That night, Ty read Lieutenant Kato Tanaka’s file cover to cover. Every single word.

The trouble was, despite having so many pages, there simply weren’t that many words. For the most part, the file was redacted. It was page after page of long black boxes. And when Ty had finished reading the file, that was what Tanaka remained to him: a black box. Perhaps the only thing he knew for sure was that both of their genomes had been broadcast via the quantum radio transmissions.

They shared a bond, but what was it?

He paced the room, hoping the exercise would focus his mind. It didn’t.

He sat on the narrow bed and again opened the folder and read the pages until he was so tired the words began to blur. In his sleep-deprived, nearly delirious state, the black letters seemed to morph together and march over the long black bars of redaction like ants on a log.

He was getting nowhere. He was too tired to even process what he was reading.

He set the file aside and let his body fall back to the bed, thinking, I’ll just close my eyes for a second.

*

Ty woke in his clothes.

Above, the lights buzzed, a bright beam like a hospital exam room. And that’s exactly how he felt: like a patient after surgery. Sore all over, mind fuzzy, disoriented.

Without a window in the small room, there was no way to know what time it was.

He attempted to get up, but his body wouldn’t cooperate. He rose a few inches and flopped back onto the thin mattress.

As he lay there, he realized that although his body was numb, his mind was refreshed, and it instantly went to the words Richter had said to him last night, the speech Ty instinctively felt contained a code.

The lines ran through his mind, like numbers of a combination lock, as though every possibility was a turn of the tumblers waiting to fall into place, to unlock whatever the man was trying to tell him.

Study the file on Tanaka, Richter had said.

It can tell you more than you think.

… connect the dots.

… see through the pages.

… study it hard enough, you’ll see the most important thing of all.

… turn the page on his past—to see a way out. He’s thirty-seven. There’s still time for him, but it’s running out.

… Study the file. Backward and forward.

In the clarity after sleep, Ty was certain that the lines contained the key to an elaborate puzzle.

A code hidden in the file.

He tried to sit up again, and this time his body responded, though his back ached. He flipped through the file, studying every page that mentioned time. The years of Tanaka’s deployments—

And then Ty saw it.

Richter had said Tanaka was thirty-seven.

But he wasn’t. Kato Tanaka was only twenty-nine years old. What did it mean? The difference was eight. And the two ages added to sixty-six. Ty flipped through the file again, looking for instances of any of those four numbers. There were a few, but none that seemed significant.

He rubbed his eyelids. He needed some water. And to use the restroom.

And another year of sleep.

He stared at the file, trying to see it another way—a different perspective. That was part of what his father was trying to tell him, Ty was certain of that. Whatever that was, it was in the file. Ty was close. He sensed that. He just couldn’t see it.

He smiled at one revelation though, a subtle change in his own thinking, an event he wouldn’t have dreamed possible thirty-six hours ago: just then,

he had thought of Richter as his father, not as the mysterious stranger he had always known as Gerhard Richter.

That was something.

For his entire life, Ty had hated Richter. He was someone who had hurt him. Who had left him. Who had refused to contribute to his life.

But not here. Not now. Here and now, he was the guiding force Ty needed. He was, for the first time in three decades, playing the role of a father—someone who cared, who helped, who was there when it mattered.

And Ty’s mind had, subconsciously, adapted, changing how he thought of the man. His perspective had changed. His attitude toward Richter had changed. Would that change eventually cause him more pain? If Richter repeated the past—if he left again or turned his back on Ty? Yes, he thought. It might.

Ty had to marvel at the fact that here, in this bizarre place, in the scariest two days of his entire life, he had found one of the things he had wanted most in his life, a thing he wanted so badly he had never even admitted to himself.

A father.

Would his newfound relationship with his father change again when the quantum radio was completed? When Richter didn’t need him anymore to unravel the mystery?

Apart from that, Ty wondered if the device would transform him somehow. If it wasn’t related to him, why had his genome been included in the broadcast?

Ty wanted answers. And he was sure of one thing—he wouldn’t find them in the small room or the file he had now read four times. Not without some perspective.

He rose and opened the door and found two marines sitting at a folding table. They were playing cards and appeared to have been in mid-conversation. One stood at the sight of him.

“Sir.”

“Sorry to interrupt. Could you tell me what time it is?”

The young man glanced at a cheap watch on his wrist. “Almost twelve hundred hours, sir.”

The news instantly vanquished the last remnants of sleep that had been dogging Ty. It was noon. He had slept half the day.

Five minutes later, he was jogging into Bishop’s office, where he found his parents sitting at a round table, in chairs adjacent to each other—not opposite. His mother was smiling, the sort of smile that existed in the afterglow of a heartfelt laugh. His father was speaking softly, a wry grin on his face.

In that fraction of a second, Ty felt as though he were seeing a moment out of time and space, a scene from another world where the two of them had never separated, where the thirty-year rift between them had never happened, where his family’s own little cold war had never happened.

And then, as they realized he had entered the room, the moment was gone.

His mother turned to him. The smile vanished. And worse, she almost looked embarrassed by it, as though seeing him had severed the connection to Richter, returning her to the state of animosity she had long held toward the man she had three children with.

Ty thought the two of them seemed like entangled particles, existing in a natural, linked state of attraction, bound across space and time, defying the known laws of the universe. And when he had entered the room, the observer effect had happened, instantly altering the state of one particle and with it, the other.

He wished he could back up, rewind time, and watch from outside the room, listening to what his father had been saying.

But there was no going back.

His mother rose and walked over and hugged him. Ty wasn’t sure why— if it was just to get distance from Richter or because recent events had made her more thankful each time she saw him. They had certainly made him more thankful to be alive and to still have his mother in his life.

When she released the hug, Ty looked between the two of them. “You let me sleep half the day.”

His mother sighed. “You needed the rest.”

“What I need is an alarm clock.” Ty’s mind flashed to the cheap black one that had destroyed his apartment in Geneva. “Actually, check that. What I need is a wake-up call.”

His mother smiled. “Well, try this out—they found the third match.” Ty felt himself holding his breath as he waited.

“It’s Nora,” his mother said, a warm yet somber expression on her face. “Nora…”

“Brown.”

Ty turned away, confused, trying to process this.

He hadn’t formed any real expectations of the third and fourth matches. Well, beyond the obvious—based on XX chromosomes in their genomes, he knew they would both be women, but that was all he knew. What he hadn’t expected was for one of the matches to be the girl who had grown up next door to him. There was no way that was a coincidence.

Though he saw no link between himself and Tanaka, Ty was clearly linked to Nora, and had been since the age of three. He and Nora, much like his parents, were entangled. Over the years, they had drifted in and out of each other’s lives, like rivers weaving through time, growing closer and flowing together for long periods and meandering apart at other times until finally diverging forever—after a particularly dark moment in Nora’s life.

Ty had never blamed her for pulling away back then. He had desperately wanted to help Nora cope with what had happened. But he couldn’t. She had retreated inward, locking him out.

At age eighteen, it had broken his heart, smashed it so hard he had thought it was irreparably broken—until he had met Penny six months ago.

To Ty, Nora was a bit like his father: a person who had hurt him. But it hadn’t been her fault. It had simply been circumstances, a twist of fate that had torn them apart, events beyond her control. And then and there, he wondered if that was truly the case with his father. He sensed that somehow it was all linked, a giant web he was caught in, the threads all around him, the pattern unclear.

“What’s she doing now?” he whispered.

“She’s on her way here, on a private flight.”

“No, I mean, what does she do? For work? And where does she live? I haven’t talked to her in… well, since our ten-year high school reunion. We emailed about it, about going… it was the only reason I went. But she didn’t show. She apologized, and said something came up.”

“She’s a researcher at Oxford. In experimental psychology.”

Richter picked up a folder from the table and handed it to Ty, who flipped it open and began scanning the pages. It was so odd to read a report on someone he once knew so well. The seventeen years since he had last seen her were detailed in objective, almost clinical fashion. Ty wanted to know more than what was written in the file.

He sat down at the computer in the corner. “Is this connected to the internet?”

“With limitations,” Richter said. “You can’t send any emails or post anything. The firewalls and filters ensure that.”

Ty opened a browser and searched for Dr. Nora Brown. He clicked the first video result, which had been posted a few hours ago by Oxford University’s Experimental Psychology department.

In the video, Nora was standing in an auditorium, at a podium, smiling in front of a giant screen. The image was a dark green background with massive white letters that read THE BIRTHRIGHT.

The video played, and she began her talk. The infectious enthusiasm she had as a child and teenager was still there, and it drew Ty in like a riptide carrying him out to sea.

“I would like for you to consider, for a moment, that your mind is a key. When we’re born, the key is a blank. There are no teeth, only a block of metal, untouched. Each of us is in charge of cutting that key, of filing the teeth and shaping the ridges and notches. If we do that correctly, that key will unlock something wonderous—our true potential. A nearly limitless well of happiness and success.”

On the screen, Nora smiled.

“What is the shape of that key? How do you find it? That is part of what The Birthright is about. Finding that key to your own potential. Your key, simply put, is shaped by the contours of your mind—of your strengths and weaknesses. The good news is that they’re easier to find than you ever imagined. And your potential is far greater.”

The office door opened, and everyone turned to look at Bishop, who was a little winded. “They found the fourth match.”

Richter rose. “Where?” “Nashville, Tennessee.” “Name?”

“Sergei Evanoff.”

Richter frowned. “He’s a male?”

“He is,” Bishop said, studying the top page of a stack of papers. “Was he born a female?” Helen asked.

“He was not,” Bishop replied.

“He’s running a scam,” Richter muttered. “A scam?” Ty asked, confused.

“Yes,” Richter said. “One we should have expected.” “Why?” Ty asked, still confused.

Richter crossed his arms. “It’s very simple. Any time you offer a new way to make money, two types of people show up. Those who play by the rules. And frauds and con artists, who get what they can, by any means necessary, until it’s over.” He eyed Bishop. “I assume Evanoff got multiple kits and turned them in, collecting the cash?”

“Appears that way,” Bishop said. “FBI is investigating, but it looks like this guy submitted several hundred kits to different pharmacy locations around Nashville. It’s unclear if he had a network of people collecting and aggregating or if he did it himself. Guy made like thirty thousand dollars in twenty-four hours. All in cash. Well, VISA gift cards.”

“What do we know about Evanoff?” Richter asked.

“Not a lot. We only have the IRS filings so far. He’s a bail bondsman and does payday loans. We’re waiting on local records of any ongoing investigations from Nashville PD. He’s clean on the National Crime Information Center database.”

“So what happens now?” Ty asked. “How do we even begin to track down the actual owner of that DNA sample?”

“Legwork,” Bishop said. “The FBI is sending pretty much every field agent in the region. They’re going to interrogate Evanoff and start running down leads. We’ll have this woman in custody within hours.”