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“Nobody’s trusted me before.” She jammed the stunner in her pocket. “Thank you.”

When the door shut, he began to run.

Eve bellied over to Stage Two, used the card she’d taken to open the doors.

Inside were five cribs. The children in them—hell, what did she know? A few months, a year. Even in sleep they were monitored.

As were the children she could see beyond—Stage Three—who slept on narrow cots in a kind of dormitory style. Fifteen, Eve counted.

The doors connecting the sections required no card. At least not from the Stage Two area. She could see Deena inside One, her hands in the air. Her mouth was moving. Eve didn’t need to hear the words to know they were pleas. It was all over her face.

Get him to put the kid down, Eve thought. Get him to lower the stunner, one damn inch for one damn instant. It’s all I need.

She nearly took her chances, but saw the speaker system by the door. Engaging it, she listened.

“There’s no point. There’s no point. Please, give her to me.”

“There’s every point. Over forty years of work and progress, and hundreds of Superiors. You were a great hope, Deena. One of our finest accomplishments, and you threw it away. For what?”

“For choice, of living, of dying. I’m not the only, I’m not the first. How many of us have self-terminated because we couldn’t go on existing, knowing what you’d made of us.”

“Do you know what you were? Street garbage, a nit, nothing more. Already in pieces when they brought you to us. Even Wilfred couldn’t put you back together. We saved you. Again and again and again. We improved you. Perfected you. You exist because I permitted it. That can end now.”

“No!” She jerked forward when he jammed the stunner harder under the baby’s jaw. “It won’t gain you anything. It’s over, you know it’s over. You can still get away. You can still live.”

“Over?” His face was bright with excitement. A fever. “Barely begun. In another century what I’ve created will be existence for the human race. I’ll be there to see it. Death is no longer an obstacle for me. But for you . . .”

He swung the stunner up, and Eve was through the door. Before she could fire, he swung the baby up like a shield, and dove with it.

She hit the floor, rolled to avoid a stream that blasted the doors behind her. The air burst with the wails of infants, the shriek of alarms.

“This is the police.” She shouted it over the din, and bellied to cover. “This facility is shut down. Throw out your weapon, put the kid down.”

The comp unit just over her head shattered with another blast.

“Well, that didn’t work,” she muttered.

She couldn’t return fire, not when he had the infant. But she could draw it, she decided, and gauged the distance to the doors leading to the corridor.

She saw a movement outside the glass, wasn’t sure whether to curse or cheer when she saw Roarke position himself.

“You’re surrounded, Wilson. You’re done. I’ve already taken out two of you personally. You want to make it three, that’s up to you.”

He let out a scream, and as she gathered herself to charge the far doors, she saw the child he’d held fly up. She had an instant to jerk her body around, but Deena was already leaping into the open.

Wilson’s blast hit her in midair, just as her arms snatched the child.

“You’ll die! And suffer and sicken and stumble your way through what pathetic lives you have. I would have made men gods. Remember who ended it, remember who damned you to mortality. Initiate fail-safe!”

He rose, his face alive with a mad fervor. When he aimed at Eve, she fired even as Roarke slammed through the doors. Wilson went down between their blasts.

Fresh alarms shrilled, and a passionless computerized voice began to drone.

Warning, warning, fail-safe has been initiated. You have ten minutes to safely evacuate these facilities. Warning, warning, these facilities will self-terminate in ten minutes.

“Perfect. Can you stop it?” she demanded of Roarke.

He scooped up a small device beside Wilson’s body. “This is just a trigger. Single mode. I’d need to find the source before I could begin to override.