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labia. Her nipple rings were platinum. For her twenty-seventh birthday she was considering having her eyebrows pierced, though she was absolutely certain it would give Dad a coronary. As far as he knew, the Twins were completely without marks except for the starburst scars. He told them over and over again that purity was important, though none of his explanations as to
why
it was important made any rational sense. Something about keeping the channel open for the celestial god force that was supposed to flow through them.
    She pulled on a short pale green skirt and a white satin blouse that caught stray flickers of light when she moved. She sat down, snugged back into the deep cushions in one corner of the Lear, legs crossed, dangling a sandal from her big toe.
    The reference to the mercury pool was fair enough; it had been absurdly expensive—$5.35 per hundred grams—and yet startlingly beautiful. Ten thousand gallons of swirling liquid metal. The purchase of it through various companies they owned had caused a brief stock market run on the metal, and there was still speculation in some of the science trade journals that someone somewhere was developing something new that would wow the world.
    Hecate said, “By the time he’d gotten tired of the metal consciousness experiment the market price had gone up twenty-six cents an ounce. We made a killing.”
    “That’s hardly the point,” Paris said irritably. “It’s part of a pattern of deterioration and excess that’s making it harder and harder to separate his crazy bullshit from actual research.”
    “Which is why we pay Chang, Bannerjee, and Hopewell to validate his work.”
    “The Three Stooges? They’re idiots.”
    Hecate gave her brother a tolerant smile and a mild shake of the head. “They’re not and you know it. They’re the best of the best.”
    Paris made a rude noise and threw back the last of his drink. “With Otto always at Dad’s side our three idiots can never get close. I think we need to invite him down to the Dragon Factory for a few days.”
    “Are you nuts? He’s been trying to find out where it is for years now. No way we can
bring
him there!”
    “It’s not like we’d send him a plane ticket, Paris. We’d go get him and control what he sees and knows. We could block out the windows on the jet, maybe slip him something so he’d sleep through the trip—something so that he wouldn’t know
where
the Dragon Factory was. But I really think some tropical air would do him good, and we’d have a chance to get some actual quality time with him. And maybe see if we can figure out if he’s totally bonkers or just half-crazy. We could show him the Berserkers and the stuff we have in development for the work camps. He’d—”
    There was a soft
bing!
sound, indicating that their plane was beginning its descent. A moment later Paris’s cell phone rang. He paced the length of the cabin, mostly listening, grunting now and then. He said, “Shit!” and disconnected. His face was flushed red.
    “What’s wrong?” asked Hecate. “Who was that?”
    “Sunderland,” Paris said. “They’re having problems getting the computer system. Apparently they’re meeting more resistance than anticipated.”
    “He has the entire NSA!”
    “I know; I know.”
    Hecate bit her lip and looked out of the window for a long moment. “We need that system. Pangaea’s not good enough for the next phase. We need MindReader.”
    As brilliant as the Twins were, they could not take full responsibility for much of their transgenic work. Most of it was stolen. Pangaea, a computer system given to them by Alpha, was an advanced intrudermodel, and with it they had been able to infiltrate the mainframes of many of the world’s top genetics research labs and clone the databases. This gave them a bank of knowledge broader than anyone else’s, and broader by a couple orders of magnitude. However, Pangaea was not a new system and some of the modern firewalls were