The Escape by Teyla Branton Page A

eventually discover its location, but by then the safe house would be impenetrable by anything short of bombing—and that would attract worldwide notice.
     “It’ll be nice to put down some roots for a while,” Stella added. “We’ve been moving around too much these past few years.”
    “I’m just glad Chris is somewhere safe,” I said. At first Chris had protested at being kept out of the rescue attempt in New York, but he was mortal and I’d been grateful to keep him and our recently hired maintenance man, Benito Hernández, out of the line of fire for a while. With two of our former black ops employees providing security, they were as safe there as anyone connected with the Unbounded could be. I pulled the blanket tighter around me. “It’s a bonus that San Diego is warm.”
    “You can say that again.” Jace continued pacing as silence fell over the room.
    How was it going with Keene? I wanted to go upstairs and check, but my backside seemed rooted to the chair. Besides, I’d only be in the way. Better to focus on something I could do. “So what do we know?” I asked, ignoring the urge to lay my head on the table.
    Stella gazed at me and blinked. “You sounded just like Ava there for a moment.”
    I grinned. “Well?”
    Sitting up, Stella plugged a cord into her neural headset and twisted down the eyepiece. “First, the vice president’s son being an Emporium agent came as a total surprise.” Words began scrolling on the large wall screen but ran too fast for me to read them. “Often when the Emporium is working to get someone into politics, we can catch them while they’re still in the stage of creating backgrounds that will withstand scrutiny. It’s an involved process, but they have enough technopaths to make it possible. Usually identities are created years before they need them. So for instance, when they can no longer hide that an Emporium senator isn’t aging, they have him retire, fake his death, whatever, only to have him resurrect some years later in disguise under the new identity. We try to expose new identities whenever we find out they’re being created, but the Emporium has a growing number of agents in high positions.”
    “To what end?” Jace asked.
    Stella frowned, taking her eyes briefly from the monitor. “Sorry, I forget there’s still so much of this you two don’t know. We’re pretty sure their goal is revealing the existence of Unbounded to the world, but only once they have enough votes to effectively run the country. Since we know their ultimate idea of utopia is to create a world where Unbounded form a caste system supported by a mortal workforce, we’ve been fighting against this. At the same time, we can’t preempt them and announce our presence to the world and elicit help from the mortals without having certain safety measures in place to protect all of us from the violence we believe will ensue. We aren’t there yet.”
    “Patrick Mann could eventually become president.” My arm was hurting again, and I laid it on the table, holding the blanket tightly over it. “Especially with Emporium support. He seems to be following in his father’s footsteps.” I hoped Unbounded could make their announcement to the world sooner rather than later, but I’d seen enough of the Emporium’s hunger for power to worry about this new development.
    “That’s exactly the problem,” Stella agreed. “With that kind of influence, he could change a lot—health care, taxes, presidential term limits. But what’s bothering me at the moment is that he can’t be one of those false identities the Emporium set up—he’s too prominently in the public view for that—and there are absolutely no Unbounded genes in the vice president’s ancestry. Or in his wife’s. And there’s no sign of record tampering or of adoption. Patrick Mann can’t be Unbounded.”
    “Yet he is.” Jace finally sat across from me.
    “So that means,” I said, “the Emporium must have doctored