Defenders

Prologue Lieutenant Enrique Quinto

June 26, 2029. Morris Run, Pennsylvania.

It was a quaint Pennsylvania town, many of the buildings well over fifty years old, with green canopies shading narrow doorways. Even the town’s name was quaint: Morris Run. If not for the abandoned vehicles, filthy and faded by two years of exposure to the elements, and the trash stacked along the sidewalk, Quinto might have expected someone to step out of the Bullfrog Brewhouse and wave hello.

“Lieutenant Lucky?” Quinto turned to see Macalena, his platoon sergeant, making his way to the front of the carrier. Quinto wished he’d said something the first time someone called him Lucky, but it was far too late now. Most of the troops he was leading today probably didn’t know his real name.

“One of the new guys shit his pants,” Macalena said when he drew close, his voice low, giving Quinto a whiff of his sour breath.

Quinto sighed heavily. “Oh, hell.”

“The kid’s scared to death. He hasn’t been out of Philadelphia since this started.”

“No, I don’t blame him.” Quinto looked over Macalena’s shoulder, saw the kid perched on the side of the carrier, head down. He was about fourteen. The poor kid didn’t belong out here. Not that Quinto couldn’t use him; they called raw recruits “fish food,” but sometimes they were surprisingly effective in a firefight, because they were too scared to think. The starfish could get less of a read on what they were going to do, which way they were going to point their rifles. Usually the newbies didn’t shit their pants until the shooting started, though. “Does he have a spare pair?”

Macalena shook his head. “That’s the only pair he owns.”

Quinto reached into his pack, pulled out a pair of fatigue pants, and handed them to Macalena. “I hope he’s got a belt.”

Macalena laughed, stuck the pants under his armpit, and headed toward the kid.

What an awful thing, to be out here at fourteen, fifteen. When Quinto was fourteen, he’d spent his days playing video games, shooting bad guys in his room while Mom fetched fruit juice and chocolate chip cookies and told him when to go to bed.

They reached the end of the little downtown, which was composed of that single road, and the landscape opened up, revealing pine forest, the occasional house, mountains rising up on all horizons. There was little reason for any Luyten to be within eight miles of this abandoned backwater town, but they were all out there somewhere, so there was always a chance they’d be detected.

Quinto tried to access his helmet’s topographical maps, but the signal still wasn’t coming through. He pulled the old hard copy from his pack, unfolded it.

The carrier slowed; Quinto looked up from the map to see what was going on. There was a visual-recognition drone stuck in a drainage ditch along the side of the road. As they approached, the VRA drone—little more than a machine gun on treads—spun and trained its gun on each of the soldiers in turn. When it got to Quinto, it paused.

“Human. Human!” Quinto shouted, engaging the thing’s vocal-recognition failsafe. It went on to the next soldier.

It was always an uncomfortable moment, having a VRA drone point a weapon at you. You’d think it would be hard to mistake a human for a Luyten.

Failing to identify anything that resembled a starfish, the gun spun away.

“Get a few guys to pull it out of the ditch,” Quinto said. Four troops hopped out of the transport and wrestled the thing back onto the road. It headed off down the road, continuing on its randomly determined route.

Pleasant Street dead-ended close to the mouth of the mine, about half a mile past an old hotel that should be coming up on their left. When they got to the mine they’d have to unseal it using the critical blast points indicated on the topo map, then a 2.5-mile ride on the maglev flats into the mine, to the storage facility.

If someone had told Quinto two years ago that he’d be going into an abandoned mine to retrieve seventy-year-old weapons and ammo, he would have laughed out loud.

It wasn’t funny now.

The locomotive and five boxcars were parked right where they were supposed to be—as close to the mouth of the mine as the track would allow. They were late-twentieth-century vintage, the locomotive orange and shaped like a stretched Mack truck. Quinto called Macalena and his squad leaders, instructed them to set the big recognition-targeting gun they’d brought along in the weeds on the far side of the road, and place two gunners near the entrance with interlocking fire. When that was done, they got the rest of the squads moving down the tunnel. The quicker they moved, the sooner they’d be out of hostile territory and back in Philly.

Quinto took up the rear of the last carrier for the ride down into the mine. He was not a fan of deep holes with black walls, and when his CO had first laid out the mission Quinto had nearly crapped his own pants.

Macalena climbed in and took the seat beside him.

“So what are we looking for? I cannot for the life of me guess what we’re doing in here.”

Quinto smiled. It must seem an odd destination to the rest of the men, but they were used to being kept in the dark about missions. The fewer people who knew, the less likely the starfish were to get the information. Or so the logic went.

“The feds have been sealing huge caches of weapons in old mines for the past two centuries, waiting for the day when Argentina or India or whoever took out our more visible weapons depots. They coat them in Cosmoline and pretty much forget about them.”

Macalena frowned, sticking out his big lower lip. “You mean, old hand grenades and machine guns and shit?”

“More or less. Flamethrowers with a pathetically limited effectiveness range, eighty-one-millimeter mortars, LAW rockets, fifty-cal MGs.” Most were outdated weapons, but simple, easy to operate.

Macalena shook his head. “So we’re that desperate.”

In the seat in front of them a private who was at least seventy was clinging to the bar in front of her seat. She was tall—at least six feet. The slight jostling of the carrier was clearly causing her old body discomfort. It was true what they said: There were no civilians anymore, only soldiers and children.

“Yup. We’re that desperate,” Quinto said. “They’ve destroyed or seized so much of our hardware that we have more soldiers than guns.”

“What’s Cosmoline?” Macalena asked.

“I didn’t know, either; I had to look it up. It’s a grease they used back in the day to preserve weapons. Once you chip away the hardened Cosmoline, the weapons are supposed to be like new.”

Macalena grunted, spit off the side. “Dusty as hell in here. And cold.”

“Let’s be glad we’re not staying.”

Macalena’s comm erupted, a panicked voice calling his name.

“What have we got?” Macalena asked.

“Vance is dead. Lightning shot, from the trees to the left of the mine.”

“All stop!” Macalena shouted. The carrier slowed as Quinto dropped his head, covered his mouth as the implications sunk in.

Lucky no more.

“Where are you now?” Macalena asked the private.

“Inside the mine, about a hundred yards.”

“Stay there.”

Quinto looked up at Macalena, who raised his eyebrows. “What do you want to do?”

He wanted to get as deep in the mine as he could, and stay there, their backs against the wall, weapons raised until the starfish came to get them. Of course the Luyten would never come down, because they were reading his thoughts right now. Plus it was far easier to blow the mouth of the mine and leave them to suffocate.

Quinto ordered the small caravan to turn around and head toward the mouth.

They barely got moving before they heard the flash-boom of a Luyten explosive. The cave shook; bits of dirt and debris spewed at them, then everything settled into silence, the cave now truly pitch-black, save for the carriers’ headlights.

They climbed out of the carriers. Some of the troops cried, and there was no shame in that. One woman went off to the side of the tunnel and knelt in the rubble to pray. Quinto didn’t know their names, because he hadn’t served with them long. Troops came, and died, and new troops came. Only Lieutenant Lucky went on, mission after mission. Quinto realized he’d begun to believe he really was lucky, or special. Destined to see the war to its end.

It killed him, to think he wouldn’t get to see how things turned out, whether the bad guys won, or the good guys pulled something out of their asses at the eleventh hour.

Quinto used the walkie to apprise HQ of their situation, so HQ wouldn’t wonder when Quinto’s platoon never returned.

“Lieutenant?” Macalena said. He was studying the topo map he’d borrowed from Quinto. “Did you see these?” A few of the enlisted came over to look at the map over Macalena’s shoulder as he ran his finger along black lines set perpendicular to the mine. “There are five vertical shafts sunk along the length of the mine. I’m guessing they were escape routes in case of collapse, or ventilation, or both.”

Quinto looked up from the map, impotent rage rising in him. “Jesus, Mac, couldn’t you have waited a half hour to notice this?”

It took Macalena a second to understand. When he did, he grimaced, curled his hand into a fist, crumpling a section of the map. He turned and walked a dozen paces down the shaft, cursing quietly, viciously.

Even Macalena was too green for this war. He’d been in the infantry for only four months; before that he’d been writing military technical manuals. The army needed fighters more than writers these days.

If Macalena had waited even fifteen, twenty minutes before examining the old map, chances were the Luyten would have been out of range, and they could have climbed out of this hole and gone home.

“We need to move,” Quinto said. “The fish are going to find those exits and seal them up. Spread out, find the exits. When I get to the surface I’m going to set off a Tasmanian devil, give us some breathing room. As soon as it’s spent, get out there. Understood? Let’s move.”

“Couldn’t we just stay down here? Dig our way out when they’re gone?” It was the kid who’d crapped himself, looking absurd in Quinto’s big pants. “If we go up there now, they’ll kill us. I mean, maybe they’ll get distracted by something and leave…” He trailed off.

Everyone stared at the ground, except for the soldier who was praying.

“Let’s go,” Quinto said.

Quinto grasped the cold rung of the ladder that had dropped down when they unsealed the iron hatch.

“Good luck to you, Lieutenant,” one of the troops waiting to follow him called. It was Benneton, the old woman. The kid who’d crapped his pants was there as well, along with four others.

Quinto looked up into darkness. “Here we go.” He headed up the ladder. A lot of people who’d been as lucky as Quinto might have been tempted to believe the streak would hold, but Quinto knew his past held no hint of his future. More to the point, he knew he had no future.

It was a forty-foot climb according to the map, but adrenaline made it effortless. When he reached the top, he twisted the seal on the hatch, then pushed with his back and shoulders to force the hatch open. Daylight flooded into the dusty shaft as dirt and moldy leaves rained down on him.

The kid, who was just below him, passed up the Tasmanian devil. Reaching among the big spines jutting from the central carbon-fiber sphere, Quinto activated it, tossed it outside, and pulled the hatch closed.

The buzzing of razor-sharp shrapnel hitting, and then burrowing around inside everything within five hundred yards, would have been reassuring if Quinto weren’t absolutely certain the starfish had retreated outside the Tasmanian devil’s range as soon as Quinto thought about using it. At least it would back the fish up so they wouldn’t be able to pick off Quinto and his troops as they climbed out of their holes.

“Here we go,” Quinto said to the boy. “Have your weapon out. Run as fast as you can. Try to take one with you.” His guess was that Benneton would stay behind, shoot from the cover of the shaft until the Luyten cooked her. That’s what Quinto would do in her situation; it would probably afford her a few more minutes of life. He took a deep breath, trying to grasp that this was the end, this was the moment of his death, but he couldn’t.

As soon as the Tasmanian devil went silent, Quinto threw open the hatch, his heart thudding wildly, and ran.

Their carriers were trapped in the mine, so his best chance would be to make it to the locomotive. Of course the Luyten would have fried the locomotive, so really there was nothing to do but run, and when the fish closed in, turn and fight.

Two hundred yards ahead, he spotted four of his troops running north, into the woods, toward the nearest cover. That probably made more sense than what Quinto was doing, but all of the moves open to them were losers. It was always the same: The fish knew their exact location, but they had no idea where the fish were. If you could catch a fish out in the open, it couldn’t dodge automatic weapons fire, but you almost never caught them out in the open.

Quinto glanced back, saw the kid was two steps behind, his dirty cheeks tracked with tearstains.

The locomotive had been melted to a lump. He kept running. Everyone but he and the kid had headed north. Since Quinto wasn’t dead yet, it was safe to assume the fish had gone after the larger group first. If he could get outside their range, which meant seven or eight miles, he and the kid might have a chance. Quinto pushed himself to pick up the pace, but when he did the kid started to fall behind, looking panicked. Quinto slowed.

In the distance, Quinto heard the worst sound in the world: the sizzle-crackle of a Luyten lightning stick, a sound as much felt in your body as heard by your ears. Then another. He was spared the pungent, unearthly sweat smell of the weapon. He was too far away.

When he’d made it through the town, Quinto took another glance back. The kid was a hundred yards behind, one hand clutching his side. No way this kid was going to run another four or five miles. Panting, his throat coated in phlegm, Quinto considered leaving him behind. No. No matter how fast he ran, he wasn’t going to outrun Luyten on foot. He could try calling HQ and beg for a carrier to come get him, but they’d only tell him what he already knew: They weren’t going to feed the fish any more than they had to.

So he stopped, pulled out his comm, and waited for the kid to catch up. The kid stopped beside him, put his hands on his knees.

“You want to call anyone? Your mom or dad alive?”

The kid eyed the comm. “Just my little sister.” He swallowed, looked at Quinto. “We’re going to die, aren’t we?”

“Yeah. We are.”

“Maybe they got distracted by something. Maybe the others killed them.”

“Maybe,” Quinto said. He thought he heard the snap-crackle of something moving through the woods to the north. “Come on.” He tugged the kid’s jacket and headed into the woods on the opposite side of the road.

Should he call his own mother to say goodbye? He would like that, but he didn’t want to risk having her on the line when he died. He didn’t want that to be her last memory of him.

Branches whipped his face as he tore through the brush. It was pointless, but he couldn’t relinquish that last millimeter of hope that he might get lucky, just one last time. He barreled down a slope as the landscape opened, then splashed through a stream and raced up the bank.

He spotted a flash of crimson ahead, behind a thick cover of green leaves, and stopped short. The kid stopped short beside him, looked at him, questioning, just as a bolt of lightning burst through the foliage.

1 Oliver Bowen

March 9, 2030 (nine months later). The South Pacific.

The door was locked. The room was comfortable, replete with a well-stocked kitchen and an entertainment system that was so up-to-date it contained movies yet to be released. But the door was locked.

You’re considered a risk. They don’t know the extent of my power to influence you.

Oliver turned in his rotating chair to face Five, whose accommodations were less plush. Behind the carbon alloy mesh that separated them, Five’s room was empty except for a water dispensation device that resembled a giant hamster lick. Five was lying flat, his appendages splayed like the spokes of an elephant-sized wheel. His skin had a stony, mottled texture, and there were bristles protruding at evenly spaced intervals across it. The cilia protruding from the tips were as thick as nautical rope, and transparent.

“Because you were able to win over a thirteen-year-old boy, they think you might be able to convince me that I’m fighting on the wrong side? That’s absurd.”

But they don’t know that, Five said. They think you’ve become too familiar with me. Too friendly.

The CIA yanks him out of his position at NYU three days after the invasion begins, shifts him from Research to Interrogation as their field agents die off, tells him to figure out how to communicate with Luyten, and when he succeeds, he becomes a suspected sympathizer? Beautiful.

The next time someone comes, ask them when you’ll be informed where we’re going.

Oliver couldn’t help laughing. “You mean you don’t know?” He waved in what he guessed was the direction of the submarine’s bridge. “Pluck it out of someone’s mind.”

I don’t have to pluck. Your minds are all laid out in front of me. No one on this vessel knows.

“No one knows where we’re going?” It seemed an absurd notion, though it also made sense. If no one on board knew where they were going, or why, a Luyten who happened to be flying nearby—within their eight-or-so-mile telepathic zone—wouldn’t be able to find out, either. The mission must be important. “How are they navigating if they don’t know where we’re going?”

They’re given a set of coordinates corresponding to a point in the ocean, and when they reach it, they’re given another.

“So where are we?”

Oliver jolted back in his chair as one of Five’s mouths opened, revealing a bobbing, twitching hole ringed with teeth that resembled the spines on cacti. Smacking, hissing air and background sounds like water draining came from the hole, the sounds so unearthly and repulsive that at first Oliver didn’t register that they were approximating words.

“Find out where we’re going,” Five said aloud.

The ubiquitous hum of the sub’s engine was the only sound in the room as Oliver composed himself. Ultimately it didn’t matter whether the Luyten communicated telepathically or using spoken words, but it was still profoundly disturbing to hear the thing speak.

“You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you?” Oliver said.

“Unlike you.” Somehow the creature managed to inject a note of irony, and perhaps contempt, into the awkwardly formed words.

Oliver slid out of the chair, went right up to the nearly invisible net of carbon fiber that separated them. “Don’t assume you know my mind just because you can read my thoughts. We may not be as simple as you think.”

“Yes, humanity is the pinnacle of evolution. The chosen ones, the purpose for the existence of the entire universe. How could I forget?” Aware that Oliver was having trouble understanding his strangely formed words, Five simultaneously broadcast his words directly into Oliver’s mind, giving him the uneasy sensation of hearing the words with an indescribable overlap. “I know your mind better than you.”

Oliver grunted, folded his arms across his chest. “Right.”

“You’re uneasy. You’re afraid I might try to prove my claim.”

It was pointless to disagree. Oliver had quickly learned how absurd it was to deny what you were thinking or feeling to something who knew precisely what you were thinking and feeling.

“You love your wife now—”

“Shut up. I don’t want to hear about Vanessa. Just leave it.”

Five waited patiently through Oliver’s outburst, then continued. “After her affair, her denials, the angry divorce… now you love her. Before, when you claimed to love her, you also despised her.”

Oliver turned, went to the door, and thumped on it with the flat of his palm. “Hey, come on. Unlock this door. I’m not the POW.”

“There’s an irony you’re not aware of, in your newfound feelings for your wife. Should I share it with you?”

Oliver turned to face Five, who was running the fine cilia that served Luyten as fingers across the stump of the limb he’d lost. “No. Thanks for the offer, but, no.”

“It’s something you’d be interested to hear.”

When Oliver didn’t answer, Five continued. “All right, then why don’t I move on? What else can I tell you, to demonstrate you’re as simple to read as I think you are? How about your deepest sexual cravings? Some of these you would never admit to yourself. For example, you’d like to be tied up, gagged with your own dirty sock, and spanked by a woman twenty years older than you.”

Oliver couldn’t care less about his repressed sexual desires. They were what they were; he couldn’t control them, only whether he acted on them. But Oliver knew Five was only playing with him now. It had already dropped the bait it knew Oliver couldn’t resist.

Five grew quiet, waiting for the question it already knew was coming.

“Fine. What’s the irony I’m not aware of?”

All of Five’s eyes fixed on Oliver. “The irony is, your instinct to love her is right, because she never had sex with Dr. Paul.”

As the words registered, Oliver’s vision darkened around the edges, as if he were going to pass out. In some ways, he wished he would. “You told me she had. You gave me specific details.”

“I lied.”

An icy numbness crept through him. He’d destroyed his marriage on the word of an alien bent on wiping out the human race. He’d taken Five’s word as unassailable proof, because Five could reach right in and pluck the truth out of Vanessa’s thoughts. Only he’d forgotten Five had abilities beyond reading minds. The ability to lie, for instance.

He’d told Vanessa he knew she was lying, said her unwillingness to admit the affair bothered him more than the infidelity itself. The floor, which was nothing but steel under a thin layer of beige carpeting, lurched beneath him, either because the sub was adjusting course or his knees were wobbling.

“Why would you lie? I didn’t even ask you about Vanessa—you volunteered the information.”

“I did it to serve as a reminder.”

“A reminder of what?”

“That I might be lying to you at any time.”

It dawned on Oliver that he had no way to contact Vanessa, and had no idea when he would, because he didn’t know where he was going, or why. When he did finally contact Vanessa, would an apology make any difference? He’d trusted the word of a Luyten over hers.

This was going to torture him. In all probability that was Five’s intention in telling him now. Or maybe he was lying now, simply to distract Oliver at a crucial juncture.

“Maybe,” Five said.

2 Kai Zhou

June 29, 2029 (nine months earlier). Washington, D.C.

Kai knew better than to look up at the old man behind the counter to see if he was watching. That was a dead giveaway. Instead, Kai tracked him through the reflection in the refrigerated display case, which was no longer cold, because it was illegal to waste energy to keep drinks chilled. Not that anyone had the energy to spare on such a luxury anyway.

The old guy had an underbite that made him look vaguely apish; what gray hair he had was combed straight back in thin lines. He was watching Kai, frowning, suspicious. Kai knew he looked like a hungry kid who had no one taking care of him, but he couldn’t help it; he couldn’t find it in him to relax the scowl, to smile. This was also one time Kai’s size was probably a liability. Mom used to say he looked sixteen, not thirteen.

A wave of pain washed over him at the thought of his mom. Right now he didn’t even feel thirteen—he felt more like eight. He wanted his mommy, wanted her to rock him while he pressed his face against her long, soft hair. That’s all most kids wanted since the invasion began. There were no tough kids left, only scared kids. And desperate kids, like him.

The door to the convenience store creaked open; a chubby woman with a tattoo on her shoulder stepped in and went to the counter. Kai seized the opportunity, snaring three fat pieces of jerky and stuffing them under his jacket, pinning them under his left arm.

He rose, spent a moment looking at the drinks in the nearly empty case, most of them homemade, the corporate logos printed on the bottles partially covered with white handwritten labels. Hurrying was another dead giveaway.

He paused again on his way to the door, watched a news feed playing on the TV above the front counter for a moment.

It was war footage of half a dozen Luyten storming a power plant. You almost never saw so many in one place, in the open. They were guerrilla fighters; they lost some of their advantage when they clustered, so when they attacked in force it usually meant they’d identified a poorly defended target.

Kai was repulsed by the sight of them—giant starfish, faceless, silent. Two were flying in their weird formfitting six- and seven-pointed craft, while the rest were on the ground, galloping on three or four of their limbs, staying behind vehicles and trees for cover, their free arms firing lightning bursts from the skintight battle gear that looked like ornate brass embroidery. A couple of human soldiers were peppering them with machine gun fire, but the Luyten always had a second’s warning, always knew which way the soldiers were going to point the weapons. If the soldiers had larger weapons—flamethrowers or tanks—they’d have a chance. Then again, if they had larger weapons the Luyten would have known, and wouldn’t have attacked in the first place.

When he couldn’t stand to watch anymore, Kai headed toward the door.

The old guy moved from behind the counter with surprising speed, beating Kai to the door, brandishing a stun gun.

“I didn’t see it, but I know you’ve got something.” He waved the gun. “Open your jacket.”

Kai wanted to tell the man he had no right to search him just because he looked filthy and tired, but it was pointless to argue. He reached into his coat and pulled out the jerky.

The chubby woman with the rose tattoo tsked, shook her head. She’d moved over to watch.

“I’m a good kid. It’s just, my parents were killed when Richmond got overrun, and I don’t have anywhere to go.” In a shrill, childish whine he added, “I’m so hungry.”

The old guy plucked the jerky from Kai’s outstretched hand. “I don’t doubt what you’re saying. Times are hard.” He gestured toward the road with his chin. “Check with Refugee Services, see if they can give you some food.”

“Refugee Services is closed. It’s been closed since I got here. Please, let me have one?”

The man shook his head brusquely. “I can’t hand out food to everyone who’s hungry. I got almost nothing to sell as it is.” He gestured toward the door.

Kai looked out into the dark, frigid, rainy night. The rain ticked against the storefront window. It was turning to sleet. He turned back. “Can I at least stay in here to keep warm? I won’t take anything, I promise.”

The man looked pained. “I’m trying to run a store. It ain’t easy, you know. I let you stay, what about the next kid who wants to stay? Pretty soon I’ll have to close for good like the rest of them.”

Reluctantly, Kai pushed the door open, tucked his chin against the cold. Empty hands buried in his jacket pockets, he hurried down the street, weaving to find a path through the piles of trash, much of it electronics that didn’t work or took too much energy to operate. In the street vehicles whooshed silently past, but only occasionally, nothing like traffic had been before the invasion began.

He wasn’t sure where to go. He turned left at the end of the block to get off the main artery, passed mostly dark apartment buildings, eyeing the occasional warm yellow lights inside windows covered with security mesh. Kai longed to be in one of those apartments, in a warm bed, but none sported the green sash that indicated refugees were welcome. They were all full, or, more likely, the families inside were ignoring President Wood’s plea to open their homes to people fleeing the Luyten.

The problem was, there were a lot more refugees now. Before Richmond fell, refugees had poured into the city as the starfish seized more and more of the outlying areas, and Kai and his family had done what they could to help them, like they were supposed to. Kai had shared his clothes with the refugees who were his age, brought them along to hang out with him and his friends. He could still remember how proud his mom was, how she smiled whenever he did something nice for one of the scared, shrunken kids who came down the road pulling a suitcase. Now that Kai was a refugee, there were too many for that sort of kindness. Washington was packed with refugees.

It was so hard, getting used to each thing that was taken away. First, communication, when the Luyten took their satellites out. No way to speak to Grandma, or to Pauly, who’d been his best friend until last year. Then, as the Luyten choked off the routes between cities, no toothpaste, no food that arrived at the table ready to eat. Then the Luyten gained control of most of the solar and wind farms, the coal and nuclear plants, and there wasn’t enough power to heat the house, or the water, or to run his handheld.

Now he had no warm bed, no food to eat at all.

He was heading away from the makeshift shanty camp where he’d stayed the past three nights. The camp was too far to reach in the cold and dark; he’d walked too far, trying to find food.

His toes were already numb, his shoes soaked from puddles he couldn’t see.

He wished he had someone with him. Anyone. If he could pick one person who was still alive, it wouldn’t be one of the cool friends he’d started hanging out with in the past year; it would be Pauly, who he’d known forever. Scrawny, goofy Pauly, whom Kai had pretty much dropped, for no good reason. Mom had been disappointed in Kai when he ditched Pauly. She’d told him you don’t throw away friends.

What he wouldn’t give to have Pauly beside him. Kai wondered where Pauly was, what he was doing.

There was an old brick and concrete building ahead, three separate dark, open bays of what must have once been an auto body shop, or a fire station. The building must have been fifty years old. It had been a long time since things were built out of red brick.

The first bay was nothing but a concrete floor, providing shelter from the rain but little relief from the cold, gusty wind. There was a door sitting slightly ajar, up three concrete steps along the wall. Even if it was a tiny toilet room, it would be warmer, at least.

The door squealed when Kai nudged it open. The room stank of cigarettes. A woman was curled up in one corner of what had once been an office. She was partially covered by a corner of the wall-to-wall carpet, which she’d peeled up from the floor. In the faint light, Kai took in her swollen face, matted hair, her bulging, empty eyes, wide open and unblinking. He swung the door closed with a cry of disgust.

Skin prickling, he scurried down the steps and out of the bay, back into the biting rain.

There were two more bays. Kai didn’t like the thought of being so close to a dead body, but he was shivering uncontrollably from the cold. He couldn’t keep going. What were the odds he’d find another abandoned building?

There was a door in the second bay, but it led to a bathroom, not an office. The third and final bay had no inner doors at all, so Kai returned to the second, gathered up what scraps of paper he could find, along with a small cardboard box, and returned to the bathroom.

The room smelled dank, with an undertone of dried urine. Still shivering, Kai pulled a half-used roll of toilet paper off the dispenser and used it to dab his wet clothes. It wasn’t much help.

The room was too small for Kai to stretch out, so he curled his legs in, used a wadded-up juice carton as a pillow, and piled the trash over his legs as best he could. It felt strange, not to have Kabuki say good night. He missed Kabuki almost as much as he missed Pauly, though not nearly as much as he missed his mom. He knew Kabuki wasn’t real, was nothing but a bunch of chips in his handheld designed to say pleasant things and follow directions, but he’d been a part of Kai’s life for as long as he could remember.

Kai was freezing. He couldn’t stop shaking; his hissing breath echoed off the half-tiled walls.

An image flashed, of the woman in the next bay. She must have frozen to death, maybe last night. And she had a carpet.

There was a draft whistling through the space where Kai had left the door open a crack. It would be warmer if he closed it, but he would lose the sliver of gray light. He didn’t want to be in the pitch dark.

It had all happened so fast. It didn’t seem long ago that he’d watched the first newscast of Luyten dropping from the sky. He remembered he’d been surprised when the schools were closed the next day. Only a week ago he’d been in his warm bed in Richmond. His mother had tucked him in, told him not to worry about Dad, who was with his brigade less than forty miles away between Richmond and the Luyten surge. A day later he was on a bus roaring down Interstate 95 packed with kids and old people.

There was no point in crying, but he couldn’t help it.

The sound of his own crying made him feel worse. What was he going to do? Why wouldn’t anyone tell him what to do, where to go?

Did you smell?

Kai cried out, jolted upright. He hadn’t thought the words, they’d just come, raking through his head in a voice like steel fingernails on glass, the pronunciations all off in a strange and unsettling way.

She’s smoke. Lighter.

Kai clamped his palms over his ears. His soaked pants were suddenly warm; he was vaguely aware he’d wet himself.

Build fire.

It felt like there was something crawling around in his head. Kai sat frozen, trembling, praying it wouldn’t happen again.

Or you die.

Kai howled in terror. He didn’t understand what was happening to him.

Happening to you. Kai. Freezing.

His teeth were chattering; his whole body was shaking from the cold, from fear. The voice went on, about the cold, about Kai dying, about fire. There was enough trash around to burn, but he had nothing to start a fire with.

She’s smoker. Lighter.

A lighter was what he needed.

You dead this morning. Do you Kai?

The voice had asked him something. Kai was afraid that if he didn’t answer, the voice might get angry, might do something to him. Drive him crazy, pull him down into whatever dark, awful place it came from. Something about the voice was so terribly wrong, so profoundly off. It was as if the words were jagged, scraping the inside of his head.

You do?

“No, I don’t want to be dead,” Kai said aloud, the volume of his own voice in the tight space making him flinch.

She smoked. Lighter.

Maybe he was already crazy. This was just what it was like, wasn’t it? Voices in your head?

Lighter. Her pocket.

Kai jolted. Her pocket. Suddenly he understood what the voice was saying. She smoked. The dead woman smoked. He’d smelled stale smoke in there, hadn’t he? The voice was telling him there was a lighter in her pocket.

Yes.

He didn’t want to go back in that room. She was dead; her eyes were bulging—

Or you die. Go.

Kai shoved the door open, peered into the bay, half expecting to see something crouching there, waiting for him, but there was nothing but concrete, shadows, the howling wind.

Bent against the wind, Kai marched into the next bay, his heart in his throat. He climbed the steps, put his hand on the knob, twisted it partway.

Maybe the voice lived in the bathroom. Maybe if he didn’t go back it couldn’t get him, couldn’t talk to him—

Wrong. Go on.

Kai gripped the handle tighter. It was ice cold. He twisted it, pushed the door open a foot.

There she was. He pushed the door open farther, took a step into the room. She was old, maybe sixty, Hispanic or maybe Indian. The tip of her tongue was jutting from between her blue lips.

He didn’t want to do this; he’d rather freeze to death than stick his fingers in her pocket and feel her body. Would it be squishy or stiff?

The voice was silent, but he knew that if he waited it would speak to him again, would tell him to get the lighter. It might even yell at him. That would be awful. He had to do it. Quickly—as quick as he could. Kai’s breath was coming in quick, rattling gasps. He took a deep breath and held it, stood paralyzed for a moment.

Do it.

The voice was like a shove at his back. Kai scurried to the body, squatted.

Other one, the voice said before Kai even had time to lift his left hand. He reached with his right, slipped two fingers into her pocket.

Her hip felt stiff through the denim of her jeans. It didn’t feel as bad as he’d feared, but it was still bad. He felt the pointed tip of the lighter, but couldn’t reach it.

Pull her flat.

That would mean touching her, really touching her. Kai so desperately didn’t want to do that.

Whimpering, he scooted back, grasped her feet by her tattered shoes, squeezed his eyes closed. As soon as he pulled, the shoes slipped off. His belly roiling with disgust, he half flung, half dropped them, then grasped her spongy, swollen ankles and pulled.

The body slid forward inch by inch, then suddenly her head lolled to the left and she dropped, hard, to the floor. Not thinking, just wanting to get it over with, Kai shoved his hand into her pocket, closed his fingers around the long, thin lighter.

A moment later he was in the bay, running.

Trash for fire.

The voice was right—this bay had much more trash than the others. Kai ran around picking up as much as he could carry before returning to the second bay.

Moments later, he had a small fire burning. The heat felt marvelous on his fingers, his cheeks, his nose. The orange light pushed back the shadows and the darkness, made a place that was his in a way he couldn’t put into words.

Better. Yes. Collect more trash.

Kai did as he was told, checking the last bay and returning with another armful of trash, which he set in a pile near the fire.

Now sleep. I’ll watch you for danger.

The voice was horrible, but the words were reassuring, and they were growing clearer, less grating. Kai lay down, closed his eyes. He was so tired.

It would watch over him. How would it watch? Where were its eyes, Kai wondered?

He was drifting off, his front side warm, his back and feet still stiff with damp cold. The voice would watch over him.

Kai jolted upright, suddenly knowing whose voice it was.

I won’t hurt you.

They knew what you were thinking. But Kai had never heard of one speaking to someone. Never. Not on the news, not from anyone.

We can if we want.

It heard everything he thought. There was no way for Kai to stop thinking, no shelter from it. It was in his head. They could read your mind until you were a few miles away. Kai pressed one hand to the cold ground. He had to—

If you run, I will hurt you.

Kai froze, a trickle of dread running through him.

“Where are you?” he whispered.

Close.

Kai sat utterly frozen, afraid to move, afraid to breathe.

Sleep.

3 Lila Easterlin

June 30, 2029. Savannah, Georgia.

Lila’s toothbrush was wet. She studied the other toothbrushes in the cup, trying to figure out who they might belong to in order to rule out suspects, running through all of the people who now used this bathroom, and trying to decide who was most likely to use someone else’s toothbrush.

None of the toothbrushes looked like it belonged to her cousin Alfe, the hick from West Virginia she had met a grand total of twice before he and his family showed up on their doorstep last month. Toothbrush in hand, Lila stormed through the house, skirting bedding and mats, piles of clothes and suitcases, until she found Alfe eating a bowl of Lucky Charms, her favorite cereal, which she’d been rationing for the past six months because it was probably the last box she’d ever have.

Lila held her toothbrush in front of Alfe’s nose. His beard looked dopier by the day, all patchy and scraggly on his narrow, hawklike face.

“Did you use this?” she asked.

He ate a spoonful of her Lucky Charms, studying the brush. “I might have.”

“This is my toothbrush.” She curled her lip. “I can’t think of anything more disgusting than brushing my teeth with a brush you just used to dislodge bits of food from your mouth.” She shook the toothbrush for emphasis. “This is mine. Don’t use it again.”

“But I don’t have one,” Alfe said, raising his shoulders.

“That’s not my problem,” she nearly shouted.

Her father appeared in the arch between the kitchen and living room, wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt. “What’s going on?”

Lila folded her arms defensively. “He used my toothbrush.”

Her father looked at Alfe, who said nothing, then back to Lila. “Okay. Alfe, I’ll find you a toothbrush. You—” He pointed at Lila.

“Don’t point at me. I didn’t do anything.”

He kept his finger poised an inch from her nose. “Don’t talk like that to Alfe.”

Lila sighed heavily, tempted to point out that Alfe was also eating her cereal, but she knew that would go nowhere.

“Is he a starfish?” Dad asked, pointing at Alfe.

Lila closed her eyes, willing herself to be calm. “No.” This was her dad’s favorite routine. We have to pull together, blah, blah, blah. She got it; she just didn’t want her toothbrush in Alfe’s mouth.

“Then he’s on your side.”

Lila nodded, knowing Dad would only belabor the point if she argued.

Dad smiled, satisfied. “I’ll find you a toothbrush,” he said to Alfe. Lila watched him walk off, disturbed by how skinny he looked, how little he resembled the stocky, jowly man Lila had known all her life.

“I don’t know how he can do what he does every day and still be so positive,” Alfe said, shaking his head in wonder as he watched Lila’s father walk away.

Lila studied Alfe for a moment, deciding whether she wanted to reply. She decided she didn’t really have a choice, given that he’d said something nice about her father.

“He’s always been like that. Three days after my mother left us to become a Fire Monk, he was helping me make a Halloween costume, and one for himself. Not that your wife leaving you to join a cult compares to disposing of thousands of bodies every day.” Lila used to be embarrassed by what her father did for a living, back when being a mortician was about applying eyeliner to corpses. Now that it was about finding locations for mass graves and collecting DNA samples so relatives might one day know where their loved ones were buried, she felt better about it. “Sometimes people ask me why he’s not fighting in the war.”

Alfe snorted. “That’s a pretty stupid question.”

“I know.” It was the first time she’d said more than hello to Alfe since he arrived, and now she felt shitty for making a big deal out of the toothbrush. He might be okay.

“Did you see your mother much?” Alfe asked.

Before the invasion, he meant. That went without saying. “Now and then. She’s too serene for me. Puts me to sleep talking to her.” She didn’t want to talk about her mother, so she thought of another topic. “Was it hard getting here from Blacksburg?”

Alfe nodded. “We had one really bad moment. We stopped at a lake to get water, and when we went down to the lake, there were two starfish standing in the water a hundred yards away, filling some of their weird sacks.”

Lila felt a crawling sensation. “Holy shit. What did they do?”

Alfe put his hand over his mouth, shook his head. “They turned and stared at us. They seemed as surprised to see us as we were to see them, although we know that’s not likely.”

“What did you do?” Lila whispered, knowing she would have nightmares about this.

“We ran like hell back to our truck.”

“They didn’t chase you?”

Alfe shook his head. “All I can think is, they decided we weren’t worth the trouble. Or maybe it was because it was a mother and three kids. Because, you know, sometimes they leave the kids alone.” Lila nodded. She’d heard stories of Luyten letting children go. “But while we were running away, I just kept thinking, I’m about to die. Any second now I’m going to die.”

Lila studied Alfe’s face for a moment, then held out her toothbrush. “Here.”

“Oh, no, that’s okay. Your dad said he’d get me one.”

She kept the toothbrush out. “If he does, you can give it back to me.”

Alfe took it and thanked her. Lila went off to see what her dad was up to.

He was with Uncle Walter, whose burn scars seemed to get worse as he healed, rather than better. His face was nothing but a mottled red and white blur. They’d picked up the local news, which was now the only news, on the antenna her dad had fashioned out of junk car antennae. The picture was snowy, flickering in and out, confined to a small patch on the wall to conserve energy.

The newswoman was broadcasting from what looked to be someone’s living room. She was a Clarise Wilde look-alike, from the brief period when it became fashionable to try to look as much as possible like one superstar celebrity or another, using plastic surgery. Now it just seemed embarrassingly old-fashioned and self-centered.

Using a printed map pinned to the wall, she explained that the starfish had seized control of the Bluffton/Beaufort area, so travel between Savannah and Charleston was no longer possible. They also continued to attack and board ships leaving the port, usually coming across from Hilton Head. Sometimes they used their own craft, which resembled colored amniotic sacks spitting bolts of lightning; at other times they were in human boats they’d seized.

The picture flickered and stretched, giving the Clarise Wilde look-alike a thin, otherworldly appearance.

“Man, I miss satellites,” Uncle Walter said.

So did Lila. All those channels, so clear you could barely tell the pictures from the real world. Much more than that, though, she missed her direct feed. She missed being connected to a hundred friends at once. It would be easier to cope with the terror that gripped her all day, every day, if she had her friends to lean on.

She also missed being good at something. She’d been such a good VR engineer and navigator, better than any of her friends, anyone in her entire school. The feed had been her world, and then, suddenly, it was gone, and so was everything Lila cared about, everything that made her special.

The TV image flickered and died, along with the overhead light. In a distant room, someone cursed.

Uncle Walter checked the time. “Did we even get an hour that time?” He said it in an even, almost conversational tone. No one complained. Even when they were complaining, they used a tone that made it sound like they weren’t. Only Lila complained.

Since it was going to grow stiflingly hot inside rather quickly, Lila went outside. She sat under the crepe myrtle—the only tree in their tiny fenced-in yard—and tried not to think about how close the starfish were. She put in her earbuds, played a song by Park Zero. Usually his voice lifted her spirits. Today, though, she remained tense, uneasy.

They were surrounded now. For the longest time the starfish had kept to the wilderness areas, appearing only to sabotage a rail line, a power station—places Lila would never go, so she was safe. Now they were everywhere.

Lila wandered toward the fence, trying to get her mind off the Luyten, although the knot in her stomach was always there, whether she was thinking of them or not.

There was a truly impressive pile of junk in the alley behind the low stone wall. Someone had cleared all of the crap out of her pack-rat father’s garage—probably to make room for refugee friends and relatives—and dumped it in the alley. Lila went to the fence to take a closer look.

Her dad must be heartbroken, to have all of his useless junk evicted after he’d spent thirty years letting it pile up. There were vehicle wheels and doors, engine parts, ancient video screens, busted solar panels from the time before the big solar plant was constructed south of the city. Lila hoped the starfish were enjoying all that power.

The back door slid open. Lila would never get used to the harsh sliding sound it made when it was opened manually. Dad joined her at the fence.

“This might be the only bright side to what’s going on. I finally had a reason to clean out the garage, and help carrying all the junk.”

“I was just thinking about how heartbroken you must be. All of this good junk you might need someday.”

“Yeah,” Dad said laughing. “Someday.”

Lila reached over the fence and lifted up a cylindrical object. “What’s this?”

Dad shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Lila dropped it. It clattered off a long-obsolete medical diagnostic fMRI kit and wedged against an old TV screen.

“Find something productive to do,” Dad said, not unkindly, shooing with his hands as if she were a puppy. “If there’s nothing around here you can think of, go down to Civil Defense and volunteer. They’ll find something for you.”

Lila didn’t want to go to Civil Defense. She didn’t want to be around a lot of people, have whispered conversations about which city the starfish had overrun, what human weapon they’d figured out how to convert for their own use. She picked up another piece of junk, an old solar panel, and turned it over, looking for a date. There was none.

If only the war were taking place in the virtual world instead of the real one. She’d probably be in Washington, D.C., right now, designing weapons systems, or sabotaging the enemy’s capabilities. She knew VR tech inside and out. This hard tech—Lila turned the panel on its end, ran her thumb along its thin edge. It was a mystery.

“So what’s it going to be?” Dad asked.

Lila set the solar panel down, leaned over the fence, and fished an identical panel out of the pile. If she had to do something productive, maybe she should take a crack at this old shit, see if she could make it useful again. There must be similarities between tinkering inside the feed and tinkering with actual chips and circuits. The technology was fifteen years old—how complicated could it be?

Lila spotted a bunch of solar panels, shoved aside a stuffed penguin doll she’d gotten for Christmas when she was six, and started stacking them along the fence. The satellites might be down, but they still had the standard home library downloaded on the handheld. Surely there were all sorts of old tech manuals available.

Her father was waiting for some sort of reply.

“Go away,” she said. “I’m working.”

Dad walked away, shaking his head.

4 Oliver Bowen

March 10, 2030 (nine months later). The South Pacific.

There was nothing to do except read, watch movies, or talk to Five. If Oliver was home, he could at least be working on his comic collection. Spider-Man was complete, save for issue fourteen, the first appearance of Green Goblin. It was the early issues of The Hulk that were proving most difficult to locate.

It was insane, utterly insane, to be seeking out old comic books with the world on the brink, but it was the only thing in his life that wasn’t depressing and seemingly hopeless.

Oliver started when Five began to speak aloud. He still wasn’t used to the gurgling, hissing sound of his voice, so unlike the telepathic version.

“All of that effort, just to move paper with colorful pictures into closer proximity to you. That’s all you’re doing, really.”

“I’m not going to argue with you. I honestly don’t care what you think of my behavior.”

“Of course you do,” the Luyten said. “You used to play online poker. You were very good, weren’t you?”

“I was very good.” Oliver tried to control his rising impatience.

“Now you collect comics. Why is that, do you think?”

“Because poker takes other people, and without satellites I don’t have access to other good players.” He rubbed his eyes; he was tired, even though he was getting plenty of sleep. “Besides that, it takes energy. It taxes your cognitive resources. When I’m not working, I’m too tired, mentally and emotionally, for poker. There’s no thinking involved in collecting comic books.”

“No, there’s certainly not. A child could do it.”

Oliver poked at something caught between his teeth. “A child could do it. Yes. Provided he had a decent income.”

The comment made him think of Kai, of the decision awaiting him when he got home. If he adopted Kai, they could collect comics together. He could teach Kai to play poker; that might inject him with fresh enthusiasm for the game.

Was it foolish, to consider adopting a thirteen-year-old boy? He couldn’t imagine sitting Kai down to talk about sex, or disciplining him if he did something wrong. How did you even discipline a thirteen-year-old? His own upbringing would be no help on that front; his parents had met at an Asperger’s clinic, where they were both undergoing outpatient treatment.

Maybe all of it was moot. How much time did they have left, realistically? A year? He should adopt Kai, and let the kid eat ice cream for dinner every night, if that’s what he wanted to do.

“Do you want to know why you really collect comic books?”

Oliver groaned. “I’m not the one who tortured you. I have been nothing but civil to you. Why are you so hostile?

“I’m not being hostile. I’m just passing time.”

Until that night, when the people in charge had tired of Oliver’s inability to get Five to tell him anything useful, their conversations had been relatively polite. Certainly not warm, but polite. Two emissaries, on opposite sides of their species’ struggle to the death, discussing the situation in even tones.

“Do you want to know?” Five asked.

Oliver didn’t answer. Five knew he didn’t want to know, that he was sick to death of having his mind cut open and pinned to a piece of cardboard, but Oliver knew Five would ignore this, because that was the game.

“You collect comic books because you harbor an infantile desire for the superheroes to be real. You want the Hulk, Spider-Man, and the Silver Surfer to come and save you. To save your kind. Even a cowboy on a white horse would do.”

Go ahead, Oliver thought, pluck the name of the cowboy on the white horse out of my head. Only it’s not a white horse, it’s a silver horse. The hat is white.

“The Lone Ranger,” Five said.

“Yes, I’m waiting for the Lone Ranger to save me.” Oliver had never actually watched that ancient show, but that was beside the point.

“No one is coming to save you.”

Oliver looked at his fingernails. Had he remembered to pack nail clippers when the security contingent showed up at his house and told him to pack? Hopefully they’d been in his shaving kit when he packed it. He went to the bathroom to look.

“You have no hope left,” Five said. “I respect that. You’re realistic, for one of your kind.”

He stared into the mirror. Was that true? Did he have no hope?

It was almost true. Not 100 percent true, but it wasn’t a lie.

Oliver looked into his own tired, watery eyes and realized he was letting this creature beat him. If he had no hope, if he’d given up in his heart, he was useless. He was betraying President Wood, his country, his kind, who were trusting him with a crucial task. Maybe he was here primarily because all of the men and women more capable of doing this job were dead. Maybe that was true.

It is true.

“Shut up!” he shouted.

Even if it was true, he had assets and abilities those people lacked. He needed to better utilize his assets.

Maybe he could turn Five’s humiliating insights around to his advantage. Five was good at exposing his weaknesses. Fine, now he knew what his weaknesses were. As any decent psychologist knew, if you’re not aware of your weaknesses, they control you; if you’re aware of them, if you face up to them, you control them.

Based on Five’s attacks, his weaknesses were Vanessa, and his lack of confidence in himself.

They’re just the tip of the iceberg.

“Shut up.”

As Five had so aptly observed, he was waiting for superheroes to show up and save him. Since all the superheroes—all of the CIA’s action people—were dead, he needed to get himself a cape. Even if, inside, he didn’t feel it, even if he felt like a fraud, it was time to play the part of the big, strong CIA agent. It was time to lock out his doubts and fears, put his head down, and take bullets until he couldn’t get up anymore.

“You’re wrong,” he said aloud, because to humans speaking something aloud held a certain power, made the words real in a way thinking them did not. “I’m realistic; I recognize that we’re losing. Badly. But I still have hope. We haven’t lost yet. We’re headed somewhere, and I’m pretty sure we’re not going there to surrender.”

The little speech sounded canned even to his ears; they were the sort of words Batman might speak in a comic book. But Oliver had to admit, it still felt good to say them.

5 Kai Zhou

July 1, 2029 (eight months earlier). Washington, D.C.

Kai pried the flagstone loose from the walk that meandered through the church’s walled garden. The small, square key was underneath, just as the Luyten said it would be. He plucked it from its hiding spot, headed for the back door of the church.

Not there. Back the other way. Walk along the wall.

Kai did as he was told, his mouth watering with anticipation despite the wild guilt he felt. A church.

There was a small graveyard set inside a low, ornamental fence. Ivy covered the fence and crawled along the ground.

There. Behind the statue.

Behind a mold-stricken statue of an angel with spread wings was a raised concrete circle with a steel cover. Looking around first, though it was probably unnecessary, Kai approached the cover, inserted the key into the hole, and pulled the hatch open.

The cover lifted fairly easily, revealing a dark hole, a ladder leading down. Kai climbed to the bottom, a dozen or so feet below the ground. He was surrounded by shelves of food—dried, packaged meals, like the ones soldiers ate.

Whose are these? he thought. It was confusing, to speak to it without speaking. There was no line dividing what he wanted to say and what he just wanted to think.

The pastor. Speak out loud if you prefer, but quietly.

“Why is this food down here?” Kai whispered, relieved.

Because he doesn’t want to share it. Take six.

Hands shaking with anticipation, Kai grabbed the meals, struggled up the ladder one-handed, and headed for the gate.

Not yet. Go toward the church.

“I don’t want to get caught,” Kai whispered.

I know where everyone is. Go.

Kai went. The voice directed him along the back of the church, to a dirt- and leaf-covered black steel grate in the ground along the back wall.

Open the grate. Drop four down.

Drop them. Why on Earth would he do that?

Realization swept over him with an icy chill. It was down there. Hiding. Probably hurt.

I’m in trouble, just like you. I’m alone and afraid, just like you.

It was difficult for Kai to imagine one of those big, ugly monsters being afraid, and lonely. “Why are you lonely? I thought you could talk to other Luyten in your head.”

They’re all too far away.

They had an eight-mile range. Kai remembered hearing that.

That’s right.

As Kai knocked on the door, he told himself he had no choice but to do what the Luyten told him. It hadn’t made any threats, but it was huge, and powerful, and he was just a kid.

A woman answered the door. She was Asian like him, a streak of gray running through her long hair. More important, the aroma of fish and rice wafted through the door from a nearby kitchen.

Her name is Mrs. Boey. Tell her you have a message from her daughter. Valerie.

“Mrs. Boey? My name is Kai. I have a message from your daughter Valerie.”

The woman’s expression transformed. “You heard from my baby?” She opened the door, put a hand on Kai’s shoulder, and led him inside.

Valerie is outside Richmond, alive. She helped you escape. She asked you to tell her mother she’s sorry about the argument they had before she left.

Is Valerie alive, Kai thought.

Probably not.

With a crippling knot of guilt in his stomach, Kai told Mrs. Boey her daughter was alive and well, as a dozen people sitting elbow to elbow around a kitchen table looked on. Food was already on the table, and after Kai delivered his news the woman had little choice but to invite him to share their meal. The food was delicious; Kai ate voraciously, every chopstick-full sticking in his throat on the way down as he watched Mrs. Boey across the table, smiling, probably eating more easily than she had at any time since her sixteen-year-old daughter left to battle the Luyten four months earlier.

He should tell them, he thought. He should blurt out that there was a Luyten hiding under the church. Once it was out, there was nothing it could do. It was the enemy. It and its kind wanted to wipe out everyone on Earth, and they were succeeding—

If you tell her, you’ll go back to being cold and hungry.

Kai didn’t want to be hungry again. More than that, he didn’t want to be alone in the dark, stumbling through places where there might be dead bodies.

“Do you have family nearby?” an old, bent woman asked Kai.

“No. I have an aunt and uncle in Connecticut, but it’s too far.”

I’m not a soldier. I haven’t killed anyone.

It was not the first time the Luyten had told him this.

It claimed it had been shot out of the sky, part of a small contingent of Luyten on a night reconnaissance mission over D.C. The military knew a Luyten had been shot down in the area and they were hunting for it. For Five, he reminded himself. It had asked Kai to call it Five. It must have been injured in the crash, but it wouldn’t say.

After the meal, Mrs. Boey said, “I’d ask you to stay, but as you can see, there’s just no room.” She gestured toward her relatives, most of them young or very old.

Kai told her he understood, and followed her to the door carrying the leftover food she had given him.

As he headed toward the back of the church, Kai wondered if Five had purposely chosen a house where Kai was likely to get food, but not a place to sleep. If someone took Kai in, he would have less incentive to protect Five’s secret.

Yes, Five said. I don’t want to die. I’m just as afraid to die as you are.

“Why are you doing this to us?” Kai whispered, although there was no one to hear him—the street was cold and empty, the orange glowlights along the sidewalk his only guide in the darkness. “Can’t we share the world? Why do you have to have it all to yourselves?”

We would have done that gladly, but we know your minds. Do you really think your kind would have taken us in as refugees? They won’t even take you in.

Kai pulled open the grate leading to the church’s basement and dropped the food Mrs. Boey had given him into the darkness.

Wake up. Five’s message was deafening, like an alarm set too loud.

Kai lifted himself from the cold concrete, looked groggily into the street, where mist crawled close to the pavement. “It’s the middle of the night.”

Soldiers are coming with spotlights. Hide in the bathroom.

Still half asleep, Kai gathered the towels and blanket he’d pilfered from an apartment using a key hidden by its owner and hurried into the bathroom.

A few minutes later Kai heard the purr of engines. Two all-terrain crawlers rolled past on fat tires, flashing spotlights as soldiers scanned the buildings with night glasses. Kai pulled the bathroom door closed.

“How do they know where to find you?”

My heat signature. I have a baffle, but I can’t run it all the time.

“Why not?”

The crawlers purred away. Kai wondered if Five was debating whether to trust him. He wondered if it should.

I trust you now. But after I leave, or I’m killed, you’ll tell your people what you’ve learned about me. If I’m gone, probably they won’t believe you. But if I’m caught, they will.

Kai immediately thought to lie, to claim he wouldn’t tell. Then he caught himself, remembered lying was impossible.

Talking to you was a betrayal of my kind. I feel deeply ashamed. I was alone, in terrible pain. I was afraid to die.

Was Kai betraying his kind, by keeping Five’s secret? He was sure he was, although it wasn’t as if Five was a threat, hiding under a church, cut off.

To answer your question, I’m almost out of power. That’s why I can’t run the baffle all of the time.

Kai had gotten accustomed to the sensation of Five speaking in his head. It wasn’t as unpleasant as it had been at first. It reminded him of how he’d grown to like hot sauce on his chili. The first time he’d tried hot sauce it had been awful, burning his tongue and lips, making his eyes water. But the stinging had grown pleasant.

When he pictured where the voice was coming from, though, when he pictured that giant starfish crawling around under the church…

That made him dizzy with fear.

“I don’t understand why you don’t just sneak out of the city, if you know where everyone is.”

I am large, and a novel sight. I can’t evade the eyes of every person who might look out their window.

That made sense. “So how will you ever escape?”

Unless one of my kind enters my range so I can contact it, I won’t.

It was morning when Five woke him again.

They’re coming back. More of them. Many more.

Kai peered out at the rectangle of street visible from his sleeping spot, at the passing vehicles, the faded pod-style apartment complex across the street. “Will they find you?”

Yes, probably. You should get away now, before they come. Otherwise they might question you about what you’ve seen or heard. Their eye gear is equipped with vocal stress-detectors, so they’ll know you’re lying. I don’t want you to get in trouble because you were kind to me. Go now, through the back.

Kai gathered up his bedding and ran out through the back side of the bay, into waist-high milkweeds that choked the space between the garage and the building behind it.

The telltale whisper of an ultralight copter grew louder as Kai pushed onto the sidewalk and turned right, up a hill.

You should feel proud, Five said. We should both feel proud. We were kind to each other, despite everything. I’m not ashamed to call you my friend.

A line of army crawlers appeared at the top of the hill, the crawlers’ legs tucked, their big wheels spinning.

Kai watched them pass, his emotions in a tangle. He would miss Five, would miss its company at night, but he was also relieved to be getting away. He wanted to be free of the terrible guilt that he was betraying his people, although he would probably always feel guilty for consorting with the enemy. What would people think, if they found out?

Kai heard shouted orders. A moment later a squad of soldiers trotted around the corner—men and women, young and old, some in brick-red camo fatigues, others in torn jeans and soiled T-shirts. Head down, he pressed close to the buildings to let them pass. They were young, but not kids. Soldiers in their prime. There weren’t many of them left.

What if a soldier asked him directly if he’d seen or heard anything? Would he lie to protect Five? Five probably knew the answer to that better than Kai did.

Maybe that was why Five told Kai to leave: not out of concern for him, but because Five was afraid Kai would betray it.

That’s not true. I’m trying to protect you.

Down the hill, Kai could see the church, had a partial view beyond the fence, into the garden. Two soldiers were in there, but they didn’t seem to know where to look. Five’s baffle must still be working.

I’m using the last of my power reserve to operate it. It won’t last much longer, but maybe long enough.

One of the soldiers was a woman. Asian. It could be that woman’s daughter. What was her name? Valerie. If those two soldiers went into the basement, would Five kill them?

I’m not a soldier. I’m not a fighter.

Kai would, if they were Luyten, coming to kill him. In an instant.

He took a step toward the church, then hesitated. What should he do? Both choices seemed wrong.

He closed his eyes, pictured his mom. What would she want him to do? What she would want was what he should do. You don’t throw away friends, she’d told him once. But wasn’t it wrong to be friends with a Luyten in the first place? They’d killed her, and Dad, too.

Opening his eyes, he headed down the hill, toward the church.

Kai, please. Don’t. I just want to go home. I just want to see my mother. Now that I know you, I could never help them.

As Kai pushed through the gate, the soldiers turned, their weapons pointed at the ground.

“Go back to your home—” the Asian soldier started to say.

“It’s in there,” Kai said, pointing at the church. “In the cellar.”

Both soldiers were suddenly wide-eyed alert.

They’ll kill me. Please. They’ll burn me.

“You saw it?” the other soldier, a black man, said.

“I—” Kai struggled to describe how he knew. “I heard it.”

We’re friends.

The Asian soldier was babbling into her comm, repeating what Kai had just said, then giving their location.

“Promise you won’t hurt it. It’s just a scout—not a soldier.”

The two soldiers gawked at Kai like he was nuts, as a dozen others stormed through the gate.

“The cellar?” a gray-haired soldier called as they ran by.

“That’s what the kid says.”

They surrounded the hatch, one of them holding a flamethrower.

They’re coming. I’m scared, Kai. I’m so scared.

Kai bolted toward the church. “Don’t hurt it.”

“Hang on,” the Asian soldier shouted at the others. They waited as she turned to Kai, one hand on her wrist comm. “Kid, I need the truth from you—this is very serious. Are you saying the starfish actually spoke to you? Or do you mean you heard it moving around down there?”

Kai looked her right in the eye. “It spoke to me.”

After a short interchange on her comm, she ran over to the others, huddled around the hatch. “We’re taking it alive.”

“Holy shit,” a tall, brown-skinned soldier said.

“CIA is sending people to help.”

The Asian soldier sidled over to Kai, wrapped a hand over his shoulder. “Stick around. They want to talk to you.” She must have seen that this scared Kai, because she added, “Don’t worry, they’ll take good care of you. There’s lots of food there.”

6 Oliver Bowen

July 2, 2029. Washington, D.C.

His shoes echoing in the big, dank corridor, Oliver picked up his pace. He was late, and he couldn’t easily explain why that was, because the truth was he’d been on the toilet, dealing with anxiety-induced diarrhea.

It was one thing to be drafted into the CIA, given the circumstances, but this—this was too much. Maybe his background made him the perfect candidate to attempt communication with this Luyten, but his disposition did not. He was not an action guy; he was a behind-the-scenes guy. He should be in Research, advising someone on how to approach the situation; he should not be approaching the situation himself. But so many of the action guys and gals were dead, and Oliver had to admit, on paper he seemed ideal for this assignment. He knew more about how to bend someone to one’s will with words and gestures, more about the use of language to gain power, than anyone alive. He just wasn’t sure how well that knowledge translated into action.

He watched the room numbers pass on the big steel doors, but it turned out that wasn’t necessary. Ariel Aardsma, his supervisor, was waiting in the doorway of the room he was looking for, her arm across the shoulders of Kai, the boy who’d talked to a Luyten. Assuming he was telling the truth.

Kai was big for a thirteen-year-old, but with a baby face, and long-lashed eyes. He was staring into the room where the Luyten was being held.

“Dr. Bowen,” Ariel said. “This is Kai.”

The boy went on staring into the room. As Oliver reached them, he peered inside the room as well.

The Luyten was unconscious in its cell. It was mustard yellow, its body housed in a thick, ornately ridged exoskeleton. Doctors had sealed the massive wound, injected binders to facilitate healing. Oliver eyed the stump, trying to imagine what it had looked like when the soldiers went under the church to get it. They’d said that after losing the limb in the crash, the thing had sutured the gaping wound closed with electrical wiring it pilfered from an air-conditioning unit under there.

Being so close to it was unnerving.

“Kai has been very helpful,” Ariel said. “We’ve had a good talk with him.”

Oliver had watched the interview remotely the day before. Incredible as it was, the boy’s story checked out in every detail. The woman’s corpse in the bus repair depot, the key under the flagstone, the hidden cache of food, his intimate knowledge of the local woman’s relationship with her daughter; all of it had checked out.

Beyond the facts, Kai looked scared to death. He kept swallowing, and he was blinking rapidly, his hands dangling limply at his sides. This was not a kid who craved the attention that came with making wild claims about telepathic conversations with Luyten. Under ordinary circumstances Oliver would have been repulsed by the idea of subjecting this child to any more close contact with the Luyten, but these circumstances were as far from ordinary as they got.

Ariel led them into the room, closer to the Luyten. Kai was staring at it like it might leap from the cell and tear him apart at any moment.

“It can’t reach us. Don’t worry.” It had to have been a kid. Oliver was clueless when it came to kids. He didn’t know how to talk to them, was uncomfortable in their presence. When his sister visited with her children, Oliver always found urgent work he needed to do.

“Well,” Ariel said, “I’ll leave you to it.”

Evidently Kai shared Oliver’s wish that Ariel stay, because he watched her leave with an expression bordering on panic. Ariel and others would be monitoring remotely, but Oliver was on his own when it came to getting Kai to relax.

“Why don’t you sit down?” Oliver gestured toward a chair.

Kai sat on the edge of the chair like a kid in the principal’s office. The room didn’t help things; it was bland and oppressive, windowless, nothing on the walls but an American flag in a wooden frame, and the ubiquitous population tracker, doggedly ticking back the dwindling world population.

“So it looks like we’re going to be working together.”

Kai swallowed, nodded.

“Maybe we should discuss procedure and strategies?” When Kai didn’t respond, Oliver forged ahead. “Here’s what I think might work best: Once the prisoner regains consciousness, repeat anything it says to you out loud. This way we won’t have to rely on your memory later. It’s important that you repeat word for word…” The boy was looking past Oliver, his lips forming a tight O.

Oliver looked over his shoulder. The Luyten’s eyes were open. It was watching them.

“Is it speaking to you?”

Kai shook his head.

Oliver stood, inched closer to the Luyten. “Say something to it. Out loud, like you did when it was under the church.”

It was clear Kai had no interest in speaking to the Luyten. He licked his lips and said, “I just wanted to get you help. You were hurt.”

Oliver studied the Luyten, then turned and watched Kai. “Anything?”

“No.”

Feeling simultaneously foolish and very uneasy, Oliver moved within a few feet of the flimsy-looking mesh that separated them from the creature. “My name is Oliver Bowen. I understand that you can communicate with us. Are you in pain? If you are, I may be able to arrange relief.”

He had no idea if the medical people had administered a painkiller. Probably not—they knew next to nothing about the creature’s physiology. He’d made the offer more as a generic gesture of concern.

Oliver turned and looked at Kai. “Anything?”

Kai shrugged. “No.”

There were a few possibilities. The Luyten might be staying silent because Kai could no longer help it, or because it knew they wanted to communicate with it to seek some advantage in the war. It was also possible the Luyten was communicating with Kai, and Kai was lying because he was on its side. Oliver thought that was unlikely.

“What’s that?” Kai asked, eyeing the population counter on the wall. At the moment it read three billion, seven hundred thousand and change. The numbers went on rolling backward, counting down.

“It’s an estimate of the world population.” The number shrunk by several hundred in the time it took Oliver to answer.

Kai studied it. “How does it know when someone dies?”

“It’s just an estimate, based on updates people here receive.”

Kai pressed his tongue to his upper lip, stared at the readout, mesmerized.

“Why don’t you try talking to the Luyten again?”

“He told me to call him Five.”

The idea of it having a name unsettled Oliver in a way he couldn’t articulate.

“It’s a he?” Oliver asked.

Kai shrugged. “I don’t know. It just seems like a he.”

“Why Five?”

Looking sheepish, Kai shrugged yet again. “I don’t know.”

Luyten tended to congregate in groups of three, when they congregated at all, so Five probably didn’t correspond to his place in a group or family, although it might. It was a prime number, but Oliver couldn’t see how that mattered. Maybe it wasn’t his real name, only one he’d chosen for Kai to use.

“Does the number five hold any special meaning for you?” he asked Kai. “Your lucky number? Your birthday?”

Kai couldn’t take his eyes off the Luyten. “Not really.”

Oliver stared at the Luyten. Looking at it was unpleasant, not only because it was large and terrifying, but because of the wound, the ragged stump.

Oliver folded his arms across his chest, leaned closer, counted its limbs.

Five. There had been six, now there were five.

It was a tiny insight, but it provided a glimpse into how the creature thought.

“Why don’t you try talking to Five again?” he said.

“What should I say?”

“I don’t know. Anything.” Oliver waved his hands, trying to come up with something. Topics of conversation were not his strong suit. “What did you talk about before?”

Kai shrugged. “Where to find food, how scared we were.”

That wouldn’t work now. What else could you talk about with an alien? Maybe they should try to win it over, with pleasant topics. Small talk. Fall back on standard CIA interrogation procedures.

“Tell it about your hobbies.”

“My hobbies?” Kai said it as if he’d never heard the word before.

“Things you liked to do. Before, you know, you couldn’t do them anymore.”

Haltingly, Kai began to talk about a water park near his house, where you surfed up a stationary fifteen-foot wave.

The Luyten remained silent.

7 Lila Easterlin

July 2, 2029. Savannah, Georgia.

It had once been an indoor flea market. The battered sign by the road, hanging from a rusted pole, read KELLER’S FLEA MARKET. It sported an image of a cartoon flea. Now it was an enormous morgue, a body factory. Lila hated the place, dreaded going in there, but her father was too busy to bring the containers out, and there were too many for Alfe to carry on his own. Plus, Alfe didn’t look any more eager to go inside than Lila.

“You ready?” He was already holding the balled-up T-shirt close to his mouth and nose.

“Shit. I’m never ready to go in there.” She stepped out of the two-seat open buggy she’d salvaged and converted to solar.

Inside, she tried to keep her eyes on the concrete floor, three feet in front of her, but her peripheral vision picked up a bit of the horror show that was all around, and her imagination filled in the rest. The bodies were on tables, on the ground, some literally stacked in piles along the walls. Many were badly burned; most had gaping wounds. The ones who’d been killed by the Luyten’s lightning gun had the soles of their feet blown out.

Even if she were wearing blinders, the rancid stench would have made the place intolerable. Even with the T-shirt covering her mouth and nose, she held her breath as long as possible before taking a quick, gasping breath and holding it again.

Lila wondered if you ever got used to the smell and sight of bodies. Maybe she had, to a degree, only so gradually she hadn’t noticed. Wouldn’t the sight of hundreds of bodies have sent her screaming and gibbering three years ago? Probably.

She spotted her dad, wearing a transparent mask that covered his whole head. He was collecting DNA samples, moving from body to body with a handheld DNA harvester. He spotted Lila and Alfe a moment later, and pointed toward the back of the immense, low-ceilinged space. Lila waved with her free hand, hurried to the back where she found half a dozen battered, filthy red gasoline canisters.

It was difficult to carry three canisters each while keeping the T-shirts in place, but they managed. As soon as they were outside, Lila let the arm holding the T-shirt and one canister drop to her side. She exhaled heavily, trying to drain every ounce of the rotten air out of her lungs before inhaling the relatively fresh outside air.

“I don’t know how he does it,” Alfe said, breathless, hands on his knees. “It’s like being in a pit of hell.”

Lila nodded as she turned and headed for the buggy. The sooner they got downtown, the sooner this hellish errand would be finished. Discovering the taps were not working that morning had shaken Lila, for surely if there was one thing you could count on, it was water.

For Lila, downtown Savannah had always been an oasis, an ancient, beautiful city of manicured squares and elegant architecture. Today it felt like a moldy, menacing place. All around people were running, shouting. There was a heavy police presence, but the police looked as exhausted and scared as everyone else.

Lila turned right onto Bull Street, anxiety rendering her unable to glean even the slightest satisfaction from the way the buggy she’d rebuilt and retrofitted to run on solar power was performing. Ahead, Chippewa Square was all but empty; there was no water distribution going on like they’d heard on the radio.

She pulled over, looked around for some indication of what might have happened.

Someone whistled. Lila spotted an old woman sitting on a porch.

“You looking for water?” the woman called. She was wearing a pink kerchief tied under her chin, and shelling pecans by hand on a rickety card table.

“Yes!” Alfe shouted.

“They moved it to River Street.” The woman pointed east.

Waving thanks, Lila headed toward River Street, wondering why they’d changed the location at the last minute without leaving word at the original site. Things were so uncertain. In the past it was always easy to know who was in charge, where to go for what.

In the seat beside her, Alfe watched the houses roll past while he chewed on his cuticle. In two weeks he’d be sixteen, and he’d go off to fight. Lila would have envied him, would have snuck off and joined him, if going to fight wasn’t synonymous with going to die. She’d be going soon enough—ten months, assuming she was alive ten months from now.

She caught movement out of the corner of her eye and flinched, adrenaline washing through her. It was only a tour bus, likely pressed into service to transport refugees. They wouldn’t suddenly be marauding through downtown, she reminded herself. There would be warning, the emergency siren at least. Sharpshooters were stationed all around the city; high-def cameras that could focus on objects a mile away were watching in every direction. That there were more of them outside the city than usual didn’t mean they were coming.

None of that was the least bit comforting. And if they came, they would kill everyone, except maybe the children.

“You okay?” Alfe asked.

“No.”

“Yeah, me neither.” He studied his finger, chewed at his cuticle a little more before adding, “I feel like we’re all in a room, and the walls move in a little more each day.”

“I’ve never had so many nightmares. I don’t want to sleep, but being awake is just as bad.”

Pedestrian traffic was growing heavier. Many of them were pushing handcarts, or carrying pails or water skins. Ahead, the crowd was tightly packed. Lila parked on the edge of the cobbled sidewalk, and they followed the crowd down the rough cobblestone to River Street. Between the brick buildings that used to house bars and gift shops for the tourists she caught glimpses of the Savannah River, where hundreds of enormous slate-blue fins jutted from the black water—markers for the portable hydroelectric power generators that filled the river. Along with parking lots filled with solar panels and a few hastily built rooftop windmill farms, it was all that staved off total blackout conditions.

There was no line, only a throng pressing toward an elevated scaffold where half a dozen people were distributing water through spigots that resembled gas pumps. A truck carrying a filtration system was drawing the water out of the river.

There was a rumor circulating that the pumps to Savannah’s houses were working fine, but Luyten had contaminated the city’s underground water supply, so the water had been turned off. It was difficult to separate the rumors from truth.

The crowd swelled, and soon Lila and Alfe were surrounded by people. It was an unpleasant feeling; those on the outside tended to push forward, eager to get closer, as if the river might run dry before they reached the front.

“There should be police here, getting everyone into lines,” Lila said.

“I guess they’re all on the perimeter.”

The honk of a tugboat made Lila’s heart nearly burst through her chest. Several others glanced toward the boat as well, hypersensitized to anything that resembled the emergency siren.

There were shouts from the front of the crowd, jostling that rippled backward until a boot heel sunk down on Lila’s toes. Pain coursed through her foot; she was nearly knocked down as people pushed backward.

“Where? Where is it?” someone closer to the river shouted.

“They’re coming, oh God, they’re coming.”

Suddenly people were stampeding. Jostled and pummeled, Lila turned and struggled to stay on her feet. Someone had spotted Luyten. They must have come down the river, maybe underwater.

She heard Alfe calling her name, spotted him ten feet away, weaving in the tightly packed mob. He shouted something, but she couldn’t make it out.

The crowd carried her across River Street, up a steep cobbled road. When they reached Bay Street there was more space to move. Her heart racing, Lila jogged up Whitaker, watching for starfish, expecting one to appear behind her at any moment.

“Lila!”

It was Alfe, pressed against the First Citizens Bank building up ahead. Lila ran to join him.

“We have to hide,” she said.

“That won’t do any good. They’ll know right where we are.”

She grabbed Alfe’s wrist. “Remember when you saw them by that lake? They’ll know, but two people aren’t worth chasing.”

They ran into the bank. It was deserted, save for three or four employees, one of them armed, and an elderly couple. It was less a bank now, more an exchange center, where people swapped gold, gems, ammo, anything that still had value.

“They’re coming!” Alfe shouted.

“Why didn’t the siren sound?” a woman in a blue and white business tunic asked. She looked to be in charge, was beautiful in a way that made Lila think of mannequins.

“I don’t know,” Alfe said.

Outside, someone shrieked. Crowds were still running past.

Lila looked around for a place to hide. Somewhere tight, where Luyten couldn’t easily reach. An inner room, or better yet, if there were stairs leading down into a cellar… or a vault.

“Does this bank have a vault?” she asked.

“A vault?” the beautiful woman repeated.

“Come on,” Lila said. Alfe followed her behind the row of teller stations, down a wide hallway. It was an old bank—it might have one of those vaults full of safe-deposit boxes.

“There,” Alfe said. She’d been looking for a big, round opening, but it was a narrow, heavy door.

They waited by the entrance to see if the others were following. Two of the employees appeared, the old couple a dozen steps behind them. A moment later, the woman in charge followed.

“It won’t lock,” Alfe said, pointing at the edge of the heavy door, where the bolts had been soldered in place. They pulled the door closed as far as it would go. Despite lacking a lock, being in the small steel room in near darkness gave Lila a sense of safety. She and Alfe sat on the floor with their backs against the far wall. The others sat as well.

They waited, listening.

“Anya, shouldn’t we run?” the armed employee, a muscular guy in his thirties, asked the woman in charge. “We can’t hide from them.”

“They can’t hunt down every person in every building,” Lila answered. “They kill people as fast as they can, so they’ll go after crowds in the streets.” If one of the starfish did want to get to them, Lila had no doubt it could. She’d seen them squeeze through smaller spaces than the double doors of this bank.

“But if they’re here, they won’t ever leave. Once they take over the city they can take their time coming to get us.”

Lila hadn’t thought beyond the next few hours. “Once they move past us, I guess we head out of the city.”

“To where?” the old man asked, trying to control the panic in his voice.

There was a crash, out in the lobby. It sounded like a table of trade goods being upended.

“Shh,” Alfe hissed.

All of them looked toward the door. It knew where they were. In a few seconds that door would fly open, and it would kill them all. Lila pulled her legs to her chest. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Alfe’s Adam’s apple bob.

Muffled shouts erupted outside. The voices sounded surprised, alarmed, angry. Not terrified. They didn’t sound like people being killed.

“What’s going on?” Anya asked, her voice low.

“Maybe it’s more people looking to hide.” Alfe got to his feet, opened the door wider. “This way,” he called.

“Who is that?” It was a woman’s voice. Footsteps clicked down the hall. Alfe stepped back as the door swung open to reveal a small, pudgy woman in her fifties or sixties. “Anya? Carl? What are you doing in here?”

“The starfish are coming,” Anya said.

The woman in the doorway shook her head. “It was a false alarm. Evidently porpoises strayed too far up the river, and someone thought they were a starfish.”

Lila let out a burst of laughter. Porpoises? That stampede was started by some nearsighted putz who’d spotted porpoises.

“The looters were real, though. I walked right in on them—they ran off with armloads of automatic rifles.”

Lila felt incredibly foolish, but compared to what she’d been feeling a few minutes earlier, foolish felt good.

8 Oliver Bowen

July 12, 2029. Washington, D.C.

Oliver never tired of looking at her, at her dark eyes, the perfect slope of her jawline. That she was his wife never ceased to astonish him.

Noticing his attention, Vanessa glanced at him. “What?”

“Nothing. I’m just looking at you.”

She smiled, dimples forming on either cheek. “Cut it out; it makes me feel self-conscious, like I’ve got something sticking out of my nose.”

Oliver turned, watched the buildings pass outside his window. As they passed through the gate to the CIA compound, Vanessa said, “We did it.”

Oliver tried to think of what they’d done. “What did we do?”

She pulled over to the curb in front of his building. “We went a whole morning without once mentioning the war.” She held up her palm; Oliver gave her a high-five.

“That’s right. I forgot all about it.” They’d made the pact the night before; by morning it had gone out of his head, buried by a thousand thoughts and worries.

“In that case, you’re lucky.”

“What was the penalty again?” Oliver asked.

“Lip-synch to a song of my choice. In my underwear.”

“That’s right.” Oliver laughed. He leaned in, kissed her goodbye.

“It’s nice, getting a break from it. Almost like taking a vacation to the past, before it started.”

“It is. We should do it every morning.” They needed to come up with ways to hang on to at least some semblance of normal life.

“You’re on your own for dinner,” Vanessa said as he opened the door.

“Oh?”

Vanessa looked away, over his shoulder. “Paul and I are going to grab a bite after work.”

A surge of adrenaline hit him. “Why can’t you grab a bite at lunch?”

“Because then we’d have to hurry.” That familiar defensive tone leaked into her voice. “It’s not like I go out with friends often.”

Oliver clutched the door, wanting to think of something to say that would change her mind, but came up blank. “It’s not your going out at night that bothers me; it’s your going out with Paul. If he’s just a friend, why can’t I come?” Paul was a charming, handsome, muscular friend, the sort of man Vanessa would look very natural standing beside.

Vanessa leaned back in her seat, closed her eyes, and sighed heavily. “Can we not have this argument now? Why can’t you trust me? Have I ever given you the slightest reason not to?”

“No.” His voice was low, his tone leaking the defeat he felt. “It’s just that—” What could he say, that he hadn’t already said a hundred times?

“I’ll see you when you get home.” Oliver turned and headed for the gate as Vanessa pulled off.

Her friendship with Paul was the one thing their marriage couldn’t seem to get past. Oliver wanted to trust her, and he did with anyone else, but she and Paul seemed to share an intimacy that Vanessa didn’t share with Oliver. One of these days he was afraid she’d realize she was with the wrong man, and he’d lose her. He didn’t think he could handle this without her; she brought out the best in him, gave him courage he wouldn’t otherwise possess.

The Luyten was exactly where he’d left it, lying flat in the center of the cell, looking remarkably like a beached starfish.

“Good morning.” There were five angry red abrasions on the Luyten’s side, just under one of its limbs. Oliver squinted, trying to see them better.

They were almost perfect circles, like burns. Oliver turned, waved the room’s comm awake, and connected to Ariel.

“Do you know how the Luyten sustained these injuries?”

“Yes, we took it through a session of enhanced interrogation last night.”

The answer threw Oliver. He’d half suspected that was the case, but Ariel’s matter-of-fact tone surprised him.

“All right. Can you tell me what happened?”

“Nothing,” Ariel said. “It was in obvious pain, but it didn’t communicate with anyone. We kept Kai in an adjoining room, in case it would only speak to him.”

It surely wasn’t the first time they’d tortured a Luyten. Oliver went back to the cage. “Why did you choose that spot on its body?”

“Autopsies show there’s a high concentration of nerve endings there.”

Oliver nodded, trying to act as blasé about it as Ariel clearly was, though the thought of torturing the creature made him queasy.

“Hi.” Kai was hovering in the doorway.

“Come on in. You doing all right?”

Kai nodded vaguely, looking uncomfortable. Oliver tried to think of something to say to put the kid at ease, one of those snappy things adults said that made kids laugh, let them know you weren’t so different from them. His mind was a fat blank.

He went back to studying the Luyten. He wasn’t surprised that torture was ineffective. They were tough bastards. Given their telepathic nature, Oliver guessed being cut off from communing with its own kind was more distressing than electric shocks. Maybe it drew some sustenance from tapping into human minds, the way an amphetamine addict might draw meager sustenance from a cup of coffee.

“Kai, when you and Five were communicating, did he seem, I don’t know, like he was glad to have you to talk to?”

Kai bit his bottom lip. “I guess. He told me we had a lot in common.”

“What did you have in common?”

Kai scrunched his face, thinking. “I don’t remember the exact words, but it was how we were both scared and lonely. Or something like that.”

“You haven’t mentioned that before.”

Kai looked at the floor. “I forgot about it until you asked. Sorry.”

“No, not a problem. Thank you for remembering.”

“You’re welcome.”

If loneliness was unpleasant for it, what would happen if it was completely isolated? If the Luyten reached out to Kai not only as a means of getting food, but for companionship, it meant it could fulfill some of its social needs through contact with humans.

“I think I may know a way to torture it for real,” Oliver said.

9 Lila Easterlin

July 16, 2029. Savannah, Georgia.

Lila was in the backyard working on the solar array she hoped would soon power their house, when the emergency siren sounded.

It was a mournful sound, a giant dog who’d been put out on a cold night. Her terror found another gear, one she hadn’t known existed. There were no drills; if the siren was sounding, the Luyten were coming.

She raced inside to find out what was going on.

Her father met her inside the door, holding both of their emergency evacuation bags.

“Where are we going?” Lila asked.

Her father handed Lila her bag. “Atlanta.”

“Atlanta?” Atlanta was hundreds of miles from Savannah, all of it starfish territory. He might as well have said Mars.

Dad headed toward the front door. “They’re coming, Lila. Savannah is going to fall. Atlanta’s the closest place that’s safe.”

That couldn’t be right. “There’s nowhere between here and there?”

“No. There’s nothing left but the cities. Let’s go.”

“Can I—” She was going to ask if she could grab a few more things before they left, since they were never coming back, but the look on his face silenced her. He was terrified, his eyes wild.

She climbed into their Toyota, her knees shaking as her father set the gearshift to emergency, overriding the governor. They sped off.

Interstate 16 was packed, with everything from bicycles to militarized land yachts pressed into the six lanes, crawling along. They’d been on the road four or five hours and had gone maybe fifty miles.

“It’s going to take days to get there at this rate.” Lila peered out the window at a family of four perched on a scooter, bulky packs strapped across their shoulders, even the kids. “How many miles is it to Atlanta?”

Up ahead, a Luyten stepped out of the trees.

Lila screamed, the sound bursting from her. The Luyten crossed the high grass along the side of the highway, stopped on the shoulder, and pointed the blue-green, mushroom-shaped head of a heater at the nearest vehicles.

Through the sealed window Lila heard shrieks of agony as vehicles cooked, the exteriors warping and bubbling, black smoke pouring out at the seams. The air filled with the stench of burning rubber and steel.

The Luyten swung the heater toward the next cars in line, and the next. Paralyzed, her breath caught like a knot in her throat, Lila stared as the vehicles melted.

“Run,” Dad howled.

His voice broke the spell. Lila burst from the passenger door and instinctively headed across the highway, in the direction everyone else was running.

“This way,” Dad called.

Lila stopped and changed directions, following Dad toward the nearer trees, moving closer to the Luyten instead of away. Shoulders knotted, she waited for the Luyten to turn the heater on them, but it went on down the row, focusing on the vehicles, but catching most of the fleeing people as well. The people caught in the path of the heater blackened in seconds, their clothes disintegrating without a flame as they dropped to the ground, writhing and twitching, then going still.

Bursting into the tree line, Lila was immediately tangled in thick brush. She dropped to her belly and crawled, squeezing beneath vines and clinging branches.

A few dozen feet to her left, branches snapped and foliage shuddered as a second Luyten pushed toward the highway. Lila froze, head down. It knew she was there—she knew that—but the urge to hide was too powerful to resist. She waited, praying for it not to pause and turn toward her pathetic hiding place.

It crashed out of the trees, toward the cacophony of screams and the stench of burned bodies.

Lila’s father called her name, his tone low and urgent. She answered, crawled toward him until she was in his arms, his whiskers scraping her cheek.

She followed him as he wove through the woods, finally breaking through into the back lawn of a housing complex. The grass was waist-high, the complex deserted. No one had lived there for a year, at least. They were in Luyten-controlled territory.

They sprinted around to the side window of one of the units; Dad pulled a flagstone off the top of a low landscaping wall and used it to smash out the window.

In the distance, Lila still heard screaming.

Her father shimmied inside, then reached out and helped Lila.

“Look for a vehicle password,” Dad said, out of breath. “People always write them down somewhere. Check in drawers, the insides of kitchen and bathroom cabinets, in notebooks.” He headed into the kitchen.

Lila wanted to find a heavy blanket and curl into a ball beneath it, try to replace the images of those people dying with something, anything else. Instead she headed upstairs to search for a code. She dug through the dresser, tossing some woman’s socks and panties on the floor, sweeping her costume jewelry off the bathroom counter.

After ten minutes they gave up and went to try another unit. Across the street, Lila spotted a door standing partially open.

“Dad.” She pointed at the door.

“That makes things easier,” Dad said. They headed across the street.

Lila stood behind him as he pushed the door open.

The living room walls were draped in thick layers of what looked like brightly colored fabric. Heavier semi-stiff fabric bisected the space, cutting it into a number of chambers at forty-five-degree angles. It was strange, beautiful, and absolutely awful, all rolled together. There was no doubt about what it was.

Her father took two stiff steps backward, out of the doorway. He was pale, the corners of his mouth twitching.

“If it was in there, it would have gotten us by now,” Lila whispered, aware of how stupid it was to whisper. If you were close enough to a Luyten that it could hear you, it had known about you for quite some time. Whispering wasn’t going to save you.

They headed toward the far end of the complex to continue their search, as Lila digested what she’d just learned. The starfish were living in houses. If the starfish won, they’d fill neighborhoods and cities, as if they’d built it all themselves and had been there all along.

“I didn’t know they lived in our houses. I thought they lived underground, in those tunnel systems they dig.”

Dad nodded. “I did, too. I’m sure the people in charge know how they live.” He shook his head in sad wonder. “We used to know everything as soon as it happened. Now everything outside our neighborhood is a mystery.”

Lila’s attention was drawn toward a pile of parts squeezed between two of the units. Some were engine parts; the biggest pieces—leaned up against the side of one unit—looked like wings.

Lila stopped short. “Hold on.” She trotted over.

It was a solar ultralight—not much more than an adult toy, but it seated two.

“If we could put this together, we could fly it to Atlanta.”

Silently, her father examined it.

“I can do it,” Lila said. “I can build this.”

10 Oliver Bowen

July 16, 2029. Washington, D.C.

As the elevator descended, Oliver felt a tingling in his belly, like he’d just hit the apex on a roller coaster and was headed over the drop. It went on and on. It was hard to conceive that he was dropping eight miles below ground. All that stone and earth pressing down on him. Oliver wasn’t particularly claustrophobic, but it was distressing nonetheless.

The elevator opened onto a conference room, with a long, thin black table and a dozen chairs. Framed pictures of President Wood and Premier Abani Chandar, leader of the World Alliance, were the only decorations.

The rest of the facility was set up as an apartment, functional and comfortable, but far from luxurious. It was intended to house a team of strategists who knew things even Wood and Chandar didn’t, who communicated with other teams in similar bunkers through sealed, written documents, their minds out of range of any possible Luyten interception. Now it housed Five, whose cage took up half the living room.

Oliver sat on a couch facing the Luyten’s cage, crossed his foot over his opposite knee. He’d waited five days, hoping that was enough isolation.

“You know what I’m thinking, so you know I intend to keep you down here until you talk to me. If you do talk, there’ll be no reason to keep you down here any longer, and we can move back to the CIA compound.” He looked up at the low ceiling. “Personally, I’d prefer to be there.”

He waited, not exactly sure what it would feel like if Five did speak to him. Kai said it was unpleasant at first.

When nothing came, Oliver went to the kitchen. He paused in the doorway. “Can I get you something? Maybe some tea?” He waited a beat, then smiled. “I’m a tricky one, aren’t I? You’d have to talk if you wanted something. You’re not falling for that, eh?”

He didn’t really feel like tea, but he made some anyway, brought it back to the couch. Sipping a hot beverage made the place, and this company, seem less creepy. Maybe it was the everydayness of it.

He was all alone down here, with a creature who evidently knew his every thought. If anything went wrong, no one would get here in time to help.

What could go wrong?

The mug slipped from his fingers, spilled scalding tea into his lap. Oliver leaped up, jerked open the buttons on his pants, and yanked them down. Gritting his teeth against searing pain he hobbled into the kitchen, turned on the faucet, and splashed cold water across his thighs.

It had spoken to him. There could be no doubt, no mistaking that feeling, which Kai had very accurately described as a scraping.

Oliver found an ice pack in the freezer. After pulling off his shoes and soaked pants, he pressed the ice pack against his right inner thigh, where the skin was the reddest. Then he returned to the living room and sat on the dry side of the couch in his briefs. “Well, that was clumsy of me. Can we pick up where we left off? Nothing could go wrong, absolutely nothing. We’re just having a talk.”

Five didn’t respond. Oliver waited, watching the Luyten expectantly, not sure which of its seven eyes to look at.

When some time had passed, he tried again. “Where do you come from?”

Nothing.

“What harm would it do to tell me where you’re from?”

No harm whatsoever. How does it benefit me to tell you?

Oliver suppressed an urge to plug his ears, to run to the elevator and get as far away from the Luyten as he could. Instead, he shrugged. “If we only talk about things that benefit you, it’s not going to be much of a conversation, is it?”

What gave you the impression I wanted to have a conversation?

“You spoke to me.”

I had something to say.

“This is going to get awfully boring if we don’t talk.”

I don’t get bored.

“But you get lonely.”

Using its appendages, it raised itself from the floor. And you made sure I would, didn’t you?

“If you’d just communicated with me, I wouldn’t have been forced to take those measures.”

Oliver waited patiently, but Five didn’t reply.

“I’m sorry I caused you discomfort.”

Five only watched him.

Oliver stepped closer to the mesh dividing them. “Is there something you’d prefer to eat? I can arrange to have it sent.”

Nothing. Oliver ran a hand through his hair, exhaled audibly. Hundreds of people must be watching the live feed by now. He turned to face the comm link, a silver quarter-sized disk set in the wall, and recounted everything the Luyten had said to him so far. Then he turned to face Five again.

“We don’t have to talk about sensitive topics. You choose the topic.” Oliver held out his empty hands. “Whatever would interest you.”

Still nothing.

Of course the Luyten would be aware that this was standard CIA interrogation procedure. Get the subject talking about anything, learn what makes him tick. Then win him over. The question was, was it possible to win over a Luyten?

11 Oliver Bowen

July 17, 2029. Washington, D.C.

Sixteen hours later, a text message from President Wood came, encouraging Oliver to try harder, imploring him to find a way to break through. He could imagine what must be happening up there. Some were arguing they pull Oliver, let the Luyten stew a few more days. Others would want to replace him with one of their other experts, who’d tried and failed to get the Luyten talking. Some, at least, were arguing that Oliver needed more time, or else he wouldn’t still be down there.

Oliver wasn’t sure which argument he agreed with. He didn’t want to give up, yet he desperately wanted to escape this stiflingly claustrophobic bunker and see the sky. The bunker was equipped with plenty of outdoorsy VR simulations, but as realistic as they were, they couldn’t remove Oliver’s awareness of his location.

He wondered what would become of Kai, now that it was clear he wasn’t the only one able to communicate with Five. Would they continue to house him at the compound, in case they needed him? Would they try to find a home for him? Surely they wouldn’t simply turn him out onto the street. Oliver wouldn’t let them. He’d take Kai in himself if it came to that.

Oliver poured himself a glass of milk in the kitchen and returned to the living room. Or should he think of it as the interrogation room? Not that there was much interrogating going on.

It wasn’t only claustrophobia that made him want to get back to the world. Oliver wanted to get home to Vanessa. He was worried Vanessa would use his absence as an opportunity to spend time with Paul.

To spend time with. What a pathetic euphemism. The truth was, he was afraid Vanessa would use the opportunity to fuck Paul. That was the crux of it, wasn’t it? He was afraid she was having an affair.

A few of Five’s eyes were tracking Oliver as he paced. He needed to get his mind off his marital problems, focus on the much, much larger problem at hand. How criminally narcissistic was it, to be thinking about his wife’s suspected infidelity when he’d been entrusted with a task that could help save the entire human race? He needed to stay focused, to find a way to extract useful information from this Luyten.

“Why Earth, of all the planets in the galaxy?” he asked the Luyten. “Does your kind just enjoy a challenge?”

You’re right, you know. Your wife is having an affair.

Oliver was so shocked by the words he very nearly cried out. “What did you say?”

When she dropped you off at work, her mind was close enough that I could hear it. She is having sex with Paul.

“You can’t—” He was going to say ‘You can’t know that for sure,’ but he checked himself. Yes, it could. “You’re lying.”

As she was driving off, she was thinking about taking Paul’s penis in her mouth while they drove to—

“Shut up.” Oliver could imagine her, breathless, telling Paul the things she wanted to do to him when they got to his house.

A voice message came through the comm, fed directly to the earbud connected to his comm, although they might as well have broadcast it aloud, for all the secrecy it afforded them.

“What’s happening down there?” It was Ariel. “Your heart rate is one-twenty. Can it inflict harm psychically?”

“No,” Oliver answered. “I’m okay. I’m just adjusting to what Kai described—the unpleasant sensation in my mind when it speaks.” He didn’t want to air his dirty laundry in front of who knows how many agents and operatives, and didn’t want to get pulled out when he was making progress.

To address your spoken question, it never occurred to us this planet would be inhabited. When we arrived it was too late. Either we settled on Earth, or our kind would die out.

“We would have given you asylum, if you asked.” He dragged a hand down his sweaty face, still not able to banish the image of Vanessa going down on Paul in a car.

No, you would not have.

“You don’t know that.”

Yes, I do.

“If you were oblivious of us, why did you take such pains to stay hidden behind various celestial bodies as you approached? For God’s sake, you parked behind the moon. You did that so we wouldn’t detect your approach.”

It felt childishly satisfying to bring up the Luyten mother ship. Humanity’s one real victory had been sending a motley collection of weaponized space vehicles and shooting their mother ship out of the lunar sky.

When I say “when we arrived, it was too late,” I don’t mean when we arrived in your solar system. We detected your existence well into our trip, through your SETI transmissions, but long before we reached your solar system. We took precautions once we were aware of your existence. Some of the musical compositions included in the SETI transmissions were quite interesting, by the way. We enjoyed Bach.

Ariel’s voice intruded through the comm. “Get to the questions we prepared, before it goes mute again.”

“Christ, it knows everything you’re saying as soon as I do.” Oliver gestured emphatically at the speaker on the wall. “Just speak through the goddamned speaker.”

It doesn’t offend me, Five said. Though needless to say, I don’t intend to answer any of those questions.

“No, I didn’t imagine you would.” He glanced at the comm. “That’s why I didn’t ask.”

Although those questions aren’t the real reason your people are so eager for you to open communication with me.

Oliver froze, slowly canted his head to one side. “What do you mean?”

There’s no point in speaking aloud. I don’t have ears, or the capacity to detect sound.

“It helps me organize my thoughts.” Oliver wasn’t going to let this creature tell him how to behave. A good interrogator was always in control of the situation. “You said there was another reason they want me to establish contact with you. What’s the reason?”

Ariel cut in on the comm. “Oliver, what is it saying? Give us an update.”

Oliver ignored her, waited, watching the Luyten groom itself with its cilia.

Isn’t it obvious?

“Not to me.”

“Oliver? What’s going on?” Ariel asked.

They want to discuss terms for surrender.

Maybe it shouldn’t have been a surprise, but the sheer magnitude of the words, the finality of what Five was suggesting, rocked Oliver. He turned to face the comm.

“It says I’m here to discuss terms for surrender.”

There was a long delay, then “Hold on.”

Surrender? His head spinning, Oliver tried to unpack what that would mean. Would humans lay down their arms, and the Luyten take control of everything—all the territory they didn’t already control? In exchange, no more humans would be killed. But how would they be treated?

“President Wood is coming down,” Ariel said.

The president of the United States.

Was coming down to speak to him.

Under different circumstances he would have been excited by that prospect.

Oliver headed to the bathroom to check himself in the mirror, to make sure he looked presentable.

Surrender.

How had it possibly gotten to this point?

When the starfish first rained from the sky, spinning like pinwheels, protected as they entered Earth’s atmosphere by huge porous bags that bore zero resemblance to any Earth transport, everyone had been terrified. But in every case, they’d dropped into unpopulated wilderness, in groups of three, and at first did little more than hide.

Oliver set his comb back on the sink and headed back into the living room.

When they began to attack, the targets were small, the goal more likely sabotage than occupation. They would hit a railway line, a wind farm, an isolated community, then disappear back into the trees, or underwater in breathable embryos that turned out to be miniatures of their mother ship. People were petrified, but it felt more like some horrible infestation than an invasion.

When it became apparent the Luyten could read human minds at will, people got really scared.

The attacks grew steadily bolder. Satellites. Weapons systems. Nuclear plants. Attacks on people living in the country escalated to the point where most fled to the safety of urban hubs, ceding more and more territory to the Luyten.

It had been a brilliantly executed attack.

The elevator flashed, indicating visitors.

President Wood was short and stocky, with a crooked nose and a curled-down mouth set in a perpetual sneer. Two Secret Service agents hung back near the elevator as Wood crossed the room to shake Oliver’s hand.

“You’re doing good work,” Wood said. “You’ve succeeded where many others have failed.” He held up a hand. “Don’t get me wrong, that doesn’t surprise me. I’ve seen your résumé. You have forty IQ points on me, and I’m not as dumb as I sound, and your work on influence techniques at NYU?” He shook his head. “Remarkable.”

“Thank you, sir.” Oliver motioned toward the little kitchen. “Can I get you something?”

“Nah, I’m good.” Wood wandered over to Five’s cage, studied the creature. “So why don’t the three of us have a talk?” Wood waited a beat, then turned to Oliver. “Did it answer?”

“No.”

Wood turned back to Five. “What harm would it do to talk?” He looked at Oliver, eyebrows raised.

Oliver shook his head. “Earlier it asked what it gained by talking to us.”

Wood raised one eyebrow. “Awfully cocky attitude.”

“I know.”

Wood studied Five a moment longer, then sighed and turned away. “I understand it told you we wanted to discuss surrender.”

Oliver nodded. “Is it true?”

Wood started to answer, stopped, began again. “It’s one option.” He rubbed his upper lip for a moment. “Put it this way: If you can get our friend to discuss whether they would accept our surrender, and under what terms, we would be interested to hear what it has to say.”

Oliver nodded slowly, digesting this.

“That’s not to say there’s nothing in the works. There may be.”

“But you don’t know?”

“If I knew for sure, so would they.” Wood jerked a thumb in Five’s direction. “Then we’d have nothing in the works.”

12 Lila Easterlin

July 17, 2029. Savannah, Georgia.

As rooftops came into view below them, Lila had second thoughts about the plan. She watched her father, a bead of sweat dangling from his nose, his fingers squeezing the throttle. The plane had automatic stabilizers, but still, it was not exactly safe for someone who’d never flown one to just take off and go.

The breeze kicked up and the plane wobbled, the stabilizers on the wings whirring, trying to compensate. They were above the tall pine trees, the highway visible on Lila’s right, a long strip shrinking in the distance.

“You’re doing great!” Lila said, having to shout over the wind.

Dad only nodded, his attention glued to the task. He kept going up, up; Lila had imagined clearing the trees and then staying as low as possible.

“How high are you going?” she asked.

“High enough that we’re out of range of Luyten weapons. There’s no hiding the fact we’re up here. If any Luyten on the ground can just point a heater or lightning rod and cook us, we won’t make it far.”

Lila hadn’t thought of that. Being in the air—away from all the Luyten on the ground—made her feel safe from them, but every Luyten they passed would know they were there.

“How high can we go?” she asked.

“I don’t know. How high can you go and still breathe?”

Lila thought about mountain climbers. At the top of tall peaks, climbers could barely breathe, but how high was that? She missed her feed; whenever teachers had wanted her to remember some esoteric detail like the heights of mountains, Lila had rolled her eyes and ignored them. “Like, I don’t know, maybe twelve or thirteen thousand feet?”

Dad nodded. “I guess if we’re getting too high, we’ll know.”

When the altimeter read thirteen thousand feet, they were still breathing fine, although Lila felt slightly out of breath, and inhaling deeply didn’t make the feeling go away. The cold was worse. Lila was wearing a thin short-sleeved tunic, and she was trembling. Their emergency packs, which included warm clothes, were back in their fried car.

The ground below was a patchwork of black-and-white towns, brown fields, green forest.

“How do we find Atlanta?” Lila asked. The ultralight had a built-in GPS system, but with satellites down it was useless.

“I’m just heading due west.”

Was Atlanta due west? It must be, more or less. Certainly they’d spot the downtown skyscrapers if they were anywhere close.

Dad glanced at her. “I can’t believe you were able to assemble this. It would’ve taken me a week.”

“You told me to find something productive to do.”

“I did. And you did.”

Lila studied the airspeed indicator. They were going just over sixty miles per hour, which meant maybe a two-hour trip. She turned to look over her shoulder at Savannah.

Smoke was rising from a thousand places. Some of the larger buildings were visibly on fire, the flames licking the sky. A container ship was sinking on the river.

“Oh, shit.”

The words jolted Lila awake, set her heart pounding. She looked around and immediately spotted what had caused her father to cry out: seven or eight Luyten were in the air, heading toward them.

They were in modified human Harriers, their massive bodies hanging in harnesses below the craft. Dad was descending, the nose of the ultralight pointed at a steep angle that sent uneasy butterflies through Lila’s gut.

It was hard to tell if the Luyten were dropping to intercept them. If they were, Lila and her father were going to die.

“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” her father was chanting, clearly in shock. Lila gripped the dash, afraid to look for the Luyten. The ground below was a checker of farmland broken by roads and occasionally buildings.

Lila ventured a look up: The Luyten craft were much closer. They were flying in a circular formation, as Luyten always did, closing on them.

“They’re coming after us!” Lila screamed.

“I’m gonna ditch us,” Dad said, his chin pressed into his neck, his mouth stretched in a grimace. “Find the—”

Suddenly, Lila was burning. She screamed in pain, the worst of it coming from her fingers, where her rings were searing her skin.

Dad was screaming, too, his fingers sizzling where they gripped the controls. “We lost the engine.” He held fast to the controls, as the ultralight plunged and his fingers burned.

The heat was getting intolerable as the Luyten closed on them. Lila scanned the dash, frantically seeking the crash suit indicator. There was nothing she could see that looked like an emergency icon. Surely all aircraft, no matter how small, were equipped with crash suits.

Then she saw it, down by her dad’s right foot: a square yellow icon with a fold-up ring. She struggled to read the simple, red-ringed instructions: Pull ring out, turn clockwise.

“Wait until we’re close to the ground,” Dad said. “As close as possible.”

“I know!” Lila screamed, trying to concentrate. Her shoes were burning her feet. She kicked them off.

Suddenly the heat let up.

Crying with relief, Lila looked up and back, and spotted the Luyten pulling away.

It was deadly silent save for the whistle of the wind. They were close to the ground, quickly growing closer. Pine trees hurtled by just below. Lila realized they were moving much faster than they seemed.

Her skin was throbbing all over. They’d been just on the edge of the heater’s range. Besides her ring finger and feet, she felt like she had a very bad sunburn.

They cleared the line of trees; Dad tried to bank so they would drop along the length of a cornfield. Lila hadn’t known you could grow corn in Georgia. For some reason the thought made her laugh hysterically. She tried to stifle the laugh, but that only made it worse. They were going down, about to crash, and she couldn’t stop laughing.

The ultralight was canted, the left wing lower than the right. When the left wing was about a dozen feet above the corn, Lila twisted the ring to activate the crash suits.

She had the barest instant to see the ultralight burst apart, then the suit inflated around her, pushing her flat, pinning her arms at her sides. She was turning in the air, head over heels, the blue sky framed inside the tight rectangle of vision the suit afforded, then trees, then the startlingly green cornfield, and blue sky again.

Hitting the ground was much worse than Lila had anticipated. It felt like she was being beaten with a steel bar as she slammed into the ground again and again. Then she rolled and skidded, her momentum carrying her farther than she thought possible.

Finally, she stopped rolling and lay still. She stared up at the sky, the clouds drifting by.

High above, a lone Luyten flew by. Although it was high, it was surely not eight miles high, so it was reading her thoughts at this very moment, perhaps considering whether it was worth the trouble to land and finish them.

It continued on, maybe because they were only civilians, weaponless, lying in a field scattered with wreckage.

“Lila?”

She had no idea how to deactivate a crash suit. When she’d seen them on the news, the people inside were always surrounded by concerned medical personnel who knew how to deflate them.

Lila felt around with her fingers, the only part of her body she could move. They came in contact with a bulb. She squeezed it three or four times, and suddenly the suit hissed and settled around her in a plastic puddle. She pushed it off and struggled to her knees.

Dad was heading toward her, limping deeply, a purple bruise rising on his cheek. “Holy shit,” he said. “Holy shit, Lila.” He looked at his hands: His palms were covered with angry red sores. “Holy shit.”

“Do you know how far we are from Atlanta?” Lila asked.

Dad nodded. “It was in sight when the Luyten showed. Maybe ten or fifteen miles to the suburbs?” He pointed to the right. “The interstate is that way. Maybe we can hitch a ride with some of the refugees.”

Lila struggled to her feet. She expected to feel lancing pain in one limb or another, but besides her burning skin and a lot of soreness and a few bumps and bruises, she was all right.

13 Oliver Bowen

March 11, 2030 (eight months later). Easter Island.

As they stepped onto the ramp leading off the submarine, Oliver found the fresh, salty breeze delightful. They’d been on the sub for only four days, but it had felt like a month. At first all Oliver could see were the rocks of a jetty. He climbed a ramp, and as he cleared the rise he saw palm trees scattered on an open, rocky plain sloping upward. A handful of horses were grazing in the shadow of a line of a dozen or more enormous stone figures. Oliver recognized the long heads; the sharp, angular, features; the shelflike brows and unreadable expressions.

“Easter Island. Rapa Nui.” He’d always wanted to visit, never found the time.

Off to his left, close to shore, Oliver spotted a group of crisply uniformed officers disappearing down a stairway leading underground. There was no military base on Rapa Nui as far as he knew. It must have been constructed since the invasion. Closer to the water, a large forklift was carrying Five and his entire enclosure. The forklift set Five on a raised platform, which sank slowly into the ground until Five disappeared.

“Dr. Bowen? This way, please.” A woman with gray crewcut hair, wearing a black suit, sidearm, clearly CIA security, touched his elbow. She steered him toward the staircase that led under the island.

Oliver followed the agent down the steps, stunned as the size and scope of this operation unfolded before him. He was descending into an immense open space. The cavernous room was bisected into dozens of smaller spaces, separated by transparent material that gave the facility an unnerving sense of weightlessness. Hundreds of people were visible, hurrying about, seemingly walking on air.

“What is this place?”

“I’m taking you to a briefing, sir,” the agent said.

“It must have cost billions to construct this facility.”

“You’re only seeing a fraction of it. It covers most of the space under the island.”

The far walls were raw stone. Oliver watched as someone stepped onto a small framed platform, grasped the handles jutting from its frame, and shot out of sight. He was led into a room along one wall—one of the few fully enclosed rooms. A thin black woman who looked about sixteen met him at the door.

“Dr. Bowen, I’m Dominique Wiewall. I head up the biological side of the defenders project.” She had a lilting Caribbean accent and spoke quickly, breathlessly. “I’ll be providing your orientation, which, if you don’t mind, I’d like to start straightaway.”

Oliver nodded. “Please, I’m dying to know what’s going on here.”

Wiewall motioned for Oliver to take a seat at a circular meeting table in what looked to be her office. There was a computer station in one corner, a dozen or so small wood carvings of Moai along a single shelf, and a big framed poster of a gorgeous rain forest. Along the bottom of the poster, Island Rain was printed in teal cursive lettering.

As they sat at the meeting table, an impressive three-dimensional display of the island materialized above it.

“Rapa Nui is a volcanic island,” Wiewall said without any preamble, still speaking rapidly. “The underground is riddled with caves—lave tubes created by three volcanoes that formed the island. The original residents lived in these caves in the years before they died off. The caves, and the incredibly remote location of the island, made it a perfect base of operations.”

A red line appeared, surrounding the island.

“Elaborate precautions have been taken to keep the Luyten from becoming aware of this project. No one knows the details of the project except those on the island, and anyone who comes to the island, stays.”

“You mean, I have to stay here indefinitely?” Oliver thought of Vanessa, then reminded himself: Vanessa was a weakness. No weakness.

Wiewall nodded. “You will. If all goes well, though, that should not be long. Maybe three months. The project is in its final stages.” Her head was nearly shaved, leaving only a sheen of tight black curls outlining the elegant shape of her skull. Come to think of it, most of the people Oliver had seen had severe haircuts, as if time was too precious to devote to hair grooming.

He couldn’t imagine what they were working on, what sort of weapon would justify expending such massive resources. For the first time in a year, he felt a flicker of hope.

It’s a desperate, last-ditch effort.

Oliver had almost forgotten Five was there. What is? he thought. Five would already know the details.

Five didn’t answer.

The display changed, from Easter Island to an enlarged map of a human neural network, the receptor sites for the various neurotransmitters highlighted with different colors.

“I know you have a background in psychology, so I’ll skip the preliminaries,” Wiewall said. “We’ve studied Luyten physiology using corpses salvaged from battles. Based on those examinations, our medical experts think the Luyten’s telepathic ability relies on the presence of the neurotransmitter serotonin.”

Oliver nodded. That made sense. Serotonin was what made humans feel human, what made them feel love, sexual desire, awareness, and interest in the world.

In the display, the serotonin receptor sites vanished. “If there is no serotonin present, the Luyten can’t read the target, and their telepathic advantage is neutralized.”

“If you removed people’s serotonin receptors, they’d be in a catatonic state, so there’d be no mind to read.”

Wiewall nodded. “That’s true. But we haven’t removed serotonin receptors from human brains; we’ve designed a brain that functions without serotonin.”

“Designed a brain?” All Oliver could think was Wiewall was speaking metaphorically. “You mean some sort of advanced AI?”

The display changed to another neural network. It was organic, but utterly unrecognizable to Oliver.

“The world’s superpowers have all had well-funded genetic engineering programs since the beginning of the century. Soon after the Luyten invaded, they began pooling their resources and knowledge.”

Oliver leaned forward, examined the display more closely. “But if you excised the entire serotonin system, you’d have a domino effect. You’d have to change everything.”

“We did. And more.” She stood, motioned Oliver toward the door. As Oliver stood, Wiewall paused, then smiled for the first time. “I have to admit, I’m looking forward to seeing your reaction to this. Most of us have been here the whole time, and we’ve gotten used to seeing them.”

“Them?”

Wiewall’s smile broadened. She led him out, down a long transparent hallway, into a lift that took them down six, seven, eight stories.

“I was sure you’d be looking toward AI technology,” Oliver said as they dropped. “That seemed the obvious direction; what little success we’ve had has involved drone and robot technology.”

Wiewall shook her head. “That would have been a dead end. Robots are stupid in all the ways that matter in this war. Luyten can’t read their minds, sure, but they don’t have to, because robots can’t develop independent battle plans, can’t come up with creative strategies without human assistance. They can’t react to anything new the Luyten throw their way.”

Transparent dividers were suddenly replaced by thick concrete walls.

They’d engineered humans with utterly different neurological functioning? Oliver couldn’t quite buy that. It just couldn’t be right. He kept expecting Five to weigh in, but Five stayed silent.

They slowed to a stop; the lift door opened.

Oliver clutched the wall, his knees jelly, his heart hammering fiercely.

They couldn’t possibly be real.

“They won’t hurt you,” Wiewall said. Her voice seemed to be coming from a distance, although she was still right beside him.

They were sixteen feet tall at least, walking on three legs, ghost white, their huge faces obviously inspired by the statues ringing the island.

“How is this possible?”

The creatures were engaged in a training exercise in an enormous space that must have been a half mile square. Their movements were fluid, athletic, assured; the third leg allowed them to run incredibly fast—faster than a Luyten.

It’s not a footrace, Five said. There was something in his voice. It was tentative. Afraid, even. They wasted their time bringing me here.

Why had they brought Five? Oliver had been too mesmerized by the giant warriors to consider the question until Five brought it up.

They want to find out if I can read them.

“Can you?” Oliver asked aloud.

Wiewall glanced at him. “Can I what?”

“Sorry. I was speaking to the Luyten. I don’t know why I do it out loud.”

“It’s speaking to you right now?” Her voice held a tinge of awe.

“That’s right.”

The giants were carrying standard weapons: bayoneted assault rifles, grenade launchers, all enlarged to match their massive scale. On top of this there were what appeared to be blades running down the sides of their arms and legs for hand-to-hand combat. Other hardware was attached to their skintight black uniforms at their forearms, like it was a part of their anatomy. In that regard, it reminded Oliver of Luyten weaponry.

“The weapons bulging from their forearms…” Oliver began.

“Their arms and legs are artificial, from the joints down. That not only made them simpler to design from a genetic perspective; it makes them stronger and faster. They control their artificial limbs entirely through thought.”

Oliver watched them for a moment. “Their movements are so fluid.”

Wiewall smiled like a proud parent. Then the smile was gone, and she was all business again.

“Notice they only have three fingers. Our ergonomics team determined that was maximally efficient for handling weapons.”

Their fingers looked like powerful claws, thick and long. And they were fleshy—not at all mechanical-looking. “Are these all of them?” Oliver asked. He counted twenty.

“So far we have two thousand. If they’re effective against the Luyten, the plan is to produce several million at facilities already being constructed under cities around the world. No one involved in building the facilities has any idea what they’re for; they’re working from blueprints.”

Oliver nodded. It was an incredibly ambitious undertaking. The cities involved must be diverting a substantial percentage of their resources to the construction.

Do you know what she’s thinking about you right now? She thinks you’re bizarre. You never make eye contact. You fidget. Just now, you were digging at your scalp with a fingernail while speaking to her.

Willing himself to ignore the comment, he turned to Wiewall and asked, “How will you convey battle instructions to the—what are they called?”

She wonders if you’re autistic.

“Defenders. That’s the point—humans can’t know the defenders’ intentions; otherwise the Luyten will as well. They fight independently. They develop their own battle plans.”

He gawked at Wiewall. “You’re kidding me.”

“They don’t look it, but they’re extremely intelligent. They’re epigenetically primed to learn extremely rapidly. They learn to speak in a matter of weeks. Then, when they’re not here training, they’re in a classroom studying warfare. All they know is military strategy and tactics. They don’t sleep, so their training is almost nonstop.”

Oliver didn’t know what he’d been expecting. An airborne virus that affected Luyten but not humans. A new superweapon. He hadn’t expected this. If the Luyten could read the defenders’ minds, though, they’d be nothing but bigger targets.

“You said your medical people think the Luyten’s ability won’t work without serotonin present. How confident are they?”

Wiewall paused, then, in a careful, deliberate tone, said, “Some are more confident than others.”

You just scratched inside your nose. Yes, it was just barely inside, but it doesn’t matter. Do you know how uncomfortable you just made her? Do you see how she’s averting her eyes? It drove Vanessa crazy when you did things like that in public.

Oliver squeezed his eyes closed, knowing that would only make him seem odder to Wiewall, but needing a moment to regain his composure.

“Five isn’t going to help you,” he said, opening his eyes. “He understands what the stakes are. He’ll die first.”

The young scientist’s expression did not instill confidence. “I was told that wasn’t my concern.”

“Whose concern is it? Mine? Because I’m telling you right now, Five may talk to me, but believe me, he doesn’t say anything useful.”

Dr. Wiewall swallowed. She was blinking rapidly, clearly uneasy. “I’m not sure what to say. If there’s a plan, there may be a good reason no one in the Luyten’s range is aware of it. Or maybe they’re just hoping the Luyten will slip up. I don’t know.”

Chuckling morosely, Oliver looked at the ceiling. “If that’s the plan, they don’t know Five very well.”

14 Oliver Bowen

March 12, 2030. Easter Island.

Hands on hips, his breathing slightly labored from the walk up the sloping field, Oliver took in the line of statues. Moai, the locals called them. They were watching the horizon, their faces resolute. Waiting. At least that’s how it looked to Oliver, now that he’d seen the defenders. The resemblance was uncanny. How the geneticists had engineered that resemblance, Oliver could not imagine.

“What do you know,” Oliver said aloud. “Maybe the Hulk and Spider-Man showed up after all.”

No response. Oliver thought he knew why Five had gone mute: He didn’t want to risk tipping off Oliver about whether he could read the defenders.

So much had changed since Oliver learned of the defenders. Five had been right—before, Oliver had had very little hope. There had seemed no reason for hope. Humanity had been whittled from seven billion to under four in a matter of three years. They were surrounded by the Luyten, crowded into the cities, starved of food and resources. All that seemed left was for the Luyten to wipe out the cities.

“Dr. Bowen.” It was Wiewall, on the comm he’d been provided.

“Yes, ma’am?” he replied, then winced as he heard how stupid he sounded calling her ma’am. His attempts at levity usually fell flat.

“You’d better start heading back. They’re bringing the Luyten down in a few minutes.”

“On my way.”

Oliver took one last look at the Moai, and realized some were the same height as the defenders.

Wiewall and a CIA security guy who’d introduced himself as Ski led Oliver into what looked to be a medical bay where a lone defender waited, sitting against the wall, one of its three legs canted. The defender watched them enter but otherwise didn’t acknowledge them. Oliver wondered if it had a name, if it would know what to do if Oliver went over and introduced himself. Its expression was as unreadable as the Moai.

As they waited, others filed into the room, including the commander of the operation, Colonel Willis. Oliver had met him earlier, thought he seemed like a bright, decent guy.

The hum of machinery interrupted his thoughts; Oliver turned. The big forklift was bringing Five, still caged, into the room.

The defender’s reaction was immediate. It stood, stared at Five, craning its neck to see the Luyten better. Then it began to pace, never taking its eyes off Five, keeping a uniform distance.

“This is the first time it’s ever been in the presence of a Luyten,” Wiewall whispered. “They’re conditioned to despise them.”

The defender looked down, then back up at the Luyten.

“Is the Luyten communicating with you?” Wiewall asked.

“No. Five’s giving me the silent treatment.” Oliver raised his voice. “Aren’t you, Five?”

I wonder if Vanessa went ahead and fucked Paul after you were so convinced she already had. Maybe they’re living together now.

Oliver did his best to ignore the comment. This was too important; he couldn’t allow himself to be distracted.

The defender paused in front of a table built in along the wall. It picked something up, then resumed pacing. Oliver squinted, straining to see what the defender had picked up.

It was a bayonet. Large enough to look formidable in the defender’s hand.

“What’s it doing?” Oliver asked. He looked around, but no one responded. There were about a dozen people present now. All eyes were on the defender.

Oliver turned, studied Five, who was watching the defender. There was nothing in its manner that might indicate whether it knew what the defender was thinking, although Oliver had always struggled to read the Luyten’s body language.

The defender stopped pacing. Its mouth a tight line, it took a deep breath through its nose, exhaled. With shocking speed, it hurled the bayonet at Five.

An instant later, the bayonet was embedded in one of Five’s limbs—it had gone right through the eye set in that limb. A cawing filled the room, multiple voices squawking in an eerie harmony. It took Oliver a moment to realize it was Five, screaming in pain and surprise through all of his mouths at once.

He hadn’t even tried to duck. The attack had caught Five completely by surprise.

Oliver rushed toward the Luyten. Five was gripping the bayonet with the cilia that served as his hand, pulling carefully, trembling from the pain.

“Kill you all,” Five said aloud, the pitch of his voice rising and falling. Gasps ran through the small crowd.

Five worked the knife out a half inch. Black blood dribbled from the ruined eye, pooling along the ridge that ran from each limb, spiraling to the center of his body.

“They won’t stop us. We’ll kill you all.” Five pried the bayonet farther.

“Can somebody help it, for God’s sake?” Oliver said. He glanced at the people now clustered around Five’s prison. “Are any of you medical personnel?”

A man with heavy jowls studied Oliver, then glanced at Five. “Let it bleed awhile.”

Oliver pointed into the cage. “That’s the only Luyten who has ever communicated with a human being. Do you really want to let it die?”

Drawn out of a stunned stupor by Oliver’s raised voice, Colonel Willis said, “He’s right. Get the thing patched up.”

The man studied Five. “We’ll have to sedate it first.”

Oliver opened his mouth to argue, then realized it would be foolish to insist Five was not dangerous. Five was very dangerous.

He stepped back, rejoining Wiewall. “So now we know.”

Wiewall nodded, clearly unnerved. Whether she was shaken by the attack on Five or Five speaking, Oliver didn’t know. “It was an ingenious test. Whoever devised it must have left the island before the Luyten arrived, so it wouldn’t be forewarned.”

On the far side of the room, the defender had resumed pacing. Occasionally it lifted its head to look at Five. Oliver wondered just how the test had been arranged. “I’m going to speak to it.” He gestured at the defender. “Does it have a name?”

“Robert. They’re all male, though they have no genitalia.”

As Oliver approached, the size and mass of the thing became more apparent, and more intimidating. It continued pacing, evidently unable to relax in the presence of a Luyten. Oliver could relate to that.

“Excuse me. Robert?”

The defender considered him, snorting air through its long nose, reminding Oliver of a bull.

“Who instructed you to injure the Luyten with the bayonet?”

The defender frowned. “No one. Colonel Willis ordered me to determine whether the Luyten could read my thoughts. It can’t.”

“No, it can’t.” Oliver’s mind was reeling. The defenders were definitely more intelligent than they looked. Their faces were stiff, didn’t express much in the way of emotion, but he shouldn’t have been fooled into thinking that reflected their intellectual ability. He thanked Robert and returned to Wiewall, who’d been watching from a distance.

“Robert devised the test himself.”

Wiewall tilted her head. “I’m surprised. Pleased, but surprised. They’re engineered and trained to be skilled tacticians, but still, that’s impressive problem solving.”

“What happens now?”

Watching Robert pace, and glower at Five, she said, “Now we make more.”

15 Oliver Bowen

May 9, 2030. Washington, D.C.

Oliver watched the city go by through the limo’s one-way glass. He wiped his sweaty palms on his pants. The D.C. area gave you a deceptive perspective on what was happening in the world. It wasn’t that D.C. was the same as it had been before the invasion, but the fortifications around the entire D.C.-Alexandria area were so heavy you felt a sense of safety and stability.

The limo pulled to a stop in front of Vanessa’s apartment, a walk-up in a luxury complex, and Oliver’s heart rate doubled. He had no idea how she would react to him showing up at her door. In the weeks since Five revealed it had lied, Oliver had rehearsed a hundred things to say, imagined all the reactions Vanessa might have.

He raised his fist and knocked.

Vanessa looked surprised to see him, and that gave him hope. She didn’t look angry, at least. But she didn’t invite him in, either; she only stared at him, wide-eyed, clutching the door.

“I’ve made a terrible mistake.”

Vanessa began to look, if not angry, then at least unhappy.

He stammered, words eluding him. After all the time he’d spent planning what he’d say to Vanessa, he found his mind blank. “I’m so sorry.”

Vanessa folded her arms. “How did you finally figure it out?”

“Five—the Luyten—told me it had lied.” He didn’t know whether to refer to Five as it, or he, or she. None sounded right, so he found himself switching back and forth.

She gave a dry, humorless laugh. “Maybe it’s lying now. Maybe you should find another starfish to corroborate Five’s claim before jumping to any conclusions.”

Oliver licked his extremely dry lips. “I know I should have believed you instead of it, but if you understood what it was like, how it gets inside your head.” He stabbed a finger at his temple. “It knows exactly what buttons to push, it knows your fears and insecurities, all of your secrets.” He took a deep breath, trying to control his rising emotions.

Vanessa’s arms were still tightly crossed. She looked past him, into the street. “A limo?”

“I’ve been promoted. I’m the CIA Director of Science and Technology, and a special advisor to President Wood.” Oliver wanted to tell Vanessa about his work, about the small part he’d played in the defenders project, but it was still technically classified. He’d been allowed to leave Easter Island now that eight heavily defended production facilities were up and running, and keeping their existence secret from the Luyten was all but impossible, but that didn’t mean he could talk about the project with anyone he chose.

“Wow, congratulations,” Vanessa said, sounding sincere, if not particularly enthusiastic.

“I’m going to adopt Kai—the orphan who discovered—”

“I know who Kai is,” Vanessa said, cutting him off. She was back to looking surprised. “You told me you never wanted children. You said they made you uncomfortable.”

“They do.” He shrugged. “But someone has to take care of him.” He’d hoped telling Vanessa about Kai would reform him in her eyes, make him seem worthy of forgiveness. That wasn’t the reason he was doing it, but still, he’d hoped. He waited for some kind word he could build on.

“Why did you come here, Oliver?”

“I came to apologize. I should have trusted you. I’m sorry.”

“Oliver—”

“The truth is, I believed Five because I couldn’t believe you could really love me. It was so hard to see how you could. But, believe it or not, Five’s psychological attacks have opened my eyes to—”

“Oliver.”

He knew what she was about to say—he could read it in her eyes, and he didn’t want to hear it. “Just spend some time with me, and you’ll see. I’m not asking you to forgive me, just give me some of your time—”

“No,” she said, simply, emphatically. “No. You’re right, I can’t forgive you for this. For leaving me in the middle of this.” She started to lift her arms, then let them flop back to her sides. “Maybe the end of the world is supposed to make things like this seem insignificant, but for me, it hasn’t. It’s set me on a razor’s edge. There’s right, and there’s wrong.” Vanessa rubbed her upper lip, shaking her head. “And what you did was wrong. You were supposed to believe me. You were supposed to take my side.”

Oliver had no response. Her answer was one he’d anticipated, but even imagining the words, he’d never come up with a reply.

He wanted to say goodbye but didn’t trust himself to get the words out steadily. Instead, he nodded, then headed down the steps.

16 Oliver Bowen

May 21, 2030. Washington, D.C.

With each swing of his arms, Oliver could feel his underarms gliding on slick sweat. He was short of breath, as if he were sprinting to the war room instead of walking.

A dozen or so people were talking in low tones, clumped here and there around the huge circular room, waiting for the meeting to start. The war room was built like an amphitheater, with the center the lowest point, and each subsequent ring of seats and electronics a few steps higher. Oliver spotted Ariel silently working her screen and took a seat beside her.

She looked up, nodded once, went back to work.

“Can you fill me in?”

Ariel stopped working. “I figured you knew more than I did. Five isn’t keeping you updated?”

“Five does nothing but hurl insults at me, on the rare occasions when he deigns to speak to me at all.”

Before Ariel could respond, President Wood entered, flanked by Secretary of Defense Oteri, Secretary of State Nielsen, and his senior advisor, his brother Carmine. He raised his voice to be heard, showing no interest in sitting.

“The starfish are massing around the cities housing defender production facilities. Every single facility. We don’t have nearly as many defenders as we’d like, but unless someone in here says something to change my mind, I’m going to advise Premier Chandar to release what we have immediately. Their primary mission will be to defend those production facilities.”

Raising his shoulders, the president waited, looking around the room at individual faces. He stopped on Oliver’s. “Dr. Bowen. Oliver. What does our resident starfish have to say about all this?”

“He stopped communicating with me after Easter Island.”

“Probably smart of it,” President Wood said. He resumed his scan of the room. “So? Does anyone want to voice an objection? What do we risk by having them fight now, besides affording them less time to train?”

Evidently no one could think of objections. The Luyten were clearly aware of the defenders and understood they were a threat. The secret was out. Given that nine facilities were now in operation, it wasn’t surprising.

“Can I make a suggestion?” Secretary of Defense Oteri asked. She was built like a bulldog—short, squat, with thinning black hair and a bulb nose. “Deploy one battalion first, so we can assess its effectiveness, maybe learn some things we can pass on to the other forces. It will take the Luyten time to mass numbers large enough to storm those facilities.”

The president shrugged, looked around the room for reaction.

“We could send the Easter Island force into Santiago,” said Wood’s brother Carmine, who was tall and extremely thin, almost skeletal. “In fact, the Algarrobo nuclear plant is only twenty miles outside Santiago. If they could retake the largest power plant in South America while securing the defender production facility in Santiago, that would be huge. We need energy. Badly.”

There were murmurs of agreement.

“We need to see what they’re capable of on a mission before we set them all loose,” Oteri added. “Once we set them loose, that’s it. They become a fully independent fighting force—allies, more than anything.”

“But if we set them loose in Santiago, aren’t we giving the Luyten a chance to learn from that encounter as well?” Secretary Nielsen asked in his customary dulcet tone. Nielsen was soft-spoken, balding, with a full reddish beard.

Ariel waved her hand and waited for the president to recognize her like a child in class. “As the Luyten mass, their communication grid breaks down. They cut themselves off from one another as their web configuration folds. Do they have electronic communication?”

“Not much,” Oteri said. “They have some they seized from us that they use to communicate across oceans and deserts and so on, but they don’t have the capability to transmit visual recordings of a battle, or detailed schematics. They’re used to passing information instantaneously, through their telepathic network.”

Wood took a deep breath, let it out. “All right. I’ll send a recommendation to Premier Chandar that we launch an attack on Santiago and the Algarrobo nuclear plant as soon as possible.” Since the president was the World Alliance’s minister of defense, it seemed certain the premier would go along with his recommendation.

17 Dominique Wiewall

May 25, 2030. Easter Island.

When the colonel put his hand on her knee, Dominique wanted to hack it off with a knife, but instead had to settle for shifting to the left to dislodge it. How dare he use this, the culminating moment of all of their work, to pull this kind of stunt?

She’d been drunk the night she slept with him. Extremely drunk. Also wallowing in a modicum of self-pity, because it had been her birthday. She’d regretted it the moment it was over, before she’d even sobered up. When she did sober up, she more than regretted it—she’d been mortified. Not that Colonel Willis was unattractive, he was just… too military. A walking stereotype. It made him seem clownish in Dominique’s eyes.

Shaking off the memory of his pale body rocking atop hers, Dominique focused on the feeds. They had three to start. Some might be knocked out once combat began, but hopefully not all. They needed to collect as much information as possible about the defenders’ performance. It would be tricky, to pass on recommendations that might aid the defenders in subsequent engagements without passing on information that might help the Luyten, who would undoubtedly intercept everything they sent.

Her pulse was racing. These were her children. Many, many others had helped, but no one would argue that she was the primary architect. Besides everything at stake for humanity, Dominique felt in a very personal way that her life would be either vindicated or ruined in the next few hours. She was so glad she’d opted to stay on Easter Island. No one off the island would witness this, not even the premier.

Dominique was cautiously optimistic that the defenders would do well. The Luyten depended heavily on knowing their enemy’s minds; they’d had no need to develop tactical expertise in battle. And while their weapons were sophisticated, most only had what was embedded in the biologically grown suit that fit them like a second skin. The defenders, by contrast, knew nothing but military tactics, and were armed to the teeth.

Dominique watched the feed from one of the little aerial butterfly cameras, which was temporarily perched on the helmet of the operation’s commander, a defender named Douglas. He was traveling with the Airborne Battalion, briefing his officers in a clipped baritone, squatting in the hold of the huge stealth-enabled C-5, which was typically used to transport heavy artillery and buses. She enabled the sound.

“We establish two separate LZs. The first, five miles north-northeast of the objective.” Douglas pointed to the spot on the relief map. The first LZ, which Dominique assumed meant landing zone, lit up in red. “The second, five miles south-southeast.” He marked this one as well. “One squad from each drop zone will be designated as a security squad and will move as follows: From drop zone one, directly north. From drop zone two, directly south. The northern moving squad will secure Highway 60 and establish a perimeter defense. The southern moving squad will secure Highway 5. The full security squad will deny any Luyten movement from west to east—”

From what she knew of military tactics, the plan seemed solid. It soothed her drumming heart, how competent the commander sounded.

“—additional squad will be dropped in the southern LZ and will proceed to the area just north of San Antonio. Center of gravity, CP, and HQ will be established at that location, here, ten miles south-southeast of the objective.”

A commander named Luigi was overseeing the defense of the production facility in Santiago, but taking the power plant was the more challenging of the two missions. Not only did the Luyten already hold it, but the defenders couldn’t use large weapons to bombard the plant, because they needed it to be operational. To compensate, they were sending a large force—120 defenders.

“Here they go,” Colonel Willis said, leaning forward. Dominique reflexively drew her leg away, afraid he’d use the shift in posture as an opportunity to reestablish an LZ on her thigh.

As the defenders jumped, two at a time, from the aircraft, they didn’t appear to be almost three times as large as humans. The oversized aircraft and gear threw off Dominique’s perception. But as they dropped to the ground in an open field adjacent to a forest, they were almost half as tall as the trees, and the illusion was shattered.

Douglas grunted orders to his men, as the butterfly camera lifted off, giving Dominique a wider view of the terrain. A gentle slope led up to another wall of trees. The defenders fanned out, trotted across the field in what seemed like half a dozen steps, and disappeared into the forest.

It was strange, to think the Luyten didn’t know they were coming.

Dominique glanced at the feed originating with the sea-based B Company. The company was in skiffs, heading toward the beach. They looked awkward, riding six to a skiff in boats meant to carry twenty humans. They would attack from the west, while the airborne company attacked from the east.

The butterfly camera panned down to provide a glimpse of defenders moving through the forest below, then up, to provide their first look at the power plant. It was shaped like a figure eight lying flat. Four enormous storage tanks on stilts stood behind it, and all of this sat on a platform surrounded by a placid artificial lake of steel-blue seawater, pumped in from the nearby Pacific. The lake was bisected by three breezeways. A Luyten-modified heavy construction vehicle was crossing one of the breezeways, its Luyten operator clearly visible. Half a dozen other Luyten were moving around outside the plant.

The crackle of small-arms fire erupted in the forest below. The camera swung toward the trees.

By the time Dominique could see what was happening, it was over. Two Luyten lay dead, their centers jellied with ordnance wounds. Defenders confiscated the fallen Luyten weapons, and the company pushed on.

“There goes the element of surprise,” Willis said. “Though I doubt the defenders expected to make it right up to the gates without being spotted.”

Willis’s final words were partially drowned by an explosion coming over the feed, then two more on top of one another. The camera rose.

The Luyten had blown the three breezeways. Water surged to fill the gaps. The plant was now on an island.

“They’d better not set foot in that water. The Luyten will electrify it and fry them,” Colonel Willis said, stating the obvious. Dominique was certain the defenders would realize that immediately. They weren’t stupid grunts; their IQs were higher than the colonel’s.

When C Company reached the edge of the forest they hung back, out of range of the Luyten weapons. B Company—the one coming by sea—had landed on the beaches and was spread out, waiting for orders. Now the question was how to reach the Luyten.

Fifteen minutes crawled by as the defenders continued to hang back. Dominique wished whoever was controlling the camera would set it back down on Commander Douglas so they could hear the defenders’ planning, but it remained above the trees, providing a useless bird’s-eye view. Another camera was embedded with B Company, the third at HQ.

Three A-7 Razorback Harriers buzzed over the horizon from the north, from HQ and the Engineering Company. Dominique couldn’t easily see how three Harriers helped the situation, unless they used them to bomb the shit out of the Luyten position, which would mean destroying the power plant.

The first Harrier dropped low, close to the tree line. A defender sprinted out of the trees, leaped, and grabbed one of the Harrier’s skids, as if it were trying to pull the thing out of the air. The Harrier was more powerful than Dominique would have guessed; it rose rapidly, the defender clinging to it with one hand. Each of the other two Harriers took on a hitcher and rose as well. They rose steeply, headed toward the air above the fusion plant with blinding speed.

The Luyten, brandishing Y-shaped lightning rods, opened fire as they drew close. The defenders returned fire, pumping hot rounds from the handheld mortar launchers in their free hands. Dominique’s heart raced as she saw a Luyten go down. Then another, clipped on one limb and spun around.

From the beach side of the plant, defenders surged forward in twos, carrying the skiffs that had transported them to shore.

The first pair were hit by heaters, bursting into flame short of the artificial lake. Despite being thousands of miles away, Dominique felt singed by the heat that engulfed them, felt their loss like a sting as each managed a few steps before they fell, nothing but husks, black smoke rising from them.

Dominique took a deep breath, trying to calm herself. She hadn’t expected to feel their deaths so strongly, to take them so personally.

The next pair made it, as the airborne defenders continued to lay down a blinding cloak of cover fire, the Harriers diving toward the plant, then rising just as rapidly. The pair hurled the skiff into the lake and retreated. The lake was shallow; the skiff landed with a splash and lay impotently on its side.

The third pair heaved their skiff beyond the first, and suddenly Dominique understood what they were doing: They were building a bridge out of the skiffs, which were undoubtedly composed of carbon fiber, and not electricity-conducting.

Another aircraft flew into view to the east, this one large, clearly not a fighter. Without slowing it dropped a pile of unidentifiable materials—slabs and poles.

One of the Harriers was hit. It spun in a tight circle, dropping rapidly. The defender clinging to it let go, plummeted a hundred feet, and landed in a tucked roll on the edge of the platform surrounding the plant. It came up firing, its shots uncannily accurate.

Seconds later lightning crackled, the pale blue zigzag landing just beyond the stranded defender. It trembled violently and dropped.

“Shit,” Dominique said. Colonel Willis looked at her. She kept her eyes on the feed.

Ten or eleven defenders were down, maybe more. Each time one fell, Dominique felt it like a punch in the heart. Another skiff went into the water, this one hurled, flying end over end before landing. One more, and there was a ragged line in place, like stones across a brook.

Immediately, the defenders charged across it. The first few had no chance, but there was no hesitation in their steps as they leaped from skiff to skiff until they were hit, and fell.

C Company surged from the tree line. As they passed the materials dropped moments earlier, each scooped up rectangular sections and pilings.

As the battle raged to the west, the defenders to the east constructed a bridge, fitting pilings into slots in the large rectangles. They took Luyten lightning and heat fire, but it was tepid compared to what B Company had faced, because now the Luyten were under siege. Only one of the Harriers was still in the air, but it was wreaking havoc on the Luyten position. Maybe three dozen defenders had made it to the platform surrounding the plant.

Dominique watched as a defender, screaming with a rage that seemed all too personal, charged two Luyten blocking the entrance to the plant. He put a dozen bullets in one while slashing the other open with an uppercut of his edged forearm. Before reinforcements could reach him, he stepped to one side of the door, swung his arm around, and pumped artillery bursts at the door from his forearm unit. Before the smoke had cleared, one of his comrades charged what was left of the big door, dropping his shoulder and battering it open.

Fighting at close range, the defenders made vicious use of their size and the built-in blades running down their limbs. To say they were fierce fighters didn’t capture the jaw-dropping combination of rage and cold efficiency they displayed. Dominique found herself on her feet, roaring with her companions as the defenders tore the Luyten apart.

When the defenders dragged the last of the Luyten bodies from inside the plant, Dominique counted fifty-four. It would take a while, because the Andes to the east and the DeValparaiso range to the west would slow them, but more Luyten would come. They would come three at a time, from the nearest quadrants first, their numbers growing each day until they believed they had enough to retake the plant.

There had better be a lot of them.

18 Oliver Bowen

May 27, 2030. Washington, D.C.

Oliver couldn’t help thinking of Five. What was going through his mind, as he waited to follow the battles through the minds of his enemies? Was he nervous? Afraid?

“Mr. President?” Oteri gestured toward the wall of video feeds being transmitted from cities around the world. “The Luyten are attacking. Mumbai, London, Rio, Seoul.”

The president, who had been huddled in a corner, discussing something with his brother, hurried over.

In London, they were all over the streets, already past the defense perimeter. Oliver watched as a half dozen barreled through Trafalgar Square. It was raining, so their lightning bolts were electrocuting fleeing civilians in wide arcs around the points of impact. Bodies lay everywhere, the ruined soles of their feet smoldering. Crisscrossing blue blades sizzled along the puddled ground.

“How did they get through the perimeter defenses so quickly?” Wood shouted.

Nielsen was scanning data on his portable system, his fingers flying across the keys, seeking some answer.

“Look at Shanghai,” someone said.

They were in Shanghai as well, marauding through the darkness of the downtown area.

“They know the threat is real,” Ariel said. “They were waiting to see what the defenders could do. If the defenders had stumbled in Santiago, I bet they would have gone back to their slow-and-steady strategy.”

The population clock on the wall was racing backward. The human population was tens of millions fewer than it had been an hour before.

“They’re coming from underground,” Nielsen called out, still working his system.

“Underground?” Wood spun to face Nielsen. “How the fuck is that possible? All the subway lines were blasted precisely so they couldn’t come from underground.”

“They’re coming through the sewers.”

“The sewers? What do you mean, the sewers? They’re as big as fucking elephants.”

Elephants without bones. The voice in his head made Oliver flinch.

“Elephants without bones,” Oliver repeated aloud.

“What did you say?” Wood asked.

“I didn’t say it, Five did. Elephants without bones.” On the feed from New York, Oliver watched one of the big, rectangular sewer grates glow red and drop away. He pointed at the feed. “New York. Watch.” A Luyten squeezed out of the hole, its appendages folded tightly behind it until it popped free.

President Wood cursed a blue streak. He turned to Oteri. “Get the defenders out there.”

“They’ve already been released,” Oteri said. “Premier Chandar ordered it ten minutes ago.”

For once, Wood didn’t seem annoyed to be reminded he was not in charge. He seemed relieved.

It was difficult for Oliver to watch the carnage on the screens, but he couldn’t turn away; it was his duty to stay apprised of what was happening.

What was happening was, people were dying. The streets of London, New York, Rio, Shanghai were littered with corpses as the starfish killed everyone in sight on their march toward the production facilities.

“Order civilian evacuation of the areas surrounding all production facilities. Those people don’t know which way to run,” President Wood said.

The Luyten were choosing routes that sidestepped combatants, instead wreaking havoc on civilians, who had nowhere to hide. Some of the Luyten were being picked off by stationary visual-recognition drones set up on rooftops, but each of the drones only worked once, then the Luyten knew where they were and took them out.

Their heaters were firing almost continuously, burning and melting people, vehicles, the sides of buildings, leaving behind a landscape that resembled a giant scar.

“Where are they?” Wood growled.

It was a rhetorical question. The defenders were now an independent army, allied with the human forces but formulating their own battle plans. From this moment on, the human forces would have no idea where the defenders would strike, what tactics and strategy they might use.

In Manhattan, the first Luyten reached the production facility’s inner defenses and tucked behind buildings to wait for reinforcements. The ten blocks surrounding each production facility were heavily fortified. Silver heat shields the size of buses lined the perimeter; the turrets of heavy VRA guns poked from reinforced window slits in many of the old brick and concrete buildings. Oliver knew this sort of battle would not be as one-sided. In tight urban quarters their soldiers would be better able to hit Luyten, who didn’t hold the element of surprise, and the automated weapons systems would take their toll. He was also aware that if they lost these battles, the war was lost as well.

19 Lila Easterlin

May 27, 2030. Atlanta, Georgia

Cheena held the clunky box with its fat antenna up to her ear and said, “Talk to me, Hoochie. Anything new happening?”

The reply came after an absurdly long delay. “All quiet on the eastern front,” a woman’s voice squawked, causing Lila to flinch.

“Music to my ears,” Cheena replied. “Death to fish.”

Hoochie responded with a “Death to fish” of her own. Evidently it was their sign-off.

They were perched on a catwalk far above the floor of a defunct factory. Huge tanks lined the floor and walls, some hourglass-shaped, others spherical, a few tubular.

A voice burst from the walkie-talkie, paging Cheena. Cheena retrieved it. “Walk, tell me what you’ve got.”

“I’ve got defenders,” Walk said. “Two platoons were released from the Cheshire Bridge production facility an hour ago. Reliable source.”

Cheena raised her fist in the air. She was eighteen. Her long legs and confident style made Lila feel twelve. “What do they look like? Tell me, tell me.”

“Huge,” Walk reported. “I mean, huge. And angry, like trembling with rage. It’s not a good day to be a fish.”

The three of them burst into cheers. Lila hugged Alfe fiercely, then Cheena. Finally, something to give them hope. More than hope, if the reports from Chile were true.

Cheena set the walkie-talkie down on its end. “I’d say this calls for a celebration.” She stuck a finger in her jacket pocket, fished around until she came out with a little white ball of Lace. Setting it on the catwalk, she squeezed it until it popped, shooting a cloud of particles into the air. She and Alfe craned their necks, inhaled deeply. Lila followed suit.

Lace was a memory enhancer. You were supposed to think back to a time in your life and the drug would draw out those memories, making them super-vivid. It was also supposed to make you feel light enough to reach the clouds. Maybe Lila wasn’t inhaling enough of it. She took another big breath, thought back to when she was ten. If she was going to relive a time in her life, she wanted to relive ten.

At first it only felt like she was reminiscing about the good times, which she often did.

At Tybee Island Beach with her friend Margot and their dads. Eating oysters. Her dad singing oldies after he’d had a few beers. She and Margot making faces, singing modern hits to drown him out, only to have him sing louder.

Lila, stealing Dad’s access code and reprogramming his phone to take on the voice of a porn actress from an interactive she found in his cloud. Then Dad, after toning down the language, leaving the voice intact for a week, so Lila had to endure lurid, “Ooh, you like that, don’t you?” comments from his phone.

The memories grew warmer, more vivid, washing over her in waves.

Loblolly School. Seeing it again filled her with a glowing warmth, a profound comfort. She and Margot created Loblolly using a virtual-world-building kit, filled with characters their own age. It took them all summer, but it was worth it. Every day after school they’d meet in Loblolly and hang out with kids far more interesting than their actual classmates.

“Lila?”

The voice was far away. Lila probably wouldn’t have noticed if the voice hadn’t called her name, if it hadn’t been so familiar, and so frantic.

“Lila.”

She tried to open her eyes, but she just couldn’t leave the place where she was. It was so perfectly where she wanted to be.

“Lila. Jesus Christ almighty, what the fuck are you doing?”

She was eating a big, gooey block of frozen strawberry taffy at her tenth birthday party. Annabelle Toynbee was laughing and poking her in the ribs.

She gasped, jolted back into the present by something. She wasn’t sure what. The side of her face felt warm, almost hot. Her father was leaning over her, his shirt soaked with sweat in the V of the neck, and where his belly bulged against it. His eyes were wild.

He raised his palm, smacked her hard across the face.

Lila shrieked in surprise and rage, jerked herself up, her head still light, wanting to go back to the party.

“Wake up,” Dad said. “Alfe, Cheena, you too. Jesus, what did you take?”

Dad smacked her again. Screeching, Lila swung, trying to hit him back, but missed. He grabbed her hand, yanked it.

“I’m awake. Stop hitting me.” She took a huffing breath, trying to clear her head. He’d never hit her before, not on her worst day.

“Do you understand the situation we’re in?” Dad asked. “I mean, do you fully grasp what’s happening? Because you act like you don’t.”

Cheena sat up, looked groggily from Lila to her father. Alfe was blinking heavy eyelids, clearly still out of it.

“Yes, Dad, I fully grasp the situation,” Lila said. “We’re going to die. That’s the situation. I’m not sure what good it does me, but I grasp the situation.”

Dad stood, wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve. “Come on, get up.” Then in a louder voice, “They’re coming, for God’s sake.”

She, Cheena, and Alfe struggled to their feet. Lila was fully in the present, her pulse racing, hallucinogenically vivid visions of Luyten crawling in the back of her mind.

“They’re coming now?” Cheena asked. “We just checked in at all the outlying areas with the walkie-talkie.”

“They’re coming now!” her father shouted. “Through the sewers.”

Her father must have gotten hold of some insane rumor. The sewers? How could they fit in sewers?

“Dad, are you sure?”

“I saw one,” he said, his voice low, trembling. “Is that sure enough for you?” He grabbed her upper arm and pulled her toward the door. “Move.” He was almost crying.

They burst through the entrance, into sunlight. “Fast as you can run, Lila.”

She ran, already breathless from fear, fed by adrenaline. She felt her father, Alfe, and Cheena right behind her. The air was filled with the sounds of battle: booming explosions that vibrated underfoot, the rattle of gunfire, and, worst of all, the sizzle of lightning.

An image burst into Lila’s memory unbidden, of a Luyten coming out of the trees, cooking people along I-16 with its heater gun.

The front door of Aunt Ina’s house opened when Lila drew close, then closed as soon as everyone was inside. Aunt Ina, Uncle Walter, and a few others stood at windows pointing guns, waiting, watching.

Battle sounds were growing louder.

“The defenders are coming,” Cheena said. “We heard it on the walkie.”

Aunt Ina nodded from the window. “We heard the same on the TV. They’d better get here soon.”

A dozen soldiers came around the corner of Cherry Street, covered in body armor, turning in one direction, then another. They were carrying serious weapons. Lila didn’t know how to tell one sort of weapon from another, but she’d seen enough news footage to recognize the serious ones.

When they drew close, Lila’s dad and aunt Ina ran out to speak to them. Lila couldn’t hear what they said, but she heard the soldier who answered in a near shout.

“Get everyone to Brandon Elementary. We’re setting up a defense there, and that’s the only facility we’re defending in the area. Most of our resources are devoted to defending the production facility.”

“What about the defenders? Are they coming to help?” Lila shouted from the window.

The soldier, who must have been sixty at least, held up his free hand, gesturing that he had no clue. “We have zero communication with the defenders. Zero collaboration. We just have to hope they know what they’re doing.”

Just then, the emergency siren began to blow, startling the hell out of Lila. Just a little late to be of much help.

The soldiers continued on their patrol as Lila and the others headed toward the school.

They squeezed through a back door into one of the classrooms, where a hundred others were huddled, the smell of terror-sweat rife in the air. No one was speaking, save for the occasional murmur of assurance from parent to child, scattered whimpering from scared children. Lila and her people found a space near the windows, which looked out onto the playground behind the school.

Outside, soldiers squatted behind a mix of sleek new fighting vehicles and antique tanks that were spread in a semicircle to create a perimeter. Beyond them lay a ball field, then trees on all three sides.

Lila’s father handed her a canister of water. She took it, grateful, dehydrated from running.

Dad studied her eyes one at a time. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” she said, not sure if he was asking if she was scared, or still stoned from the Lace.

An old man near the window shushed loudly. He was peering out, his mouth hanging open, jaw trembling. The voices outside had taken on shrill, urgent tones.

Lightning surged from between the trees—three, then four bolts. Two soldiers were thrown into the air by the force of the blast. Others, farther from the impact points, vibrated violently before collapsing to the grass.

Three Luyten surged out of the trees from the opposite direction, barreling over swings and slides, their free arms pointed forward. There was a blinding flash, the screams of burning soldiers, who’d been facing the other way, toward the lightning blasts.

Lila squeezed her eyes shut as a half dozen more Luyten broke from the woods.

“Where are the defenders?” someone asked as they huddled on the floor.

Lila tried to think of something else. Anything else. Loblolly School, where she and Margot had gone to escape in that long-ago summer. Lila would keep her eyes closed and think only of Loblolly until it was over. Until she was dead. She whimpered, squeezed her eyes shut more tightly.

Someone in the room with Lila began praying. Her voice grew louder, more tremulous, as the sound of lightning bursts outside grew louder.

“Oh, no. No,” someone moaned.

“We have to help them.” It was her father’s voice. “Anyone who can fight, we have to go now.”

Lila’s eyes flew open. Her father and half a dozen others were headed toward the back door, toward the smoke and the bodies and the starfish, so close now.

Then her father was outside, running, because the soldiers were dead and the Luyten were coming. He raced for the makeshift bunker where the dead soldiers’ weapons lay amid their toasted bodies.

She saw a tall, balding man in a suit swing a fire ax at a charging Luyten. It cut him in two at the chest with a whip of its cilia.

Over soon. Think of Loblolly School. All over soon. Lila felt a warm wash of pee run down her thighs. She clapped her hands over her ears. One of them was speaking to her. She’d never felt something so awful, had never heard an accent so foreign, so evil and wrong.

Aunt Ina covered Lila’s eyes, her trembling fingers not doing a thorough enough job, because Lila saw between the slats of her fingers, saw her father raise one of the big rifles as a Luyten galloped at him.

It gripped the arm holding the rifle and pulled it off.

Lila howled as her father spun out of the bunker. He landed at the foot of a toppled slide.

“Daddy!” Lila screamed.

She pressed her face to the window, suddenly unable to see her father because something was blocking her view. It was a pillar, bone white at the bottom, black above, that hadn’t been there a second before. Just as quickly, it was gone.

The center of one of the Luyten blew out, leaving a trail of black meat behind as it toppled to the pavement.

Everyone was cheering. It was deafening. For a moment Lila was confused, because her father was dead and everyone was cheering. Then she saw them, impossibly tall on three knobby white legs. A defender leaped from the roof of the school above her, landed right behind one of the Luyten, and slashed it with the razor-sharp knife edges that ran down its arms and legs.

One of the defenders threw up its hands as a Luyten turned a heater on it. It took a heartbeat longer for it to die than it took a human soldier, but as it crumpled, black and smoking, to the ground, the Luyten wielding the heater was blasted by a weapon that was built right into a defender’s forearm. The Luyten burst into half a dozen pieces.

Three surviving Luyten fled into the trees, a handful of defenders in pursuit.

The room went wild. Everyone was leaping in the air, kissing, hugging, laughing, crying, shouting. This was something they’d never seen before: Luyten being beaten. Being slaughtered by these giant warriors, these fearless, powerful creatures who were on their side.

Lila understood the rush of joy and hope they felt, the relief after being so close to death, but she didn’t feel it herself. She ran outside, ignoring Aunt Ina’s calls that she come back.

She stopped a dozen feet from her dad, who was lying awkwardly, one leg bent under him, the other splayed up high, close to his face. The bloody hole, the bone jutting where his arm used to be, made her turn away, hand over her mouth. How could he be dead? How could he die now, just when there was hope? Lila wanted him to see what had happened to the Luyten.

It struck her that on the last day she’d ever see her father, she’d disappointed him. She’d gone off and gotten high, and he’d been forced to slap her out of her stupor. When she finally opened her eyes, he’d looked so disappointed in her.

Lila wanted to go to him now, stroke his hair, tell him goodbye, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it, not with him like he was. Where was his arm, she wondered?

20 Oliver Bowen

May 27, 2030. Washington, D.C.

“There, in Mumbai,” Oteri said, pointing at the feed. Finally, a glimpse of a defender. He was pressed close against the buildings, his enormous body hunched. The streets were deserted; the emergency signal would have sounded by then, ordering everyone inside, away from windows. It was not simply a safety consideration—any human watching the battle became involuntary eyes and ears for the Luyten.

The defender paused, looked left, then right. The camera sending the feed rose above building level and panned the area, revealing another defender on the adjacent street.

“They’re nowhere near the production facility,” Ariel commented. She checked her system. “The facility is under Seshadripuram; they’re out in Rajajinagar.”

“Maybe they figure our forces are dug in around the perimeter, so they’ll take the fight to the starfish.” Oteri smiled. “The starfish won’t be expecting that.”

“For once those fuckers have no idea what’s coming, or from where,” Wood said. “It’s time they find out what that feels like.”

“Starfish!” someone shouted, pointing at the Mumbai feed. There were three, their bright emerald, gold, and mustard skin fouled with sewage, galloping in a line perpendicular to the defenders’ route.

One of the defenders spotted them. He said something into his comm and took off, parallel to the Luyten, one block to their right. Another defender took the street one block to their left. They were incredibly fast. Three legs allowed them to run upright, yet almost gallop.

“Go!” Wood shouted, like he was watching a running back heading toward the end zone. “Go, go, go!”

The defenders drew ahead of the Luyten, then cut inward on a crossing street. They stopped just out of sight of the approaching Luyten, pressed against buildings on either side, weapons raised.

“Get ’em!” Wood shouted. “Yes!”

Others in the command center joined in, shouting at the screen, as the Luyten passed the spot where the defenders had set up their ambush. The defenders stepped into the street and opened fire from behind.

The Luyten were hurled forward by the force of the shots, black blood splattering across the pavement. Deafening cheers filled the war room. The president leaped, swung his fist in the air, again, again.

Oliver couldn’t tell if all the Luyten were dead at that point, but it didn’t matter, because the defenders were on them in an instant, shooting each at close range before moving on.

Now the feeds from all of the cities showed either Luyten, defenders, or both.

“Look at that Manhattan feed,” Ariel said. She expanded it. Two defenders were standing in an alley. It almost looked like they were hiding.

“What are they doing?” someone asked.

A Luyten passed in the street. The defenders just watched it.

Oteri studied the scene, frowning, hands on her hips. “Either something went very wrong in their training, or everything went right. We’ll know soon enough.”

They spotted more defenders on the roof of Clayton Tower in Manhattan, watching Luyten movements and relaying them to troops on the ground. A few of the troops were involved in firefights, putting up some resistance, but most were actively avoiding the enemy.

Manhattan’s production facility was beneath the tip of the island, much of it under the bay. The Luyten were converging on it. As each arrived it set up close to the outside layer of human defenses, creating a web encircling those defenses. If the soldiers holding it were overrun, they had nowhere to go but into the bay.

More Luyten arrived by the minute. Soon there were hundreds, maybe thousands. It was a terrifying sight, to see so many in one place. Oliver’s heart was pounding; he turned his head, tugged at the collar of his shirt, which suddenly felt too tight.

The Luyten attacked. It came simultaneously, from all sides.

“Why are the defenders hanging back like that?” Oliver said. “Those soldiers need help, right now.”

The Luyten wasted no time pressing in, trying to break through the perimeter. Mostly they stayed behind their cover, moving only when necessary. Oliver watched as a Luyten firing a human-made wall-buster from behind a truck suddenly bolted. Two seconds later, the truck blew to pieces.

Suddenly all of the Luyten scattered, just before a sphere the size of a coconut sailed from a high window inside the human defense perimeter.

“Tasmanian devil,” Oteri said.

It exploded like a swarm of angry bees, the individual bits creating gaping wounds in wood, concrete, even the street itself, before burning out.

As soon as things settled, the Luyten began to reappear.

Just as suddenly, they disappeared again. Another Tasmanian devil flew from the same window.

“They’re buying time,” Oteri said, “hoping the defenders will show. We’re in trouble if they don’t.”

Three Luyten flying in modified Harriers appeared high over the rooftops. They hovered there as the Tasmanian devil played out, then two swooped down, fired wall-busters point-blank at the window where the Tasmanian devils originated. The side of the building erupted, spewing concrete and steel into the street. Both airborne Luyten were hammered with small-arms fire. They were cut to pieces before their aircraft had time to fall out of the air and crash, one of them taking a chunk out of a building before dropping to the sidewalk, the other tumbling and spinning down the center of a street.

The Luyten kept coming, probing for a breach in the perimeter, firing captured human-shoulder-launched rockets that blew sections off the old buildings, their snipers waiting patiently for the soldiers to grow the least bit careless. The soldiers were using right-angle rifles with electronic sights to shoot without exposing themselves, because even before they poked a head out, the Luyten would know it was coming and blow it to chunks.

Oliver opened his mouth to ask what the hell the defenders were waiting for, when the first few stormed into view. At that moment he realized what they were planning, and wondered if he was the last person in the room to catch on. They’d been waiting for the Luyten to pin themselves against the human defenses. They came with weapons blazing, screaming in maniacal rage. Luyten spun to engage them.

Immediately, a Luyten fell, two of its limbs blown off. It twitched and scrabbled on the pavement as if trying to right itself, then lay still.

“A pincer maneuver,” Oteri said, seeming to relish her role as the room’s military authority. “Perfect for this situation.”

“The Luyten had to know it was coming,” Ariel said. “Every human in the area is a set of eyes for them.”

“But what choice did they have?” Oliver said. “They could have hung back, chased the defenders around the city, but their best chance to destroy the production facility was to get there before—”

Wood shushed him. Oliver shut up.

A defender’s legs glowed red, then blackened. Writhing in agony it crashed to the ground, its head all but crushing a minivan as it landed. A second defender was firing blasts from its forearm-mounted weapon while pressing his other hand against a badly bleeding chest wound.

The humans continued to engage the Luyten, their fire tightly contained to avoid hitting defenders.

The Luyten were falling faster than Oliver could track; black blood was everywhere. Defenders pressed forward, spraying the Luyten with bullets, tearing them to shreds.

Moving as one, the Luyten surged forward, storming the defenders’ position, trying to escape the trap they were in. The defenders fell back, letting them come. They waited until the Luyten were almost on top of them, then, shrieking, eyes wild, they attacked the Luyten close in, using their bladed limbs to slash Luyten open. The Luyten couldn’t match the giants in hand-to-hand combat, and had trouble firing weapons with the defenders so close; their heat guns roasted as many Luyten as defenders as they tried to repel the onslaught.

Within a few minutes, all of the Luyten lay dead. At least half the defenders—Oliver estimated sixty or seventy—were dead or wounded as well.

The war room had gone silent during the final battle, but now President Wood raised his face toward the ceiling and let out an undulating whoop, part Native American war cry, part coyote howl.

People exchanged hugs and high-fives, but only briefly, because there were eleven battles still raging, and not all were as clean and beautiful as Manhattan. London, especially, was a mess. Teams of Luyten had each defender surrounded, while other Luyten had penetrated the human defense perimeter. There were no cameras inside the facility, but it appeared the Luyten were already inside.

“What’s happening in London?” Oliver asked.

“They had only two platoons of defenders ready,” Ariel said. “It looks as if there were too many Luyten.”

“If the London facility is the only one we lose, this will be a very good day,” Wood said.

21 Oliver Bowen

May 29, 2030. Washington, D.C.

Although he hadn’t slept in two days, Oliver had never felt so alive. They had a chance, a real chance, to win the war. The feeling of impending annihilation sitting on his chest like a gorilla for the past year had lifted, replaced by images of defenders swooping into cities, fighting like crazed superheroes. He couldn’t get over how fiercely they fought. They seemed to hate Luyten more than humans did. When the last of the Luyten were dead, the defenders seemed downright frustrated that there were no more to kill.

Oliver passed Five’s holding area. He paused. Five had been mostly forgotten; he was fed and watered, and otherwise left alone. Even Oliver hadn’t spent much time thinking about Five recently.

Oliver activated a retinal scan that allowed him access to Five’s room, and stepped inside.

Five was curled in a ball. Oliver had never seen a Luyten in that position. He had no idea what to say. He hadn’t come to gloat. Honestly, he didn’t know why he’d come. Five probably knew.

“You underestimated us,” he said.

Five didn’t move, didn’t reply. Oliver wondered what he was feeling. Was he mourning their dead? Given their psychic bonds, they might all be emotionally closer than human brothers and sisters, parents and children. That is, if they loved at all.

The war was far from over; maybe Five was strategizing with his kind at this very moment, plotting their next move. The perimeter around D.C. had decayed enough that there were certainly Luyten close enough to Five for communication to be possible.

Oliver was tempted to get a rubber band and shoot some paper clips at Five through the barrier, to see if he could get him to at least move. It was a childish thought, but Oliver was feeling giddy. Odds were, Five wouldn’t react to anything less than a blowtorch.

Studying the Luyten, Oliver wondered what it must be like, to be in constant contact with thousands of minds, some human, some Luyten, all at once. Could Five turn them off, or were they always chattering in his head? A human mind could never tolerate that.

“I guess you’re not in the mood to talk.” He paused a moment longer, then headed for the door.

22 Kai Zhou

June 11, 2030. Washington, D.C.

A little boy in pants way too big for him ran past Oliver and Kai on the sidewalk, shouting, “A defender! A defender!” He disappeared through an open doorway, still shouting.

They paused, waited until the boy reappeared clutching a grocery bag of what looked to be carrots and potatoes to his chest. As he ran, hiking his pants with one hand, potatoes dropped out of the bag and rolled along the sidewalk.

“Oh, no,” the boy said. He squatted to retrieve the fallen potatoes, causing even more to roll out. “Oh, no,” he wailed.

Grinning, Kai went to help the boy secure the bag while Oliver retrieved the fallen potatoes. As soon as he was set, the boy took off again, down Third Avenue, still tugging to keep his pants up.

“Shouldn’t we take the defender something?” Kai asked. He was eager to get back to their poker game, but he was also aware of their duty. The premier had made it clear, right after the defenders were released: How can you help? Feed them. They eat a lot, because they’re big and they work hard. When a defender needed food, all it had to do was go find humans. It made sense.

“You’re right, we should,” Oliver said.

They stopped in a bread shop, bought two large loaves of wheat, and headed in the direction the little boy had gone.

As they walked in silence, Kai occasionally looked at Oliver, still half expecting him to say something, to ask Kai questions the way his father used to. He wasn’t at all like Kai’s real father, who’d laughed and goofed around and played jokes on Kai. Most of the time Oliver didn’t say much. It was strange to eat dinner mostly in silence, but it felt good to have dinner to eat, and a table, and someone taking care of him. Kai had had a nightmare the night before, where he woke up to find his bed had been moved outside, into the woods, while he slept. When he woke for real, in his own room, he’d felt such relief.

There were three defenders, actually. They were standing in the shadow of the Vietnam War Memorial, accepting food eagerly from kids and adults alike, their assault rifles leaned up against the memorial. They ate fiercely, the way they fought, showing no preference for any particular food, and no pleasure in eating it. The people feeding them were clearly enjoying themselves, though.

Kai held up his loaf until a defender plucked it away with two clawed fingers. He felt a thrill as the defender ate it like it was nothing. It felt good to do his part.

When the defenders had eaten their fill, they retrieved their weapons and left without a word. They weren’t much for conversation, didn’t say please or thank you, but as they trotted off to rejoin their company Kai and Oliver joined in when the humans applauded, shouting out lyrics from the defenders’ song the band Hot Button had just released. Kai loved the song, played it all the time.

As they headed out of the park, Kai looked up at Oliver, who seemed lost in thought, as usual.

“Do you like football?” Kai asked.

“Sure.”

“Maybe when the war is over and the NFL starts back up, we could go to a game?”

“Okay. I’d like that.”

Oliver sounded a little hesitant, like he wasn’t sure he’d like it but was willing to give it a try.

“What team do you like?” Kai asked. When Oliver hesitated, Kai added, “I like the Broncos.”

“Me, too,” Oliver said.

Kai suspected Oliver didn’t know a touchdown from a ground-rule double, but he appreciated that Oliver was willing to lie to make Kai feel like they had something in common. It was a good sign. He was a good guy. Maybe one day it would feel natural to call him Dad.

23 Oliver Bowen

August 23, 2030. Washington, D.C.

Oliver watched a cardinal perched in a tree outside his office window. He wondered what birds thought, when they were flying around in deep woods and came upon a Luyten. Were they at all surprised? Did they sense the Luyten were something different that didn’t belong?

“Dr. Bowen?”

It was Carlotta Marcosi, carrying a screen. “You said you wanted to see the fMRI. Is now a good time?”

“Sure. Yes.”

Marcosi set the screen on his desk. Oliver studied the fMRI video, trying to make sense of it. Brain activity was not his area, but he could read an fMRI well enough to know Five’s brain activity was beyond bizarre.

“I don’t understand what I’m seeing,” Oliver finally said. “Do you?”

“Not really, no,” Carlotta Marcosi said. Her hand was trembling as she pointed out regions of Five’s brain. Apparently she was nervous about making this presentation to Oliver, who was, from her perspective, the big boss.

“We’re struggling to link brain structures to functions. We do know there’s a lot of repetition in the structures.” Marcosi pointed to structures that looked like jagged mountain peaks, repeating again and again in Five’s brain. “There’s very little overlap in the pattern of chemical and electrical activity among these structures at any one time, though, so they’re carrying out independent functions.”

“Hmm.” It boggled his mind, how complex their brains were. It would be so much easier if Five were willing to talk to him, although Oliver couldn’t blame Five for not wanting to divulge information about how the Luyten brain functioned. They were, after all, studying Luyten physiology because of the potential to gain military advantage. Still, Oliver couldn’t understand Five’s recent boycott on any communication whatsoever. Oliver had grown so used to hearing that voice in his head that he missed it, in a masochistic way.

Not everything about the Luyten brain was foreign. They shared some neurotransmitter systems with humans, including serotonin, which had been the key to developing the defenders. But the Luyten brain also possessed dozens of mysterious neurotransmitter systems the human brain didn’t.

When Marcosi finished briefing him, Oliver went to Operations for an update on the campaign. Now that it was often good news, Oliver was addicted to hearing the latest on the various campaigns being carried out by the defenders.

The news was always after the fact. The war was primarily taking place in Luyten-controlled territory, so surveillance of defender activity was strictly prohibited, because human knowledge of defender troop movement hindered defender effectiveness. Once a territory was under defender control, they alerted their human counterparts, often requesting that human forces hold captured territory. The defenders didn’t have sufficient numbers to leave behind troops to hold territory after they captured it.

Oliver slipped into Operations and watched over shoulders as technicians updated three-dimensional maps. He worried that they might get tired of Oliver hanging around, although he wasn’t the only one. There were usually two or three voyeurs from other departments hanging around Operations at any given time.

Suzanne Ramos, one of the technicians he’d gotten to know a bit, noticed Oliver and smiled. “Hey, the starfish whisperer.”

Oliver had a thing for Suzanne, but she’d never know it. He was utterly incapable of flirting, and usually didn’t know when a woman was flirting with him. He never would have known Vanessa was interested, if his late sister hadn’t told him.

“Hi, Suzanne. What’s the latest? In—” He stepped closer and examined the topography she was working on. “Southwest Africa?”

Suzanne leaned back in her chair. She was petite, her eyes bright. “There’s no defender presence there yet. We’re trying to assess what sort of Luyten presence there is. I still miss high-def satellite imagery; we’re working with these little butterfly cameras that give you grainy images, plus the Luyten have a habit of routinely frying them to ash.”

“What about in our backyard? Any progress since yesterday?”

“I-95 is clear from here to Baltimore. There’s a lot of activity between Wilmington and Philly. We’re guessing the defenders are trying to create a supply corridor from D.C. to New York.”

Oliver couldn’t help grinning. “That’s just wonderful. It’s hard to imagine, being able to walk from here to New York.”

Suzanne leaned her head back until she was looking at Oliver upside down. “Even if there were no starfish, it’s hard to imagine being able to walk from D.C. to New York.”

“True,” he said, wishing he had a witty comeback. One would come to him tonight, while he was watching a video or something.

“Here,” Suzanne said, calling up a map of the area, divided into a green and red grid. Green squares indicated defender- or human-controlled territory; red squares, Luytencontrolled. There was still an awful lot of red—to the west, between D.C. and Richmond, covering the entire Delaware peninsula—but the green area was growing.

Large-scale battles between the Luyten and defenders were rare. Soon after the bloody battles to defend the production facilities, the Luyten went back to their net configuration—three Luyten defending territories of five to ten square miles. After retaking most of the strategically important facilities from the Luyten, such as power plants, factories, and mines, the defenders were now forced to locate and kill millions of Luyten, three at a time. Meanwhile, the Luyten had resumed their early strategy of sabotage and raids on vulnerable human populations.

“Thanks, Suzanne. Sorry to interrupt your work.”

“Not a problem,” she said, restoring the map of southwest Africa.

Back in the hallway, Oliver passed the room housing Five’s holding cell. He hadn’t been there in two months. There was little point, if Five wouldn’t talk to him. He decided to pay Five a visit.

Five was facing the back of his cell. Oliver took a seat and watched Five do nothing for a while.

“When it looked like humans were on the verge of being wiped out, I still spoke to you. I didn’t blame you, personally, for it.”

When the reply came, it startled Oliver, because he wasn’t expecting it. You spoke to me because you hoped I could provide you an advantage.

“It wasn’t quite that simple, was it? There was more than one reason.”

As usual you give yourself credit for being more complex and inscrutable than you are.

Oliver let it go, not wanting to goad Five into once again hurling the ugliest contents of Oliver’s own mind back at him to prove a point. “If my kind win, I won’t take pleasure in your defeat.” And every day it seemed more likely that they would win. The tide was turning.

Yes, you will. You take great pleasure in dominating and debasing other species. It’s what your kind does best.

“I don’t. I wish we could live in peace. I honestly do.”

No, you honestly don’t.

Oliver sighed, then closed his eyes. Five would never allow that what he thought—actively, consciously—should be given more weight than what the baser, more primitive, less controllable parts of his mind felt. Yes, he hated the Luyten, and hoped to see them rendered extinct as a species, but he didn’t want to hope that.

Yes, you do. You want to believe you’re conflicted, because it makes you feel better. There’s no conflict inside you. Your primitive side and your conscious side feel the same elation at the prospect of our extinction.

“So I have nothing redeeming in my heart or mind. I’m just one big hate pie.”

You don’t want me, personally, to die, if that makes you feel more virtuous.

“No, I don’t want you to die,” Oliver agreed. “And no, it doesn’t make me feel more virtuous.”

Yes, it does.

Laughing at the hopeless absurdity of trying to interact with Five, Oliver stood. He was already tired of this game.

Do you know why we arrived here so unprepared for war?

“You arrived unprepared? You seemed awfully prepared to me.”

If we’d been prepared, you would have lost long ago. Our weapons are adaptations of civilian technologies we brought with us, for heat and power generation. We brought no weapons because we came as settlers, not conquerors.

“You adapted to your new role quickly. And brutally.”

We’re more deserving of existence than you. More will be lost if we’re gone.

“Don’t you think that’s a bit narcissistic?”

No. Evidently Luyten didn’t possess ugly qualities like narcissism or bigotry. They were perfect, enlightened killing machines.

We have many flaws. Understanding them is beyond you.

“Of course it is.” He should have left well enough alone. Now Five would probably yammer in his head all day, distracting him from his work, feeding him false information about Luyten brain function the way he’d fed him false information about Vanessa. “You can do so many things I can’t, Five. But I can do something you can’t. I can leave.” Oliver spun and headed for the door.

We want you to speak with President Wood on our behalf.

Oliver paused, but didn’t turn around. “About what?”

Conditions for surrender.

Oliver’s heart began to thump, slow and hard. “Is this more psychological warfare? Are you just setting me up to look like an ass.”

There’s only one way to find out, isn’t there?

Never a direct answer. “Do you have the authority to negotiate this?”

I won’t be negotiating. I’m in contact with those who make the decisions.

“You’re in contact with them right now?”

Shall I tell them you said hello?

It could be nothing but a big screw you Five was orchestrating, but he had to take it seriously. “I’ll contact the president.”

“He’s in a lunch meeting with Secretary of Defense Oteri in the West Wing,” Five said.

“Silly me,” Oliver said as he left Five’s room. He continued as he hurried down the empty hall. “I was on my way to his chief of staff to request a meeting. With your helpful information, now I can barge straight in and interrupt the president of the United States. Unless the Secret Service agents stationed outside his dining room disapprove, of course.”

Oliver hurried toward Chief of Staff Reinman’s office.

24 Oliver Bowen

August 23, 2030. Washington, D.C.

Oliver glanced around the Oval Office, took in the burgundy drapes, the ornate woodwork over the doors and on the crown molding, but it was difficult to appreciate where he was, because of what was about to happen. If it actually happened, this might be the most important event in human history, and Oliver was right in the middle of it.

“I’m not sure why I’m here,” he said to Five. “Can’t you speak directly to the president?”

I can, but I don’t want to. You’re the only human who wants at least one Luyten to live. You’re the closest thing we have to an advocate.

Five was in his cage, which had been transported from CIA headquarters to the White House via a closed underground rail system Oliver hadn’t known existed. The triptych of windows behind the president’s desk had swung open to allow Five to be rolled right into the Oval Office. Oliver wondered if the windows had always opened like that, or if the president’s people had installed it in case there was ever a need to meet with Luyten. Whatever the case, they’d gone through a great deal of trouble so Five could come to the president, rather than vice versa. Evidently it was crucial to keep up appearances, even if your opponent knew all of your effort was simply for appearance.

The president’s private door swung open. Wood entered, followed by Secretary of State Nielsen and Secretary of Defense Oteri. Oliver stood, and to his surprise, so did Five.

As they shook hands, the president winked at Oliver, then clapped him on the shoulder. Oliver’s throat tightened with pride at the private attaboy. He swallowed, trying to banish the emotion, which was extremely premature. It was yet to be seen if he’d accomplished anything.

The president turned to face Five. “I understand you wish to discuss terms for surrender?”

Tell him he’s correct.

Relief washed over Oliver as he repeated Five’s words.

“What terms are you requesting?” Wood asked.

President Wood has been authorized by the premier to accept our surrender if we’ll agree to incarceration in an internment camp. We see this as the best terms we will be able to negotiate given our circumstance, so we would, theoretically, accept them.

Everyone in the room jolted visibly, as Five finished his thought aloud: “The problem is, once we enter the camps, we will be killed.”

It took Wood a moment to regain his composure. He’d seen the recordings of Five speaking aloud on Easter Island, but no doubt hearing it live was another matter entirely. “No you wouldn’t,” he said, still facing Five. “If we sign an agreement in good faith, we’ll honor it.”

“Your intention is to honor it,” Five said. “The premier is less certain. Others are certain you should exterminate us.”

“Others such as who?” Wood asked.

“Such as your secretary of defense.”

Scowling, Wood turned to Oteri. “Is this true?”

Oteri nodded tightly. “Yes, sir. That would be my counsel.”

Wood moved a half step closer, pointed at Oteri’s nose. “Another half billion people will die before this war is over. If we can save a half billion innocent lives by commuting a death sentence to life in prison, we’ll take that deal every time. Erase any thoughts of going back on our word once we make an agreement. Wipe them out of your fucking mind right now.”

He turned back to Five. “Is my secretary now on board with this agreement?”

“Yes. It may prove more of a challenge to convince other world leaders, including the premier.”

“I’m supposed to convince all of them?”

“Ninety percent will do.”

Wood grunted. “Only ninety percent.”

Oliver couldn’t help but feel disappointed. Somehow he’d imagined they would strike a deal then and there. It was a step in the right direction, though.

Don’t flatter yourself. There are dozens of these meetings being held.

Right now? He thought it, rather than speaking it aloud.

Now, or soon, or they were recently completed. The other meetings were conducted without the drama of face-to-face interactions. Leaders within range were contacted telepathically.

How are the meetings going? Oliver thought.

Mixed. That was all Five would say on that, or any other topic. He fell back into silence as he was wheeled out of the Oval Office, onto the front lawn of the White House.

25 Oliver Bowen

October 10, 2030. Washington, D.C.

Everyone would remember where they were when it happened. Oliver was tossing a football with Kai in their backyard. It was two hours before the news would go public. His comm alerted him to an incoming call from President Wood, indicating that full security was required to take the call.

“Holy crap.” Oliver dropped the football. “I have to take this.” He activated his phone’s security protocol.

“Oliver.” The president stretched his name into three syllables, as if relishing the sound of it. “I have news.”

“Good news?”

“The best news.”

Oliver let out a whoop. “It’s over? Please tell me it’s over.” Kai had come over to stand close to him.

“The terms of surrender were signed ninety minutes ago. If you want to call what the starfish do with a pen ‘signing.’ More like doodling.”

“Oh my God. I can’t tell you.” He fumbled for words, his throat tight with emotion. “Thank you for calling me personally, Mr. President.”

“Are you kidding? I should be driving over to give you a hug. You were an important part of this victory. I won’t forget it. When everything settles down I want to talk about a position.”

“Yes, sir.” Oliver thought he might cry. He took a few deep breaths, tried to keep his emotions from overwhelming him. It was over, the war was over. Things would return to normal.

“Can you be here in an hour? I want to meet with my top advisors. There are things to be worked out.”

“Yes, sir. Of course.”

Kai stood looking at him, waiting expectantly.

“It’s over. The war is over.” And although he felt awkward doing it, Oliver gave Kai a hug.

He had to tell someone. An adult—someone he could absolutely trust. He was busting with the news. He had a few close friends, most of them back in St. Cloud, where he’d grown up. He could trust every one of them, but none seemed quite right.

Then he thought of Vanessa.

“I need to make a call; I’ll be back in a minute.” He went inside.

She answered, but didn’t say hello, didn’t say anything.

“Hi,” he said.

“What can I do for you?”

“I wanted to share something I just heard.”

“Oh? What’s that?” She was clearly trying to control the tinge of anger in her voice.

“President Wood just called me.” He took a deep breath, wanting to relish the moment, relish the words. “The war is over. The Luyten have surrendered.”

He heard a choked sound escape her.

“It’s over,” Oliver said. “Can you believe it?”

“No. No, I can’t.”

He watched out the window as Kai threw the football straight into the air, ran a few steps, and caught it himself. Kai would have liked Vanessa; she was playful, always turning things into a game.

Oliver glanced at the clock. “Oh, crap.”

“What is it?” Vanessa asked.

“It’s still morning. No talking about the war in the morning.”

It got a laugh out of her. Not a full, rich, Vanessa laugh, but a chuckle, tinged with sadness. Then she said, “I have to go,” offering no excuse or explanation, just the simple declaration. “I appreciate you calling to tell me. It’s wonderful news.”

Staring at his silent phone, Oliver wondered if Vanessa still kept the voice-mail recording from the first time he’d ever called her. Whenever something went wrong, whenever things were bad, she could play that recording of him fumbling and stammering with nervousness, and they would both collapse into laughter. Surely she had erased it, after their divorce.

Maybe now that things were returning to normal, she would have a change of heart. All he wanted now was to have Vanessa in his life, and Kai, and to have a quiet, uneventful existence. Maybe he would decline the president’s offer when it came, and go back to a university position. With his experience and a letter of reference from the president, he could take his pick of positions, could go in tenured. It sounded so good. Maybe that’s what he’d do, as soon as everything settled down.

Oliver laughed aloud, suddenly realizing how absurd this train of thought was. There wasn’t a university in the country that was operating at the moment. Maybe in a few years, though. Now that the war was over.

26 Lila Easterlin

October 20, 2030. Near Madison, Georgia.

The gently sloping hill was covered with people, tents, and trash. There were people as far as Lila could see, from those high up among the copses of scrub pines dotting the top of the hill, to the throngs pressed right up to the outer fence, which had been set up to keep onlookers from getting too close to the real fence surrounding the detention camp.

It was like an enormous party. Everyone was drinking, singing, hugging, laughing. She could see the roadies for Hot Button setting up in a space between the laser fence and the real fence. Lila hoped they would sing the defenders’ song more than once.

Alfe passed her a bottle of moonshine. It wouldn’t be long before real booze, brand-name booze, would be back in stores, along with real soft drinks, real lipstick, real meat. She took a swig, then tapped Cheena on the elbow and held out the bottle. Cheena was dancing; Lila tapped her a second time, harder, just as another roar went up from the crowd, starting up high and spreading like a wave down the hill.

Lila scanned the valley, and finally spotted them. “There,” she shrieked, pointing. Six Luyten moved across a long-neglected field of brown crops and tall weeds. They passed between a towering white silo and a row of combine harvesters. The cheers grew deafening as the Luyten continued on, between two rows of armed defenders, through the gates, into the enormous detention camp.

The crowd was still cheering as loudly as when the first two Luyten padded between those gates, two days earlier. Now the camp was getting crowded, even though it went on for miles, encompassing trees, hills, even a few buildings. It was a temporary solution, until a secure structure could be built. On the news there was talk of imprisoning all the Luyten in one place, maybe on an island. Lila didn’t care where they put them, as long as they were miserable. Despite the premier’s speech about saving half a billion lives, honoring our word, blah, blah, blah, she really wanted to see them all shot. She knew the defenders did as well—it was in their eyes as they watched the starfish shamble through the gates. They were an abomination; they didn’t belong anywhere on Earth, except in the ground.

The crowd began to cheer again. It was a large group this time—thirty, forty starfish, clustered in their usual groups of three, forming triangles. One of them was crawling with baby starfish. The first time one of these momma and babies had appeared out of the trees, Lila had been mortified. Everyone had been mortified.

Lila threw up her fist and hooted, wondered if one of these was the one who’d killed her father. She felt the familiar stab of his loss, the aching sadness that was never far from the surface, no matter how drunk she got. He was really gone; she would never, ever see him again. It didn’t seem possible.

And on the last day of his life, just before he ran out of the school to confront monsters, she’d argued with him. Along with the horrible moment of his death, she’d always carry the memory of him slapping her awake, asking her if she understood the situation, and her oh-so-clever answer. We’re going to die. That’s the situation. Would it have killed her to say, “I’m sorry”?

“Are these things going to be allowed to fuck?” Cheena asked, mercifully interrupting her thoughts. “I mean, are they going to be having kids in there, so there are more and more of them for us to feed until one day they bust out?”

Evidently Cheena wasn’t much for listening to the news feeds. “Part of the treaty is the starfish agreed not to breed.”

“They can control that?”

Lila shrugged. “I guess so, I don’t know. I don’t want to know any more about them than I have to. Let them rot.”

More cheering, as more starfish appeared and took their perp walk.

Alfe leaned over to speak into her ear. “The defenders’ parade’s been announced. It’s on Friday.”

“Vascular. I can’t wait.”

Looking down at the defenders, at their stately, serene, strangely beautiful faces, their lean, powerful bodies, Lila had an epiphany. Now that her future was open, that’s what she was going to do with her life: She would become a genetic engineer. She would study at the feet of the people who created the defenders.

Lila was confident she’d remember this moment for the rest of her life, because in this moment she’d found the blueprint for what was to come, and it felt so, so right.

“I wonder if they’ll have any good music at the parade, or if it’ll be all marching bands,” Alfe said.

Lila rolled her eyes and sighed. “It’s not about music. It’s about honoring the defenders.” She enunciated every word, like she would if she were speaking to a child. “If it wasn’t for them, we’d all be dead.”

“I know that,” Alfe said, annoyed. “I’m not saying the music is the important thing. I was just wondering.”

Lila didn’t hear Alfe’s last words. Another voice drowned him out—a voice in her head that felt like a razor blade dragged across her brain.

I’m sorry I killed your father.

Lila sunk to her knees.

Very sorry.

All around her, people shrieked, cried, clutched their ears. It wasn’t just her—they were speaking to everyone.

Sorry for your loss. Indeed.

This was a different voice, although she didn’t know how she knew that. Their voices felt horrible, like spiders had gone into her ears and were crawling around inside her head.

People were fleeing toward the road, where buses were parked, waiting to take the crowds home.

She looked at Alfe, who was plopped in the grass, his head between his knees. Cheena grabbed her by her tunic from behind, tugged her to her feet.

“Let’s get out of here.” She was shaking her hands, as if she’d gotten something disgusting on them and needed to wash. “Let’s go.”

Lila tugged Alfe up and they ran, letting the crowd carry them toward the buses.

I’m truly sorry. It was the first voice again, the voice of the monster who’d killed her father. It was speaking to her. Lila suspected the sound of that voice might drive her insane. She had to get out of there. She tried to run faster, but the crowd was setting the pace, and not everyone in it was young.

Her gaze was drawn down into the pens, toward one particular Luyten, a smallish, crimson one pressed close to the fence. There was no way to know for sure that it was the one who was speaking to her, but somehow she felt sure it was.

27 Oliver Bowen

October 21, 2030. Washington, D.C.

They loaded Five into a semi. It was marked as a Killer Donuts truck, leading Oliver to wonder if the Killer Donuts Corporation was a government front. They made surprisingly good donuts, if that was the case.

As two men rolled down the back door of the semi, Oliver resisted the temptation to wave. Enough people thought his relationship with Five was sick and weird—no need to throw fuel on that fire. Oliver imagined Five would miss tormenting him.

Having you as company is about as fulfilling to me as the company of a goldfish would be to you.

Although Five had given no indication he was joking, Oliver couldn’t help laughing. He turned away, headed into the shade of the oak trees on the side lawn of the compound, where he could speak aloud in peace.

“You’d really prefer to be in a camp? I could argue that you’re more valuable as a liaison.”

I prefer to be with my kind.

“All right.” Oliver wondered what sort of reception Five would get. If he’d been telling Kai the truth back when they first met, Five had violated a basic rule set down by the Luyten leadership: no communication with the enemy.

Luyten don’t shun their own. Even those who’ve made terrible mistakes.

“But in the end, it allowed you to be of some use to your kind.”

To facilitate our surrender. Yes, how useful.

Oliver realized the direction of their conversation provided an opportunity to broach the subject many people were curious about. “Of course, there are lots of Luyten talking now.” Oliver watched the truck pull away. “Can I ask why that is?”

You already know the answer.

“I suspect the answer. Given that Luyten motives are way beyond my comprehension, how could I possibly know I’m right, unless you tell me?”

In this case, our motives should be utterly transparent, even to you. We’re engaging in a campaign to “humanize” ourselves, because your kind are less likely to carry out genocide on a species that seems somewhat human.

“You’re scaring the shit out of people.”

That can’t be helped. By communicating we become less alien. By sending a consistent message of kindness and contrition, we become less threatening.

Oliver had to admit it made sense. In human wars, countries went to great lengths to dehumanize the enemy so their soldiers would feel less guilty killing them.

“Can I make a suggestion? Tell your kind to take on names, and introduce themselves when they contact someone. Names humanize.”

Five didn’t respond. Oliver frowned. “Five?”

The truck must have carried Five outside his telepathic range. He was gone.

His hands in his pockets, feeling somewhat melancholy, Oliver headed back inside. If not for what happened with Vanessa, Oliver could honestly have said he would miss Five.

28 Oliver Bowen

October 24, 2030. Washington, D.C.

The defenders just kept coming. They were marching three abreast, and that was all that would fit across Pennsylvania Avenue. The crowd cheered, waved flags, tossed flowers and wreaths at the defenders, who crushed the offerings underfoot until the pavement was hidden beneath a layer of multicolored mulch. Many carried weapons as they marched briskly, eyes front, their long faces proud, unsmiling.

They just kept coming. And these were just the defenders who’d been in the D.C. vicinity at the end of the war. There were hundreds of parades going on all over the world. Oliver wondered what all of these defenders would do now that the war was over. They could guard the Luyten, but that would require only a small fraction of them.

“How many defenders are there?” he asked Ariel. “Do you know?”

Ariel touched a finger to her lip. “You know, I don’t. Millions. Several million. Maybe ten. We made as many as possible, as fast as we could. Every new defender meant fewer human lives lost.”

“What are they going to do, now that the war is over?”

Ariel shrugged. “I don’t think that’s been discussed yet, not at the highest level. I guess they could be retired, given barracks and pensions. They could relax, watch jumbo TVs. Or they could be retrained to work in law enforcement, maybe construction?”

“Hmm.” Oliver caught a glimpse of Kai, near the front of the crowd, waving at the passing defenders, who did not wave back.

“Why? Do you have an idea? I doubt anything’s been decided.”

“I was just curious.”

Oliver leaned forward, tried to see if the end of the line was in sight, but the crowd was too thick.

The defenders just kept coming.

Oliver craned his neck to look in the other direction. “Where are they going, when they reach the end of the parade route?”

Then he remembered: His comm was working, the satellites were back in orbit. His comm located a camera farther down Pennsylvania Avenue and provided a link so he could see.

The defenders were turning onto Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway, and exiting along the long stretch of parklands. He linked to a camera in the park.

They were simply standing there. Not looking around, not talking to each other. Just standing. They had no idea what to do with themselves.

29 Oliver Bowen

November 11, 2030. Washington, D.C.

Despite everyone being nothing but holographic images, the ethereal UN assembly hall nothing but keystrokes of computer code, the tension in the room was palpable.

Undoubtedly, the meeting the defenders were having at that very moment was taking place in a less impressive virtual environment, but the fact that they were having it at all was disturbing. Oliver didn’t know what to feel about the defenders’ closed meeting. By necessity, the defenders had been engineered to be fiercely independent, reliant on humans for nothing. It had worked—the plan had saved the human race, but no one had thought beyond defeating the Luyten.

Oliver admired the assembly hall, and fretted, while the assembly argued over whether they should have forbidden the defenders from meeting, cast about for scapegoats to blame for the awkward situation humanity found itself in, and occasionally digressed into debate about the wisdom of allowing the Luyten to live.

The hall had been restored to its full size and splendor, now that a network of satellites had been returned to the outer atmosphere. The structure was stunning, a masterpiece of classical Greek architecture with a dizzying, spiraling ceiling.

President Wood was recognized by Premier Chandar. Oliver lifted his head, paid closer attention.

“Our Japanese brethren have a profound saying that I think is relevant at this moment: Fix the problem, not the blame. The issue we should be discussing in the brief time we have available before the defenders join this meeting is how to tell them that while they certainly have the right to decide their own fate, they do not have the right to retain possession of our property.” Oliver was always impressed by the president’s ability to utterly erase his Brooklyn accent and his cocky, confrontational tone when speaking in public. “I’m of course referring to the substantial cache of state-of-the-art weapons we provided them. They’re entitled to their rights as citizens, as set forth by the recently ratified UN decree, but they are not entitled to our arms.”

Lorenzo Manzanillo, the prime minister of Nicaragua, jumped in without being recognized. An interpreter jumped in just as quickly. “Not only did we build the defenders’ weapons, we built the defenders. I don’t think their status as citizens—”

Premier Chandar interrupted. Her usual calm, dignified demeanor was completely absent; her long white hair was frizzy and unkempt. She looked as if she hadn’t slept in days. “Excuse me, Minister Manzanillo. The defenders have finished their meeting and are asking to address this assembly.”

It was the moment they’d been waiting for, the sole purpose for this meeting. The defenders had asked to address the assembly at noon, GMT, but had kept it waiting for… (Oliver checked the time) two hours and forty minutes.

The space between the bowl-shaped seating area and the dais where the premier and her deputies were seated expanded to accommodate the defenders’ representatives. When the space was ready, Premier Chandar nodded to the chief of technology, and the defenders materialized.

There were seven defenders, chosen, Oliver had heard, because they’d distinguished themselves during the campaign. One was badly burned, his bone-white skin an angry, puckered swirl down one side of his face and neck, disappearing beneath his black dress uniform. Another was missing an arm at the shoulder.

It was the burned one who spoke, his arms dangling at his sides, fingers flexing and unflexing, as if they were hungry to clutch something. A weapon, maybe. He was breathing heavily, whether because he was nervous or just ramped up, Oliver didn’t know.

“My name is Douglas. I’m not familiar with the protocols of this assembly, so I apologize in advance for breaching them.”

He scowled as he spoke. All of them were scowling, actually. It seemed to be their default expression. “We have spent the past several days trying to determine our mission. During the war our mission was clear, and we were happy. Now we are not. We’re left with nothing to want, no one to hate. You have suggested one solution, to provide us financial resources and vocational training. We’ve decided to decline your offer.”

Douglas looked to the other defenders, who nodded, almost as if the decision were being made on the spot. They seemed awkward, now that they weren’t in battle. Unsure of themselves.

“You are our mothers and fathers. We recognize and celebrate this. But we are not children.”

Again, he looked to the others, who again nodded. One thumped his chest with his fist.

“We will create our own nation, forge our own identity, our own culture.”

Douglas paused, as if to allow time for those assembled to digest what he’d said. Oliver couldn’t digest it, because he didn’t understand it. Their own nation? Did they mean that symbolically, or were they talking about a physical place, with borders, laws, an economy?

“Your population was culled substantially by the war. There were seven-point-two billion humans before the Luyten invaded; now there are two-point-nine billion.” He spread his hands. “There is more than enough space, plenty of resources for all. We’ll claim our prisoners, carry out executions, then leave you in peace.”

Their prisoners? That didn’t sound good. The uneasy feeling Oliver had been nursing became downright dread. Judging from the look on the premier’s face, she felt the same.

“I’m not sure I understand. What are you proposing, exactly?” Premier Chandar asked.

Without hesitation, Douglas replied, “We want Australia.”