Flood Rising (Jenna Flood #1)

Jenna shook her head. “He wasn’t lying.”


Noah inclined his head. “Okay, not lying. Maybe he believes that’s what happened, but it’s not the real story. That message didn’t originate from deep space. It was from Earth, bounced off a piece of orbiting space junk.”

“Preposterous,” snarled Soter. “Who’s trying to deceive you now, my child?”

“The Soviets created the whole thing as a disinformation campaign. They wanted us chasing our tails, wasting resources looking for aliens where there weren’t any. And it worked. He spent millions—the equivalent of billions today—on a hoax.”

“A hoax?” Soter was incredulous. “A hoax that contained the entire human genome more than a decade before geneticists were able to even begin unraveling the mysteries of DNA?”

“You saw what you wanted to see,” Noah countered, then turned his gaze back to Jenna. “But that’s only half of it. His clones—Jenna, it kills me to say it—they’re not stable. There’s something wrong with them.”

He kept speaking, talking over Soter’s protest, pushing past the unpleasantness of his revelation the way a parent tears off a Band-Aid in one quick jerk. “I know you know about this Jenna. About the SARS virus in China and the cyber-attack here in America. The DNA recipe he cooked up gave the clones extraordinary abilities, but it also took something from them, something that made them human.”

“You don’t think I’m human?” Jenna’s voice sounded very small, as if her breath could not quite get past the hurt and rage she now felt. She was angry at Noah for saying such horrible things, but she was also very afraid because she knew he wasn’t lying.

“Oh, Jenna.” Noah’s pained look appeared genuine. “I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone. You have to believe that. We can get through whatever comes. I believe that, and I want you to believe it, too. But you have to know the truth, and he’s not going to tell it to you.

“It’s something that happens to the clones when they reach adulthood. It’s like a switch gets thrown. I’ve seen the evidence, heard from the people who worked with Jarrod Chu and Kelli Foster. They changed.” He snapped his fingers. “It’s like something was hardwired into their DNA. It’s in you, too.”

Like a switch gets thrown.

The words slammed through her and brought to mind Soter’s reluctant explanation of his plan to show her the signature portion of the message.

Seeing the message for yourself might have a stimulating effect on that part of your brain where the genetic memory is stored.

It was important to allow your abilities to fully develop…to reach maturity.

She could not tell if Noah was being truthful, but Soter was an open book, and she saw the truth of the accusation in his eyes. He seemed on the verge of boiling over with righteous indignation, but his expression told a different tale.

He knows.

And I read the message.

Unbidden, the entire binary sequence flashed before her eyes, a siren song in ones and zeroes, irresistible. Look, it sang, all you have to do is look, and all will be revealed.

Jenna’s knees went weak, and she staggered back against the wall. Through the rush of blood in her ears, she heard Soter’s insistent denial. “It’s not true, Jenna. He’s lying.”

Even in her state of shock, she knew that it was Soter, not Noah, who was hiding the truth, and not just from her.

He must have known all along that there was something defective in their—in our—DNA. No wonder he kept going, year after year, tweaking the genome, trying to figure out why his ‘children’ were turning into sociopaths. She doubted that it was Soter’s intention to unleash monsters on the world. He seemed to care only about making contact with the extraterrestrial architects of the message.

Noah was wrong on that score. The signal wasn’t a Soviet-era plot. It was far too sophisticated, even by twenty-first century standards. It was most certainly the product of a very advanced intelligence, probably an alien intelligence, and that meant its potential for disaster went far beyond anything dreamed up during the Cold War. The message was a trigger, activating the mental equivalent of a computer virus that lay dormant in the genetic memory of the clones. That’s exactly what she and her siblings were: a dormant virus, sent in a radio transmission, designed to crash the entire planet.

Jenna wondered if it had been a similar incident fifteen years earlier that had prompted Noah’s mission to terminate Soter’s project with extreme prejudice. Had a first or second generation clone read the message and then tried to destroy the world?

It’s in me, Jenna thought again. Even now, it’s trying to burn its way through my mind.

What will happen if I let it? Will I still be me?