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off.
    Then he flipped the tape over and started talking.

Chapter Three

Subject Seven
    â€œHUNTER HARRISON’S” VOICE GRATED on his nerves. The Other was a whiny little piss pot, and that much hadn’t changed at all. He thought he’d been freed of him forever. But now? Now the Other was back.
    But things were different. The Other seemed . . . confused. He was lacking. He was missing most of his memories. He knew he had a brother, a father, a mother, but he couldn’t remember them clearly. He might have recovered from the car crash, but it seemed to have had an amnesia-like effect on his brain. Seven couldn’t clearly see into the Other’s mind, he never had been able to, but the bleed over let him see some of what was going through his enemy’s mind. Luckily it hadn’t done the same to him. That brought a small smile to Seven’s face, but it didn’t last long. The world was no longer his own and he hated that.
    He lay on the hotel bed and listened, eyes closed. He didn’t want to see yet. He wanted to take in every nuance of Hunter’s voice, to understand everything about the Other. It was best to understand your enemy completely. Best to know him better than he knew himself. In this case, he certainly did. Seven smiled again at the thought. The name Hunter Harrison was a lie. A fabricated identity he’d created when he was learning how to make forgeries. The address was real enough, mostly because he would never be able to forget that damned location, but everything else was a lie and the Other fell for it.
    He had believed the Other was dead and gone. He began to build a proper life for himself, to make connections and get himself set up, despite his age. He’d had the reins and full control and it had been amazing—liberating! But now the Other was back, stealing his world from him.
    Again. The thought made him want to scream, but he’d learned a lot about self-control over the last few years. A lot.
    He willed himself to focus on the tape. After the idiot had completed a long list of whining complaints about how horrible his life was, he finally got to the point. “Who are you? What the hell do you want from me? What did you do to my family? I need to know that they’re safe. And who . . . who am I?”
    The anger disappeared for a moment and he roared with laughter, pounding the bed with his hands and his feet alike. “Who am I?” He repeated the phrase several times. Oh, this was rich. This almost made up for the changes in his plans.
    The Other was alive. That meant a change in plans. If his meeting went well, he might even be able to get that help, too.
    He’d done all he could without help, all he could without backup. Now he needed to handle the next level of the game. And really, it was a game. It was best if he thought of it that way because games were different from life. Games could be won definitively.
    He intended to win. It was what he did.
    A moment later he left the room. He was hungry, but that could wait. There was a man waiting to meet with him who had information that could be bought.
    Once outside the hotel room, he picked up the pistol he’d stowed under a decorative rock at the edge of the parking lot and fished the bundle of hundred-dollar bills from where he’d taped them to the underside of the closest manhole cover and stuffed them in a duffel bag. Not the best bank in the world, but no one asked questions. If no one asked stupid questions, he didn’t have to kill anyone else. Hiding the bodies was inconvenient on such short notice.
    Loaded with cash and weapons, he headed for the meeting place.

    Clarkson was late. Seven wasn’t happy about it, but there was nothing he could do. He flipped open his cell phone again to double-check, but there were no messages.
    He dialed the number his contact had given him, but Clarkson didn’t answer.
    No. Wait. Just before the damned phone kicked