“Yes.” Zach straightened, the man still dangling from his hold.
“Do you know which one?”
“No.” He thought furiously. “Get Ami.”
Seth’s scowl deepened. “I don’t want her here. We don’t know—”
“Do it, Seth. She may be our only hope.”
Seth vanished.
Zach’s mind raced, full of impossibilities that had somehow become probabilities.
Seth reappeared with Ami at his side.
“Ami,” Zach said, “whose energy signature do you sense in this room?”
She cast a questioning glance up at Seth, then perused the room. She tilted her head to one side. “Yours. Seth’s. Maybe David’s.”
“David was just here. Anyone else?”
Her brow furrowed. “I do sense . . . someone. Or the remnant of someone. But the signature is weak.”
“Do you recognize it?”
“No.”
“Is it strong enough for you to memorize? Strong enough that, should you ever encounter the individual again, you would know him?”
She closed her eyes. “I don’t know,” she said after a moment. “It’s fading even as we speak.”
“Memorize what you can.”
She nodded. According to Ami, every living thing had its own unique energy signature. Once she was exposed to it, she could always identify it . . . which was how she had always known when Zach had visited David’s home without Seth’s knowledge.
Seth watched Zach in silence.
She opened her eyes. “All right.”
“Thank you. Seth will take you home now.”
“Can I see Marcus first?”
Seth shook his head. “I can’t risk your being here if mercenary backup should arrive and engage us.”
The two vanished.
Zach dropped the mercenary.
Seth reappeared. “In the past, Ami has had to be in close proximity to a person to learn his or her energy signature. How did you know she would be able to sense the Other even though he’s no longer here?”
“I didn’t know. I hoped.” He motioned to the downed humans littering the floor. “Every time he comes here, the Other wipes the memory of his face from every mind here. With these few, he implanted the image of my face. That adds up to quite an expenditure of energy.”
“And even when we focus our energy . . .”
“Tendrils of it escape and infuse the air around us. I hoped enough of that excess would linger for her to catch it.”
“Good call. Have you figured out which of the Others it is?”
Zach shook his head, frustration beating at him. “I can smell him on the mercenary’s clothes. He must have gripped the man’s shirt in damned near the same place I did. But . . . we’ve occupied the same dwelling for millennia. Every room smells like every one of us.”
Seth’s face mirrored Zach’s anger. “How is this even possible?”
Zach shook his head. “I would have sworn it wasn’t. Not one of them has given even the tiniest inkling that he was losing faith in the path they tread, that he intended to defect. And a defection of this magnitude—”
“Is precisely what they all wish to avoid.”
Zach still had trouble grasping it. “Straying as we—as you and I—did is one thing. We fell in love. We chose to help humanity. Protect them. Ensure they have the fighting chance they were meant to have before this virus came from who-the-hell-knows where and altered the playing field so dramatically. Straying as this Other has . . .”
“Is the complete opposite. Helping the mercenaries acquire the virus, helping them wage war with us and try to capture one of us to learn the secrets of our advanced DNA, helping them create an army of supersoldiers who can change the world—”
“Could do what the Others have feared any interaction with humans would do.”
“Trigger an Apocalypse.”
“And destroy us all.”
Somber silence enshrouded them.
“Could that be his goal?” Seth murmured.
“To kick-start Armageddon?”
“I see no other end to his game.”
Zach shook his head. “Seth, I’m telling you, none of the Others have ever evinced even a hint of discontent.”
“None, including you,” he pointed out.
“If I had succeeded in hiding my growing dissatisfaction with our way of life, they wouldn’t have beaten me after I told you your phone was broken. They would have just assumed I had been there to warn you to keep your immortals in check.”
Seth loosed a weary sigh. “Then this Other must be a better actor than you, because I just don’t see an alternate explanation.”
Zach’s chaotic thoughts, which struggled to cling to denial, nearly drowned out the sounds his sensitive ears could hear outside.