his wrist. He expertly flips the knife around and raises it to bring it down toward my chest.

An ice-pick grip.

Bad idea.

I step forward, wrists crossed, and snap them up against his forearm to keep him from bringing the knife down, then I move toward him as I twist my right hand, grasp his wrist, and swing the knife he's still holding down, fast and hard, toward his leg.

The blade must be sharp, because it goes in smooth and quick and deep, not to the hilt, but far enough to do some serious damage.

Amazingly, he doesn't back off, only lets out a small grunt of pain. He holds his ground, levels his flashlight at me, and with the other hand grabs the hilt of the knife and pries the blade, dripping wet with his blood, out of his thigh. “Do not move.” A coarse, low whisper.

This guy is either unbelievably tough or on drugs, or somehow the adrenaline was blocking the pain, because his voice remains slow and measured.

Still I cannot see his face.

My arm is hidden in shadows, and I pocket the item I took from him when I brushed my hand across his arm. Sleight of hand. I did it without even thinking. My heart is churning, my breathing fast. He didn't see. He didn't notice.

My TaeKwonDo instructor's words flash through my mind: “A tense muscle is a weak muscle.”

I know that from my escapes as well.

Relax. Relax.

But I can't seem to. Charlene is here and this guy just cut her and I wasn't about to let him get close to her again. My fists are tight, my stance ready, my muscles tense and flexed. It's not ideal, but it's not an easy time for a tai chi state of mind.

I could make a move, but if something happened to me, I couldn't imagine what he would do to Charlene.

I edge in front of her.

Relax.

Relax and respond.

A wire-tight silence stretches through the air.

He backs up a little, but Charlene and I are still trapped in the chamber. She's pressing her right hand against the wound to stop the bleeding.

I'm about to ask if she's okay, but before I can the man speaks, keeping his voice in the gravelly whisper. “Who are you?” I say nothing. He swings his light toward my face. “Tell me who you are and who sent you.”

I blink against the brightness. Don't reply.

“You tell me”—now his voice is ice—“or I will kill you both. Right where you stand. Do you understand me? Who sent you?”

He might have more weapons, a gun.

Based on the size and type of the knife he brought with him, I take the guy seriously. I search for what to say.

Think, Jevin, think—

“Who sent you?” He tightens his grip on the knife and tilts the blade first toward me, then toward Charlene.

I have an idea, go with my gut.

“RixoTray,” I tell him. “To verify everything.”

He keeps his flashlight directed at us. “RixoTray,” he repeats softly, but it doesn't sound like a question and he doesn't ask me to elaborate.

Okay, don't let him ask a following question. Please don't let him ask a follow-up question.

All I can think of is helping Charlene. I don't want to fight this man, but in a rush of emotion I find myself wondering how far I would go to defend her if he came at us again. Would I die for her? Would I be able to kill for her?

Yes to the first. I wasn't sure about the second.

And thankfully, I don't have to answer it, because finally, without another word, our attacker backs slowly through the room and disappears out the door to the hallway.

I hurry to Charlene's side. “Are you alright?”

She's still holding her hand against her wounded arm. Her sleeve is soaked in blood.

“I'm fine.”

“Let me see.”

“No, Jevin. It's okay.”

I lay my hand softly on her shoulder. “Charlene. Let me see.”

Gingerly, she lifts her hand, revealing a dark, bleeding gash over four inches long, visible through the slit fabric.

Not good.

She quickly puts her hand back on her arm.

“Here.” I take off my belt, wrap it around her arm, and carefully cinch it off, not as a tourniquet, but snug enough to serve as a pressure bandage, to slow the bleeding. “We need to get you to a hospital; you're going to need stitches.”

“We have that test tomorrow.”

“That doesn't matter.”

“Jev, a man just tried to kill us. This is no longer just about some kind of ESP test. We need to find out what else is going on here, and we're not going to be able to do that from a hospital room. I'll be okay, we'll just bandage it up. I saw a first-aid kit in the bathroom at the cabin.”

She knew first aid, had to, working as my assistant. CPR too. She was the one who'd brought me back after the water escapes I didn't quite succeed at. I figure she should be able to evaluate how serious the cut is.

But still—

Argue with her later. Just get her out of here.

“Okay, come on.” I help her to her feet.

“You stepped in front of me, Jevin. I saw that. Thank you.”

“Sure.”

“Where did all that come from, by the way?”

“All what?”

“Those moves. How you swung the knife down into his leg? I've never seen you do anything like that before.”

I've never had to.

“I guess those Bruce Lee movies are paying off.”

“I guess they are.”

Gently, I lead her out of the chamber and into the room. I'm not certain if she needs me to or not, but I support her with one hand under her armpit. She doesn't pull away.

Before we head to the hallway, she insists that we check the computer to see what the guy might've been accessing. “Go on. I'll be okay.”

Though I want to keep moving, I tap the keyboard and wake up the screen, only to find that the computer is password protected. As Fionna had pointed out to me more than once, you
hack
a site, you
hash
a password. I had no doubt she could hash this one in seconds, but it might take me hours.

Obviously there was no time for that.

Did the guy hash it, or did he already know the password?

It was impossible to know.

“Let's get out of here, Charlene. Get back to the cabin and take care of that arm.”

“Yeah. Okay.”

A voice in my head:
That guy might not have been alone. Watch out in the hall.
Edging open the door, I tip the light quickly in both directions. After making sure the coast is clear, we head in the opposite direction from the spotty blood trail our assailant left behind.

Unfortunately, even though Charlene has her wound covered, we leave our own sporadic trail of blood as we go, and I wonder what kind of suspicions it might raise in the minds of whoever would be cleaning this floor tomorrow, but—

She whispers to me, “What made you think to say RixoTray when he asked you who sent us?”

“Follow the money.” We reach the stairwell, cautiously start down the steps. “Where there's a twenty-million-dollar investment, there's a lot at stake. Behind every dollar sign there's an agenda. RixoTray has a dog in the hunt, and I took a stab that our guy would know that.”

“A stab.”

“Bad choice of words.”

Obviously, Charlene knew that our shows in Las Vegas and Atlantic City were by no means financial failures and money wasn't a big concern for me. Over the years I've made some sizable investments, and I always keep an eye on them. After all, unless your income is in the stratosphere, you don't throw millions of dollars, or in this case, tens of millions, into a project and then fail to monitor its performance—even if that means doing so in unorthodox ways.

We reach the lower level, the other end of the hall from where we first entered.

“But Jev”—she's been thinking about what I said—“it's just as likely that he was sent by a competitor to find out what the research was about. In fact, that might even be more likely.”

Hmm. “True. Come to think of it, all he did was repeat ‘RixoTray' when I told him they'd sent us. He could've just been muttering that because it gave him information he didn't already have.”

“Exactly.”

Near the exit I see a small waiting area with six chairs and an end table just outside a door with Dr. Tanbyrn's name on it. We quietly leave the building and pick our way through the woods until we reconnect with the trail that leads toward our cabin.

I'm worried about her arm, about nerve damage, but I'm also thinking about our assailant, wondering who he might've been, what he was looking for.

And why he'd brought a knife like that along with him into the building.

Riah and Cyrus finished passing through the last of the three security checkpoints to RixoTray's R&D facility.

An ultramodern fortress of steel and glass, the building was surrounded by razor-wire fence, a myriad of electric sensors, even a fifteen-foot-deep moat that was made to look like an innocuous, landscaped stream.

This was where RixoTray researched the effects of its experimental drugs and developed new strategies for pushing out pharmaceutical products faster than their competitors. It was here where their biggest secrets were kept, here where they coordinated placebo tests for their drug trials, and here where they were close to a breakthrough in developing a commercially available telomerase enzyme to reverse the effects of aging.

In this building, tens of billions of dollars could be generated by a single discovery or lost by a single miscalculation.

Cyrus strode beside Riah through the main corridor on the east wing. The hallway was high-ceilinged and bright, with pictures of scientists and plaques of patents decorating the walls. The conference area they were heading toward was at the end of the hall, next to the renovated research rooms that served as a two-bedroom office apartment for the twins when they were in town.

It was just down the hall from Riah's lab. She was involved with electrical brain stimulation, specifically deep-brain stimulation (DBS),
which had most often been used for treating people with Parkinson's disease, although it had also been used to help people manage obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, and even the symptoms of epilepsy and Alzheimer's.

Primarily she used an EEG to scan specific areas of the brain involved in speech production, then, by identifying the sounds or syllables those brain waves represented, she was working toward translating those signals into actual audible messages.

A pair of guards stood sentry at the terminus of the hallway.

“We're here to see Daniel and Darren,” Cyrus told them.

The broad-shouldered, shorter man nodded. He tapped his fingers subconsciously together, which Riah took to be a sign of nervousness. She wasn't surprised. When people close to the project found out what the twins had done, uneasiness was the natural reaction. Especially if you were going to be alone in a room with them. “Okay, sir. Yes. I'll get them.”

He left, and as she and Cyrus waited for the twins to arrive, she found herself reviewing what she knew about them.

The best way to describe the two brothers was that they were practitioners of death—apparently two of the most effective ones the Army's Delta Force had ever trained.

As identical twins, Daniel and Darren shared something fundamental that so many twins share—the ability to communicate on a seemingly subconscious level in ways that defy typical categorizations. Of course, since she was the principal investigator on the team, part of Riah's job was to find out what those ways were.

According to the information she was privy to, the twins had been born to a teenage girl who'd been raped and decided to give her sons up for adoption rather than abort them.

Because of a clerical error, Daniel and Darren were separated at birth, adopted by different families, and raised separately in New Jersey and South Carolina, respectively. They never met until they were in their twenties, yet the similarities between their lives were striking.

They both lettered in soccer and wrestling in high school, both
had girlfriends named Julie with whom they had their first sexual encounter, both tinkered with cars in their spare time, both worked in fast-food restaurants—not unusual for teenage guys, but both were fired for spitting on the hamburger bun of a female patron. Who was wearing a blue dress.

Yes, a blue dress.

The stories were astonishing, and when Riah first heard them, she'd thought they were manufactured to create a sense of awe or amazement at the two men. Or even that they were simply an honest mistake, an inadvertent misrepresentation of the facts, but after reading more identical twin studies—some dating back to the nineteenth century—she'd found herself believing the seeming inscrutable coincidences between Darren's and Daniel's lives. In truth, the similarities weren't nearly as incomprehensible as many of those found in the rest of the literature.

Both Daniel and Darren joined the Army.

Which is where they met.

A colonel visiting Fort Bragg saw Darren at the shooting range and mistook him for a soldier he'd seen the previous day at Fort Benning. After some inquiries and a bit of deciphering, Colonel Derek Byrne made the serendipitous connection. Some people might call it chance. Or fate. Or coincidence. Cyrus once told Riah it had to do with quantum entanglement, but whatever the reason, the colonel was able to reunite the two brothers.

They both made it onto the Delta Force and eventually moved into the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command.

Some people think that the CIA is responsible for the majority of the United States' political assassinations carried out abroad, but over the last few months, Riah had found out that those people are wrong.

After a little research of her own and some frank and astonishingly forthcoming conversations with the twins, she'd learned that the military's covert operatives were happy to work in the shadow of the CIA and let the spooks take the brunt of the media's scrutiny and Hollywood's ever-watchful eye.

Daniel once mentioned to Riah that he and his brother had “found their niche” in their new line of work. She could see that they were patriots through and through, and could only guess that they did as they were told by their supervisors without question, without reservation, without hesitation.

A month ago, out of curiosity, she'd asked Darren straight-out how many people he and his brother had killed. “None,” he'd told her evenly. “But we have eliminated certain targets when necessary.”

Riah knew this differentiation between “targets” and “people” was a psychological ploy used by the military to make it easier for soldiers to kill—depersonalize the enemy by calling them
combatants
or
targets
rather than allowing the soldiers to think of them as fellow human beings, as fathers and brothers and sons, as mothers and sisters and wives.

When Darren used the word
target
, however, it'd struck her that the difference in terminology wouldn't have affected her if she had their job.

Actually, as troubling as it might be, she realized that given the right circumstances, she would have found it relatively easy to kill, no matter what anyone called the victim.

Just like the bird when you were a kid. Grab the head. Twist.

And it goes still.

Limp and still.

She remembered that Darren had studied her face carefully as he waited for her to respond.

She didn't want the brothers to realize that she was like them in certain fundamental ways, so she hadn't pursued the matter any further. However, she'd gotten the sense that Darren saw something in her eyes that'd given away more than it should have.

Now in the conference area, Cyrus looked at his watch. “They're late.”

“I'm sure there's a good reason,” she told him softly. “They're very reliable men.”

Back at the cabin, Charlene still refuses to let me take her to a hospital, so in the end I'm left to simply do what I can to cleanse and disinfect the wound with the rather ill-equipped first-aid kit in the bathroom.

Throughout the process, she gives me instructions, wincing at times but not crying, and I'm impressed by how well she's handling it. We're both rattled from the attack, of course, but surprisingly, still focused.

Finally, I butterfly the wound closed with alternating strips of tape and wrap her arm with the first-aid kit's Ace bandage.

She digs out some Advil, and after she's taken a couple capsules, she positions herself on the couch, then states the obvious: “Alright. Just so we're on the same page, we're no longer here just to debunk some research on mind-to-mind communication.”

“Agreed.”

“Should we go to the police?”

It was a good question, one we shouldn't take lightly. “Did you see his face?”

“No.”

“Me either.” I join her on the other end of the couch.

Honestly, I want to stay here at the center, keep looking into things, especially now that there seems to be another layer to everything that's going on. “So we wouldn't be able to identify him by anything other than his voice. Would you be able to do that?”

“Not the way he spoke, whispering like that.”

“The same for me.”

“So we could report it to the police, but they would, of course, ask what we were doing in the building.”

I evaluate everything. “I think we should hold off contacting them until we know more.”

“So you don't think we should back away from this?”

I have the feeling she already knows the answer to that.

I've never been one to back away from a challenge, and I can't see myself doing so now—even if it ends up being a little dangerous. It
isn't about money or fame or anything like that. It's about the challenge. And about uncovering the truth. “No. I'm in.”

“And you know me, Jevin.”

“Petunia never backs down.”

“Wolverine.”

“Whatever.”

To cover all my bases, I offer one last time to help her: “I still think we should take you to a clinic or something.”

“Jev, think about the timing here: a thug with a combat knife shows up, sneaking around looking for some sort of computer files the night before this round of Tanbyrn's study begins. That has to be more than a coincidence.”

“But it was a coincidence that we ended up in the same room as him in a locked building, wouldn't you say?”

“Maybe it was more than that.”

“What do you mean?”

She sighs. “I don't know. I'm just saying we need to find out as much as we can about Tanbyrn's research and what that guy might've been looking for. Being part of the study tomorrow is our best shot at doing that.”

Of course, I feel the same way. Fighting that guy had awakened something in me that imitating the tricks of psychics never had—a taste of danger that I used to know when I was doing my escapes. A surge of adrenaline, the paradoxical tightening of focus and widening of awareness that danger brings with it. There was a time when I wouldn't do an escape unless there was a chance I could die from it—something that I know was always hard on Rachel.

I contemplate what to say.

“Alright. So we keep an eye on your arm, but after the test tomorrow, I want to have someone who knows what he's doing take a look at that cut. Within the next twenty-four hours. Deal?”

She's a little reluctant but finally agrees. “Deal.” Then she leans forward. “So, who do you think he was?”

“Honestly, I have no idea, but based on what I saw, I'd say he's not specifically trained in knife fighting, more of a street fighter.”

“The grip he used?”

Nicely done.

I nod. “Yes, too easy for me to deflect. It wasn't one a pro would choose. So I'm guessing his background isn't in law enforcement or military. He learned to fight the hard way.”

“By actually fighting.”

Or killing.

“Probably. Yes.” I stand. Pace. Take the 1895 Morgan Dollar from my pocket and flip it quickly through my fingers. Habit. Helps me think. “We really need to find a way to reach Fionna or Xavier. I want to know what files that guy might've wanted from that computer.”

“Go outside. See if you can get a signal.”

“It's no use. I tried earlier.”

“Try down by the road, where we parked the car. It's more in the clear down there.” I don't want to leave her alone, and I think she can sense my hesitation because she adds, “Go on. I'll be okay. Just lock the door behind you.”

I glance at her forearm one last time, and when she folds her arms, apparently to show me that she's fine, I finally agree. “Okay. I'll be back in a few minutes. The light switch for the exterior porch lights is just inside the front doorway. I'll keep an eye on the cabin. If anything comes up, anything at all, flick the porch light on and off a couple times. I'll be watching; I'll get back here right away.”

Taking both my phone and hers so I can try each of them, I leave the cabin, lock the door behind me, and head to the parking lot.