Before the Dawn

COLD PURSUIT MANTICORE HEADQUARTERS GILLETTE, WYOMING, 2009 Her bare feet pounding, breaking the crust of ice on the snow-packed ground, her thin blue hospital-style smock hiked high over pumping legs, nine-year-old X5-unit 332960073452 barely noticed the February cold. Neither did she have any knowledge that in other parts of the United States, Valentine's Day was less than forty-eight hours away; that was part of a mundane, ordinary life as unknown to her as her controlled existence had been to the outside world. Though she had learned much at Manticore, all the girl knew, at this moment, was that she was running for her life. The deafening whir of choppers circling overhead did not cause her to look up, and she avoided the wide white beams of searchlights that probed, slashed the remote Manticore facility, turning the gloomy woods into a haunted house of light, dark, and shadow. Brunette locks shaved down to a severe concentration-camp buzz cut, she was small, but not skinny--lean, lithe, wiry . . . and, though unmistakably a child, already battle-hard. Her dark olive complexion gave her a tiny advantage over some of the others, the ones so white they practically glowed when the searchlights neared them, ghosts in the haunted house. Her eyes were large and dark, and she might have been referred to as doe-eyed if there hadn't been something lethal glinting in there, something almost predatory in the way those orbs took in whole scenes and missed no detail. Sprinting through the woods, she didn't breathe hard, didn't even sweat, as--machinelike--she pumped her arms and pistoned her knees up and down. Her hypersensitive hearing picked up--behind her, farther in the distance with each stride--the ragged breathing of her pursuers, grown-ups who, for all their own training, could only vainly fight to keep up with a genetically enhanced soldier-in-the-making. The child knew it was true now--they were escaping, they were really escaping . . . though she and the others, her "siblings," could barely grasp the word's meaning. They were well schooled, these soldier kids, but their context was limited. The girl knew "escape" only as something you thought about when you had been captured, after you'd been taken prisoner. But she and the others weren't prisoners, were they? After all, wasn't Manticore their home . . . the only home they'd ever known? But that home had seemed suddenly a prison, when the man they trusted, the father figure to these special children--Colonel Lydecker himself--had callously shot one of them down. Eva was dead! For what? Mere defiance? Now they knew exactly what they were--they were an experiment, an exercise in mutated genetics and military tactics; and they knew, too, what they were worth to Manticore, if that experiment failed: nothing. All the training, all the exercises, all the studying, nine years, her whole life, had shattered into something incomprehensible, within the blast and echo of a single gunshot. A group of snowmobiles, their engines howling like a pack of wild dogs, flew by her flank, traveling too fast to see her as she pressed herself against a tree, the rough bark weirdly soothing, reminding her she was alive, awake, not dreaming this. The grown-up soldiers looked like futuristic monsters to the girl, in their baggy black fatigues and night-vision goggles, all with laser-sighted automatic weapons, pressing up the hill from the valley in an ominous wave . . . She took off running again. Cresting a slope, fleet as a fox, Max found herself in a clearing. After a moment of indecision, she saw a head, Zack's head, rise up from behind a log. Wordlessly, she moved to join him. As she neared, more kids in the blue-gray nightshirts and pajamas began to pop out from behind other logs and the trunks of trees, like strange, sudden night-blooming flowers. They shared not only theBallantine Books Staff is the author of 'Before the Dawn' with ISBN 9780345451828 and ISBN 0345451821.