Flood Rising (Jenna Flood #1)

Cort had wasted no time asserting his authority, and Noah did not challenge him. Jenna sensed that her insistence on making the trip—and her decision to surrender to Cort at the cost of Mercy’s freedom—had taken the wind out of Noah’s sails. That, and the fact that he had been shot just eighteen hours earlier.

The wound wasn’t serious—the bullet had deflected off a rib, fracturing it and tearing up the surrounding tissue, but doing no damage to vital organs—but a gunshot was a gunshot. He bore the pain stoically, but Jenna saw how he winced a little whenever he changed position.

He had been taken to the hospital, along with the two deputies who—Jenna was pleased to learn—had also survived the shooting, thanks to their standard-issue body armor. Noah had managed to slip away but had arrived at Mercy’s trailer just as the police were showing up. With no way to track Jenna and Mercy, he had turned to his old handler at the Agency—Bill Cort—who had briefed him on the sanction and the reasons behind it. Noah had been as surprised as Cort when he learned of Jenna’s arrival at the safe house.

Jenna didn’t believe Cort’s assertion that he had been out of the loop on the decision to send the hit team, but they were well past the point where recriminations would make any difference.

Soter also seemed to have set aside his aversion toward the men who had killed his team and destroyed his lab fifteen years earlier. Jenna suspected that had more to do with the realization that he had been a pawn in the opening move in a war to destroy humanity. He spent nearly two full hours describing the history of the project. The account was more or less the same as what he had told Jenna during the flight from Miami, but the air of pride had faded. It was now a recitation of facts. When he was done, he gave what information he could concerning the whereabouts of more than a dozen clones—Jenna noted that he no longer referred to them as his children.

The conversation had come around to the transmission’s origin. Soter maintained that an extraterrestrial intelligence was the most plausible explanation, but Cort seemed reluctant to even speculate. “Let’s just deal with one thing at time,” he said.

It seemed to Jenna like textbook denial. An extraterrestrial explanation would not only mean a threat beyond comprehension, and possibly against which humanity would be powerless, but it would also invalidate a host of beliefs about the nature of life and the meaning of existence. It was no surprise that Cort shied away from the topic. Jenna had her own reasons for not wanting to discuss it. The entire conversation had been an excruciating ordeal, in which her very artificial origin was dissected and put on display. Her unique abilities—what her school teachers called ‘gifts’—had occasionally made her the target of ridicule from jealous classmates, but she had never felt the kind of embarrassment she now felt listening to this discussion.

She felt like a freak. No, worse than that: an illegitimate freak.

Noah sensed her discomfort, holding her hand, squeezing reassurance into her, but she endured without comment. The events surrounding her, past and future, were much more important than her hurt feelings.

The discussion turned to the question of how to proceed when they arrived at their destination. Cort tried to arrange for Agency assets from Texas and California to be sent in ahead of them, but the remote location confounded those efforts. He contacted the military, but was tight-lipped about the full results of that conversation, saying only that there would be no additional boots on the ground, meaning that the little group in the Gulfstream would be the sole defenders of the human race. If they failed, it would be game over.

“What should we expect?” Cort asked.

Soter turned to Jenna.

“How should I know?” she snapped, but then she realized why he had deferred to her. If anyone could predict what the clones would do, it would be her. Yet the truth was that she didn’t know. The door to the implanted memories remained shut. The only thing she really knew for sure was that the urge to go to the coordinates in the message was overpowering. Even now, with the memories ripped from her head, Jenna felt the irresistible urge. The other clones surely felt it, too. She wondered how many were on their way there? She did not share this insight with Cort, though, and he noticed the omission.

“I signed off on this little field trip because you insisted that only you could stop them,” he reminded her.

“I’ll understand it better when I get there,” she said.

They were nearly at their destination, and she still had no idea what was going to happen.