The Iron in Blood

They were wrong.

Angus

I remember that first call from my brother. I had arrived back at the hotel I'd been staying at for the past eight weeks. It was five in the afternoon, dark already and cold, and I'd just finished tracking down a man I'd been looking for for the past three days. He lived in a medium sized town about fifty miles from where I was staying, and I intended to pay him a surprise visit the following day. England is a beautiful country steeped in history and tradition, but it was also home to the type of man that I liked to, er, find. Hence my presence in the country when Marcus phoned.

When he told me that a match had been found, at first I did not believe him. He and Fergus had been searching for decades, and had so far turned up nothing. I thought he was playing some sort of joke. He has a tendency to do things like that; his sense of humour can be a bit peculiar. I suppose it may have a lot to do with him being the ultimate academic, plus the fact that he and Fergus lived in almost complete isolation from other more normal people. But when he repeated his statement, and I heard the suppressed excitement and elation in his voice, I knew that he was telling the truth, and I was pleased for him. And for Fergus. They had both worked so hard on this project, Marcus the geneticist, and Fergus the computer whizz. Thirty years spent sweating away at a seemingly impossible task that had been left to us by our equally frustrated father, and they had just achieved the second major breakthrough. The first had been when Marcus had isolated that little group of genes that separated us from the rest of humankind, that collection of base pairs that sat lurking in our DNA and that was ultimately responsible for both our strengths and our strangeness.

Marcus and Fergus had decided that I would be the retriever and general facilitator, mainly because I happened to be in the same country as the person with the alleged match, but also because I did not stand out in a crowd quite as much as they did. There was not much of an age difference between the three of us, unless you counted a few minutes. Besides, our father could never remember which of us had been born first, consumed as he was by the grief of losing our mother. Nonetheless, Marcus and Fergus had always behaved as if they were the older brothers, and ordered me about accordingly, and I had gone along with it. It had seemed too much effort to argue, and I had been far more interested in learning to use my own specific abilities.