We had agreed — the woman I loved and I — that as soon as the child was born, we would perform an act of mercy and decency and wrap it in a towel to drown it in a nearby sink of water; like a kitten in a sack dropped into a river. But in the motel room that was our home, the woman I loved died while giving birth, and her child, a grotesque tiny bundle of strangely silent vulnerability, was all that remained to remind me of her. I was nearly blind with tears in that lonely motel room at the side of a highway. With the selfishness typical of my entire life to that point, I delayed the mercy and decency we had promised the baby. I used the towel not to wrap and drown the little girl, but to clean her dry of blood and placenta. In the moment as I lifted her twisted, misshapen arms and gently wiped the terrible hunch in the center of her back, where her arms connected to a ridge of bone that pushed against her translucent skin, I heard God speak to me for the first time in my life. He did not speak in the loud and terrible way as claimed by the preachers of these Appalachian mountains where I eventually sought refuge with the child. Instead God spoke in the way I believe God most often speaks to humans — through the heart, when circumstances have stripped away our obstinate self-focus. In that moment, holding this girl child in her first moments outside the womb, my revulsion gave way to protective love. In that moment, my life was transformed far more than I would have ever believed when I made a decision to turn my back on my science for the woman I loved.

That was 15 years ago, and although I knew then that the day would arrive when I would have to pay the price for this love, it has still arrived far, far too soon …

* * *

"Papa," Katrina says to me, "Where are we going?"

Our cabin is behind us. Door locked. When the men we flee break down the door, a switch will trigger an explosion. Tear gas, not nitro. I do not wish them dead. Only delayed.

"Please trust me," I tell my Katrina. "You will find out soon enough."

She nods. She is tiny, but not elf-like. To me, the beauty in her face gives her a dignity much greater than her lack of size. I also see the trust I have requested.

I feel like Abraham, taking Isaac to the top of the mountainside. I understand the ache he must have carried as they slowly moved upward. I understand the trembling mixture of faith and hope and sadness that must have burdened him. All that is different are the mountains. His mountain was dusty, strewn with rocks and shrubs. My mountain is deep in the southern Appalachians, green with pines, alive with birds and snakes, a clear river rushing its course below. And, of course, Abraham traveled with a son. I have a daughter — not by blood, but by love.

"Will it take us long to get there?" my beautiful daughter asks.

"I hope not," I say.

Which is truth. With those in pursuit, we do not have time. But my answer is also a lie. I know what awaits us at the top. I wish it would take forever to get there.

* * *

… It is ancient science now, human genetics. Sixty years ago, just into this new millennium, the Human Genome Project was completed. Its goal, lofty at the time, was to map out the entire genetic code of homo sapiens. When scientists were able to understand the purpose of every strand of human DNA, advances in medicine became astoundingly rapid. For the wealthy, embryonic screening eliminated every hereditary disease; most couples with enough income elected for test-tube fertilization, followed by implantation into the mother if the embryonic cells proved satisfactory for long-term health, eye-color, height and whatever other factors the parents dictated. Insurance companies and large corporations benefited too — a single hair or fingernail clipping was enough genetic evidence to determine if its owner was a suitable risk for insurance or employment. Cloning became a hotly debated outrage, in the same way that the choice of abortion on demand had once caused horrendous division. Then, like abortion, cloning became commonplace and accepted by too many in a world weary of fighting evils. Brain stem tissue from aborted fetuses led to an industry of organ cultivation — the unspecialized cells of the unborn were perfect for genetic manipulation — and the wealthy were able to extend their lives by purchasing new hearts and livers custom ordered from a laboratory.

Then the government realized that these advances in human genetic manipulation had military potential.

* * *

"This reminds me of the picnics we have shared," Katrina says, a smile across her face.

Indeed, it is a day for a picnic. A rare day of no clouds, little wind. At the top, where the trees have thinned and the mountain is almost bare rock, I know the wind will be stronger. I pray it will be stronger.

" I always enjoyed those," I say.

I do not tell her more. That those picnics, sitting at the edge of cliffs, overlooking the valley, were also times of sadness for me. I would wonder about the woman I loved, imagine she was with us too. My deeper sadness was in observing little Katrina as she marveled at the hawks soaring below us, flashing their shadows across the tops of the pines of the valley. Katrina watched with unknowing longing, the way, I believe, God’s touch makes our human souls instinctively yearn for a place we have never been.

"Remember," Katrina says, looking behind us and down at the river, "how you would tell me that our souls will someday fly?"

I am startled and half-guilty, afraid that somehow she is reading my thoughts.

"Yes," I tell my beautiful daughter. "We have all been designed to soar with angels. Our souls will someday leave the prisons of our bodies and return home."

I repeat myself.

"All of us," I tell her. "In one way or another, God allows us to fly."

* * *

… At the one-cell stage, an embryo is much like an egg. The outer cell wall is like the shell. The nucleus at the center is like the yolk. This nucleus contains the microscopic strands of DNA which program the growth of that embryo. Soon the one-cell divides into two, then four, then eight, and continues to divide. God’s incredible simplicity is at work — each new cell contains the exact copy of the DNA code of the original nucleus; different strands of DNA are programmed to become active as the cells begin to specialize. Because every cell contains the entire DNA code for that organism, any changes inserted into the nucleus at the one-cell stage will be replicated in every new cell created. Scientists learned early to take advantage of this. Even before the millennium, they created flies which had up to 14 pairs of eyes, simply by adding a snippet of DNA at the one-cell stage. Genetic manipulation at the embryonic level is known as germ-line therapy, for once the embryo matures to adult and reproduces, through its offspring, it will pass these changes to the next generation of its species. This biotechnology, and the funds and the secret blessing of certain military agencies, literally gave scientists the power to begin to reengineer the human species.

I was one of those scientists.

* * *

"Papa," Katrina says. She points below us. "Is that smoke? Near our cabin?"

"Yes."

Earlier in the day, George had stopped by. He is older than I am, but born and raised in the valley; much more spry. George told me about the strangers who had arrived and asked about a deformed girl. George told me he sent them the other direction, but knew the strangers would be back. I thanked George calmly so that he would not be afraid for us. Then I pulled together all that I had prepared for this day.

"Do you suppose our cabin is on fire?"

"Perhaps," I say.

I take her hand. Her fingers are much like long claws. I have learned to love those fingers and hands.

"Come," I tell her. "We must continue to climb. What happens to the cabin no longer matters to us."

* * *

… I am not a man that women look at twice. Yet she did, the woman I loved. Katrina. The name I would give to our child in honor of her memory. The woman I loved was a dark-haired beauty. She was among perhaps a dozen surrogate mothers at our institution, paid to carry implanted embryos to term. She saw beyond my lab coat and slight build and slight paunch and slightly balding head, and saw something in my eyes perhaps, a loneliness of soul that touched her. At first, our eyes held contact longer than necessary. On my later visits, we exchanged smiles. Our first tentative conversations. A touch of fingertip to fingertip. So it grew, our love, until we pledged to seek a life beyond the institution, once her body had fulfilled its contract by delivering the baby she carried. She was six months pregnant when I discovered there would be no life beyond for her. The secrets of the institution were too grave and troubling to be risked. It was no coincidence that females selected as surrogate mothers had no other family to initiate troublesome investigations when they did not return to the outer world. It was my decision to take her away. My decision to give up science and become a fugitive with her. I had discovered love, and through it, my soul first became aware of its own existence within me. We escaped. Became man and wife. Pledged together to be parted by nothing short of death.

Our pledge lasted until the end of her pregnancy, when death arrived to take her with a hemorrhage I could not stop in that lonely, lonely motel room, where my other Katrina was thrust into this world among the echoes of her mother’s groans of death.

* * *

"I am hot," Katrina says.

It is not complaint. She never complains.

I understand it is a question. May she remove the coat?

Rarely do I allow it. Isolated as this valley is, men still travel through it. On other occasions in other valleys, when I was less cautious, prying eyes forced us to move. The loose coat with the long, wide sleeves is our only protection.

"Let me carry your coat."

She is surprised and grateful. Her smile tinges me with deep sorrow. I take the coat.

I know, of course, what lies beneath it. I know the thinness of her body, the ribs pressed so tight against skin, the unnatural length of her delicate legs in comparison to her upper body. Today, she wears a tight sheer fabric that does little more than allow her modesty.

We continue to walk up a trail that I have placed in my memory from a dozen trips to scout the suitability of our destination. I have a hip pack belted to my waist. That is all we carry. Aside from the coat.

It is the coat which has always restricted her freedom.

* * *

... We were at a church gathering in a small town along an abandoned railroad, deep in a valley in the Appalachians. Children were playing around the adults, who stood in a tight group to discuss the weather and the sermon. Katrina had slipped loose from me to stare curiously at the other children. There was such longing in her eyes that I did not call her back. Another girl, tiny like her, approached shyly. I let them talk, happy that Katrina was happy. Too late, I noticed that Katrina had wandered among the boys, who were rough and tumble and pushed her to the ground. Her new friend helped her up, and patted Katrina on the back. From where I stood, much too distant to be able to prevent it, I could see the curiosity on that little girl’s face as her hand bumped the hump on Katrina’s back, the hump hidden by her loose coat. A question was asked, and Katrina in her innocence began to shed her coat. I ran, shouting. I arrived soon enough to prevent other adults from seeing, but three of the nearby children glimpsed enough of her mutated arms — terribly thin and long, dark with shaggy and coarsened hair — to scream and fall back in horror. I scooped Katrina in my arms, my sorrow renewed at the lightness of her bones, and fled the crowd, knowing we would have to pack our meager possession by nightfall, and once again outrun the rumors and move deeper into the mountains. Katrina never made the mistake again of joining with other children. Not because I warned her against it.

But because she finally understood she was different.

* * *

"I love you," I tell Katrina.

We are three-quarters of the way to the top. There is so much I want to say.

She smiles, a smile that pierces my heart.

"I love you, Papa."

There are hawks above us, taking advantage of the updrafts and the wind that blows this far up the mountain. The hawks are half a mile in the air, trusting in the fabric of nothingness that carries them.

"Your love is my joy," I answer.

I say nothing else, realizing I must also trust a fabric of nothingness, all the invisible things I have taught her.

Smoke drifts and spreads across the valley from our cabin.

We continue our journey, with the silence of the valley pressing upon us.

* * *

… Unlike Katrina, I could not entirely endure the solitude inflicted upon us by the deep and rugged valleys of the Appalachians. On Sundays, I would lock the door and leave her in the cabin for a few hours, and go to church. I first went because it was the safest way to lose myself anonymously in a small crowd; I could listen to others and make small talk when pressed, without placing myself into an intimate conversation or friendship. I enjoyed the music. I enjoyed listening to unsophisticated preachers, and I enjoyed dissecting their sermons for errors in logic, syntax and omission. That was my weekly entertainment. Yet truth is a diamond; mishandled, smeared with grease or buried in mud, it cannot be marred and waits for one with a cloth to polish it again. That was how God spoke to me again. Through those preachers. I finally understood, despite the distortions created by hellfire sermons and exhortations for collection plate money. God loved me. Once God had visited this earth to deliver that message, and He was crucified for teaching that love. My soul was destined to join with Him. I was astounded and grateful at this realization. As a scientist, it had never been difficult to acknowledge that there was a Creator behind this universe — the marvels of DNA, the exquisite dance of electron and proton, the boggling forces of gravity and light, all of it forced many of us in science away from agnostisism. Yet to comprehend that this creator loved us more deeply than I loved Katrina gave my life renewed meaning.

Deep in the Appalachians, I had found the most important diamond any man can find — God loved me, and forgave me, even with young Katrina as a daily reminder of how terribly I had sinned.

* * *

"Are you tired?" Katrina asks.

Her long dark hair is tied behind her head, resting on the hump that others might think belong to a freak.

"No, we must keep moving."

"Why?"

She asks sweetly, no hint of worry on her face. She is, as I asked, trusting me.

"Why? You will find out soon," I answer.

I do not wish her alarmed. I am certain the men below us are in pursuit, but she does not need to fear what I fear.

Already, the trees around us are barren and stunted, thrust to the sky at awkward angles from the massive stone of the mountain top. We near our destination.

* * *

… For years, Katrina and I were safe, simply because the greatest empire the world has ever known was as dependent on water as any primitive culture. The Great Water Wars distracted our government for almost a decade, until it emerged at the top of a coalition of developed nations that survived by literally sucking lesser-developed nations dry. Once our nation’s fabled economy began to hum again, the military machine went back to previous tasks, including the search for better soldiers through human genetic manipulation. My desertion of the machine was once again relevant, and the agency resumed its pursuit. I did not regret withdrawing from the civilized world. Others may have their memory bank transfers; their biological insertions of computer chips to efficiently monitor body functions. I now prefer a fire on a starlit night, the sounds of the insects like a blanket over me, Katrina curled against my chest. I did regret that even the isolated valleys could not keep me safe. The trail of rumors behind us was like a faint scent on wet grass, enough to bring the hounds of my past into the tranquility that Katrina and I shared. I only wish they would have arrived a month later. A week later. A day later. Even hours later. Katrina may now be ready. But it is only belief, not certainty.

When the top of the mountain arrives, I must test that belief.

* * *

"Is there a trail down the other side?" Katrina asks.

She knows the back side of this mountain is sheer granite. Now there is worry in her voice. Worry for me. She sees that my face is hot with exertion; hears my hard breathing. She does not believe I am capable of climbing down.

"Yes."

I do not tell her that only one of us will go; that the other will remain.

* * *

… Because we lived in solitude, Katrina did not have any standards of normalcy to measure her life against. When I was a scientist, someone could have explained it to me, yet it would not have stopped me, for I would have understood it only in the abstract. Now I understand differently. Regardless of the changes we make to the human body through genetic manipulation, the result will still be human. Indeed, to label the result as ‘result’ is evil, for every creature born will have a heart and soul, despite any outward appearance. I know this, for I have lived with and loved Katrina, when once, at the embryonic stage, beneath a microscope, she was merely a result to me. I believe I have been punished for my scientific arrogance — while in her innocence she is unable to comprehend what science had stolen from her, I knew, every day, what she was missing from a normal childhood, because every day, my heart was broken again at the solitude and loneliness I had inflicted upon her with that single injection of DNA strand into the single embryonic cell which became her being. The only advantage of her innocence and solitude was that she did not think it strange, the regimen of exercises she endured every day without complaint. With little available for equipment, I rigged bags of sand she pulled towards herself by rope and pulley; she did hundreds of pushups, hundreds of chin pulls. The exercise which puzzled her most was the half hour a day I asked her to hang in the shape of a cross, feet down, head high, arms extended with wrist, elbow and shoulder joints locked. I pushed her to exhaustion, amazed at the strength, size and lightness of the incredibly tough muscle fibers of her shoulders and chest and upper arms.

Her growth left me both ashamed and proud of what I had accomplished as a scientist.

* * *

" Where is the trail, Papa? The trail to take us down the other side?"

We are at the pinnacle of the mountain. The trail we climbed is a snake leading back down to our cabin. Down the other side, the drop into the neighboring valley dizzies me. This rift of ancient stone is a chasm a half mile wide. Far, far below there is a shine, where sunlight bounces off a curve of river.

"Papa?"

I realize I haven’t answered her. Up here, wind pulls at the loose ends of Katrina’s hair. My eyes lift from the shine of the river and I direct my focus to meet her eyes with mine.

I still do not answer.

There is a shift of the muscles of her face. This is the moment she realizes our journey is different than all the other times we have fled.

"I love you, I say again."

* * *

… In the last few months, triggered I would guess by her first menstrual cycle, other changes rapidly inflicted themselves on Katrina’s body. She became voraciously hungry, especially for milk and meats. The coarse hair that draped her shoulders and upper back and arms became thicker than straw, shiny and swelling until near bursting, until the outer layers of what had once been hair became dull with a sheath of dead, flaky skin. Her fear with her first menstrual cycle I was able to explain. Her arms, I could do little except assure her that it was what her body was meant to do. I did not care to explain that as the scientist who had viewed her first moments of life under a microscope, I knew what the DNA snippet I had added was programmed to do. A truth untold is also a lie; I justified it by telling myself she would discover the purpose for herself when her body was ready. I also told myself that the surprise and joy of that discovery would be worth the fear of her uncertainty.

If only I could share that joy with her.

* * *

"Turn around," I tell my beautiful daughter.

She hesitates.

"Turn around." Spread your arms.

She hears the near anger in my voice; does as commanded.

I take my hip pack off my waist and secure it around hers.

"In here is everything you need."

Inside the hip pack is a lightweight cloak of space age material, folded to the size of a packet of tissues. It will cover her and hide her deformity. There is money. And a letter explaining the remainder of what she needs to know.

"Papa?"

I am stripping the dead skin off her arms, peeling it away no differently than dead skin off a snake. Beneath the dead skin, it is lustrous and shiny.

"Hush, my beautiful child."

I continue to pull off the skin, satisfied at the ease it is removed. Yes, her body is ready.

"Papa?"

Her voice holds fear. The wind is pushing at her outspread arms. She tries to fold her arms together so that the wind will pass by her instead of lifting her off her feet.

"No," I say. I push her arms apart again. "You were born for this."

"Papa?"

I walk around her. She sees the tears in my eyes.

"Papa?"

I see that she is beautiful. Not the beauty that any father will see in his daughter. But truly beautiful.

Her outstretched arms, hinged on the hump of her back, are no longer the arms of a freak. Her coarse hair has been transformed. Her thin light bones are no longer a fragile curse.

She stands before me with her wings shiny and new.

"Fly," I tell my beautiful daughter. "You were born to fly."

"What will you do, Papa?"

"I will watch," I say.

I glance over my shoulder. Those who pursue us are near.

"Fly," I say.

She trembles. An instinct in her has been awakened.

I know that once the draft takes her, she will not be able to return to this pinnacle. Later, perhaps, after she has mastered her wings. But not now.

"You must go," I say.

I smile, sadly. "There are others like you. Find them."

"Papa?"

I have pushed her. As a father first releases the bicycle seat to let his child ride unassisted.

Katrina falls forward into the abyss. Without thought, she reacts to the wind. The subtle adjustments of her wings are instinctive.

The wind takes her away and she soars into the abyss.

She is free.

I hear from her a cry of joy. A gift from her to me.

She becomes a distant speck, lost against the shine of the river below.

I will wait for my pursuers to reach me. They will kill me, I am sure. This location is too convenient. They will kill me, and hurl my body into the abyss.

And then, I too, will be free.