Shadow game Page 0,47

couldn't be bothered with our names, so he called us flowers and seasons and things like Rain and Storm." She tore her hand from Ryland's, knotting her fist against her trembling mouth. "We were nothing at all to him. No more than rats in a lab."

There was a small silence while they stared at one another. "Like me. Like my men. He repeated the experiment on us."

Lily nodded slowly, paced away from the cage and back to him, a restless anger growing. Ryland watched the shadows chasing across her pale face as she paced back and forth, unable to remain still, and his heart went out to her. She was fighting back in the only way she knew how, with her brain, thinking things through logically.

"And the worst of it is, all the same problems he had here, with you, he already knew about with us. My God, Ryland, he just sent those little girls out there, unprotected, unwanted, when they became too much trouble."

Her voice was so low he could barely hear her. She was too ashamed, as if she were to blame for what her father had done.

Ryland reached through the bars of his cage, tried to catch her arm, to pull her to him, but she was already pacing away, withdrawn, pulling her emotions in close.

"I never saw his data, Ryland, I never had a chance to really know how he did it. What he did was pure genius-wrong, but nevertheless genius. He noticed the older antidepressants like amitriptyline decreased psychic ability, while the newer serotonin reuptake inhibitors were either neutral or they enhanced it. Dad was able to do a postmortem study on a clairvoyant. The subject demonstrated a sevenfold increase in serotonin receptors in hippocampal and amygdala tissue, compared to controls."

"You're losing me."

She waved a dismissing hand, not looking at him, still pacing. "Parts of the brain. Never mind, just listen. Moreover, it was a receptor subtype with completely new binding characteristics. He sequenced the protein, found the associated gene, cloned it, and inserted the gene and expanded it in a cultured cell line. He elucidated the protein structure with computer modeling and then modified an existing serotonin reuptake inhibitor to have high specificity for the newly discovered ligand. The tricky part was to keep the molecule lipid soluble, so it would cross the blood-brain barrier. Presto! Suddenly the radio was tuned to the right station."

"Baby, I'm not understanding a word you're saying." Lily didn't realize it, but she had shifted from hurt daughter to interested scientist. "Can you speak English for me?"

Lily continued to pace, quick, agitated movements betraying her inner turmoil; she was speaking more to herself than to him. "Not all subjects had the same abilities. Like a poorly performing weight lifter, the answer was more drugs. Using a threefold program of training was a stroke of brilliance. Each separate avenue provided a way to enhance the natural abilities. And he used pulses of electricity, much like they've tried with Parkinson's disease in the hopes that it would stimulate more activity. But the little girls all began to fall apart, on sensory overload. He found there were a few anchors in the mix and all the other girls gravitated toward them. He thought it was their young ages. They began to have severe emotional and physical problems. Seizures causing brain bleeds, hysteria, night terrors, symptoms associated with severe trauma. I think the pulsing electricity probably caused the brain bleeds, but I'll have to study it further. They were just children. We were just children."

She turned away from Ryland, crossing her arms across her breasts. "He turned off the natural filters and then abandoned them all. I was a subject. He called me that. Subject Lily."

Staring away from him toward the computer, she looked desolate. "He realized the girls were going to overload, burn out, so he hastily found them families, came up with some plausible explanation for their problems, and turned his back on them. He kept me because I was an anchor and he hoped to use me again." She turned her head then, her blue eyes cloudy with pain. "And he did."

"Lily." Her name was an ache between them. Her beautiful name, so much like her, pure and perfect and elegant. He wanted to strangle her father with his bare hands. Ryland knew there was much more to it. Peter Whitney was a scientist driven to achieve. He wasn't a man who would deliberately hurt another human being, but he