The gates on her property had swung open when his driver announced him—Stefan hadn’t called ahead—but he didn’t expect her to answer her own front door. “Stefan,” she said. After a brief pause, she swung wide the door, gesturing him in. He hadn’t seen her since the mess at Hanford, but they’d left each other that night on better terms than they’d been on in the past. Before that holocaust night, she’d tried to tell him that people in his company were part of an unthinkable plot. He hadn’t believed her. Not until he’d seen the compound in eastern Washington where a cabal of savvies planned to cross over to the Entire and slam shut the door behind them. They didn’t want anyone following them, and to ensure this, they would have…Christ, even now, he couldn’t think it. Ended the world. What they called the transform. Their sanitary-sounding code word for erasing the human species—or at least the less-than-savvy ones.
