"I'm using you."

"No, you're not."

"Yes, I am. I'm using you."

"I don't care." Ezra directed a small flashlight in front of us along the path. I'd already stumbled twice.

"How can you not care? My body is feeding off yours like a tick."

"When a mother feeds her infant, does she think of it as a tick?"

I stopped cold. He stopped when he realized I wasn't walking next to him any longer and looked back.

"First, you are not my mother, and second, I'm not a child." He didn't respond but looked away. "I'm not that kind of child. And really, that term is starting to get old."

"You're not a child, and I'm not your mother, or father rather. But a parent loves their child more than anything. Nothing else matters. A mother would throw herself in front of a train, do anything, to protect her child." He stepped closer and looked down at me. The mother analogy was a little creepy.

"Do you? Do you really or is it just the tether? We don't know."

"I know."

"You should leave me," I said as I disappeared into the darkness. Ezra grabbed my wrist and pulled me to a stop.

I heard a voice crawl out of Ezra's throat that I had never imagined. There was so much intensity, ferocity, and hurt. "I will not leave you," he said, stressing each word more than the last. "Don't ever ask me to again."

"How can you ever be sure?"

He pulled me closer. "Gregor doesn't know everything. He doesn't know. He doesn't know you chose me. Maybe I chose you."

I nodded slowly. He dropped his hands to his sides.

Maybe he was right. Maybe Gregor was right. How could we ever know? I quietly walked next to Ezra the rest of the way to the car.

The sun had already risen, and people had begun their morning activities by the time we arrived in Kaş. I peeled off my clothes and climbed into bed. Curling onto my side, I felt Ezra pull back the covers to slide in next to me.

He pulled me closer to him and wrapped himself behind me, his warm breath tickling the tiny hairs along my neck. As I waited for sleep to find me, I watched the light slowly creep across the room.

This story was spinning in ways I had never predicted. Whether it was for better or worse... I was too terrified to guess.

Days passed without any new revelations or incidents. Ezra followed Esther's research, digging through files on her computer and hard drives. I stared at the map and read the genetic reports we found in her mail over and over again. What was I looking for? What was Esther looking for? Most importantly, why? While I found genetic profiling and the map of people fascinating, I couldn't find a discernible reason for it.

She didn't seem to be searching for the obvious... the quest to find the Avati gene—that immortality gene that makes us who we are. I couldn't tell if she had already found the gene and had moved on to a different search or if she simply didn't care to discover it. All the research seemed to focus on where people were born and when... it was all about the clusters.

"It's almost like she's searching for someone," I said to no one in particular.

"Who?" Ezra asked. He was bent over the coffee table again with a dozen scrolls piled in front of him. One was rolled out, and he was making light marks on it with a pencil.

"I don't know who. That's the point."

"No. Who's looking for someone?"

"Esther, I guess, or... huh..." I stopped to consider it. Was it Esther? She was definitely working with someone. My guess was Hattu. They talked about their research in the video. But Hattu had wanted to forget the research and shove it in a box. If that was true, then she couldn't be in charge of this project. In the video, Esther looked... not sad exactly... but resigned.

"She said he'd never let her go."

"Esther said he'd never let her go? When did you hear this?"

"In the video with Hattu on her cell phone. They were in bed together." Ezra's eyebrows shot up. "Hattu wanted to give up the research and run away together, but Esther said he'd never let her."

Concern etched his features. "Someone else is definitely manipulating all this, has been for years. They must have been collecting all this data for decades. There was a letter in Esther's hotel room that said her work took precedence."

"Precedence over what?"

He shrugged softly with his right shoulder. "Me... her obsession, I guess."

"Wait. You're saying some guy was basically... what... giving her permission to indulge in her obsession with you but ordering her to keep working to? Who does he think he is? You can't dictate the terms of obsessions. That's why they are obsessions."

The Esther I saw was determined. Her demeanor that night, the way she moved, everything about her said she was purposeful. She was emotional and erratic, but she had a mission, and she never wavered. She didn't strike me as the kind of person who could be managed or dictated to. But was she?

Maybe I was too terrified to notice. She wanted me dead. Yes, I couldn't question that. But she was... strangely apologetic and friendly about it. Maybe that was why I was struggling to hate her. Everything would be so much easier if I could just hate her and forget about her. But I couldn't because...

"She was just a kid."

"Esther wasn't a kid. She was three thousand years old."

"Even so."

I thought about her apartment, cluttered with pictures of her friends, butterflies, and fluffy pillows. Her phone was filled with pictures of her and friends, dancing in clubs, drinking... playing. "She was still a kid. Her body may have been three thousand years old, but her brain didn't know it. She still thought and acted like a teenager... emotional, anxious, driven, moody, unpredictable, wanting to prove herself but still unsure... unable to control herself but absolutely confident that she was in complete control. In that half-hour with her, she was an emotional rollercoaster. Just like any stressed and emotional teenager."

"A teenager may be a kid today, but three thousand years ago, she was a woman at her age."

"Sure, she was a mother, and she was considered a woman, but that doesn't change how her brain worked." I was so close to understanding something. My mind was thinking so fast. "Biology hasn't changed in three thousand years. Our brains continue to develop until we are in our mid-twenties. That's why teenagers are such a mess. They have the bodies of adults, but they can't control them. She died when she was fifteen. She'd been in puberty for three thousand years!" I said with a groan. "If someone knew how to push all the right buttons, he'd have known how to easily manipulate her." Ezra stopped to consider what I was saying.

I looked at the scrolls on the table and the map. "This isn't Esther's research project. This is someone else's."

"And he, or she, is looking for something."

"Yeah, or someone."

Ezra sat down again and ran his fingers across the open scroll. "If it is someone, then it's someone old." I craned my head over Ezra's shoulder to study the timeline. It was filled with marks and descriptions. He had been making marks of his own along some of the points. "All of the scrolls are of very old Avati. Aside from Esther's, I don't think a single person is less than about five thousand years old." Ezra made an exasperated noise in the back of his throat. "They are impressively detailed. They have details on my life going back nearly seven thousand years. Hattu's goes back six thousand years, and Esther's about three. All of them are astonishingly detailed and accurate."

He sounded amused. "They have information about me I hadn't thought about in years. Too many years to remember."

"If I didn't know better, I'd say you were almost bragging."

"I have much more impressive things to brag about." I coughed lightly and looked away. Indeed. Ezra just laughed.

"Anyway," he continued, "the timelines appear to focus mostly on major events and when different Avati meet for the first time."

Ezra pulled out another scroll and moved the weights aside. The ends of his scroll immediately curled in. I saw some light markings on the back as it rolled up.

"What's that?"

"What?" He saw what I was reaching for and grabbed the scroll before it rolled off the table.

I took the paper from him and unrolled it again, facedown. The markings were written in pencil near the bottom. I weighed the paper down and leaned over it, trying to get a better look.

There were several words written connected with lines. Some of the words had question marks next to them.

Ezra breathed in sharply. I looked at him and then at the scroll again. The markings were divided into three groups. The first group read m. Katza. Beneath it was a line to another word, m. Telisi, which connected with a path to m. Busa followed by a question mark.

"What do these words mean?"

"They're not words," he answered. "Or they're not just words. They are names."

"Oh..."

It was a simplistic family tree. The second group read m. Bin with a line drawn to m. Silal. M. Silal then had two lines, one connecting to f. Saratu and another to f. Kalihanan. Saratu then joined to f. Mursu. The third group just read f. Arinu followed by a question mark. The m must signify male, and the f was for female. It was obvious now that I understood.

Arinu?

"Arinu was your daughter, wasn't she?" Ezra nodded. "So Katza and Bin were..."

"My sons." He laughed once in a sad, pitiful manner. "I tried so many times to remember their names, their faces. I was fifteen, and a man grown when Arinu was born." He stared at the names on the page as if he could somehow feel a heartbeat and breathe life into them. "Katza was starting to crawl when I left. I would've been nineteen by then. I can almost remember him now. His laugh..."

"Why did you leave?"

"I don't remember." He collapsed the sofa behind him. "I must have had to. Maybe I was forced to. Most Avati leave their first life when it's discovered they've stopped aging." He leaned his head back and covered his face with his hands.

"Bin had a son named Silal," I said as I lowered myself to sit next to him. "And Silal had two daughters, Saratu and Kalihanan. Do you think... Are these really the names of your family?"

Ezra didn't answer; he just stared through me. I didn't think he heard me, or perhaps he was considering my question. I caught myself just before I started to ask something else when he opened his mouth.

"Yes, I do."

"Are you sure?"

He nodded.

"How could they know?"

"How could Esther know the names of my children when I couldn't remember them myself?" He closed his eyes and sat quietly. "They've been watching me for a very long time. After so many generations and so many thousands of years ... I just couldn't..."

She knew the names of Ezra's children and their children. "My God," I whispered. "How deep did her obsession with you go?"