Scarlett’s stomach clenched, and she was ready to tell Mrs. Black to fuck off, but a closer look at Ms. Jance’s neck showed Mrs. Black was right. For once. The windpipe was off center, and one side of Ms. Jance’s head was lower than the other.
Scarlett tried to turn the head back on straight, but the more she moved it around, the worse it seemed to get. The woman’s ears felt fake, probably from all the astral material in them. Her hair felt surprisingly fragile. Ms. Jance watched the entire time. Her eyebrows began to pinch together in that way Scarlett took to mean I’m going to kill you if you don’t knock this off in two seconds.
“Sorry, sorry,” Scarlett said. She wanted to shout, Look, I have stuff to do; did you know a monster is eating everyone in the Caribbean?
With an exasperated “move,” Mrs. Black pushed Scarlett’s hands away. She grabbed the head, lifted it off, and settled it back on the neck, straight and proper.
Ms. Jance closed her eyes and let out a long-suffering sigh. A line of silver astral material rolled out of the woman’s mouth, and her shoulders relaxed. “Thank God. I thought I was never going to be able to breathe again.”
Scarlett started to say, “Uh, you don’t need to breathe—”
Ms. Jance gave Scarlett a look that stopped any other words from escaping her mouth except “sorry.”
Ms. Jance inhaled, staring pointedly at Scarlett, and exhaled slowly. “Yes, that’s lovely,” the woman said. “Now let me out of this chair, please.”
Mrs. Black stripped off her gloves again and shoved them in a red box on the wall with a biohazard symbol on it. “You know we can’t do that, Ms. Jance.”
Ms. Jance pressed her lips together and lifted her chin. Clearly, she’d had enough of Mrs. Black. Scarlett wondered how long this whole strapped-to-the-chair thing had been going on. “I know no such thing. I do know it’s highly likely someone’s about to break through the cleanroom door, and things will go much better for you if I am not taped to a chair, Mrs. Black.”
It was true. The banging and crashing they had heard before had grown quite loud. At the top of the weird lecture hall, the metal door was bulging outward, like it was being punched by a relatively weak superhero. Scarlett looked around the room for another exit but didn’t see one. Unless she really wanted to freak them out, she should probably leave by the door. She looked down at her hands. They were metallic white. Shit. Incidentally, she was naked. She looked into one of the monitors and realized she still didn’t have a face either.
She grew herself eyes, nose, ears, and a mouth and then skin to cover it all. I’ve never done clothes before, she thought. A thought gave her a pair of tights and a fuzzy purple sweater. She looked in the monitor. “Shit!” She’d forgotten hair! Eyebrows. Eyelashes.
A burning heat was rising in her chest, a feeling like she was going to puke fire, even though Lana was nowhere nearby. Scarlett’s fingers were tingling, too. Too much astral energy. Too much of fucking Lana. She needed some balance.
She reached out for some negative energy. Shyly, as though it were just slightly scared of her, a few strands of negative energy slithered across the floor toward her. She bent down for them, letting them wrap themselves around her wrists and then letting them pass through her skin.
Ms. Jance cleared her throat.
Mrs. Black was still glaring at Ms. Jance, making no move whatsoever to get scissors or a scalpel or anything to help let her out. Scarlett sighed. Ms. Jance could probably break through the tape all by herself; she just wanted to know who her allies were. So… it was Scarlett’s job to make herself into one.
Scarlett flicked out a thread of negative energy toward the tape on Ms. Jance’s arm.
Ms. Jance grunted and pushed away from it, making the chair slide into the exam table with Pax’s body on it. “Oh, God. That… thing coming out of your arm. It’s a Loricati tentacle.”
“What?” Scarlett looked at her arm. “I don’t know what that is, but don’t worry, it’s just me.” She threaded the negative energy up through the tape and slit it on both sides. “See? You’re loose now.”
Ms. Jance leaned forward and tried to lift her arms, but they were still taped along the front of her chest, and she only succeeded in untucking her shirt from her skirt.
“Hang on,” Scarlett said.
Ms. Jance slid one hand in a flat, straight line between them and began peeling the tape from her blouse. “Keep that away from me, please.”
So much for making an ally.
A fire ax burst through the metal door at the top of the lecture room, slicing the metal open like a spoon through an orange peel. The ax pulled away, and a boot kicked the pieces of metal apart.
A man with a chubby face and a small black mustache looked through the door. “Ms. Jance? Are you all right? We need to evacuate the building immediately.”
Ms. Jance stood up and straightened her skirt. Her eyes looked hollow. The astral material pulled back into her skin, leaving it unblemished and unscarred, even around her neck. “I’m fine,” she said. “What about the AI? It isn’t, by any miracle, confined to the classified side of the network?”
“It’s everywhere, Ms. Jance. We need to get out of here now.”
Ms. Jance blinked, wiped her hand against her neck, and checked it. “Ms. Black? Are you able to walk up the stairs or shall I assist you?”
“Don’t you touch me!” Mrs. Black snarled.
“Then please start going upstairs.”
Mrs. Black started walking stiffly toward the stairs. She hesitated beside Pax’s corpse and pulled the sheet away from his face.
“Miss… Scarlett?” Ms. Jance said, but Scarlett’s couldn’t look away from Mrs. Black’s terrible expression. She looked like she was going to spit on Pax.
Ms. Jance snapped her fingers. “Miss Scarlett. We only have a moment. Please pay attention.”
Aside from the tape still stuck to her arms, Ms. Jance looked a hundred percent normal now. But, really, she was a bunch of astral material puppeting her own corpse. Just like I was. Ugh. “Yes. I mean, I am.”
“I know what you are, Miss Scarlett. We call your kind Loricati. I have seen what they can do—and if you act against the interests of humanity, I will find you and kill you.”
Scarlett’s skin went cold. “What?”
“Don’t play games with me.”
“I swear I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”
The door finally smashed open. Ms. Jance held up a finger. “You will keep silent. And know I will be watching you every second. We’ll discuss this later.”
Jesus Christ, thought Scarlett. What was up with that woman?
Mrs. Black jerked the sheet back over Pax’s head and began limping from the room as though her body were a broken toy. She grabbed onto everything she passed—the robots, the cart full of medical supplies, the wall, the side of the plexiglass shell.
Ms. Jance walked toward Mrs. Black, glancing back once to look significantly in Scarlett’s direction, and then caught up with Mrs. Black and began helping her up the stairs. Mrs. Black tried to shake off Ms. Jance’s arm but didn’t have the strength.
Fuck, lady. I’m not evil. It’s just negative energy. Not the same thing.
But was she really able to tell the difference anymore?
She’d killed. Everyone. At. Her. School.
No, I didn’t. Lana did that.
But I let her, didn’t I? I let her take over.
Scarlett looked down at her hands. They looked human. But they weren’t. Not really.
The robot beside her twitched and reached one thin hand toward its chest. Scarlett backed away quickly.
“Miss! Are you coming?” the guy from upstairs shouted. Ms. Jance and Mrs. Black were going through the upper door, and the guy was waving at Scarlett
from this side. Come on, come on.
A small door opened silently in the robot’s chest. It reached in and pulled out a thin square—a USB memory stick.
The robot froze again, the stick held between its two pincers.
“Miss! Are you all right?”
Of course she wasn’t all right. She wasn’t human either. Or normal or good or anything like that.
But for the sake of humanity, she’d pretend.
Scarlett grabbed the chip and absorbed it into her palm. “Coming!”
Two shimmering blue spheres rose out of the atmosphere and drifted into low earth orbit. The larger of the two caught the reflection of a nearby communications satellite: a box covered in golden foil and two fragile wings to catch the sunlight. Its two long antennae—rigid, ugly plates—were positioned to talk to Earth, but the waves around it were silent. It had been fried by the solar flare. Pax couldn’t help hoping it could be saved.
Inside its hamster ball, the monster had braced itself against the walls with I-beams ending in giant, chicken-like claws. It was rebuilding itself within its armor plating, too, but Pax couldn’t tell exactly what it was doing. Strangely, the air inside the ball was free of spores.
Once Pax had established that he didn’t feel like being a superhero, he found he didn’t actually want to destroy the monster. It was too fascinating.
He looked down at the Earth.
Fuck, it’s gorgeous.
White, puffy clouds hovered over the long blue expanse of the ocean. Funny how when you were on Earth, the sky looked blue, and the water seemed to reflect the sky, but in space, it was the other way around. The ocean lit up the atmosphere from below. The masses of land were mostly brown with streaks of green across them. Specks of clouds threw shadow on the ground thousands of feet below. Some storm clouds were rolling over the eastern side of the planet; the tops of them were so huge they seemed to jut above the atmosphere, like islands on the ocean. On the western side of the planet, where the sun was just starting to set, he saw a shimmer of light, as whole cities’ worth of streetlamps lit up.
Pax opened his senses not just to visible light but to the whole spectrum.
That, too, was fucking awesome.
What got him was the sound of it. It was like what he imagined being in the deepest part of the ocean would feel like: the sound of the currents moving past each other and over the ocean floor, the sound of the earth turning. The sound of the moon pulling on the oceans to make the tides. Those were the sounds of the lower end of the spectrum, going down so deep it was impossible to hear them all. The sound of the universe at work was constant background noise nobody really heard.
The visible light spectrum was like the sound of whales calling to each other.
And, above that, the crashing of waves, far distant—a faint, high-pitched susurrus—was the spectrum from UV to gamma rays and upward.
He let it all flow through him.
Peace.
No one but an astronaut could even begin to understand how he felt, and even then, they’d miss most of it.
Human? He wasn’t human. Not anymore. You couldn’t hear this sound and stay limited to one species, one planet.
He’d spent his whole life in battle: A battle against his disease. A battle to remember his father. A battle against the doctors who were constantly telling him that he only had two weeks to live, then kept moving the date forward. A battle against time. Against death. Against obscurity. Against Internet trolls. Against allergies… against predatory microbes that viewed his weakened state with relish.
Now he felt peace.
Beside him, the monster had changed inside its bubble. It wasn’t an armored beetle anymore but a shape almost like a manta ray, thicker in the middle, with stubbier, trailing “wings.” On its hind end were what almost looked like tailpipes.
A spaceship.
Terry had said the things had evolved to track down the invaders across deep space. Somehow, that didn’t make it any less surprising to see it actually happening.
Warily, in case Terry had lied again, he popped the bubble around the monster’s ship.
A few tiny blue lights flashed. It retracted its support beams, and the ship started moving. It was using some kind of plasma propulsion system it had not used while on Earth. Maybe it hadn’t reached critical mass at that point—maybe it hadn’t needed it. But now that it was in space it had no reason to hesitate.
It was definitely headed somewhere. It gave itself a few more course corrections and then accelerated.
Pax studied the stars in that direction. What was even over there?
It was an unfortunate gap in his education. Humans had been stuck planet side for so long, without any real hope of moving into space, that the study of astronomy had receded from a “need to know” into a “nice to know,” on a species-wide basis. For Pax, it had never been more than a passing interest.
The sky was full of more stars than he’d ever seen before, and with his general lack of knowledge, any hope of finding a recognizable constellation approached nil. He could have been looking right at the Big Dipper for all he knew. There were just too many stars.
Except in one spot.
Below and to the right of the Milky Way, from Pax’s perspective, the stars were spread more unevenly than they were elsewhere—they looked crushed together, as if in tangled ropes or a kind of bent web. If the stars had been on the surface of a balloon, the balloon would have been in the process of being bent and popped simultaneously.
And the plant-monster ship was headed right for it.
Shit.
Shit, shit, shit. Terry was telling the truth.
Pax was looking at a rift in the universe.
Once they reached the clean room, Ms. Jance handed Julie over to two men in combat gear, complete with smoked visors that covered their faces, leaving Julie with the impression that under the shielding, they might be robots or astral beings. Or maybe werewolves. Nothing would surprise her anymore.
Ms. Jance was hustled out of the room. Julie could hear the woman demanding information all the way down the hallway. When Julie’s escorts discovered she wouldn’t, or more properly couldn’t, move any faster, they swung her up in their arms as though they were a kind of human chair.
“My purse!” Julie realized. Of course she’d left it behind. Of course it had all her meds.
“Forget it, lady,” one of the men said. “Replace your IDs later.”
“It’s my meds—”
“You’ll just have to get your prescriptions refilled.”
They rushed her down the hallway. Their jolting run made her bones ache and her stomach turn. Her heart raced even faster than their footsteps.
Oh, my God, she thought. What if it’s not just the heart attack? What if there’s something else wrong with me? What if I’m dying, really dying?
Scarlett’s voice echoed in the hallway behind them, asking a question. Someone snapped an answer at her, and she shouted, “Fine! Whatever!”
Running feet came up behind them, and the girl and the other men passed around them. The girl’s face was streaked with tears, just like a typical spoiled teenager.
Except she’s not a teenager. Not anymore.
Nothing was left of the security door at the end of the hallway but glass pebbles on the floor. Scarlett slipped on them, was jerked upright, and was dragged to the door of the emergency stairs, complaining at the top of her lungs.
The door had been blown open. The top and bottom halves of the door were bent at angles to each other, with a twisted, soot-streaked mess of metal shards between them.
Julie’s escorts slowed as they passed through the entry hall, glass crunching under their feet, and started descending the stairs. The air was still acrid from the explosives.
> The sounds of the others running down the stairs had become distant; shouted orders echoed from somewhere on the first floor.
The only ones left in the building—the only ones left alive in the building—were her, her two escorts, and a single guard behind them that she only just realized was there as they turned the first corner on the stairs. He had a rifle in his arms and was backing quickly down the stairs, covering their rear.
Nothing followed them that she could see.
Can’t you understand? They don’t need to follow us. You’re not just fighting robots. You’re fighting… a kind of god. If it had wanted us dead, we would be.
The stairs below her echoed with the sound of running boots coming toward them.
Julie’s escorts pressed themselves into a corner, squeezing her embarrassingly between them, as a dozen men passed. They were all dressed in combat gear and holding rifles. Their boots sounded like an oncoming train. All of them except the first and last carried heavy-looking, green tin boxes as well as black duffle bags strapped to their backs.
As soon as the men passed, her escorts picked her up and started carrying her down the stairs again. Faster. She clenched her teeth to keep from biting her tongue and swallowed repeatedly to keep from vomiting.
A man with a radio was waiting for them at the bottom. “They’ve reached the bottom of the stairwell,” he said into his radio. “Over.”
“Initiating Operation Clean Slate,” the voice on the radio responded. “Over.”
By then her two escorts had been replaced by a different, yet nearly identical, pair of men. All of them streamed out of the front doors and into the back of a large black military truck. It had two benches in the rear and two additional guards. As the last of the group entered, each guard reached outward, grabbed a door handle, and slammed the doors shut.
“All clear!”