"Good. You can help us with these."

Jenna exchanges a glance with Allys. "Not right now, Angel. Maybe later."

"Come on, Sweet Pea," Allys says, and begins walking away. "This lettuce needs your special touch."

Kayla chases after her, and Jenna looks after them both, smiling.

"How do you know them?" I ask.

Jenna turns, and we continue toward the greenhouse. "Allys is an old friend. A very old friend. She lives here with me now. And Kayla"--she reaches for the greenhouse door and pulls it open--"she's my daughter."

I stop halfway through the door. I can't hide my shock, and she smiles. "Come on, Locke, it's not that unusual. I may still look like the sixteen-year-old that you knew, but I have been around for a while. I haven't been sitting gazing at my navel all this time."

I nod like an idiot and then blurt out a question before I can even think about it myself. "Are you married?"

"I was. Ethan's been dead now for a hundred and ninety years, but we were married for seventy. He was a good man."

The numbers aren't adding up in my head. "But Kayla's only--"

"I was illegal the entire time Ethan and I were married. It didn't seem right to bring a child into our way of life. But we had saved everything that was necessary for a child if either of us ever felt the time was right. I had to use a surrogate for obvious reasons, but Kayla is one hundred percent ours."

"You've been alone for a hundred and ninety years? You never married again?"

She shakes her head. "It's hard enough to lose one husband. There have been a couple of people over the years...." She leans back against the door. "The thing is, Allys is just as old as I am. She was saved with Bio Gel about the same time I was. I've watched her outlive six husbands and what she's gone through each time. That's not for me. When you're like us, saying good-bye becomes a way of life, but I couldn't deliberately do that to myself over and over again like she does. She says she's done for good with love now, but it's only been six years since her last husband died. Give her time." She walks through the door, and I follow.

"So you're done for good?" I say to her back.

She pauses mid-step and shakes her head, then turns to face me. "I've learned never to say never about anything. The world proves me a liar every time I do. But I know I'm done with saying good-bye." She throws out her hands, sweeping them toward the plants. "So, what do you think?"

Nice change of subject, Jenna. That's what I think. I look around the greenhouse. Lots of plants. Green. Warm and wet. Woven hemp mats down neat rows of green stuff. All nice, but hardly important to me right now. I look back at her. She isn't getting it. The clock is ticking. I don't have time for tours or to admire her hobby. There's a madman after me and Kara. Not to mention, I haven't even begun to scrape the surface on all I need to say. One short conversation doesn't wipe out decades of wondering. I can't pretend enthusiasm. Not right now. Not even for Jenna. "It's a greenhouse, all right."

"Exactly. That's just what I wanted to hear." She grabs my hand. "Come on." She pulls me toward two rows of thick palms. Fronds whip at my face as we make our way down the path between them. Halfway down, she stops and faces me. "If you need to hide for some reason, this will be a safe place to come."

I look at the palms. They provide some camouflage, but I think I could do better in the woods past the bridge.

"Lift," she says, pointing to a corner of a hemp mat.

"Here?" I lift a corner and see that the ground beneath the mat is not dirt. There's a metal plate with a recessed latch. I pull on the latch, and a three-foot square of floor swings away, revealing a staircase.

"Before the Fox fortune was all gone, I did manage to make a few improvements around here. Let me show you."

She leads and I follow her down the dark stairwell.

Chapter 47

The room below is about a quarter the size of the greenhouse. On one side are three cots and some shelves that are dusty and empty. On the other side is a Net Center with two stations, neither of them operating. Covering it all is a thick layer of dust, like the room hasn't been used in a long time. I learn it hasn't.

"For years, Ethan and I worked down here to help others like me obtain new identities and find some semblance of a life. After Ethan died, I became braver. Maybe I just felt I had nothing to lose. I showed up at a Congressional hearing on the FSEB and announced who I was." She tells me about the Federal Science and Ethics Board, some government agency I probably learned about in school but never paid attention to. I should have. They were the ones who had decided she was illegal based on a point system of replacement parts.

"I was taken into custody and spent a year in what they called detainment. Same thing as jail, but with none of the rights. But I already had all the groundwork in place before I made my move. I felt the time was ripe, and I had given all of my information to a Congressman Peck, who championed my cause. And I had plenty of hired guns ready--publicists--who were armed with enough video--all the good of me, all the bad of the FSEB, and press releases that never quit--that the FSEB hardly knew what hit them. They never could catch up. I have to say it was probably the best campaign in history. Of course, like I said, the time was ripe, the public was ready. It was the beginning of the personal privacy era. Other than public space ID, all personal tracking information and devices were being outlawed. The heavy hand of the FSEB was already crumbling--this just brought them down faster. In the end, the campaign came together in a moment that would have made my mother proud. It was as dramatic and well-choreographed as the climax of a ballet. At the height of the hearings, Allys walked in leading forty other Bio Gel recipients who had gone over the FSEB's quota system, all fine, upstanding citizens of the country. That did it. The FSEB came tumbling down, and new standards were adopted."