“Iris had deep red hair, almost the color of wine, and she has acute hearing. She’s able to manipulate sound in extraordinary ways.”

“And she’s an anchor.” That would mean she wasn’t as vulnerable as some of the other girls. She could exist in the world without a shield.

Lily nodded. “I believe she is. I know it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack trying to find her, but you never know. She’d be somewhere between twenty- two and twenty-five now. My father kept meticulous records, yet he didn’t bother to record our birth dates, which makes no sense to me. I did an age simulation on the computer. Here’s what she’d look like now.” She handed him the photograph.

His heart nearly stopped beating, then accelerated wildly. Flame was beautiful. Not just striking, but truly exquisitely beautiful, unlike any woman he’d ever seen. Even in the photograph her skin looked so soft he found himself running the pad of his thumb over her face. He kept his expression relaxed, charming, unworried-the usual mask he wore. “You know, Lily, the chances of finding her are almost nil.”

She nodded her head and her gaze skittered away from his. It wasn’t the real reason she’d come. Gator waited. She shuffled her feet but didn’t speak.

“Spit it out, Lily. I’ve never been much for games. Say what you came to say.”

She slid past him to catch the edge of the door, peering out into the hallway before shutting it carefully. “This is confidential.”

“You know we’re a unit. I don’t keep things from Kyland or my men, not if it impacts them and what we do.”

“That’s just it, Gator, I don’t know if it does. I’ve discovered a couple of things, and I’m checking them out. You have to understand these experiments have spanned more than twenty years. There are dozens of computers and hard drives, storage disks and zip drives I haven’t even gotten to yet, and that doesn’t include handwritten notes.