A pink-orange sunrise was barely edging over the horizon in the east to unmask the blue-black velvet sky. Josh sat on a muddy incline beneath a bridge, his clothes and skin soaked from a desperate night of slogging through the wintry swamp that surrounded the isolated compound in China’s desolate western Qinghai Province for dozens of miles in every direction. It was not the bone-chilling cold he felt; his body was inured to it from years of training. His heart was not pounding in his chest; he had learned to control blood flow and body temperature. It was the twitches that came from inside his head that irked him. As he breathed steadily to regulate his oxygen intake, using methods he had mastered to elevate consciousness and reduce heartbeat, he would only stay in command so long as he could block the spasms. One day he would totally rid himself of them, he swore, but today was not that day.

He was not worried about staying alive. They wanted him back alive, needed him unharmed. He was too valuable an asset. They would deal with him in their own ways.

Everyone could be adjusted.

They wanted back what he was carrying, what he had taken from them. Wanted it back very badly. They had broken every law of God and Man to create it. But it was not theirs to possess. And it wanted Josh to rescue it.

Life in the 21st Century could have been worse for Josh. He could have languished in detention years earlier. He could have been locked away in a gulag on any of the continents to spend his days in agony as penance for his recalcitrance. He could have tried to escape to freedom, not true freedom as had once existed years earlier, but the life of the underground resistance, a never-ending existence of scraping together whatever sustenance one could, always in flight from recapture and torture, ultimately praying for a speedy death one could own outright if things went hopelessly awry. He had chosen his own path. Chameleons survive.

Night was inexorably turning into day. Above the bridge, great pillowy, pristinely white cumulus clouds punctuated the developing azure sky like stubborn commas in a sentence that went on without end. The only sounds he heard were the intermittent croaking of frogs and the increasing chirping of birds.

The searchers would be as silent as possible. They had undergone the training he had, but they did not have certain advantages he had. Mother had made sure of that.

He had mastered a blocking mechanism that would frustrate their efforts to locate him, at least until they had overpowered the mechanism. He would be aware of that moment. In the meantime, it bought him an interval of calm to let his mind wander back to its source of memory, thanks to what he carried. Memory was the fountainhead of his strength and will. It returned him to a place of love and warmth and reason. So far, they had failed to rob him of it, despite all their efforts to wrest it from his–and maybe not really his–synapses.

He had to reach the distant mountains before nightfall, where he would find temporary refuge in the extensive network of miles of unlighted caverns deep below the earth. He needed to outpace the searchers.

Sitting amongst the reeds in wet clothes clammy against his skin, Josh carefully weighed the steps he would take to seek a well-deserved revenge. A very cold revenge.

Mother, far off in Beijing, had a plan.