A knock at the door startled Elena Ruskin into dropping that morning's coffee mug onto the freshly washed linoleum. The whole kitchen smelled slightly of lemon as she breathed deeply to calm her nerves. She didn't know why, but for the last year she had been extremely jumpy. Everywhere she went, she felt mildly unsafe. Even George had noticed it. More than once he had put his hand on her shoulder only to have her react with some anxiety. She was paranoid, looking over her shoulder in the market yesterday like some sort of criminal on the loose. The knock came again, stronger this time. "I'm coming!" she called, picking up the pieces of the mug and tossing them into the garbage. The knocking was insistant know, forceful and loud. She hoped silently that it wouldn't wake the baby. She hurried to the door and looked through the peephole. On the stoop were two men in military uniform, standing still and straight as if they were at attention before a general. They gave her a bad feeling; the sight of them sent chills up her spine. "Who's there?" she called out timidly. "United States Military, ma'am," one of them responded. "We're here to speak to your husband." George had been in the military for most of their marriage. He had only recently retired in order to make a more stable, stationary life for her and their new baby. They had not contacted him officially in more than four months; she didn't know any reason why they should want to do so now. "Is he in some kind of trouble?" she asked them. "No ma'am," the other replied. "We just want to speak with you both." "What for?" "It's about your son." Elena drew in a sharp breath. "What about William?" "He's in danger, ma'am," the man told her. "Grave danger." Elena fumbled for the locks and opened the door slowly. "What kind of danger?" Without responding, one of the military men put his hand on the door and shoved it open, smashing her up against the wall. Her head hit a picture frame, smashing the glass and cutting her head open. Blood spilled down her face in small rivulets. She shook her head to get her bearing. Her vision cleared just in time for her to see the two soldiers run up the stairs. She grabbed the doorjamb and thrust herself away from the wall. Stumbling, she took the stairs as fast as she could in pursuit of the two men. "Don't you touch my baby!" she screamed, tears blinding her and rage fueling her. "Don't you touch him!" Just as she got up the stairs she noticed the two men emerging from the room, one carrying William in his arms. She grabbed his leg as he went past her, but he walked on as if nothing fettered him. At the bottom of the staircase he shook her off roughly, sending her tumbling into the kitchen. She slammed into the table, smacking her head on the linoleum as she went down. As her blood spread over the clean, white surface and the darkness closed in on her, she saw one of the men in uniform, the one without the baby, lean over her with a look void of any human emotion. "Wha . . . " she managed to gasp before she lost conciousness. "Valediction," he said softly, in a voice cold as steel. With that, he took her neck in his hand and snapped it briefly, the crack of bone and sinew echoing throughout the house. The control room at Offres Air Force Base in Grover, Montana was empty but for one man. He was one of the few left who wasn't altered, the one who was still true. The replacements were difficult to deal with, but not to understand. Once they had their orders they were not deterred; it was only a matter of getting them to respect your orders, and giving them the right ones. He ruled over them like a god because they didn't have minds of their own. They were below humans in that way, even on the colonists' own evolutionary scale. In some ways they respected the humans, their freedoms. The colonists answered to a few elite thinkers only---they envied their human counterparts the right to autonomy. But they also viewed it as a weakness; they believed that humans followed their emotions too much, that they answered not to authority but to their own inner concience, what they called the "mystic voice". It was what had made them so easy to target as a colony, one of them had explained to him. They told him things like that because they could, because they knew, because he knew, that he would not be around long enough to see the coming of their fabricated apocalypse. He was dying, slowly---they were killing him. The cancer that had exterminated so many of the women used in the hybrid experiments was ravaging his body, too. It was his penance for having remained human, for refusing replacement. And now he sat like a king on his throne, watching the entire world go to hell from his Mount Olympus---and there wasn't a damn thing that he could do about it. There was a knock on the door. They were very polite, the colonists and the replacements. They didn't like to burst in on anything. "Come in," he sighed. A replacement in military attire (he wondered why they even bothered to assimilate now) entered the room. He stood attention like a good soldier until the man in the chair gave him a signal---not the salute that the old military had used, but a new sign of deference, a tap to the left shoulder by the right hand, nothing more. All ceremony had been exterminated, but this the colonists had kept. They liked it more than any other human custom. The replacement returned his signal, then proceeded: "We have the human child." "All right." "He's putting up a fuss, sir," the replacement said, wincing a little at the memory of the boy's little lungs and their ferocious sound. "We don't know what to do to calm him down." "Have you tried feeding him? Changing him? Singing to him?" The replacement looked confused. "Singing, sir?" "Sure, babies like that." The man turned back to the monitors. "Sir?" Without turning, the man replied: "Yes?" "He's been injected with something---some sort of substance." "What is it?" "We have yet to determine that, sir." "Well, what's it done?" "The doctors say it has depressed his abilities. They say it is losing its effect, but they don't know how long it will really last." "Wait it out, then. I'm sure it won't be effective much longer." "Yes sir." The replacement turned to go. "Can I get you anything, sir?" "Yes," he said. "You can get me Ramos." The replacement nodded, then left. The man turned to his computer and typed in the word VALEDICTION. As he watched the series of code numbers scroll, he knew what he needed to do. He needed to find them, the only ones who could stop it.