After the Dark

Chapter seven Death Ray

A woman named Wendy Olsen had been looking for her son.

The boy had been kidnapped, and Mrs. Olsen came to Eyes Only for help in finding — and retrieving — young Ray. Logan’s investigation was already under way when he brought Max aboard, sharing with her the shocking revelation that the boy they were looking for was the son of NSA agent Ames White.

For several years various Seattle citizens — disenfranchised from city, state, and federal governments that seemed on the one hand uncaring and on the other corrupt — had turned to Eyes Only, seeking underground aid in situations like these. Logan would do his utmost to resolve such problems, utilizing his operatives, and for almost two years Max had been his chief field agent.

And Max and Logan had indeed — true to form — rescued the boy, Ray, carrying the child away from Brookridge Academy, a private school that served as a front for the cult Ames White served, the so-called “Familiars.”

Ray had been weak — the result of a typically twisted snake cult ritual that involved slicing the boy’s arm with a sword dipped in venomous blood — but White’s son had somehow survived the attentions of the Familiars. Unfortunately, the same could not be said for his mother.

When she went to the town of Willoughby, in search of her missing son, Wendy Olsen White was murdered... by her own husband.

In the end, Logan had located Wendy’s sister, and Ray had been sent to live with her. Logan — using his seemingly endless string of Eyes Only operatives, a modern day underground railroad — had helped the pair vanish, their whereabouts unknown even to Max.

Now the only option open to Max was to play White’s game — to retrieve and deliver his son to him; and walk right into a trap. There’d be no fooling Ames White; she might have duped the Furies, but White and his snake cult associates — demented and deluded though they might be — were as shrewd as they were smart.

And she knew they were as vicious as they were smart — just ask the Furies... try using a Ouija board...

She knew damn well there would be no hostage-for-hostage trade: end game for the snake cult would include her death. That much had been made clear to Max in her previous encounters with the bizarre cult.

Still, she figured they would have to do whatever White asked; her only hope to save Logan — and herself, and the lives of those helping her, and the boy Ray, for that matter — would be to walk into the lion’s den and beard the bastards.

The problem was, she wasn’t sure how to accomplish the vital first step — finding the boy Logan had so skillfully hidden away, a step that Ames White no doubt assumed she would be able to accomplish easily. Without Logan to help her, Max’s efforts would be blocked by Eyes Only’s own security measures, designed to protect the boy from White and the Familiars.

In the kidnappings she and Logan had thwarted together, Logan found the clues, and Max grabbed up the missing person — that was the program, that was how it had always gone down.

Now, with Logan MIA — in fact, with Logan one of two key MIAs — she was left to her own devices to locate the other missing person, Ray, and secure him...

And it wasn’t like Ray was a normal missing person. Logan — a master at concealing people, at giving them new starts — had made the boy disappear, so that he would never be found even by his own father and White’s formidable network of NSA and snake cult allies. She’d be finding a needle in a haystack — only she didn’t even know where the damn haystack was.

They left the carnage of the cemetery behind — should the cops show, they didn’t want to seed the press for another transgenics media storm — and repaired to a small café. Nestled in a back booth, over the warmth of hot steaming cups of coffee, the four comrades sat — Joshua, Alec, and Mole watching her, waiting for her decision.

She was their leader, and they would follow her through the gates of Hell, if necessary; she knew as much, and she appreciated it... and this time, the gates of Hell were exactly where she’d be taking them.

On her cell phone, Max called Dix and quickly laid out the situation.

“Who do you want me to kill?” Dix asked.

“We’ll get to that,” she said. “Right now, it’s your brain I need.”

“Good. I just hate it when women want me for my good looks.”

“Bet you do. I need you and Luke to take a crack at decrypting Logan’s hard drive.”

“Ouch. Couldn’t we just crack the Pentagon data banks, or somethin’ easy? Frickin’ Logan, he’s the best, y’know.”

“I know. But Logan says you and Luke are the best hackers he ever ran into.”

“No shit?”

“None at all,” she said, lying through her teeth. “Get on it.”

“All over it,” Dix promised; but uncertainty peeked out around the edges of his bravado.

She clicked off and looked at her three friends, Joshua next to her in the booth, Alec and Mole across. “Logan hid this kid away so that God couldn’t find him. But we have to.”

“What?” Alec said, frowning. “And turn him over to White?”

Shifting his dead cigar from one side of his mouth to the other, leaning forward, Mole said, “Max — you know I will follow your lead.”

“I appreciate that.”

“But this — big mistake.”

“Why?” she asked, and she couldn’t keep the defensive edge out of her tone.

Mole relighted that stogie; got it going good; then he gazed at her, hard. “Why did Logan hide that kid away? To keep him away from daddy dearest. Now we’re going to do White’s damn dirty work for him? Tell me there’s another way.”

“Is there another way?”

All three just looked at her.

Finally Alec said, “You figure we go through with the exchange and, what? Just vamp? Improvise our way out of it, shooting up as many snake-cult goofballs as we can? And hope for the best?... Again, I have to say it: and you think my plans suck?”

Max said, “What... other... choice... do... we... have?”

“You know what choice we have,” Mole said.

Max said nothing.

“He takes one for the team,” Mole said.

“Logan?” She practically shrieked this response, and hated herself for the “girl” softness of that.

Alec shook his head, but he was agreeing with Mole as he said, “Man knew the risks of gettin’ involved with Eyes Only — that’s how he ended up in the wheelchair in the first place.”

Sitting forward, Max said, “No one knows that better than—”

“You’re a solider, Max,” Mole cut in. “We all are... And so, in his way, is Logan. Do you really think Logan would want you to turn the kid over to White, just like that? After you risked so much rescuin’ the brat? After he put so much effort in saltin’ the kid away? No. No way.”

Max turned to Joshua, whose lionlike features were draped with sorrow. “What do you think, Big Fella?”

Joshua covered his face with a pawlike hand. He was crying.

Max touched his arm. “Joshua...”

“Logan,” Joshua said. “Have to respect... what Logan would want.” He lowered his hand and gazed at her, his hairy face matted with tears. “Mole is right. Logan. Take one. For the team.”

Even Joshua could see it — and now so could she. Everything they were saying was true. But that did not mean she would roll over and allow Logan to die at the hands of Ames White — not while there was breath in her body.

“You’re right,” she said, “and you’re wrong.”

Alec arched an eyebrow.

Mole rolled his stogie around.

Joshua dried his eyes with a napkin.

“You’re right that we can’t just turn Ray over to White,” she said. “That would negate everything Logan stands for — everything we’ve stood for... But we don’t walk away from a brother. We don’t sacrifice any one of us unless we absolutely have to.”

Alec said, “I’m sensing a Plan B.”

She nodded. “We still need to find Ray White. We still need that boy.”

Alec frowned. “We find him... blow his cover... yank the kid out of hiding... and then we don’t turn him over...?”

“That’s right — and, Alec, my plan doesn’t suck.”

“Of what use is Ray White to us,” Alec said, “if we don’t turn him over?”

But Mole was ahead of the X5, eyes tight in the lizard face. “Bait.”

Max smiled and nodded. “Got it in one, Mole.”

But Alec and Joshua weren’t on the same page, the former shaking his head, the other squinting in confusion.

Max pressed on: “Ames White is going to insist on talking to Ray at some point.”

“A given,” said Mole.

“Well, if we’ve got the kid, even for White just to talk to on the phone, if he knows we really have the boy, we’ve got a chance of getting Logan back. Or do you really wanna walk away and let Logan Cale ‘take one for the team’?”

Alec, typically, just cocked his head like a beagle who wasn’t sure he’d understood the question.

“We gotta try,” Mole said. “He’d do the same for us.”

“How about you, Alec?” Max asked.

“What?”

“Do we walk away?”

“No.”

“No?”

“I mean... hell, no.”

The self-absorbed X5 still didn’t seem to be fully on board, but at least he wasn’t fighting her anymore.

Mole said, “Max, one thing is understood... we don’t give the kid up to White under any circumstances.”

She’d lost her head for a while, allowing her feelings for Logan to cloud the bigger picture. Now her friends had her back on track. They would use Ray to draw White out, but that was all.

She said, “No way White gets the boy. No way in hell.”

Alec lifted his coffee cup. “I’m in,” he said, and they toasted — Joshua hitting the cups a little too hard, spilling some coffee.

A lot more than coffee would be spilled in the days ahead.

“Here’s where we are,” Max said. “Dix and Luke are trying to crack Logan’s computer, but I doubt they’ll have much if any luck. White and his NSA goon squad took the old one, when they raided Logan’s prior apartment, and they still haven’t cracked the codes.”

“You know that for sure?” Alec asked.

She nodded. “Comes straight from Otto Gottlieb.”

Gottlieb, White’s former partner in the NSA, had seen the light and helped the transgenics capture Kelpy and bring White down at the NSA. Max wondered if Gottlieb could be of any help on this outing.

But Gottlieb had been rewarded by the NSA with a raise and promotion, for his whistle-blowing on White, and Max was afraid his loyalties these days might be too strongly NSA for her to risk trusting his involvement.

Alec said, “Why don’t I talk to Matt Sung — he might be able to help.”

Matt Sung, an Asian-American detective for the Seattle P.D., had helped Eyes Only on numerous occasions.

“Good call,” Max said. “Logan trusts Matt completely.” Then, turning to Mole, she added, “Can you track down Bling?”

Mole’s cigar bobbed as he nodded. “Count on it.”

Bling — Logan’s African-American physical therapist and occasional driver/bodyguard — knew more about Eyes Only operations than anybody this side of Logan himself.

With Logan wearing the exoskeleton more and more, Bling found himself with free time, now that Logan was doing less rehab and getting himself around. They hadn’t seen Bling for several months, but she knew Logan talked to him regularly and was sure he was still in the city somewhere.

“How can Joshua help?” Joshua asked.

Max couldn’t exactly send a six-foot-four-inch Dog Boy out to do anything inconspicuous; when it came time to kick ass and take names, Joshua would be the point man. But she couldn’t bench him now — it would hurt Joshua, whose fondness for Logan she found touching.

She said, “Go over to Father’s house and look around. Logan laid low there for a while — maybe he left something behind that’ll lead us to the boy.”

Father’s house had once belonged to Sandeman, the enigmatic and benign figure behind the transgenics program that Manticore had corrupted; Joshua had lived there for a while, and Logan had been a frequent visitor who’d often crashed there, after his apartment was trashed by White and the NSA.

Joshua nodded eagerly, happy to be part of the effort.

“What about you?” Alec asked.

“I’ve got a plan of my own,” she said.

Alec gave her a wicked little smile. “Hope it doesn’t suck.”

She traded him smirk for smirk. “Me, too... We’ll meet back at Terminal City in two hours. Use the cell phones to keep in touch — if you find something, don’t save it up for later. Call me right now.”

They all nodded.

She let out a huge sigh and slid off the booth. Outside on the street, she said, “Okay — let’s go find that kid.”

“Why don’t we?” Alec said. His black eye had healed already — those good transgenic genes.

Fists were bumped, and they went their separate ways. Joshua — understandably shy about being seen in public — opted to return to his old house via the sewer system. Max would pit Joshua’s knowledge of the sewer system against anyone’s, even the engineers who designed it. When it came to underground travel, Joshua was king.

It was agreed that Mole would drop Alec at Matt Sung’s precinct, after which Mole would continue on with the X5’s cycle in search of Bling. For her part, Max was off to some old stomping grounds.

Might have been yesterday that she last leaned on the bar in Crash; but in reality, she hadn’t set foot in the place in six months, not since that day everything went sideways at Jam Pony.

The converted warehouse was separated into three rooms by its rounded brick archways. Video monitors attached to the walls and the big screen TV in the middle room all still showed footage of violent collisions between cars, trains, buses, motorcycles, anything mechanical, providing the crashes that were the bar’s namesake. Manhole cover tables were scattered around, each surrounded by four or five chairs. The far room held pool and foosball tables. The entire wall behind the bar was a backlit Plexiglas sculpture constructed of bicycle frames.

Max sat at the bar nursing a diet cola. The scene at the Furies’ mausoleum had put her in the mood for something harder, but she needed to keep her wits about her. For now, all she could do was cool her jets and hope she wouldn’t have to wait too long.

She didn’t.

In less than ten minutes a woman opened the door and stood in silhouette against the bright sunshine. The door closed slowly and Max’s eyes readjusted to the dim light as the woman came down the stairs, spotted Max, and came over to take a seat next to her at the bar.

A slim blonde with her short hair tucked neatly up under a stocking cap, the woman was mannequin thin with alabaster skin, standing slightly taller than Max, with large dark eyes. When the blonde sat down, Max got a glimpse of the tattoo on the woman’s back, just about waist level.

“Asha,” Max said, by way of hello.

The blonde’s smile showed some teeth, but seemed forced. She and Max had never been friends, exactly, even if they had been allies much of the time. Max knew Asha had a thing for Logan, and she wouldn’t have been at all surprised if the blonde still resented Logan picking her.

“Max,” Asha said, with a curt nod.

That was the extent of their chitchat.

After Asha ordered a coffee for herself, Max laid out the situation — Asha’s only reaction to hearing of Logan’s kidnapping was a tightening between her eyebrows, but that spoke volumes — then Max told Asha what she needed.

Asha’s eyes tightened, and her mouth did, too. “You really think I’m gonna betray Logan’s trust?”

Max shrugged. “Only if you want to save his life.”

The blonde took a sip of her coffee and carefully set the cup on the bar in front of her. Her eyes never left the cup as she said nothing for a very long minute.

Then her eyes rose and she said, quietly, “If I tell you anything, Logan will never speak to me again.”

“If he’s dead,” Max pointed out, “he’ll never speak to anyone again.”

She shook her head, and the blonde hair shimmered with barroom neon. “He’ll never be able to trust me.”

Max let out a breath. “Asha, he’ll never know I got it from you. You have my word.”

Asha studied Max for a good thirty seconds — it seemed an endless time to Max, but she let the blonde make up her own mind.

Finally Asha spoke. “I believe you, I really do. Despite our... differences, you’ve been honest with me. And I would help you if I could.”

“But?”

“I really don’t think I know anything.”

“Sounds to me like you’re not sure... Any little thing you could share would be more than I have right now.”

Again Asha shook her head. “You’re asking me to betray a trust. Do you know what it does, between two people, when trust is shattered? When one betrays the other?”

Max looked away.

“What?” Asha said.

“Nothing.” Max shook her head, smiled a bitter little smile, and said, “We don’t have the luxury of social niceties right now, Asha. I’m afraid ‘betraying’ Logan’s trust is the only way of saving Logan’s life.”

Looking back into her coffee, Asha kept her voice low, barely above a whisper. “All right... all right. But I don’t remember the woman’s name — the aunt?”

Max nodded slightly, one eye going to the bartender to make sure he wasn’t watching them.

“And I didn’t have all that much to do with it,” Asha continued. “I tracked the woman down, introduced her to Logan. The rest was Eyes Only.”

Like most of Logan’s operatives, Asha did not know that Logan was Eyes Only.

“I understand,” Max said.

“All I can tell you is, the aunt lived in Fremont. Once Logan reunited her with her nephew, he gave her the money and the new papers to make the move. I did hear him mention Appleton.”

“Appleton... about an hour and a half from here? Upstate?”

“I don’t know. Could be some other Appleton in Arkansas or Maine, who the hell knows. Would Logan salt somebody away so close to home?”

“Actually, he might. It’s unexpected enough... Asha, think—”

She shook her head, hair shimmering with neon again. “Max, honestly — that’s all I know. Really.”

“Thanks, Asha.” And she touched the woman’s hand on the bar. “I appreciate it.”

Asha gripped Max’s hand; the squeeze they exchanged was the most personal, warmest moment they’d ever shared. “You save his fine ass, girl — understood?”

“Understood.”

“And you didn’t hear any of this from me.”

“Also understood.”

Appleton.

It wasn’t much.

But it was more than she had when she came in to Crash, wasn’t it? Tossing some money on the bar, Max retreated up the stairs and out into the bright sunlit day. As she rode back to Terminal City on her Ninja, she wondered if the others were having any luck. Her pickings were pretty damn slim.

Alec was already there, in the control room, when Max strode in.

“How’d you do?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Zip, zally, zero. Sung didn’t sing — he doesn’t know anything about the White kid.”

“Says he doesn’t know, or doesn’t know?”

“I didn’t hook him up to a lie detector, Max, but I know a lot about lying... and I don’t think he was. Besides, you know how highly Logan regards Sung.”

She wondered if Alec had run into another Eyes Only loyalist who was refusing to share info out of respect to Logan.

“How did you do?” he asked.

Shrugging, she said, “Not much. Small lead. Maybe.”

Dix and Luke came in next, Luke carrying a small black box in his arms like it was a new puppy. Max cocked an eye; the “puppy” seemed to be smoking from one end.

Luke looked up, tears in his black eyes. “This little box has broken every code I’ve ever turned it loose on.”

“It doesn’t look so good,” Max said.

“No, it doesn’t,” Dix admitted. “We’ve what you might call a setback.”

“Yeah?”

Luke, nodding, said, in the voice of a school kid who’d been beaten up on by a playground bully, “Logan’s computer burned up my codebreaker.”

“What?”

“Burned it up! Tied it into some kind of loop that kept going faster and faster until the poor baby finally overheated and just... burned up.”

Max grunted a laugh. “Logan’s a smart cookie.”

“I thought my little box was pretty smart, too,” Luke said, walking off with the smoking box, possibly to bury it.

“So you got nothing?” Max asked.

Dix shrugged. “Does a migraine count?”

Mole came in next, his head down. “Bling says Logan swore him to secrecy.”

“Maybe I should go talk to him,” Max said.

“Can I watch?” Alec asked.

But Mole was shaking his head, saying, “I don’t think he knows anything, anyway. Bling’s a pretty tough character — and he’d just go into a yoga trance while we pulled out his toenails with pliers or somethin’.”

Max said, “I have the pliers.”

“Not worth the trouble,” Mole said, and relighted his stogie. “Anyway, Bling said Logan never let him know that kind of info — figured Bling was too obvious a target, and if somebody did torture him or use truth serum on ’im or somethin’, best Bling not know anything important.”

Joshua straggled in last, carrying a pillowcase like a sack. Whatever the shaggy transgenic was lugging looked heavy.

“What did you find, Big Fella?”

“Nothin’, Little Fella. Sorry.”

Max felt sick to her stomach. She had the name of the town, and that was a start; but there could be ten thousand or more people in Appleton. What were they going to do, go door to door?

“If you didn’t find anything,” Alec asked, “what’s in the pillowcase? Kibble?”

Joshua shrugged. “Not kibble, Alec.” He gazed mournfully at Max. “Logan had some of Father’s books out, so I brought them along. But I couldn’t find anything else.”

“Let’s see the books,” she said.

Joshua emptied the pillowcase onto the map table, and the volumes clattered like big hailstones.

A dozen books lay in front of them. At Max’s instructions, everybody picked one out and started flipping through the pages, in case Logan had made a stray note in one of the margins. Max knew Logan well enough to realize he didn’t trust his own memory — bright as he was, Logan still felt the need for pneumonic devices, so he was always leaving himself cryptic little notes.

The third book Max picked up was Gulliver’s Travels, a hard-back edition of the classic satire, similar to one she’d had when she was living in the projection booth at Mann’s Chinese Theater in Los Angeles. On the inside of the cover, next to where Father had inscribed it for Joshua, Max saw a doodle — a pencil-drawn little apple...

Appleton?

Had Logan, looking for a new name for Ray White, absently plucked one from a book? This book?

“We have a name or two to try,” she said, trying to keep the excitement out of her voice.

She could stand the despair... It was the hope...

“Get me an uplink,” she said. “We’re going to see if the tiny town of Appleton, Washington, has a ‘Gulliver’ family, or maybe a ‘Swift,’ or even ‘Lemuel’...”

“Max,” Alec said, “you’re grasping for straws...”

“And if we come up blank, we try every other ‘Appleton’ in the U.S. and Canada... Alec, grasping at straws is the only way to find a needle in a haystack.”

With night falling, they commandeered Logan’s car and were on the road toward the upstate hamlet of Appleton.

It had been easier than she had thought to locate Ray White. She just needed the right cryptic clues and a little insight into Logan and, oh yes, some luck; if a man named Moody hadn’t given her Jonathan Swift’s great book to read, years ago, they would not have this chance tonight to save Logan Cale.

Accompanied by Alec, Mole, and Joshua, Max drove through Seattle, using her old Jam Pony ID and claiming to have an emergency delivery. When the sector cops asked why it took four messengers to deliver one package, she jerked her thumb toward Joshua and Mole in the backseat.

“It’s radioactive, with a potential leak,” she said. “The transgenics are the only ones who are able to deal with it without dying.”

The prospect of leaking radioactivity was plenty to convince every sector cop they encountered. Max and crew and their hazardous materials were allowed free passage. And once they cleared the checkpoints in the city, the rest was easy.

As they whipped down the highway, Mole had the wheel with a foot mashed down on the gas. Max rode shotgun, studying the map even in the dark, her cat eyes still able to make out the details. In the back, Joshua and Alec tried to catch some rest and the two of them leaned into each other as they slept, a boy and his dog... his really, really big dog.

Glancing over her shoulder, Max wished she could take a photo of the two sleeping warriors; it wasn’t often she was presented with an image that was on the one hand warm and fuzzy, and on the other, perfect blackmail material.

Leave it to Logan Cale to come up with a literary alias for Ray White. Lemuel Gulliver traveled between two worlds, and so had Ray. Max remembered the book fondly from nights when it lulled her to sleep back at the Chinese. That book had been the one possession she regretted leaving behind in Los Angeles when she’d left, seeking Seth in Seattle.

Max missed her Chinese Clan family, Moody, Tippett, and especially Fresca; but they were dead, and revenge, such as it was, had been taken. The book, though — Gulliver’s Travels — had stayed with her. Like memories of a childhood she’d never had, the book was always part of her.

She wondered if Logan had remembered her talking about the book when he picked Ray White’s alias. If so, she’d planted the very clue she’d been able to interpret; the irony of that made her smile, a little. Maybe she would ask Logan about that when she saw him...

If she saw him.

The first order of business would be convincing the boy’s aunt — now using the name Sara Gulliver and pretending to be the boy’s mother — to help them. Max knew the woman would be reluctant to get involved, and risk the boy’s safety; but perhaps to help rescue the man who had saved both her life and Ray’s, she might consider it.

Once Max had the name, tracking the pair down on the Internet had been surprisingly easy. The Internet was getting better every day, more and more like the heyday in the early ’00s, especially here on the left coast, farther from the reach of the Pulse.

Things were less screwed up here than on the East Coast, and businesses were making a comeback. Even though that pirate Jared Sterling had made millions bilking the public as he rebuilt the Internet, his death had signaled a new freedom to build; and the Internet was playing a large role in renewing commerce within the United States, if mostly out West.

The Internet also provided more information than it had at any time since the Pulse. Now, Max not only knew where the Gullivers lived but where Sara worked, where Lem went to school, and even what kind of grades the boy was getting — not surprisingly, considering his genes, straight A’s.

“Town,” Mole said back over his shoulder.

The two in the back stirred, saw the position they were in, and instantly slid to the far sides of the vehicle, each looking toward the front to see if anyone had noticed them. They glanced quickly at each other, gave a little nod that signaled they didn’t think the others had seen, then they both sighed in relief.

“You lovebirds have a nice nap?” Mole asked.

Joshua glared at the lizard man, and Alec offered a couple of short words in response.

Within minutes they were pulling up in front of the Gulliver house, a white two-story clapboard dating to the first half of the twentieth century, resting on a well-tended sloping lawn, a large ash tree in the front yard, and they could glimpse some other big trees out back. It was after dark but early in the evening, yet no lights were on inside the house. Max wondered if the Gullivers were out to dinner or visiting a neighbor.

They could be anywhere, doing anything, blithely leading an idyllic small-town life, unaware of the storm swirling around young Ray White... that is, Lem Gulliver.

And all the transgenic team could do was wait for them to come home. Leaning against her side of the car, Max looked up at the house. She hoped the Gullivers wouldn’t be gone all evening. She wanted to get back to Terminal City; getting the boy was only the beginning — a strategy to defeat White, and return Logan, had yet to be developed.

She was about to turn and ask Mole a question when she saw a sudden illumination in a second floor window, as if someone had taken a picture with a flashbulb...

... and Max was running toward the house and up the lawn even before she heard the report.

The X5 knew a muzzle flash when she saw it.

“Gun!” she yelled over her shoulder, but the others were in action already, too, even as she saw another flash, and they heard a second report from upstairs, terrible momentary thunder in the otherwise quiet night.

She shouldered through the locked door and on inside, Joshua on her heels, Mole and Alec taking off around back to block the shooter’s retreat to the rear.

The stairs were immediately to the right, and she hit the fourth step just as a head peeked around the corner at the top, a stocking-capped head that looked like it belonged on the body of a big man, which it did. He stepped forward, showing off a linebacker’s frame and, more important, a nine millimeter automatic in his right hand.

Taking the rest of the stairs in a single bound, she leaped, landed at the top on one side and swung her leg around, her foot catching the man in the face. He backed up but neither flinched nor dropped the gun.

Shit, she thought, noting the lack of reaction; any normal human would’ve dropped in pain. A Familiar!

Had a squad of cultists been sent to guard Ray? And if so, why didn’t Ames White know where his son was?

Pressing her advantage, she punched him six quick times, backing him up toward the door of the room from which they had seen the gunshot flash, outside.

And if the Familiars were guarding Ray, who the hell were they shooting at in that bedroom?

The Familiar brought the pistol up again, and this time Max grabbed his arm and spun, the barrel of the pistol pointing directly at Joshua, who had followed her up the stairs but was now facing her.

At the last second Joshua dodged to the right as the Familiar pulled the trigger two times, the shots blowing through the front wall of the house and into the night.

Max heard Joshua growling, but there was no way to let him by, and she didn’t want to, anyway... not until she’d disarmed the Familiar. She crashed the man’s arm down on her shoulder and heard a satisfying crack as his arm broke at the elbow, the pistol slipping from his grip and thunking on each stair as it bounced to the bottom like a heavy Slinky. The Familiar made no noise when his arm snapped — pain just didn’t seem to register on these bastards — swinging the limp limb like a whip. The open other hand caught her on the side of the head and sent her tumbling down the stairs, as if following the gun.

Somehow, Joshua got past her, grabbed the Familiar around the waist and forced him toward the far end of the wall. Rolling into a combat stance, Max rushed back up the stairs and pushed her way through the closed door into the bedroom. The window was smashed and any Familiar that had been in here was gone.

All that remained were Sara Gulliver and her “son” Lemuel, aka Ray White.

And they were both dead.

From the hall, Joshua roared with rage, then Max heard another nasty crunching sound... then silence.

Heartsick, she spun into the hall and found Joshua, blood running from a wound in his shoulder. The Familiar hung limply in the Big Fella’s arms, head lolling like a Christmas goose with its neck broken.

Forcing herself back into the bedroom, Max gaped at the horrifying sight before her. On the floor, their hands tied behind their backs, gags in their mouths, the woman and the child both lay facedown, a single bullet hole in the back of each of their heads.

Executed.

Alec and Mole came pounding in from outside.

“Bastard got away,” Mole said. “We were around back, he went out the front! He was one fast son of a...” The lizard man’s voice trailed off as he took in the bodies on the floor. “Oh, God.”

Pushing by him, Alec saw the carnage. Shaking his head, he turned away.

Bending down, Max touched Ray’s face. It was still warm.

Why would the Familiars kill Ames White’s son?

This made no sense at all to her! Not only had they killed White’s boy, they had taken the only bargaining chip she had left. She stroked the child’s head, his hair, and she wept.

She wanted to be tough.

But with the dead child, and the realization that Logan was going to die — and that there was nothing she could do to prevent it — these things and every other thing she hadn’t cried about for all those years, all the way back to Manticore, came pouring out.

She knelt there, one hand on Ray’s head, the other on her forehead as she wept. Tears ran freely, her body wracked with sobs.

“Let it out, Little Fella,” the gentle giant said, kneeling beside her now.

Max wondered if she ever could, though — there was too much to let out, there had been so many wrongs, so much pain, with no end in sight. Was this the normal life she’d hoped for, this endless parade of pain?

At least little Ray White could sleep through it all — his pain, his travels, over.