A thin, middle-aged man hurried through the rain of Carlisle Street, the hood of his parka cinched tight. It was late on a weekday night. Cars splashed by. Trams hummed along. He passed some teenagers huddled under the awning of a 7-Eleven store. They were vaping and admiring a rash of fresh graffiti on the brick wall.

He stopped at a darkened storefront and dug for his keys. Unlocking the door, he doffed his hood and pushed inside, the little bells jingling over his balding head. Wiping his feet, he stooped to inspect the gilded Star of David and Hebrew letters painted on the inside of the window. Then he made for the back of the deli.

Gryphus watched from a darkened alleyway. Shouldering his heavy rucksack, he crossed the street. With gloved hands, he opened the door a few centimeters and reached up to stifle the bells. Slipping inside, he wiped his feet and padded across the checkered tiles, past the deli case, to a door behind the counter. There he crouched, listening to the Jew as he talked to someone on his phone.

"Yes," he was saying. "They took my blood at the clinic, but what business is that of yours? . . . Danger? Who from? . . . I don't have any sons. . . . Who are you? Are you calling from the States? . . . Good, and don't ring again!"

The door opened, and out stepped the Jew, face buried in his phone. He was taller than he had looked from across the street, but his shoulders were narrow, his skin fleece-white. Gryphus clicked his tongue to get the man's attention then with a swift punch to the solar plexus dropped him to his knees. Pirouetting behind him, Gryphus wrapped a wire garrote around his neck, locking it off with three lightning-quick twists. Then he stepped back.

As the Jew writhed on the floor, Gryphus snatched up his phone. The call had originated from a private international number.

When enough time had passed, Gryphus dragged the lifeless body into the meat locker, where he propped it up between two hanging sides of beef, their rabbinical stamps vivid in the fat. Into the wire garrote, he hooked something small and metallic, a tiny charm with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. Then he unloaded his rucksack and got to work.

***

Sophea pocketed her phone and spied out from the forest eaves. Fifty yards of parched meadow stood between her and the back entrance of Numex research building C-1. From high on the walls, security cameras dangled like bats.

She hurried across the meadow, head bowed. Swiping her ID badge, she opened the heavy door and climbed the stairwell, her feet clanging on the steel steps.

On the third floor, she donned a powder-blue lab coat and sat down at her computer, shivering. Numex engineers insisted on keeping the room at twenty degrees Celsius, optimal running temperature for the GA-3, a hulking mass of machinery in the center of the room.

"You ready to blow through this shit?" said the kid with a Styrofoam box under his arm. Chris Dowdy was Jonathan Avery's replacement, a twenty-two-year-old neo-punk with bleached, spiky hair, a tongue stud, and tattoos that snaked up his pale, freckled arms, neck, and all sorts of horrid places. At least he was sober.

Chris set the Styrofoam box on the counter, cut the packing tape, and lifted the lid to a swirl of dry ice fog. Reaching inside, he extracted a frosty rack of tiny vials, each containing a drop of frozen blood. "Are you done with the pre-run check?"

Sophea consulted her computer screen. "Check."

Chris extracted three more identical racks and removed the shipping manifest from its plastic pouch. "Says here they're from a military base in . . . Syria. God, that place is a fucking mess."

Sophea pretended to ignore him.

"What I want to know is if we're supposed to be looking for disease-associated DNA mutations, why do we keep processing samples from military recruits and blood donors? I mean, aren't they supposed to be the healthy ones?"

"I hadn't given it much thought," she lied.

"What did the last guy think? What was his name?"

"Jonathan." Sophea had not heard from Jonathan Avery since those Numex goons dragged him from the press conference. No one had.

"Jonathan, yeah."

There was nothing in the world Sophea wanted more than to share with another human being the terrible burden Jonathan Avery had dumped on her. Still, she hesitated. God only knew what those Numex goons had done to him; it might only be a matter of time before they came for her. The head that stands above the crowd gets lopped off. That was what her grandparents always told her.

"Well?" he pressed. "What did Jonathan say about it?"

She looked at Chris. He was just a kid. An annoying little shit, but a kid nonetheless. "He never brought it up."

"Oh, OK." A pause. "I heard he was juiced up all the time—an alcoholic I mean."

"He had a problem."

"Not that you need to be sober to run this machine." He loaded the now-thawed blood samples into the GA-3's gaping receptacle. "A monkey could do it."

It was true. The GA-3 was a wonder of automation. All they had to do was feed it raw blood samples, and in a matter of minutes, it could isolate DNA and analyze it for over 3.5 million unique genetic mutations. There were three more GA-3s running on other floors, each ripping through a thousand samples a day, seven days a week. And that was just the Oregon facility.

The amount of data Numex Industries had amassed was staggering. Jonathan once said it was the largest genetic repository in the entire world. Roughly one in twenty of the planet's inhabitants was represented. And not one of them had consented to it. Numex simply purchased leftover blood samples from whoever was willing to sell, which, it turned out, was everyone. It was the real reason Numex Industries donated so much money to the Red Cross and other similar organizations.

Chris was drumming the countertop with a pair of unsharpened pencils, head banging to the beat of a song playing out in his mind, lips mouthing the words.

Sophea cleared her throat. "Did you get the quality-control data I asked for, from yesterday's run?"

His freckled face scrunched up in drum-solo ecstasy.

"Well, did you?"

He concluded his performance with a rim shot to an empty beaker. "Relax. It's not like there's ever a problem."

"How would you know? You just started here."

"Well, that's what the engineers told me."

"Did you find the data or not?"

"Yes. And no."

Sophea let her hands fall to her sides. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means that someone at R and D deleted the data from the server."

"But I hadn't analyzed it yet."

"Like I said, there's probably nothing to worry about."

Sophea shot Chris a smoldering glare, something she normally reserved for her snotty little nephew.

"Whoa. Relax, chica. I retrieved a copy from the local hard drive. It's right there in the desktop folder if you really want to waste your time looking at it."

She found the folder and clicked. On the black computer screen, there appeared a grid of blue squares of various shades, twenty wide, a hundred tall: the quality-control data from one hundred of the five thousand samples they had run the previous week. In addition to the 3.5 million genetic mutations, the GA-3 searched for twenty so-called negative controls, nonsense sequences not expected to produce a hit. If they did, something was wrong with the run, and engineering was to be notified.

She tapped the space bar to pull up the next set of one hundred negative controls. She kept tapping, scanning each blue field for the faintest yellow flicker.

Chris rolled up on his chair and hovered behind her. "I don't know why you even bother."

She tapped the space bar even faster, each matrix as blue as the last. Then she stopped abruptly, convinced she had seen something. Chris was leaning over her shoulder now, the spicy scent of his deodorant somehow far more sinister than Jonathan's boozy stench. She scrolled the mouse back six pages, then resumed her tapping, slower now.

"There!" she said, pointing. Near the bottom of the screen, two yellow squares shone together against the blue background, one above the other.

Chris plopped back into his chair and rolled away. "So? They're just isolated hits. We're supposed to ignore those."

"Where did this batch of blood come from?"

"You expect me to remember?"

"Go to the back room and pull the shipping manifest."

"Why?"

"Just do it!"

Sophea was only five foot one, ninety pounds wet, but when she got angry, people paid attention, if only out of surprise. Chris skulked off to the back room, and Sophea returned her attention to the two yellow squares flickering there in column number five. It was always column number five, Jonathan said. Because column number five was not a negative control at all. It was a very specific probe hidden among the negative controls, designed by Numex engineers to detect a very specific, and exquisitely rare, DNA sequence. A DNA sequence that did not exist in any of the public databases. Sophea had checked for herself. Whatever Numex engineers were looking for, it was unknown to science.

Chris returned with the shipping manifest in hand. "Looks like that batch came from a blood-donation center."

Blood donors. The two yellow squares had been blood donors, two generous souls, two good men. They were all men, or boys, sometimes infants, but always male. In the days before his firing, Jonathan had tracked down every one of them, every person whose sample had turned up positive on column five. They came from all over the world—Hong Kong, Australia, the United States, Greece, Israel, Germany, Ireland. But each had suffered the same fate. Within days of Numex Industries receiving their blood sample, each had been found dead, and with them every first-degree male relative.

Sophea felt like she might vomit. "Which blood-donation center?"

Chris handed her the manifest. "Take a look for yourself."

Her gaze tumbled through the ashen letters of a carbon copy. The batch of specimens had come from a blood-donation center in Seattle, Washington, USA.

________________

Image courtesy of Pixabay public domain photos, https://pixabay.com/en/photos/