Prodigal Son

fashion.
        Wound tight, wary, edging sideways from the window because her back felt exposed, she said, "I wasn't asking."
        She took a two-hand grip on the pistol, pointed it at him.
        "Will you shoot me in the heart?" he asked. "You'll need two rounds."
        Allwine lying on the autopsy table. Chest open. The associated plumbing for two hearts.
        "I came here thinking Allwine was an innocent man," he said, "torn open to provide the heart for another… experiment. But it's not that simple anymore."
        He moved, and for an instant she thought he was coming at her: "Don't be stupid."
        Instead he went past her to the window. "Every city has its secrets, but none as terrible as this. Your quarry isn't a crazed murderer. Your real enemy is his maker… and mine, too."
        Still reeling from his apparent claim to have two hearts, she said, "What do you mean, I'll need two rounds?"
        "His techniques are more sophisticated now. But he created me with bodies salvaged from a prison graveyard."
        When he turned away from the window, facing Carson again, she glimpsed that subtle pulse of luminosity passing through his eyes.
        "My one heart from a mad arsonist," he said. "The other from a child molester."
        Their positions had been reversed. His back was to the window, hers to the bathroom door. Suddenly she wondered if he'd come alone.
        She put herself at an angle to him, trying to watch him directly while keeping the bathroom threshold in her peripheral vision.. This put the door to the living room behind her. She could not cover every approach by which she might be assaulted, overwhelmed.
        "My hands were taken from a strangler," he said. "My eyes from an ax murderer. My life force from a thunderstorm. And that strange storm gave me gifts that Victor couldn't grant. For one thing…"
        He moved so fast that she did not see him take a step. He was at the window but then right in her face.
        Not since her first days at the police academy, when she'd been in training, had Carson been out-maneuvered, overpowered. Even as he seemed to materialize in front of her, he boldly wrenched the pistol out of her hand-a shot discharged, shattering a window-and then he was around her, behind her.
        She thought he went behind her, but when she turned, he seemed to have vanished.
        Even dressed in black in this black room, he could not make a shadow of himself. He was too big to play chameleon in a dark corner.
        His unmistakable voice came from the window-seat-"I'm not the monster anymore"-but when Carson spun to face him, he wasn't there.
        Again he spoke, seemingly from the doorway to the living room-"I'm your best hope"-yet when she turned a third time in search of him, she was still alone.
        She didn't find him in the living room, either, though she did recover her service pistol. The weapon lay on the floor beside the Lockaid lock-release gun, which she had left there earlier.
        The door to the public hallway stood open.
        Wishing that her thudding heart would quiet, she ejected the magazine. The telltale gleam of brass confirmed that the weapon was loaded but for the one expended round.
        Slamming the magazine into the pistol, she cleared the doorway fast, staying low, weapon in front of her.
        The corridor was deserted. She held her breath but did not hear any footsteps thundering down the stairs. All quiet.
        Considering the shot that had accidentally discharged, she could be reasonably sure that someone in the apartment across the hall was watching her through the fish-eye lens in that door.
        She stepped back into the black hole, snatched up the Lockaid gun, and pulled the door shut. She left the building.
        As she reached the bottom of the stairs, she realized that she had not switched off the lights in the apartment. To hell with it. Allwine was too dead to care about his electric bill.

CHAPTER 36
        
        IN A CORNER of the main lab, Randal Six had been strapped in a cruciform posture at the center of a spherical device that resembled one of those exercise machines that could rotate a person on any imaginable axis, the better to stress all muscles equally. This, however, was not an exercise session.
        Randal would not move the machine; the machine would move him, and not for the purpose of building mass or maintaining muscle