me the Genesis baby—the only one of my kind in existence. The crazies already hate me just for breathing. The religious zealots want to pray the devil out of me. But I am not to blame for how I came to be. They continued to fail in re-creating me, because when they murdered the woman who was my mother, they lost their chance to ever re-create me again. I have the DNA of four of the greatest scientific and psychic minds in the world in me. But I have the blood and DNA of Laura Wyrick in me, too. I came from one of her harvested eggs. I am a science experiment that worked, and they wanted me back. She didn’t agree, and they killed her to make me theirs.”
Jade took a deep breath and looked down at the podium, at her hands, gripping it as tightly as they’d gripped the pole she was holding on the merry-go-round, and when she looked up, her dark eyes were blazing with a rage she rarely let herself feel.
“They kidnapped me from a merry-go-round, on a beautiful, sunny Sunday afternoon. There were men in clown masks who grabbed me. I heard her scream. And I heard the shots that killed her. But UT had their experiment back, and I lost the rest of my childhood in labs, performing like a monkey on a chain for pieces of candy. Can Jade put this piece of electronics back together? Can Jade work these mathematical equations? Does Jade know how jet propulsion works? Does Jade understand the stars? See how long it takes Jade to crack a code, to hack a computer, to not leave any tracks in doing it. What they didn’t know was that in doing all that, I also found the files to me...and I purposefully began failing little bits of the tests they gave me, because I didn’t want them to know that my skills, knowledge and power were growing at an alarming rate...even to me.”
She paused to take a drink of the water from the glass beneath the podium when Charlie swept it out of her hands.
The audience gasped.
“Sorry,” he said softly, then leaned into the mic and pointed at the servers manning the buffet tables. “Someone bring me an unopened bottle of water.”
Wyrick looked at him then, realizing why he’d done that, then looked back at the audience.
“I am an important commodity in Charlie Dodge’s world, too. I bring bear claws to the office every morning.”
And they erupted into a roar of laughter, shifting shock to humor at just the right time.
A waiter came running to the foot of the stage with two bottles of water and gave them to the agents on guard. One handed them up to Agent Raines, who tossed them to Charlie.
“Good catch,” he said, and went back to his post.
Charlie opened one of the bottles and then handed it to her. She took a couple of quick sips and then handed it back to him.
“Just a few more comments for those special people who are claiming I am an alien, and that they know because they went to school with me. I’ve never been in a school in my life. I look like this because I had breast cancer. UT decided I wasn’t so special after all because my body got sick, so they fired me. I took myself home to die. Only I didn’t. Something inside me turned on, and my body healed itself. But my hair never grew back, which pissed me off, so I rejected the idea of wigs, and in defiance, which Charlie will tell you is one of my best traits, I opted for a badass tattoo instead of new boobs. I never have bad hair days. I threw away my bras, and when I look at my naked self in the mirror, I don’t see a victim of anything. I see the dragon, and I see the warrior that life made me become. UT wanted me back after I didn’t die. They wanted to study me again. And that’s when they came after me again. When I wouldn’t comply, they stalked me, and then decided I knew too much and tried to kill me.
“The first time they tried and failed, it cost Cyrus Parks forty million dollars of his personal money, donated in his name, of course, to a charity for hurricane victims.”
This bit of info created a ripple of murmurs across the ballroom, but she kept talking.
“The second