Mostly, just sad.
This is for your own good. You don’t belong here, with them.
Words spoken by the ash man before Alex split him in half with one of the cop thing’s severed arms, leaving him to talk out of both sides of his mouth.
You have something we want, something that belongs to us.
* * *
Raiff picked up speed as soon as the lights of the FedEx Office came into view, framed by an endless ribbon of empty sky. Sights like this made him wonder what people here who didn’t know the truth about the contents of that sky saw when they looked at it. Surely not the same thing he did, his perspective stilted by the knowledge that something else really was out there.
But it wasn’t that simple.
Not even close.
The truth wasn’t something that could be spotted through telescopes or by space stations. The truth was that the boy inside that FedEx Office was the only thing standing between this world and extinction.
Raiff gave the car more gas.
* * *
“You remember what the ash man said?” he asked Sam suddenly, feeling her hand tighten around his while they waited to pay for the copies.
“No, not exactly.”
Her eyes left his to dart toward the manager, who was busy helping another customer with an order, the harsh lights reflecting off her glasses.
“That I have something he wanted,” Alex said, “something that belonged to him.”
“I was thinking of something else he said, that this night never should have been necessary, that they shouldn’t have needed to come here—something like that.”
“They,” Alex repeated, “as in who?”
“That’s what I’ve been thinking about,” Sam said, trying to clear the fatigue from her voice. “I don’t know, maybe whoever brought you from wherever you came from to Laboratory Z. Like rebels, going up against the establishment.”
“So now I’m a rebel?”
“I didn’t say that. But you’re obviously important to them, and whatever their cause is, back where you came from.”
“My parents told me I came from an adoption agency. They didn’t say it was based somewhere in outer space.”
“I think you must be part of some civil war,” Sam said suddenly.
“That’s what you’ve been thinking about?”
“And it makes perfect sense. The way the ash man talked about disobedience, how it wouldn’t be tolerated, that there was a price to pay for it. What did that sound like to you?”
“Is this a test?” Alex asked her, managing a smile.
“Just answer the question.”
“I don’t know, maybe something like the Nazis would say.”
“Exactly my point.”
* * *
“Go,” Rathman commanded and watched his men move.
He’d never worked with them before and the files he’d read on the private jet that brought him from Marsh’s fortress in the Klamath Mountains in northwestern California to San Francisco told only part of the story. Their training was rock solid, experience too. But until he saw them in action, he wouldn’t know if they were really any good, how they’d respond to such a challenge.
He watched the front team moving with perfect fluidity, avoiding the most direct spills of light so their approach could not be detected from inside, weapons held at the ready.
They were good, all right. Now it was time to see how good.
“I’m going in, sir,” he told Langston Marsh.
61
MISDIRECTION
ALEX TUCKED THE NOW folded pages containing the results of Dr. Chu’s final tests in his pocket, while Sam handed some change to the clerk to pay for them.
“Okay,” she said, backing away from the counter, “let’s go.”
Alex held his ground, seeming to grind his shoes into the floor. “I’ve already ruined your life enough. I can’t drag you into this any more than I already have,” he said, his voice warm, gentle, and very sad.
She shook her head. “I’m not going anywhere without you. I can’t.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, I just can’t.”
“You need to go home, back to your parents. Leave the rest of this to me.”
“Alone?”
Alex swallowed hard.
“I go where you go,” Sam said.
And then she started to shake and couldn’t catch her breath. Like some kind of panic attack had set in, like the past ten hours had been poured into a bottle that had burst apart inside her, all the death and fear spilling out at once. The tears were coming before she could even try to stop them, all the unanswered questions hammering at her mind. She tried to breathe again but managed only to gasp. She’d never hyperventilated before but was pretty sure this was what it felt like.
Then Sam felt Alex wrapping his arms around her, hugging her so close she could feel his heartbeat against her chest and wondered if he could feel hers skittering. The rapid beating slackened as he held her. She could feel her breathing steadying as well, wanted to wipe her nose and eyes but realized she was squeezing Alex too tightly to let go. She felt like a little girl again, weak and helpless. Not the high school girl with the perfect GPA and through-the-roof SAT scores, which were her ticket to the Ivy League and a career with NASA in space.
All that seemed so distant now, so behind her. Tonight had changed everything; no more looking any farther ahead than the next hour, if not minute. Sam started to feel it all overwhelming her again, the same tightness returning to her chest and stomach, and clung to Alex.
The boy of her dreams for as long as she could remember.
Then he was kissing her and Sam felt her glasses push up against the bridge of his nose. In that moment it seemed like everything would be all right, as if nothing bad had ever happened at all. Her glasses shifted again and Sam found movement flash in the mirror placed high by a corner ceiling. Three men wearing matching suits just entering the store.
Three men who looked a lot like the drone things that had killed Alex’s parents.
* * *
Raiff saw them too, from the street. His mind conjured the corrosive, burned-wire smell that hung in the air of the Chins’ home. He wondered why they smelled that way, guessed the internal cooling mechanisms designed to keep them from overheating still hadn’t been perfected. To him, this had long before indicated that they were being manufactured here on Earth. So the raw materials had come from here, and the manufacturing process was unable to account for all the variances and variables at once.
Hence the drones smelled like car engines with their temperature gauges flirting with the red. Raiff wondered if they might even spontaneously combust after too much activity. That would be something.
But it wasn’t going to happen in time to help Dancer, so Raiff jumped the curb and tore, tires screeching, toward the FedEx Office entrance.
* * *
“Alex!” Sam screamed, tearing herself from his grasp.
Alex twisted from the counter, facing the suited figures as they reached the door.
Sam looked at them again, wondered if they were no more than businessmen needing materials for an early morning meeting.
Then where were their briefcases?
They seemed not to see her, focusing on Alex with laser-like eyes as they stormed through the door. Sam swinging around when something rattled behind them.
* * *
Rathman caught up with his advance team just after the breach. They fanned out to provide support, while he moved into the lead, the shocked targets out of their chairs now and clearly in view, the team covering his rear flank as he burst in from the door at the store’s back that led into a break room.
All exactly according to plan.
Rathman leveled his submachine gun, finger pawing the trigger. Locked and loaded. Ready for whatever came next.
Then he froze.
* * *
“You need to pay for those?” the store’s shift m
anager called to Sam, emerging from the part of the store sectioned off by a counter where staff printed jobs that were completed. “Hey, is something wrong?”
An old SUV’s headlights flashed through the store an instant before the rest of it followed through the glass, the suited figures swinging toward it.
* * *
“Stand down! Stand down!” Rathman had the sense to order, over the staccato bursts of automatic fire driven up into the ceiling.
Also as planned.
Targets surrounded. Targets controlled. Targets captured without incident.
“Cease fire! Cease fire!” Rathman called out next, signal hand flapping in the air.
Because these weren’t his targets.
EIGHT
BATTLEGROUND
You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.
—MARGARET THATCHER
62
DRONE THINGS
ALEX GRABBED SAM AND pulled her backward, up and over the counter, crashing past the shift manager, who’d covered up in a crouch. He’d popped back up again just as a figure surged out of the ancient SUV with pockmarked paint, now bleeding steam from its radiator, which rose toward the drop ceiling like a curtain.
The drone things, near-twins of the figures wearing cop uniforms back at Alex’s house, seemed suspended between intentions, their focus divided.
“Alex,” one of them had said just before the SUV crashed through the storefront. Same voice as the fake cops too.
Your family, so to speak. Your real family.
No, they weren’t and neither were these, no matter what planet or world Alex came from. An and Li Chin were his family.
Alex felt his blood heating up, his skin seeming to bake. But then the figure from the car was in motion, moving as much with the air as through it. He was holding something in his hand, some kind of weapon, lashing it out toward the drone things even before his feet touched down.
* * *
Raiff counted three of them, their positions imprinted on his brain. He’d recognized them as androids immediately, even before he caught that burned odor wafting in the air.
He extracted his stick while hurdling airborne out of the SUV embedded in the front wall. Firearms were fine but not very effective against the androids’ steel, maybe titanium, shells. He snapped the stick outward, feeling its connection with his own DNA register like a switch being flipped, elongating the elements, their molecular composition altered by its whip-like form. His whip could cut through anything, and without the randomness of bullets or blasts. Perfect weapon for the kind of in-close maneuvers he’d most likely have to perform.
He spotted Dancer, and the girl the Watchers had informed him about, at the edge of his vision, but she was not yet his concern. Protecting him was Raiff’s concern. So many years of waiting and preparing, finally coming to this, his purpose fulfilled.
Even now, though, even as the whip whistled through the air, that purpose seemed empty against the bigger picture that Dancer’s world would never be the same, any more than Raiff’s task would ever be. They had found the boy twice already, not even a day apart, and they would find him again.
Something was coming.
He felt it with a dread certainty in the pit of his soul, the last eighteen years rendered meaningless in the face of such a concentrated attack.
Two of the androids swung toward him in perfect unison, as if possessing the same mind. The third went for Dancer.
So Raiff went for the third.
Lashing his whip outward so it sizzled through the air, a crack resounding when it impacted the overlayer of skin-like material wrapped around the neck of android number three. Raiff pulled and twisted and the head popped off in a shower of smoke and sparks that intensified the burned odor to the point it hurt his nostrils when he sniffed it.
“Run!” he yelled to Dancer, their eyes meeting ever so briefly for the first time ever. “Run!”
Raiff watched Dancer drag the girl with him out of sight through a door leading out the back, distracted long enough for the android on the right to lurch for him, laser knife in hand. The size of a common kitchen knife but far more deadly.
He saw the first blade as a flashbulb-bright light coming straight for his face. Raiff twisted, feeling the thing graze his shoulder, taking flesh and fabric with it. He smelled his own blood now, the wound as searing hot as the sparks that flew from the first android’s head when he’d lopped it off.
The remaining two androids sensed his vulnerability, came in for the kill together and tossed laser blades from twin angles to catch him in the cross fire. Raiff dropped to the ground and rolled, his whip in motion. Low first toward the one on the right, slicing off both its legs at the ankles. Then he snapped the whip with a violent jerk of his wrist, sending it on an upward trajectory from floor level directly between the final android’s legs.
Wires, electrodes, and capacitors popped, frizzled, and flamed as the whip made a neat slice upward all the way through the android’s metallic skull. Leaving both halves of him sputtering on either foot, somehow managing to retain their balance while the matching eyes on the perfectly symmetrical husks popped out in a final flame burst.
Raiff reeled his whip in, starting to push himself back to his feet, when a boot clamped down on his hand, the disembodied foot of the android he’d upended. The rest of the thing hopped along on ankles spewing smoke and wire, the burned smell noxious enough to turn Raiff’s stomach.
He felt the severed boot trying to crush his hand, the pain starting to shoot up his arm, when he swept it off into the air by whipsawing his own foot across his body. Launched airborne, the booted foot struck the android it had belonged to in the face, toppling the thing over as it continued hopping after Dancer. Raiff got one leg up in front of him, balanced on his other knee, and lashed his whip out from there. The blow struck the thing’s face, left it a mass of severed, spaghetti-like wiring with the eyes still attached by clear strands.
It was done. Dancer was safe, at least for now.
Then Raiff heard the scream coming from the back of the store.
63
TRASH
EVEN AS HE DARTED toward the screams and hurdled over the counter, Raiff was aware of the store manager and single other customer cowering for dear life: witnesses to the scene of unprecedented risk and exposure on the part of the enemy he’d been sent here to fight.
Just like in Dancer’s house.
Reaching the back door, he spotted another witness, a pimply faced kid wearing a FedEx shirt, with phone pressed to his ear, desperately trying for a signal that was blocked. Raiff burst past him outside into a nest of massive trash bins overflowing with paper, crushed cardboard boxes, and shredded document remains that now blew like confetti across the scene. His feet crunched over the glass shed by outdoor light fixtures the androids had broken, likely to cloak their presence long enough from a big trash hauler with an automated pincer assembly that grasped, hoisted, and dumped the contents of the trash bins. Its engine idled, no driver anywhere to be seen.
Raiff’s eyes scanned the scene and saw two of the androids dragging Dancer and the girl off, along the back alley of the FedEx store and the others in the strip mall, barely wide enough to accommodate the trash truck.
The girl’s presence here had thrown Raiff a bit. His mission, though, remained unchanged:
Save Dancer, the one and only priority. He could not risk Dancer to save the girl.
Complicated.
Right now it was moot. Right now the androids had both of them in tow, and Raiff couldn’t attack without alerting the androids to his presence well before he reached them. They’d be ready this time and, worse, might kill Dancer to make sure the secret he was keeping remained just that.
Raiff’s mind was made up in a fraction of a second, the pieces falling into place as he turned and slid off in the opposite direction.
* * *
Alex struggled but it was useless. He was a feather in the first dr
one thing’s grasp, being dragged along. The other had Sam by the hair and throat at the same time, dragging her too, her face red from lack of air, mouth gaping for breath.
They’d walked right into the trap set outside the back of the store.
The only working computer at the FedEx Office in Capitola, the one the motel clerk had recommended, was being used, so they’d driven a few miles up the road to this FexEx Office in Santa Cruz.
So how had the drone things found them? And who was the guy who’d driven his car into the store, saving them from the man-like machines, at least for the moment?
Alex couldn’t bother considering that or any other question right now. He needed to figure out a way to break free and escape.
And take Sam with him.
“Sam!” he cried out and felt a hand clamp over his mouth, crinkling like a soda can.
Her eyes were gaping in terror.
He needed to do something, but the drone thing was now holding both his hands in a single, gloved grasp by the thumbs. When he struggled, he felt the wrenching pain of the thumb jerked so hard, it strained the bonds of its tendon.
Sam’s taser was still tucked just behind her hip in her jeans, hidden by her jacket. If he could reach it, maybe, just maybe …
But he couldn’t. Only thing that would get him was more pain. He needed to bide his time, wait for an opportunity—which came when a shape lunged out from an idling trash truck, complete with compactor and arm-like assemblages, parked across the alleyway directly before him.
* * *
The route out blocked, Raiff projected himself through the passenger window of the garbage truck, having looped all the way around the strip mall to avoid being spotted. He hit the ground tucking, rolled once, and was back on his feet. His whip was useless to him with Dancer pulled in so close to the android holding him. The android didn’t let go, pulled Alex in even tighter against it, backed up closer to the trash hauler. Raiff let it, showed the whip he had no intention of using to make the android retreat even farther.…