Sigmund Brouwer - Flight of Shadows

Praise for
Flight of Shadows

Flight of Shadows is as haunting as it is intense. Brouwer keeps the pages turning in this deftly written sequel that engages the intellect and paints a frightening picture of a near-future world where the boundaries of morality are tested and broken. J EREMY R OBINSON , author of Antarktos Rising and Pulse

Praise for Sigmund Brouwer

The terrific pacing is surpassed only by the character development P UBLISHERS W EEKLY Good books keep you turning pages. Great books make you care. Outstanding books make you think. Broken Angel does all three! B ILL M YERS , author of The Voice Sigmund Brouwer never stopped spinning my head with Broken Angel . Every time I thought I had the story figured out, he swept out the rug and changed the game. This is a brilliantly imaginative turn from a fantastic writer thats endlessly emotional and affecting. Couldnt put it down. R OBIN P ARRISH , author of Relentless, Fearless, and Merciless Its been a long time since I finished a book and said, Wow, what a ride! Broken Angel left me breathless. A LTON G ANSKY , author of Zero-G and Angel In a genre-bending tale, Sigmund Brouwer takes us from emotional depths to soaring heights. Broken Angel is full of memorable characters, challenging ideas, and fast-paced scenarios. This story works on a number of levels. E RIC W ILSON , author of A Shred of Truth and Field of Blood

Other novels by Sigmund Brouwer

Broken Angel
Fuse of Armageddon
The Last Sacrifice
The Last Disciple
The Weeping Chamber
Out of the Shadows
Crown of Thorns
The Lies of Saints
The Leper Wings of Dawn
Blood Ties
Double Helix
Evening Star
Silver Moon
Sun Dance
Thunder Voice
Degrees of Guilt

Caitlyn ,

We had agreedthe woman I loved and Ithat as soon as you were born, we would perform an act of mercy and decency and wrap you in a towel to drown you in a nearby sink of water, like a kitten in a sack dropped into a river .

But in the motel room that was our home, the woman I loved died while giving birth. You were a tiny bundle of silent and alert vulnerability and all that remained to remind me of the woman .

I was nearly blind with tears in that lonely motel room. With the selfishness typical of my entire life to that point, I delayed the mercy and decency we had promised you. I used the towel not to wrap and drown you, but to clean and dry you .

As I lifted your twisted hands and gently wiped the terrible hunch in the center of your backwhere your arms connected to a ridge of bone that pushed against your translucent skinI heard God speak to me for the first time in my life .

God did not speak in the loud and terrible way as claimed by the preachers of Appalachia, where I fled with you. Instead God spoke in the way I believe God most often speaks to humansthrough the heart, when circumstances have stripped away our obstinate self-focus .

Holding you in your first moments outside the womb, I was overwhelmed by protective love. Even in the circumstances you face now, believe that my love has only strengthened since then .

I do not regret the price I paid for my love for you. But I do regret what it has cost you, all your life. And I have never stopped regretting all that I kept hidden from you .

PROLOGUE

O utside, wind and rain and darkness. On the main floor, rattling of the big windows that took the brunt of the storm.

But below, in the hidden rooms, where there was usually hushed silence, Jessica Charmaine approached a glass wall to a sound that she dreaded. Groaning.

Charmaine had learned that her hybrids on the other side of the glass had a wide range of sounds, and it wasnt difficult to read emotions into those sounds.

Sometimes, for example, she would enter and hear soft mewling. She would know in an instant that one had rolled away from the other. And that each would grope and roll until they were united again. She would help them back together and watch their faces contort in joy at the touch of the other.

Other times, their sounds expressed curiosity. Fear. Puzzlement. Sorrow. Frustration. She was convinced that they were trying to speak.

She knew why they were incapable of it.

Charmaine had two doctorates. The first was in genetic science, and the second, by necessity for this long-term experiment, was as an uncertified surgeon. She prided herself on her medical skills and her specialized knowledge. As required, using the equipment behind her in this large, partitioned room, shed long ago mapped out the genomes for these creatures. She still spent hours and hours puzzling over their gene sequences; if she could unlock the mystery, no longer would this experiment need to remain hidden from the world. In her studies, shed learned early by comparing the genetic mutations of the hybrids to Homo sapiens , that the FOXP2 gene of the hybrids had been altered by three specific amino acid differences.

She could have written a fascinating paper on this, definitively answering a long-disputed theory on why humans could speak and chimpanzees could not. The paperand the existence and characteristics of her hybridswould establish her reputation as a world-class scientist at the top of her game.

The irony, of course, was that the same existence and characteristics demanded the secrecy that would doom her as a scientist to perpetual obscurity. Unless she cracked the mysteries behind the genetic code of the hybrids and their near miraculous powers. To say the payoff would be enormous gave no idea of what was at stake. Without doubt, it would be the physics equivalent of generating an antigravity device.

Shed been close once. Oh, so very close. Decades earlier, as a co-director in the Genesis Project. But as the experiments neared the brink of final discovery, a scientist named Jordan Brown had unleashed a near-perfect storm of destruction upon the project. Along with the total deletion of irreplaceable computer data and all backups, hed triggered a laboratory explosion and an official loss of all the cataloged embryos. Even so, Charmaine might have had a chance of rebuilding her research, but funding for the crippled project had been swept away by much larger events: the Water Wars that forced government focus on survival, not experiments.

All would have been lost, except for three embryos not listed in the official report. Two of the three embryos belonged to these hybrids, serialized embryos shed managed to rescue just before the explosion and over the years had secretly nurtured to maturity. For these two hybrids, shed sacrificed her personal life in search of her holy grail, and her ambitions had slowly evolved. Charmaine had accepted this evolution so completely that she took a different satisfaction from her long hours with the hybrids. When she first spoke to them, it had been merely experimental, trying to learn whether they had the required motor and mental skills for speech. Now it was different, reflective of her emotional commitment to them. Always the detached observer, Charmaine guessed that part of her bond to them was maternal, a subconscious reaction to her deliberate choice to put careerand this long-term experimentahead of anything else in her life. It could even be said that her affair had been dictated by the hybrids. She was single and attractive, but with her need for secrecy, she had limited her suitors in a practical way to serve her quest. Except for Jordan Brown, who had been a fugitive since the lab explosion, the man shed chosen for a prolonged affair was the one and only other person who had knowledge of the hybrids.

Because of her maternal bond, when entering the glass cage, she would often lean over them, utter soothing words, or help each find the other if they had separated. They were adolescents, still growing. She knew they loved her. This gave her joy. Not enough perhaps to make up for the irony that such an incredible scientific achievement had to be hidden so carefully until someday she learned their secret. But enough that she did not resent all the time they needed from her. Their world had become her world.

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