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Startled, the janitor stepped forward.
    Behind Lester, Deucalion stepped forward, too, snaked his right arm around the other’s neck, his left arm around the head. As the janitor, with his strong hands, tried to claw loose of the death grip, Deucalion wrenched with such force that the Epsilon’s spine shattered. Instant brain death precluded any healing, rapid or otherwise.
    Gently, Deucalion lowered Lester to the floor. He knelt beside the cadaver. Neither of the janitor’s two hearts continued beating. His eyes did not track his executioner’s hand, and his eyelids did not resist the fingers that tenderly closed them.
    “Not dead and alive,” Deucalion said. “Only dead and safe now … beyond despair and beyond your maker’s fury.”
    Rising from his knees in the basement networking room, Deucalion reached his full height in the main laboratory, at Victor’s U-shaped workstation, where his search had been interrupted by Lester and then by Annunciata.
    Earlier in the night, from Pastor Kenny Laffite—a creation of Victor’s, whose program had been breaking down—Deucalion had learned that at least two thousand of the New Race were passing as ordinary people in the city. Pastor Kenny, who was now at peacelike Lester, also said the creation tanks in the Hands of Mercy could produce a new crop of his kind every four months, over three hundred annually.
    More important was Kenny’s revelation that a New Race farm, somewhere outside the city, might go into operation within the next week. Two thousand creation tanks, under a single roof, would produce six thousand in the first year. Yet another such farm was rumored to be under construction.
    When Deucalion found nothing useful in the drawers of Victor’s workstation, he switched on the computer.

CHAPTER 11
    RIPLEY, IN THE MONITORING HUB , was also in a dilemma.
    He knew that, even as strong and smart as he was, he couldn’t survive a battle with the Werner thing. Patrick Duchaine, also an Alpha, had been overpowered and torn to pieces in Isolation Room Number Two.
    Certain beyond doubt that he would be killed in a confrontation with this creature, he must do everything possible to avoid contact, although not because he wanted to live. The unfocused anxiety that every day tormented him for long hours—as well as the fact that he was in essence a slave to his maker—made life less of a joy than it was portrayed in the warm and cozy novels of Jan Karon, which Ripley sometimes secretly downloaded from the Internet and read. Although he would have been relieved to die, he must escape fromWerner because the proscription against suicide, genetically wired into his brain, restrained him from doing battle with an adversary that inevitably would destroy him.
    As the Werner grotesquerie conjured words out of an insectile mouth that should have been incapable of producing speech—“
I am free, free, free. I am FREE!”—
Ripley glanced at the control console and quickly tapped two switches that would cycle open the outer doors to Isolation Rooms One and Three, which at the moment contained no prisoners.
    Prisoners
was the wrong word, he at once admonished himself, the wrong word and evidence of a rebellious attitude.
Subjects
was a more accurate word. Rooms One and Three held no subjects for observation.
    “Free Werner. Werner free, free.”
    When the servomotors began to hum and the bolt-retraction gears to click, the Werner thing looked toward the source of the sounds and cocked its grisly head, as if considering why Ripley had taken this action.
    Having seen the lethal quickness with which Free Werner sprang upon Duchaine, faster than a snake could strike, Ripley struggled to think of a way to buy time, to distract the mutated security chief. The only hope seemed to be to open a dialogue.
    “Quite a day, huh?”
    Free Werner continued to stare toward the humming servomotors.
    “Just last night,” Ripley tried again, “Vincent saidto me, ‘A day in the Hands of