Water dripped from some leaky faucet. All the money the government had to put on this project and he had to cope with incompetent assistants and leaky faucets. And employees who refused to dispose of bodies correctly, nor take accurate readings on even the simplest of things, a dead body.

Murdoch clenched his fists on the table, head bowed and pressed to the cold plastic surface. It was not going well. This experiment was a complete catastrophe, everything relating to procedure would have to be thrown out. If he could not trust his own assistants to carry out their instructions precisely, if he could not trust that the methods which he used were impeccable and above suspicion, he could not trust the results. Everything would have to be done again, and if that happened he could not be assured of his funding.

Nor, he had to admit, should he be. This was his own failing in a way, his own failure to properly oversee his people. This was his fault in that he hadn't checked on George and the others in the testing facility. He hadn't made sure that they knew what they were supposed to be doing, he had just turned them loose with the specimens and a set of instructions and assumed that they knew their business. For that matter, had he in fact verified their resumes and credentials? He didn't know. Couldn't remember, now. He hoped he had, because if not that was another failure in a long litany of mistakes chained together to make this incredible catastrophe. And worse because it was a catastrophe that could claim lives.

"Damn," he whispered. "Damn. Damn!"

His fists and forehead thunked against the table. Rimbaugh had gone home for the evening or he would have stopped him, no doubt.

Then again, perhaps Rimbaugh wouldn't have let it get to that point in the first place. His friend was always able to talk reason into him, one way or another.

"Oh, my friend, you should have been in charge of this project and not me. You should be the one overseeing these people."

It was, Murdoch feared, the final proof he needed that his mind was truly going. Forgetfulness was one thing, older people worried about forgetfulness all the time, the ordinary kind like losing a name that was on the tip of your tongue or misplacing your keys. This was negligence and lackadaisical supervisory practices, something he never would have done in his youth.

"In your youth," Murdoch smiled, thinking back. "When you experimented on yourself with all sorts of cocktails under the delusion that since you knew exactly what you had put into it, that it was perfectly safe?"

Maybe he had always been this reckless. But not usually with other people's money. And not usually in a manner that contravened or compromised the scientific method.

Right, then. Now he must undo what he had done.

"And the first thing will be to find and destroy the specimens. All of them." He had had installed a tracking device in each one. For just such an occasion, although he hadn't expected to have to use it to do more than find a loose specimen in a hospital. Still, he knew about losing your lab subjects, after that disastrous incident with the jilted girlfriend and the rats and that neurotic neurologist. The password to the transponders, all of them, was in his little black notebook.

He still had to fuss around the lab for several minutes before he found the notebook itself, then he settled down at the terminal and entered the code and password to activate all the transponders. A little map of the city came alight.

Several little dots of red sprinkled over the laboratory buildings, some in the testing facility, a couple of them within the labs themselves. Autopsies, he thought, there were a couple autopsies in progress.

But if they were autopsies, why were the transponders still lit?

"Oh dear. Oh dear, Mr. Bryson, I think we have a problem." Never mind that he was alone in the room. He extended the search parameters outside the immediate area, to the dump site where George and the others had been depositing the bodies. Impossible to tell whether or not there were bodies there; once the electric pulse that gave life left the body there was nothing to charge the transponder.

There were clusters of red, like little blooms of bacteria, all around the dump site. Big ones, bigger than he had in the labs. All of the creatures that had been discarded, all those that had died, or that he had assumed had died. If they had been dumped, they were alive, he thought. Which explained how that poor woman had been attacked by specimens in the wild. "They didn't die," he mumbled to himself, elated and distracted by the thought. "They went into some kind of stasis, a kind of hibernation too deep for a routine scan to penetrate. And we didn't scan in greater depth because we didn't know they had that ability! We assumed they were fragile, engineered creatures when in reality they were stronger than any of us had guessed..."

And more numerous. There were even more clusters in the laboratories, the autopsies, he remembered. There were autopsies scheduled.

On bodies that might not be bodies at all.

Murdoch pushed off of the desk hard enough to send peripherals and notebook scattering to the floor, slamming his hand on the door open until it worked and careening off of walls in his haste to get down to autopsy.

The bodies were still on the tables and the medical examiner was just preparing his equipment when Murdoch burst in, out of breath and looking like a mad scientist stereotype. Everyone stopped and, it seemed, held their breath until someone said or did something. Which no one did. The medical examiner glanced around the room. Murdoch looked at each of the bodies in turn, trying to discern some sign of life. The transponders operated on a much smaller scale than their rudimentary tests of life did. Much less electricity was required.

"Have you begun the autopsy on any of these yet?" He could see that the bodies on the tables had yet to be cut open, but that didn't mean the medical examiner didn't have something stashed away in one of the morgue drawers.

The younger man shook his head. "Not yet," he frowned, confused. "I was just..."

In the time it took Murdoch to realize what was happening, the creature on the table had rolled off of it and grabbed the poor doctor by the throat, flinging him across the room and into a set of morgue drawers. He slammed against them with a rattling of metal and a broad thud, then slumped to the ground and lay still. Murdoch saw that, while the corner of his eye registered a gray blur rushing past him and out the door.

Humanity dictated that he check on the man to make sure he was still alive, could still be helped, and then obtain the best help for him since he was not a practicing medical doctor and not reviewed on the latest first aid techniques. Science and possibly investigative procedure told him to pursue the attacker.

Survival dragged his attention away from the two points of the dilemma and to the movement on the other tables, where the other creatures were stirring. Presumably the ones in the morgue drawers had already been cut open and thus killed, or they would be making a greater noise now. Murdoch got out of the way of the escaping creatures and moved towards the morgue drawers, towards the unconscious man and away from the small stream of three or four creatures who followed their fellow out the door and to parts unknown.

Not entirely known, really. He had the transponder data. But his mind was still coming to grips with the fact that something had awoken these from their hibernation or whatever passed for it, and sent them streaming towards a destination they must know instinctively, lacking any other sensory data.

But how? What instincts were they following? They had laced the DNA of these creatures with so many other qualities from other animals that it would be impossible to tell which without further data.

And contemplation of the possibilities was interrupted by a groan from the man at his feet. So he wasn't dead. Murdoch gave another longing glance out the door before crouching down at the medical examiner's side and examining him, visually only in case there was some unseen injury that moving him might exacerbate.

"No, no, don't move, help is on the way." No, help wasn't on the way, he had to summon help, didn't he. Emergency services wasn't telepathic, they couldn't tell where he was and that he needed help by the power of his mind alone.

He had his phone device out and was pushing the button for emergency services when he backed up over that thought and took another look at it. Telepathy as it was portrayed in science fiction was a long ways off, several generations of cortical mapping and enhancement and so on, but a hive mind, or an empathic sense might be possible. The electrical impulses of the brain and nerves. Something that connected them one to the other, certain animals were known to be able to manipulate or ride along the Earth's magnetic field, to use it for navigation, it was possible that the creatures whose senses they had enhanced had had that particular sense enhanced as well.

"... sir, if this is some kind of..."

"I'm sorry, I beg your pardon, I forgot I'd called. Yes, there's a man here who needs some urgent medical attention. He's been thrown into a wall."

There. That ought to get their attention.

He patted the medical examiner on the shoulder, completely forgetting his earlier resolution not to touch the man in case something was broken. The younger man didn't wince, though. He could barely focus his eyes

"That's all right, help is on the way. If you'll excuse me, I've got to, er..."

Not that there was any point in telling him, since Murdoch wasn't sure if he was conscious or not. He hurried out the door and down to the street level, activating the portable tracking program on his device to see if the transponders had any useful data to give him.

Kim didn't like this. It was getting dark, and even in the city it got dark at night. The streetlights kept it in perpetual haze, and the shadows just got longer. Better to hide in. People thinned out on the ground but still walked by, which was no guarantee that anyone would say or do anything if something attacked you.

As her experience the previous week had so amply proven.

But there weren't any of her usual contacts at the labs, and she'd been called in. It was her duty shift now, not Scofield's. She rolled up to the building door, painted pinks and purples in the evening light, just as the four or five people burst out of it and almost ran her over. Assholes.

She moved up to the skyways. Not on official business but that didn't matter, she cleared the barriers and kept going. Through downtown, past the big school and the mini-mall in the bottom of one of the skyscrapers, mannequins giving an eerie horror movie look to the whole thing. After dark couriers were scarce on the skyways, although the pedestrian level was still crowded enough to be annoying. When her legs started to twitch she rolled to a stop and sat on the edge of one of the platforms, legs dangling, wheels pulling her feet downward.

The moon was a little brighter tonight. Not much, but enough that the shadows were clearer. Shadows of the edges of buildings, of the pedestrians below her feet. The elongated shadow of the boy trying to sneak up on her, a boy she knew. "Hey, Lyle."

"Hey." He sat down next to her, legs kicking. His legs were almost as long as hers. When had that happened?

"You know you're not supposed to be up here." Not that, at this time of night, she was going to kick him off for walking on the skyway. There was room for everyone. "You're not even supposed to be out this late."

"Yeah..." he shrugged, fingers twisting around themselves, then drumming on his thigh. She'd noticed that a lot of programmers had that particular tic. "Dad was working late, crashed pretty soon after he got home. I figured I'd come out and see how you were doing."

Kim glanced at him again, this time holding his gaze until Lyle started to squirm and looked away. "You're a terrible liar, kiddo. What did you find out?"

"What? No! I didn't find out anything, I didn't go looking, I stayed out of the DoD servers like you said..."

Only he hadn't. He protested too much, tried selling it too much, pushed it too far and she knew he was lying. She rubbed her temples. "Clay told you."

Lyle's fingers tapped faster. He shook his head. "Dad didn't tell me anything. He didn't have to, I knew you were worried about it. I hacked into the, the scheduling database?"

"Oh Lyle..." She bit back all the curses she wanted to launch at him, turning and opening her mouth to shred him for that. "You know that..."

"No, no, shut up and listen, okay? I hacked into the scheduling database, I got the project number and the buildings and then went looking for the original project. Do you even know what it is?" He hurried past her flat, unfriendly stare. "It's some kind of super soldier thing, they're working on bio-warfare, bio-engineering, they've appropriated virus samples from the CDC, they've been experimenting on criminals. Political prisoners..."

Kim stared. Lyle's fear was a little contagious; more importantly the depth and sound of it was compelling. He didn't freak out over the little things, and he didn't get caught up in conspiracy theories like a lot of hackers she knew. He was good at both parts, both the online and the offline aspects. One reason she thought he'd make a good member on a security team some day.

And, political prisoners. There were quite a few of those these days. The government waffled between something terrifyingly close to a third-world dictatorship and a benevolent democracy under siege by outside forces. People sometimes did disappear into an underground prison for months, sometimes years. It wouldn't take much to report them dead and shuttle them off to a laboratory.

"How many..." she mouthed, while her mind tried to cope with the implications.

"I don't know, I hacked into, I got this thing, this map?" Lyle pulled his portable out of his backpack, laying it on their legs and bringing up what looked like a GPS-formatted satellite map. Actually, "It's some kind of map, I don't know what..."

"It's a map of all the test subjects. Where they are, their locations..."

Which were all around the city by the look of things. They stared, shoulder to shoulder, at the cluster of dots blinking in and out all over the city along blotchy lines.

"How are we getting this?" she asked with a flash of intuition, conclusions cascading overtop of each other in its wake.

Lyle poked the portable a couple more times. "Uh, it's piggybacked onto someone's device, um. A Dr. Murdoch...?"

Kim grabbed the portable and scrambled to her feet, took off while he was still talking. "Go home! Go to bed!" she called over her shoulder.

By the time she hit the old subway station she was starting to wonder what the hell she was doing and why she had followed him in the first place. This wasn't her business. It wasn't even her problem, except it kind of was, what with the whole she had taken a job that had gotten her into this mess. Which made it her problem but not her fault. Should she even be here trying to figure out how to fix it?

"Don't see anyone else doing it," she muttered, annoyed. This went beyond toxic dumping or destroying a local ecosystem.

Rather than bother with the elevator she skidded down the ramp between the escalators. Zig-zagging this way and that to avoid the bumps put in place to stop people like her, which obviously didn't work, she leaped off the escalator and rolled through a few clusters of people, most of whom obliged her haste by stopping and staring as she passed. Couriers didn't come down here, not often. Not the kind that had wheels and sparkle-vests.

People stared at her, but no one got in her way. That was something, since she had to keep looking down at the portable to make sure she was on the right track to intercept the doctor. What the hell was he doing down here, anyway?

"Excuse me, do you know where the access tunnel is..."

That voice was familiar. That was one of the scientists, a man she'd met all of twice but one she remembered because she kept having to remind him of the importance of proper procedure, thumbprint and signature and all that. She didn't remember his name, but she wasn't convinced he remembered it either. He definitely didn't remember her name.

"Hey, Mister." Which was a decidedly childish thing to call out to him, but she didn't have any other way of referring to him until she learned his name. "Scientist guy."

He turned around and blinked at her, frowning in that Not Now Bernard sort of a way. "I don't have time for..."

"I know, I know, that stampeding herd of whatever they were you've ... been following." Okay, so maybe letting out the fact that there were experimental things running loose in the subways was a bad idea. Security clearances be damned, no one needed a panic in the streets or on the subway platforms. But she'd been tracking the doc, and he looked like he'd been tracking a cluster of red dots. "They didn't get this far, they must have turned up at the landing." If they'd gotten this far, people would know why a man in a lab coat and a courier were down here looking for something they weren't talking about.

"Then where..."

Kim had already hopped onto the escalator railing, ignoring the protests of the security guard. "Come on, there has to be another door up there..."

He blinked at her again, then followed. "Well, of course there has to be another door up there, they would have to access it..."

They both saw it at once. A narrow opening where there had been a grate and now there was a gap of twisted metal and a corridor big enough for maybe her to get through. Probably not him. They both vaulted the rail at once, Kim quietly thanking her lucky stars that they were too high up for the security guard to see.

"You're not going to fit in there," she told him, unstrapping her wheels and rocking up on the balls of her feet a bit to get rid of that moon-boots feeling. "Keep an eye on those for me, I'll be back as soon as I can."

"I... but, you... wait," he sputtered, then grabbed her arm. She almost decked him before she saw that his other hand was holding out a device of some kind. "Here, take this. It'll tell you where they are and how many of them there are. At least, I think it will."

She started to ask what he meant by that before she realized she might not actually get a coherent answer, then nodded. "Thanks."

"Good luck."

Kim snorted, wriggling her way into the corridor and breathing a sigh of relief when it widened out again after a very short while. "I'm going to need it."

About the time she realized that following the little red dots on the device had gotten her completely lost, Kim also realized that she hadn't the first clue what she was doing. More so than before. Following these things at street level and on the skyways was one thing, following them in tunnels and on her bare feet was completely different. On her bare feet, crawling through what felt like old sewer tunnels. Caked in former sewage. Or current sewage, since did sewage really have an expiration date? Was there a point after which it became even more unhealthy?

It was a sad state of affairs when her inner monologue about sewage and the horrible diseases she could be getting from it was to protect herself from thinking about the creatures at the end of this search and the horrible things they might do to her.

The only problem with that was that was that they had swarmed her once already, and nothing had happened. She'd gotten roughed up a little, nothing that said they meant to do her any harm. They could have, as fast as they moved and as hard to see as they were, done her considerable damage. But they hadn't.

"So what the hell did they even want?"

Her voice echoed in the corridors. Not a good plan, Kim, not if she didn't want them to hear her coming.

Hell, if they were hunters, the way she thought they were, the way everything about them suggested they were made to be? They heard her coming anyway.

"Come out, come out, wherever you are..." she called down the corridor. "Creepy-ass made up mad science things."

Kim was used to relying on the evidence of her senses, mostly sight. Mostly what she could see and hear around her and in front of her, not keeping one eye on her path and one eye on some device. She didn't realize she was standing in the middle of a giant red blob of the things until she hesitated under an overhang right before a giant open space where several tunnels crossed and looked down at the device. Yep. Giant red blob ahead. This was where all the signals met.

"Well, shit."

As though that had been a cue, faces started to appear along the edges of the tunnels, along the catwalks above. Hundreds of them, her hindbrain gabbled at her, even though there couldn't have been more than fifty. It wasn't that big a space. And yet their gray faces seemed to fill it, gray faces and bald heads and cheekbones like some artist's model made out of clay and unfinished. Like their faces were unfinished. Their hair was curly and soft-looking, their eyes were large and reflective. It was a whole race of Morlocks. And they were all staring at her.

"Uh. Hi."

Silence.

"I don't guess any of you speak English? No? Um... Spanish? Espaņol?" Still nothing resembling comprehension. And that was the only other language she knew, thanks to her stepfather. "Um..." What was she even doing here, anyway? "We come in peace?"

Liar!

The word shrieked in her head, to the point where spots swam in front of her eyes and she had to fight to keep her balance. Sort of the word, her mind gave her the word for the feeling of someone who could not be trusted, who was fearsome and who said and did things that were not true. Someone who was wrong on purpose. It was a weird, disorienting feeling.

"I'm not lying!" she shouted, now cranky and afraid. "I don't even know what's going on! Look, you can put things inside my head, so you read my thoughts, you see if I'm telling the truth."

A split second after she said that she realized that might not have been the best of ideas. She felt them crawling around inside her thoughts like little worms under her skin, and it was far from pleasant. Things never worked this way in the movies. The creatures were supposed to read her thoughts and it was supposed to be no worse than getting rocked by a stiff breeze.

It was over quicker than she expected, or maybe quicker than she imagined because it was all in her head. The murmur increased around her, giving her a throbbing pain behind her forehead. If she wasn't lying about that, then why was she here?

"I wish I could tell you guys," she snorted. "I really..."

Someone was coming up behind her. They couldn't have followed her in, not through that narrow corridor, but they were coming up behind her nonetheless. The murmur around her turned into a whirl of angry activity. Angry and afraid. Kim flattened herself against the wall of the tunnel and tried very hard to pretend she wasn't there and wouldn't be noticed, because this was something she wanted no part of. Not when all that anger was directed at someone.

Another scientist. The absent-minded professor's friend, or at least his collaborator, she'd delivered samples and files to him, too. Never had to remind him about the signature or the thumbprint. He was meticulous about everything, and probably just as meticulous about the nature of his experiments, which did nothing to explain why the test subjects were all down here in the old sewer system.

"Brilliant, isn't it?" he turned to her, smiling. "They're so beautiful. And so numerous. I have to admit, I hadn't expected that hibernation trick of theirs, it's quite impressive. Better than playing possum, so to speak."

Kim shook her head, trying to figure out why he was talking to her when he probably only recognized her face, and that only vaguely. "I... guess?" Don't call the mad scientist a crazy person, she told herself. That was a good way to get cackled at, or worse.

He frowned anyway, but stepped out into the middle of the circle. Instead of the swarm of bodies she had expected they all pulled back like frightened puppies. Too much to hope that they'd recognize the bad guy when they saw him and attack appropriately.

"I must admit, when General Holbrooke came to me with the project, I didn't think it would work. There simply isn't enough available data on the relevant sequences to predict with a degree of accuracy necessary to meet the timeline required, but we made some educated guesses, and..."

That wasn't English. At least, she was pretty sure that wasn't English. The words strung together as though they made sense but the sentence had no meaning for her whatsoever. "Um." Kim raised her hand. "Before you go into your monologue there, I have a question."

"What?" he turned on her, confused and exasperated.

"Why am I here again? What's my role in all of this?"

Another one of those frowning looks. "You were the control leader. You had no knowledge of the experiment whatsoever, but you carried the necessary genetic material to manufacture the pheromone markers of a leader. Catching you with the DMSO applicator was simple, even with your friend Abraham's refusal. And, apparently, they did follow your lead. For the most part," he shrugged. "There were some outliers, and a better demonstration would probably be forthcoming if you were to train them properly, give them commands, but that would be for the military to field test..."

"Uh-huh." She tried to stop him in mid-ramble. "So, you experimented on me. Without my permission. You do know that's ten kinds of illegal, right?"

No, by the look on his face he didn't. Either that or he didn't care. She slipped her hands behind her back and leaned her shoulders against the wall, as though she'd put her hands in her pockets. The other man's device was still in her pocket with the transponder screen on, but if she could make the record button work, if it worked like hers did she knew exactly where to punch and tab-slide to get to the record function. This had to be recorded. For future court sessions.

"Perhaps, but it was necessary. We couldn't waste all this time explaining things to you and having you sign forms you didn't understand, we had to move quickly. Before the population got out of control. Once we realized that our own responses were contaminating the experiment..."

"So," she interrupted him yet again, and this time she thought he might throw something at her. He had the same look her tenth grade chemistry teacher had every time she cracked her gum in class. "What you're saying is," and the only relevant part of the whole rambling speech. "I'm their leader. They look up to me." Which explained, at least in a very overall and broad sense, why they were all staring at her and the crazy man now, waiting for her to make a move.

"Well, yes. That was the purpose of..."

"Good. Get. Him."

She didn't have to explain what it meant. Their telepathic mind-melding field did it for her, and they were agitated enough already. All it took was her pointing at the man and making him the focus of her attention and her anger, and they swarmed. All of them. One giant mass of writhing bodies and it took her a second to comprehend what she had done. That there was a person under there. Or had been a person under there. No one could survive the kind of pummeling they were digging out.

That last thought was one thought too many. She turned and pelted down the hall, careening off of turn after turn until she couldn't hear them anymore, where she fell to her knees and threw up everything that was in her stomach.

"And they're there all the time now?"

"Mm-hmm." She couldn't even enjoy the fact that Scofield looked a little nervous. Kim pushed her food around on her plate with her fork, trying choke down her lunch. Three days and she still couldn't get over the fact that nothing was happening.

Somehow, maybe with the telepathic guidance of the sewer people or maybe just by blind luck, she'd made it out of there. Told the scientist whose name had turned out to be Murdoch at least on his device what had happened to his friend. Played the recording. Murdoch had been surprised, but more at her capability than at his friend. He'd gone back around the long way with a crew of government cleanup agents, whatever agency they were with. There wasn't much left of the scientist.

But after that, nothing happened. She went back to work as though nothing was wrong, the police didn't come after her, no one wanted to know even what that incident in the subway was all about. Crime actually went down in that area, enough at least for her to catch a glimpse of a report to that effect in the dailies.

"Kim?" Scofield touched her arm, a rare note of open concern in his voice. "Hey, are you okay?"

She shook her head, pushed her hair out of her eyes. Time to get her bangs cut again. "Yeah, I'll be fine. It's just, seriously. How many government jobs have you had that ended up with you being..."

Secretly watched by the federal government. At least, that's what she'd told him. What she meant was, secretly watched by a cadre of not-quite-human super soldiers, which is what Murdoch had told her they were originally intended to be. Didn't work out, as it turned out. The project was being scrapped. But since most of the creatures were originally labeled as deceased, he just let the government keep on thinking they were disposed of.

And now they were around her all the time. Her own little quiet army at her beck and call, which was far worse than federal watchers.

Scofield narrowed his eyes at her. He knew she was holding something back, but there was no way he could figure out what. "It happens more often than you'd think..." he drawled, waiting for her to explain or elaborate or at least complain a little more, give him something more to go on. She shook her head, pushed a few grains of rice around on her plate and said nothing. "Anyway, if you ever want to talk. You know, to someone who has the same clearance level as you..."

Kim forced a laugh, but the half-smile was real. "I'll know who to call. Thanks. Seriously."

"No problem," he shrugged, threw her a wink that made no sense at all, and picked up his trash to dump it on his way out.

She turned in her seat and leaned her folded arms over the back of the chair, watching him go. That was something she'd have to remember to ask Murdoch, she decided. Why her and not Scofield. There were two people in this company with the government clearances to get the project, so why'd he pick her?

Then she decided she was better off not knowing the answer.

Back out into the streets, into the humid air and the blistering sun, the clouds holding their breath for the least opportune moment for rain. The streets were familiar, stretching out under her wheels, and even if the rest of her life had turned upside down, she still had the glass and steel skyways to lean on and keep her company.