Defenders

64 Kai Zhou

October 8, 2047. Washington, D.C.

The defender watched the dealer turn the card. Kai watched the defender, who sat up straighter in his chair and licked his lips. Now Kai knew both of the defender’s hole cards. They were so absurdly easy to read, so clownishly bad at masking their reactions.

“Bet twenty-five thousand.” The defender, whose name was Sidney, slid oversized chips into the pot with his clawed fingers. The motion aired out Sidney’s armpit, causing his stress-stink to waft in Kai’s direction. When defenders were nervous they sweated profusely, and the stink was incredible.

Kai called the bet. This was a good hand to lose. It wouldn’t be obvious, given that Kai had a smaller two pair. He saw the bet and raised forty thousand, not worried about scaring Sidney into folding, because defenders didn’t know what the word meant. If they had a bad hand, most of the time they tried to bluff. They hated losing. Everyone hated losing, but defenders had turned sore losing into an art form. Kai had seen it once firsthand, when a defender named Francois had crushed Pete Sheehy’s head after Sheehy wiped him out with a bluff. What a horrible thing that had been—as bad as anything Kai had seen in the war.

Kai flipped his cards, feigned disappointment as Sidney revealed his paired king-ten, and watched as the defender gleefully raked in the pot.

“You’re a Poker World Series champion,” Sidney said.

“Yes, I am.”

“I’m an outstanding player, if I can beat you.”

“That would follow, yes.” The other human players at the table might have picked up the slightest hint of sarcasm in Kai’s tone, but they wouldn’t dare smirk. Kai’s own face generated nothing but earnestness as he looked up at Sidney.

If Kai had known from the outset how much defenders revered poker, he could have saved himself the stress of spending two months working at a nuclear power plant with no idea what he was doing. He really owed the people at that plant; they’d risked their lives covering for him.

Kai shifted to the left, then the right, trying to find a position that made his hip and side ache less. Sometimes it was hard for him to believe he was not yet thirty years old. He felt eighty.

Sidney raised old Paul Heller’s bet fifty thousand, proclaiming the raise with such ham-handed bravado that even a hamster would know he was bluffing. Kai folded.

He had probably been safer as a fraud in a nuclear power plant than he was playing poker with defenders. Once in a while you had to beat them, or they’d suspect you were patronizing them and they’d kill you. But you’d better be sure they were in a good mood when you beat them, or else they’d kill you then, too.

“Poker is war, disguised as a game,” Sidney proclaimed, apropos of nothing, as he raked in the pot after Paul folded.

Head down, Kai restacked his dwindling pile of chips. He still found it difficult, stacking chips and handling cards with only his left hand. Maybe he always would.

Poker wasn’t war; war was war. And if you lost a war, you’d better let the victors beat you at poker.

Kai’s phone vibrated. He checked it, saw it was a message from Lila.

It was so stupid, so pointless to be jealous, to feel angry at Lila for a situation she could not possibly control. Yet that’s what Kai felt as he read the message. Erik had turned their marriage into an incredibly dysfunctional sort of polyamory.

Yes, he punched, taking his frustration out on the keys. He wanted to say more, but there was always the risk that Erik, or some defender at ultra-paranoid Central Command screening messages for subversive content, might read his message. Another night of babysitting while his wife and her platonic lover went out on the town. Kai wasn’t sure how much more of this he could stand, but in the new order of things, he had no choice but to stand it.

65 Lila Easterlin

October 8, 2047. Washington, D.C.

It was stupid, but Lila found herself getting choked up watching the demolition of Disney World on her computer. Maybe it was because Disney World so perfectly represented the modern human world, with its combination of commercial crassness and creative audacity. She watched bulldozers flatten snack bars, wrecking balls topple Cinderella’s Castle and the monorail. Did the defenders really need to supersize Orlando in that direction, or were they trying to make a statement about how childish humans were? She took a big swig of coffee; she was hoping the caffeine would kill the pounding headache she had. She’d stayed up too late, drinking too much and popping too many pills.

It was stupid that the destruction of Disney World was bothering her. The real tragedy was the destruction of all those works of art at the Met, MoMA, the Louvre, on and on, to make room for defender artwork. They could have removed the human works of art instead of destroying them, but who was going to question defenders’ instructions?

Even with all of that space devoted to defender artwork, nothing of Erik’s was on public display. It gave Lila childish pleasure, yet she also felt sorry for him. That was the difference between how she and Kai felt about the defenders: They both hated them, but Lila also pitied them. Maybe if she’d been shot by a defender, and dealt with the pain Kai dealt with on a daily basis, she’d find it hard to pity them.

“Lila? You ready?” Minka stood in Lila’s defender-sized doorway.

“Sure.” She closed the feed on the demolition, grabbed her phone, and joined Minka in the hall. “Who’s doing the review?”

“Pierre.”

Lila groaned inwardly. Pierre was a walking neurosis. Lila wasn’t sure if defenders were capable of developing PTSD, but something had to account for how far from the defender norm Pierre was when it came to being tightly wound.

Pierre was waiting outside the delivery room (as they referred to it when no defenders were present). “How many?” he asked as they approached.

“Eight hundred,” Lila replied.

“Eight hundred exactly?”

“Eight hundred exactly.” Eight hundred more defenders, with their dead souls and sociopathic narcissism. With the advances in genetic engineering made between the end of the Luyten War and the beginning of the Defender Ascension (as the defenders had named it), Lila could have engineered them to be so much more stable, if they’d let her. But no. The new defenders couldn’t be in any way superior to the existing ones.

Lila and Minka followed Pierre down concrete stairs to the parade floor, where the new defenders were lined up, ready for review.

She should kill herself. Blow her brains out, or jump from a bridge. More of these monsters only added suffering to the world. If she wasn’t such a coward, if she didn’t love Kai and Errol so much, she would remove herself from the equation. They would get someone else to oversee production at this facility, but that rationalization was wearing thin for her. Lately she felt so disgusting most of the time. Most humans who learned what she did for a living shared her contempt for herself.

Other officers tended to strut around during a review, making it more a ceremonial show than a true inspection, but Pierre looked the new defenders up and down as if expecting some to be missing fingers, or major organs.

Lila waited by the door for more than an hour before Pierre finally nodded his approval. “Brothers,” he called, “welcome to the world.”

Lila and Minka stood aside as the new defenders paraded past, five at a time, up the stairs to join the hellish world they’d all created together.

Lila dropped her purse on the kitchen counter and headed for her room. She had twenty minutes to get ready to go with Erik to this thing, whatever it was.

“Lila?” Erik called from his room. “Is that you? Come here, please.”

“Coming.” She always felt uneasy, being alone in the house with Erik. It made her feel too much like his wife.

He was lying on the bed, wearing what looked like a giant pair of boxer shorts, his artificial legs on the bed beside him.

He looked less than imposing lying there, his stumped flesh-and-bone legs ending just below the knee, the last few inches of his legs deeply notched to accept the bionic appendages, his friction sores salved.

“Can you help me with these?”

“Sure.”

She clamped and locked his limbs into place as gently as she could, trying not to aggravate the open sores. The fit was never perfect, and friction was inevitable. The arms weren’t as bad.

66 Dominique Wiewall

October 8, 2047. Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, Canada.

She hated the cold. Absolutely despised it. She’d turned down a postdoc at UMass in favor of LSU solely because it was warm in Louisiana and cold in Massachusetts. That she might live out the rest of her life in the northernmost outpost on Earth was a biting irony.

As she did at the start of every information-gathering session on the Internet, she checked her sister’s Facebook page. There was nothing new. Richelle was still working on a construction project for the defenders in Sarasota, Florida, building a government office facility, working right alongside Luyten. As always, Dominique had to resist the urge to leave an anonymous message that only Richelle would understand, to let her know Dominique was still alive. She’d never actually do it, of course. If by some wild chance the defender intelligentsia checked her account that day and realized what the message was, they could trace the computer’s IP address, and ultimately discover that the computer in question was issued to CFS Alert, the northernmost continually inhabited outpost in the world, one of those out-of-the-way locales they hadn’t bothered to formally conquer. Dominique wondered why they couldn’t have fled to some out-of-the-way Polynesian island. There were plenty of those the defenders hadn’t bothered to conquer, either.

With her daily check on Richelle out of the way, Dominique got to work, starting with a check of the New York Times. Most of it was fluff now, stories of pets finding their way home from a thousand miles away, coverage of construction projects, details of the planned changeover in the NFL from human players to defenders. Very little helpful information. No one put anything helpful in writing; the president and his people assumed significant communication was happening the old-fashioned way: face-to-face. That left the good people hiding out at CFS Alert frustratingly uninformed.

Dominique wasn’t sure what good it would do them to be informed. There were fewer than fifty people at CFS Alert. They had no weapons to speak of, no army to command. The war was over. They’d lost. Still, they were one of the last vestiges of free human leadership, of legitimate human authority, and they had zero information.

Dominique lifted her hot cocoa, blew on it, took a sip. It was powdered and not very good, but how much was she going to miss it when it was gone? They would deplete their food stores by spring, by which time they’d have to know how to live off the land. Dominique shuddered at the thought of dried seal blubber for breakfast. They should fly south and surrender. Only they couldn’t, because they’d be executed for fleeing, and for being important and powerful people. No, what they needed was a way to communicate with people in the larger world that didn’t give away their existence, let alone their location.

There was a rap on her door.

“Come in!” she shouted, to be heard over the howling wind outside.

Forrest squeezed inside and closed the door, gasping from the morning cold. “That’ll wake you up in a hurry.”

“That’s why I’m still in here,” Dominique said, suddenly feeling energized. Forrest did that to her, and it was time and then some that one of them crossed that invisible line and overtly acknowledged the obvious attraction between them. Dominique wondered if they were both taking it slow because it was fun to be in this early, flirtatious stage. It was a breath of warm spring air in an otherwise barren, stifling existence. Maybe they should just go on like this. Only Dominique was tired of sleeping alone; Forrest’s warm body would be so much better than her army-issue electric blanket.

“Does that mean you’re not going to breakfast?” Forrest asked.

Dominique made a show of struggling to her feet. “No, I’m coming. I just want there to be a tunnel between the barracks and the cafeteria. I don’t want to see any more snow.”

“I can fix that. Come on.”

Dominique pulled on her coat, hat, and gloves. Grinning, Forrest took a scarf off her coat hook and blindfolded her with it. Laughing, Dominique let Forrest take her hand and lead her outside.

The wind bit her skin, immediately unpleasant.

“Did you see they’re demolishing Disney World?” Dominique asked as they walked.

“I did.”

“I mean, Disney World. The Taj Mahal was one thing, but Disney World? Mickey’s home?”

“The bastards.”

“The problem is, they’re not playful. It made sense at the time—if you’re designing killing machines, you don’t want them to be playful, but now that they run everything, it’s a problem…” She stopped short, pulled off the scarf as a flash of insight struck her. It just dropped into her mind, the way some of the best ideas arrived. “Holy shit. I think I’ve got it.”

“What’s that?”

“It. It.” The defenders didn’t have a playful bone in their bodies. That meant they would turn their prodigious noses up at video games, theme parks, anything that hinted of frivolity. Never in a million years would they visit a virtual playscape. And just to make doubly sure, she could use one of the obsolete ones. Earth2 would be perfect. Dominique recalled reading an article about how Earth2 had been saved from deletion by a virtual historical preservation group, because it was the first, the oldest virtual playscape to be widely used. If they could get the word out, humans could meet inside Earth2 and speak freely, without fear of being overheard.

“Let’s get inside and I’ll explain.”

With a dozen people watching over her shoulder, Dominique navigated to Earth2. She chose a default avatar and consulted the map. If any people were there at the moment, a central, urban destination seemed the most likely place to find them. She chose a city called Haven and teleported in.

Her avatar—a slim, pleasant-looking woman of indistinct ethnicity—appeared on a street corner in what looked like a typical early-twenty-first-century city. It was deserted.

Dominique directed her avatar to walk.

“You can fly, you know,” President Wood said—Anthony Wood, not Carmine. From the moment they’d arrived at CFS Alert, President Wood had been back in charge, though nothing was ever said. Carmine seemed fine with the change, almost relieved; Dominique wondered if it had been his idea.

Dominique craned her neck to look at the president. “How on Earth would you know that?”

President Wood shrugged. “Do the math. I was twenty-five when Earth2 was all the rage.” He gestured at the old-fashioned keyboard, which must have been at least fifteen years old. “Press and hold the function key, then hit PAGE UP.”

She did. Her avatar spread her arms and rose into the air, soaring higher the more Dominique pressed PAGE UP. When she got above the buildings she went exploring for signs of life.

There was no one on the streets, no one at the beach resorts, no one in Medieval Village or on Vampire Island.

“Someone must visit occasionally. I can check every few hours,” Dominique said.

“Over there,” Carmine’s wife, Nora, said, pointing as the avatar passed over an amusement park.

A lone car whipped around an impossibly steep curve on a roller coaster. Dominique dropped her avatar lower, until they could see a single head inside the car. She found the exit to the coaster, and landed there to wait.

The avatar was tall and slim, a black woman with her head shaved except for a ponytail. She paused at the coaster’s turnstile exit, taking in Dominique’s avatar.

Hi, Dominique typed. Earth2 had an audio function, but Dominique thought it prudent not to use it to start, given their desire to remain anonymous.

“Just what we need, a smartass,” President Wood said. “It must be a kid. Who else would be trolling around in there?” Ha.

Ha. Not quite that important. How old are you? Dominique typed.

“Told you,” Wood said.

Her name was Eclipse, at least inside the game. Dominique was happy to keep it at pseudonyms. She told Eclipse her name was Island Rain, but Eclipse could call her Rain.

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Nora said.

Chuckling, Dominique typed, You got it. She followed Eclipse to the coaster’s entrance.

67 Kai Zhou

October 8, 2047. Washington, D.C.

When the key rattled in the gargantuan front door, Kai tensed.

“Mommy!” Errol howled and scrabbled off the couch to greet Lila.

Kai smiled a greeting as Lila came into the living room carrying Errol. Erik followed behind her.

“Was Errol good?” Lila asked, sitting on the couch.

“I was good,” Errol answered, before Kai could.

“He was fine.”

Lila excused herself and headed to the bathroom. Kai turned back toward the TV with Errol in his lap as Erik eased into his giant stuffed chair.

“What is this?” Erik asked, frowning.

“Forever After. An old situation comedy.”

Erik picked up the remote and changed the channel to one of the new shows. It was a cop show, with a defender playing the lead. The defender was so bad he was painful to watch, standing out among his professional human costars like a Little Leaguer trying to play shortstop for the Atlanta Braves.

There was no romance in the new shows, and little humor save for the hammy plays-on-words the defenders could understand.

Kai watched obediently until the defender-cop got into a shootout with a dozen bad humans, then he took Errol to bed.

Lila joined him a few minutes later. “Sorry. Erik wanted me to stay until the commercial. I have to get back in a minute.” Glancing toward the closed door, Lila kissed him quickly. “Meet me in the laundry closet later?”

“It’s a date,” Kai said.

As Lila pulled off his shirt, Kai grimaced, repulsed by his own wounds. “I’m just disgusting,” he whispered. The skin was thick and puckered in the spots where he’d been shot, the damage radiating out in starburst patterns.

“Are you kidding me? War wounds are sexy.” She kissed his ravaged shoulder, his caved-in side. “If you had scars from a hernia surgery, that would be disgusting.”

He pulled Lila’s shirt over her head, dropped it on the dryer. Her skin was soft and perfect. He caressed her breast with his good hand, took her nipple between his lips. She closed her eyes, arched back onto the washing machine, her breath quick but silent. They were running both the washer and dryer to create noise so they wouldn’t be overheard. Kai slid Lila’s skirt and panties to the narrow strip of floor between the appliances. Lila kicked them off, eased back onto the washer with Kai’s help.

They knew this closet well, could maneuver without making a sound into the three positions that were possible in the cramped space. You could be incredibly careful, incredibly quiet, when you knew you’d be killed if you were discovered.

Kai slid his half hand behind Lila, gripped her ass as well as he could, expecting her to recoil from the feel of what looked like a pincer—nothing but a thumb and index finger on the end of his wrist. She only pressed closer, worked him inside her, wriggled her hips to get just the right angle.

His thrusts were careful and deliberate, both because he didn’t want the washing machine to rock, and because his body was far more fragile than it had been before he’d been shot. Sex hurt now. He could feel things grinding in his injured hip and rib cage, but tried to ignore the discomfort as Lila dug her fingernails into his neck and pulled his face close to hers, her body tensing and relaxing in waves as she whispered incredibly filthy things in his ear. Since the defenders had outlawed sex, it had become a truly forbidden pleasure, something only crazy-reckless people did. It had done wonders for their sex life.

Afterward, they took separate routes back to the living room and told Erik they were going to walk to the Timesaver to get some sodas. Erik glanced their way and nodded before returning to his TV show, giving them permission like he was their father.

It was cold outside, but Kai didn’t mind. When he was outside, away from Erik, away from the TVs that doubled as monitoring devices, he felt infinitely more relaxed, more alive. He inhaled deeply as they walked, looked up at the sky.

It seemed as if the stars should be different, now that the rest of the world was unrecognizable, but they were bright and white on a black background, just as they’d always been.

“I had a game with the usual gang before the tournament,” Kai said as they cut through the fenced backyard of Erik’s house, out through the gate and into an alley.

“How’d you do?”

“Up eleven thousand.”

Lila popped a Tick, offered one to Kai. He shook his head.

“Marcus said this resistance movement is serious. They had to expand Earth2 to hold all the people visiting. It’s packed in there. He said there are rumors the inner circle is planning something big.”

“Something big.” Lila sighed.

“I’m sure it’s not any sort of direct confrontation. Unless they’ve lost their minds, they’ll stick to their plan, borrowing from the Luyten playbook. Conquer the world from the edges, in. Disrupt the enemy; harass them.”

Lila nodded. Not in approval, Kai knew—just acknowledgment. “I’m pretty sure that’s a human playbook. The Luyten borrowed it from us.”

They emerged from the alley, their chins tucked against the cold wind. Lila swept her hair back. “They’re so stupid. They’re just confirming the defenders’ paranoid worldview. It’ll only make things worse.”

“I’m not sure things could be worse.”

Lila glanced at him, must have seen something in his eyes. “Kai, please don’t get involved in this. When the defenders stomp this out, they’re going to use a very big boot.”

“I haven’t decided what I’m going to do. For now I’m just watching.” Sometimes Kai had no choice but to push back when Lila made a pronouncement like that.

“The defenders don’t want to admit it, but they still look up to us,” Lila said. “If we play it right, we could get them to back off willingly.”

“They look up to you. They hate the rest of us.” They’d had the same argument before, and it was pointless, because they had no control over the rebels’ actions. But Kai couldn’t let it drop. “You can’t let go of that last shred of hope that these monsters will turn into the defenders of your childhood, the heroes who rode in to save the day.” Kai tried to check the sarcasm in his tone. “You know better than anyone: They’re engineered to understand nothing but force.”

“They’re engineered to use nothing but force, and to respond to it effectively. They don’t know what to make of kindness. It knocks them off balance. If you hug them, they regress into a childhood they never got to have.”

“Maybe we should launch a hug attack.” Kai threw his hands in the air. “A guerrilla love offensive. Leave bouquets of flowers on their doorsteps.”

Lila didn’t smile. “Keep your voice down.”

“I’m so sick of keeping my voice down. I’m sick of having sex in closets. I’m sick of Erik.” They turned onto Monticello Street, which was mostly deserted on the cold night. A few defender vehicles, like tanks with wheels, cruised by. “It’s like Erik is your husband now, and I’m the nanny.”

“I don’t like it any better than you do.”

“You like Erik better than I do.”

Lila stopped walking. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You stick up for him. When I say something mean about him, you don’t agree with me, you make excuses for him.” Wisps of white condensation escaped Kai’s mouth with each angry breath. “‘He’s not as bad as the others are.’ ‘He can’t help it, it’s the way he was designed.’”

“It is the way he was designed, and he isn’t as bad as most of the others.”

Kai looked at Lila and realized that at this moment, he didn’t like her. It was the first time he’d ever felt that way, and it scared him. “I’m not sure I can go on living this way.”

Lila let her head loll back until she was staring at the black sky. “If there was any way for us to get out of that house, I would pack up in a heartbeat.”

“He won’t let you leave, but he’d be happy to see me and Errol gone. We’d probably be able to see you as much that way as we do now.” It wasn’t the first time Kai had thought about moving out, but it was the first time he’d said it out loud, because he wasn’t sure how Lila would react. Now he knew. She looked devastated.

“You would want that?” she asked.

He licked his chapped lips. “I just wonder if it would be better for all of us.”

“You think it would be better for me if I lived alone with a defender? You think I’d be happier with you and Errol gone?”

Kai put his head down. “No. It’s just that, the way things are, Erik is tearing our family apart. I’m trying to think of a way to fix that.”

Lila reached out and took his hand. “The way we fix it is, we don’t let him. From now on, when you say something negative about Erik, I won’t make excuses for him. I’ll pile on. I promise.”

They continued walking. The red and yellow lights of the Timesaver reflected in puddles on the sidewalk ahead.

“Fucking Erik,” Lila said. “Clueless arrogant asshole.”

“Selfish prickless bastard.” In the shadows alongside the Timesaver, Kai noticed the Dumpster was so full the lid was jammed open.

“Grandiose pinhead,” Lila said.

Kai squeezed her hand. The green Dumpster tucked alongside the Timesaver was filled with bodies. Others were stacked in front of it, leaned up against both sides. In the tepid light of streetlamps and store signs, blood-soaked skin appeared black instead of red; deeply shadowed eyes were nothing but black sockets. A single Luyten corpse lay wedged between the Dumpster and the wall.

They kept walking, around to the front of the store and inside. They picked out their sodas and headed to the checkout counter.

“So what happened out there?” Kai asked the clerk, a teenage girl in tight jeans. He tried to sound casual.

“There was a traffic accident,” she said, shrugging, like she was just making conversation.

“A bad one?”

The clerk shook her head. “Not too bad. A woman backed into the front of a defender’s SUV. Evidently. He got angry.”

Kai nodded, glanced at the TV mounted over the woman’s shoulder. She was being careful with her words, in case someone was listening. What she probably meant was, the defender rear-ended the woman’s car, then went berserk, even though it was his fault.

They thanked her and headed home, both of them looking away as they passed the Dumpster. It was possible there had been more casualties. Sometimes people still risked retrieving murdered loved ones and burying them, even though bodies were supposed to be left out for the sanitation trucks to cart away. Kai felt sorry for people who worked as trash collectors. That would be one grim job.

“We have to do something. We can’t live like this,” Kai said.

“I agree. The only thing we disagree on is tactics.”

Kai limped along, his bad leg starting to give him trouble. There was no point in arguing; both of them were too stubborn to be shifted from their opinions.

68 Oliver Bowen

October 11, 2047. Washington, D.C.

There was a letter in Oliver’s mailbox. It was handwritten, with no return address. Oliver tore it open, withdrew an index card with a single thing written on it: Earth2.

Even if he hadn’t recognized Kai’s handwriting, he would have known the message was from Kai. No one but Kai and Lila knew he lived there. He headed back inside his little basement apartment, decorated primarily with Marvel comic book memorabilia, and sat at his computer.

He’d never been much of a gamer, even back in high school when dorky kids like him were supposed to hide there until they could escape into adulthood. Now he called up Earth2 and set up an account.

He was surprised to find the place roiling with activity. Avatars hurried here and there on foot, in cars, via flight. It seemed bizarre that so many people would be playing an old-fashioned online game. And actually, most people weren’t playing, exactly—they were meeting. Performing a three-sixty, he saw three separate groups of avatars congregated together, deep in conversation.

He directed his avatar toward the nearest group, about two dozen people sitting in a circle on a beach. As he approached, they stopped talking.

“Private meeting,” someone called in a metallic voice, or maybe his audio settings made it sound metallic.

Oliver turned his avatar around, headed for the second group. It probably would have been more efficient to check the instructions and find out how to fly, but he was in no hurry.

He was still surprised by how easy it had been to slip off the defenders’ radar. He’d been a major political player, heavily involved in the Luyten War, the defenders program, yet the defenders had simply lost track of him, and didn’t seem to be actively trying to locate him. If they had a weakness, it was this lack of attention to detail.

As he swung open the door of the old-fashioned diner where the second group was meeting, a few avatars looked his way, but no one said anything. Oliver took a seat toward the back.

“If you try that, they’ll catch you, and they’ll kill you,” a blond, square-jawed avatar said to what appeared to be a golden retriever standing on its hind legs.

“They won’t catch me. And they won’t catch you, either, if you follow my instructions. They can’t trace you if you’re using my baffle software.”

“Can we get back on subject?” a Valkyrie-looking woman dressed in purple furs said.

“We are on the subject,” the retriever said. “Our charge is to develop techniques to disrupt their electronic communications. How are we off subject?”

His heart pounding, Oliver directed his avatar back outside. If this was what it appeared to be…

He joined another meeting. They were discussing how to locate US Army weapons caches hidden during the previous century.

Oliver raised his fist in the air and whooped. A resistance movement. This was what he’d been waiting for. He navigated his avatar out of the second meeting, wandered around until he found a pedestrian—an Asian woman wearing a blue sweater and a pair of khakis.

“Excuse me, is there someone in charge of operations here?”

“You mean, here in Fiddler’s Green?” she asked.

“No, for the whole thing. All of this.” He gestured to encompass all they could see.

The woman put her hands on her hips. “You’re looking for Island Rain.”

Oliver’s heart hit another gear. Island Rain? Why did that moniker sound familiar?

Then he remembered. Dominique Wiewall. She’d been from the Caribbean. There’d been only one thing on her office wall—a poster of her home, with Island Rain printed across the bottom. Could it possibly be Dominique? But how could she have survived? He’d assumed she’d been with the US leadership in Colorado Springs when the country fell.

“Where can I find her?”

The woman laughed. “You can’t just wander in and see Island Rain. You have to earn your place, work your way up. Are you new? You look new.” She looked Oliver’s avatar up and down.

“Let’s assume I’m new, but I’m someone with expertise Island Rain would want to know about. How would I go about getting a message to her?”

“Hmm.” The woman folded her arms. She was quite good at realistic mannerisms. Oliver’s avatar was just standing there, arms dangling at his sides. Of course, that pretty well captured his mannerisms in real life. “I could message JJ, the captain of Fiddler’s Green.”

“Would you? I’d appreciate it.” If it was Dominique, how could he signal her? It would be a bad idea to speak her name, probably not smart even to mention Easter Island. Something subtle. “Ask him to tell her a fellow admirer of Moai needs to speak to her.” Oliver was elated to have something constructive to do. Something he was good at.

69 Lila Easterlin

October 15, 2047. Washington, D.C.

The morning rush hour pedestrians moved into the street, or pressed against the buildings, to let a defender pass on the sidewalk. It reminded Lila of vehicles clearing out to let an ambulance pass, only people moved more quickly to get out of the way of a defender.

Lila stood in the gutter an extra moment to allow the throngs to unclog, then stepped back into the flow of people on their way to work. She waited for the light and crossed Victory Avenue, which was a hundred feet wide at least, one of the new defender streets. The city was transforming into an enormous visual illusion. On one block everything looked normal; on the next everything was triple in size.

There was a new indoor rifle range on Ichiro Street, bearing the familiar NO HUMANS sign. She’d never seen a NO LUYTEN sign; evidently even while target shooting the defenders needed someone to fetch their iced tea.

She was so tired. Typically her insomnia would get a little worse each night, building to a crescendo where she was too exhausted to think, and that would break the cycle and she would sleep fifteen hours straight. This time it just kept getting worse. She was beyond exhausted, but her thoughts kept spinning, as if they’d discovered their own power source independent of her sleep-deprived brain.

She was so afraid of what might happen if this resistance turned out to be more than a bunch of posturing blowhards. What was it about humanity that always led it right back to killing as the solution to its problems? If someone would just listen, she was sure she could get them out of this mess without firing a shot. The defenders had weaknesses; their ability to respond to a physical attack wasn’t one of them. Why couldn’t other people see that?

If only there was some way to jump-start the process, to get the defenders to see that they’d be better off if humans were in charge, or at least sharing power. That would mean getting them to be less paranoid. Saner. Happier.

Lila laughed out loud. Couldn’t they all use that? She certainly could. The problem with the defenders was that they were engineered to be paranoid and unhappy. The only way to change it was to alter their genetic code.

She slowed her pace. What if she did it now, subtly? There was no one checking the new defenders’ genetic coding at this point. Would the existing defenders notice if the new ones were less disordered? If she could somehow reintroduce serotonin into the design, the new ones would still be violent and have negligible social skills, but they’d be less empty inside.

It would be incredibly risky. Her defender superiors had expressly instructed her to make the new defenders exactly the same as the existing ones. If they caught her messing with the formula, they’d pull her legs off, then stomp her to jelly. But if she made the alterations at the source codes, and no one checked her work, she’d be the only person on Earth who’d know.

Up ahead, the back of a parked semi rolled open, and a Luyten climbed out. Lila stopped walking and waited for it to cross the sidewalk and head down an alley between two shops. She would never get used to them; they would always make her skin crawl…

With a jolt, she realized that if she were to introduce serotonin into the brain chemistry of defenders, the Luyten would be able to read their thoughts. How could she have overlooked that fact, even for a minute? The thought gave her chills. Jesus, what if she’d gone ahead with it, not realizing what she was doing?

“Lila?”

Lila turned to find a beefy guy and a skinny blond woman keeping pace beside her. She didn’t answer, because she wasn’t sure she wanted to confirm her identity to these people. They were clean and relatively well dressed, not the sort of people she associated with the threats and hate messages she occasionally received.

“We need you to come with us, please,” the guy said. He had a heavy New York accent—Brooklyn, or the Bronx. In fact, he was wearing a New York Yankees Windbreaker.

“And why would I want to do that?” Lila shot back. Now Lila wasn’t sure; these people might be a threat after all. She looked around, saw two defenders within earshot. If she screamed for help, would they respond? They might if she made clear who she was.

“We’ve been authorized to speak to you in private, by the president of the United States.”

That got her attention. Usually when people lied, they tried to keep it plausible. “Oh, really? How did you contact him, through a Ouija board?”

“He’s alive. They’re both alive, actually. Anthony Wood is back in charge.” The man stepped in front of her; when she tried to walk around him he stuck out an arm to stop her, but stopped short of grabbing her. “Please, Dr. Easterlin. We need your help. We’re all on the same side here, aren’t we? You’re only helping them because they’re not giving you a choice. Right?”

She knew he was playing on her insecurities, but the words still stung. “What is this about?”

“It’s about exactly what you think it’s about.”

Lila looked at the woman, who had yet to utter a word. She looked to be about Lila’s age, late twenties. “Did you agree ahead of time that he would do all the talking?”

“My work comes later,” she replied. There was something about her, a nervousness, or maybe just too much caffeine.

Lila eyed them both for a moment longer, then shrugged. They’d sparked her curiosity. “Okay. Let’s go.”

The big guy stuck out his hand, introduced himself as Clete. The woman was Danika. As the three of them headed down Monticello Avenue, Lila tried to guess what they wanted. They must need her expertise for some sort of attack they were planning. Wouldn’t it be bizarre if they’d come upon the same idea as she, about altering the newly produced defenders in some way? But what sort of alteration would possibly help them? Whatever it was they wanted, she wasn’t sure she would help. If they were simply planning to blow shit up, kill a few defenders, then no way was she sticking her neck out even an inch.

They led her to the Renaissance Hotel. Lila had had lunch there once, back when it was a four-star gem; now it was in serious decline. The carpet in the lobby was stained and threadbare, the walls in need of a paint job. Few humans traveled for business, none for pleasure, and the place was too small for defenders.

There were no suitcases in Clete and Danika’s room, no indication that anyone was staying there save a briefcase lying closed on the bed. A slimy, unidentifiable lump sat on top of it. Danika went over to the lump, bowed her head as if in prayer. Clete hung back near Lila.

Danika picked up the lump with a quivering hand. She held it high, looked up at it, and stifled a sob. “I used to be a high school teacher. I taught algebra and trig.” Still holding the lump, she looked at Lila. “I don’t know why it’s important to me that you understand, but it is. Maybe it’s because I’m going to be you for a little while.”

“What do you mean, you’re going to be me? I haven’t agreed to go along with anything yet, and given how weird this is beginning to look, I doubt I’m going to.”

Clete took a step back, placing himself between Lila and the door. Suddenly Danika was the chatty one, and he was the introvert.

“I had a child, just like you. She and her father were killed when the defenders invaded Los Angeles. When I found out, I promised myself I’d join them in heaven as soon as I could. But I wanted my death to count for something first.”

Danika lowered the lump toward her face. She opened her mouth, pushed the lump between her lips.

“Wait. What is that?” Lila asked. Lila thought Danika must be eating poison, but how would that make her death count? The lump was slick on the outside, like it was sheathed in stretched plastic—a deflated balloon, or a condom.

Danika slid it farther, into her throat. She gagged, pulled it out. Whatever it was, she was trying to swallow it.

“If someone doesn’t tell me what’s going on right now, I’m leaving.” She turned toward Clete. “And if you try to stop me, I’m going to scream like you wouldn’t believe.”

“Take your time,” Clete said to Danika. “Relax. Relax your throat. Let gravity do the work.”

Lila spun toward Danika in time to see the lump disappear. Danika made a terrible choking sound; her eyes grew huge as she pressed her hand to her bulging throat.

“There you go. That’s it,” Clete said softly.

When it was down, Danika cried out in a mix of horror and relief. “It was bigger than the ones I practiced on. Much bigger.”

“Maybe they didn’t want to risk you choking in practice. Or maybe your throat is tighter because you’re tense.”

“You’re damned right I’m tense.” Danika was on the verge of hysteria.

“For God’s sake, what did you just swallow?” Lila asked.

“A bomb,” Clete said. “Now she’s going to walk into the heart of the production facility and detonate it.”

For a moment Lila was speechless. When she finally regained her voice, she shouted, “Are you out of your fucking minds? There are people in there. Some of them are my friends. Besides that, there are eight other facilities. They’ll just divert production to the others.”

“No they won’t,” Clete said, “because we’re hitting all of them at once.”

“How are you bombing the Easter Island facility?”

“All but that one,” Clete allowed. “It will still cripple their production capability.”

Lila’s head was spinning. She wasn’t sure she was on the same side as these people. She should be, but they were talking about bombing her facility. She’d designed it, she ran it, and some of her friends were in it. And this woman, this math teacher, was about to kill herself.

“Wait a minute—you don’t look like me. They’re not going to let you waltz into the lab just because you have my ID.”

“She’s the same height and weight as you, the same hair color,” Clete said. “That’s all defenders use. They can’t tell one face from another. We’re counting on the human workers to instinctively keep their mouths shut.”

“So you can blow them up. How nice.” He was right about the defenders not being able to distinguish human faces, though. Erik had told Lila as much. Still, this was insane.

Danika stood. “I need your ID.”

“You also need the pass code,” Lila said, not sure she was going to give it to her.

“We have the pass code.” Danika reached to check Lila’s pockets.

Lila slapped her hand away. Danika reached again, drew Lila’s ID out of her breast pocket.

“I’m sorry if you don’t agree with this,” Danika said, “but the president does. His people do.”

Lila didn’t see how this would bring down the defenders. Unless… “There’s more to the plan. More to come.” Lila said it aloud, but mainly for her own benefit. Clete and Danika already knew it.

At the door, Clete and Danika clasped hands. Maybe hugging risked detonating the explosive, or maybe they didn’t know each other well enough to hug. Danika was clutching a thin satchel, which Lila guessed held the igniting agent—something Danika would inject to induce a chemical reaction.

Then Danika was gone, and it was just Lila and Clete. Lila wasn’t sure if she wanted to stop them or not. She hovered in the middle of the room, deciding whether to scream, try to get past Clete, or do nothing. In the end, she took a seat in a stuffed chair by the window.

“How will you know if she’s successful?”

“We’re close enough that we should hear the blast.” Clete pulled the briefcase off the bed, took it to the little hotel desk, and pulled out a laptop.

Curious, Lila leaned in to see what he was doing. Clete opened Earth2 and got an avatar up and running.

“Is that your means of relaxing during stressful situations?” Lila asked, knowing full well what he was doing.

Clete looked up from the screen, said nothing. Lila moved closer to the computer so she could read what Clete was typing.

It was nothing surprising or enlightening. He was communicating with an avatar named Sandovar, saying all had gone well so far. He was keeping the message intentionally vague.

After a few minutes he signed off and closed the computer. He stood, sniffed, wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “Now comes the hard part.”

“The hard part? We haven’t gotten to the hard part yet?”

He gave Lila a hard, direct look. “We have to make it look like this happened against your will.”

That had crossed her mind. After the explosion the defenders would assume she was the one who bombed the facility. When they found her alive, she’d be a prime suspect, and they weren’t ones to wait for a trial, or even facts, before they started meting out punishment.

“And how do we do that?”

Clete looked at the floor, like he was suddenly feeling terribly sad, or ashamed. “It has to be immediately obvious to them.”

Then she understood, and felt a sinking in the pit of her stomach. It had to be immediately obvious, as in, she had to sport the bleeding, swollen face of someone who’d put up a fight. She wasn’t convinced their plot would do any good in the long run, yet they had dragged her into it, risked her life, and now they needed to kick the shit out of her so the defenders wouldn’t kill her. She was supposed to stand there while this asshole beat her.

She looked up, returned Clete’s level stare for a moment, then punched him in the face.

Teary-eyed with pain, Clete clutched his nose. His fingers came away bloody. “Why did you do that?”

Lila punched him again, in the eye this time. The blow landed with a satisfying smack.

Clete started to fight back. His first punch felt like a hammer blow to Lila’s cheek.

70 Lila Easterlin

October 15, 2047. Washington, D.C.

The man at the front desk called, “Jesus, are you all right?” as Lila stumbled past. She kept walking.

She couldn’t see out of her left eye. Although she knew it was because it was swollen shut, a small, scared voice in her was sure she’d been blinded. Her nose wouldn’t stop bleeding. Before he left, Clete had said that was good, let the blood pour all over her shirt. She had the worst headache of her life, and felt like she had thick clumps of mud plastered to her cheek, her lower lip, her forehead. Lila wondered if the kicks to her face had been planned ahead of time, or improvised.

Outside, she texted Kai to meet her at home while she waited for a cab to happen by.

The cabby, a woman in her seventies, said nothing about Lila’s injuries. She nodded when Lila gave her the address, and took off. Lila had to get back to her house—to Erik’s house. When he saw her face, Erik would believe her story and protect her.

She still hadn’t heard an explosion. As the taxi hurdled over the cracked, pothole-laden streets, Lila guessed the explosion must have happened by now. She must be out of hearing range.

When she got home, she went straight to the freezer. She found a defender-sized bag of frozen brussels sprouts, collapsed on the couch, and gently pressed the bag over her eye.

She jerked the bag from her eye. What was she doing? She didn’t want the swelling to go down. Easing herself to her feet, she tried to jostle her pounding head as little as possible. She had to find Erik, tell him what happened. Maybe she could act like she was trying to warn him, trying to prevent the blast.

The door flew open. Erik stormed in, flanked by two defenders in combat gear.

“Erik.” Lila stumbled, fell to her knees, and caught herself on Erik’s ottoman. She was acting, and she was not. It was easy to act like you’d been beaten senseless when you had. “They’re going to bomb the facility.”

In an instant Erik was at her side. He helped her lean up against the ottoman, then studied her face, her bloody shirt. “We caught her. She was trying to pass herself off as you, but I know what you look like.” He reached out, then brushed her hair with the gentlest of touches before turning to the soldiers. “Find a doctor.”

Both soldiers froze. “We were told to kill her.”

“Did you hear what she just said? How do you think she sustained these injuries?” Erik shouted. “By helping them?”

They left to fetch a doctor.

“It was a coordinated attack. Five of our production facilities were hit.” He studied her face.

“What is it?” She touched her nose. “Am I bleeding again?”

“I’m trying to read your expression. Part of you must be glad about these attacks, even if you tried to stop them.”

The front door clicked open. “Lila? Lila.” Kai rushed to her, pushing between her and Erik. “Oh my God. What happened?”

“I was attacked by rebels,” she said.

Kai slid his hand behind her back. “We have to get you to a hospital.”

“I’ve already sent for a doctor,” Erik said. “I have everything under control. I’d suggest you make sure your son is safe. Things could get bad out there.”

“Where is he?” Lila tried to sit up further.

“He’s at Charlie’s, down the street.” His voice tight, he added, “I’ll get him.”

Erik relaxed visibly after Kai left. If anything ever happened to her, she wondered if Erik would kill Kai. She was confident he’d make sure Errol was taken care of, but she worried about Kai.

“What did you mean, ‘things could get bad out there’?”

Erik turned on the TV, tuned it to the channel that was not a channel—the Eye in the Sky, the live feed only defenders could access. He tuned it to a surveillance camera on a street corner in a city Lila didn’t recognize, where defenders were going berserk. The air was hazy; in the background smoke poured from the broken windows of a wide, flat building Lila recognized as the Moscow production facility. They were pulling people out of a grocery store and lining them up against the wall. A defender was going down the line and shooting each person in the head. Three men broke away from the wall and ran: They were torched by a defender with a flamethrower. In the street, four defenders in a jeep were strafing the upper floors of office buildings with automatic weapons.

“I’m so relieved you weren’t involved in this. I knew you wouldn’t be.”

Lila looked at her hands, to avoid having to watch the screen. Most of the people being butchered hadn’t been involved in it, either.

“They’re going to execute the woman who impersonated you tomorrow. Why don’t you join me for the execution? I have excellent seats.”

After nearly choking with surprise, Lila managed to say, “I’d like that.” Erik had presented it as an invitation, but Lila knew he wasn’t asking her, he was telling her. Her presence would prove her loyalty and give the other defenders in power a chance to see what had been done to her face.

71 Dominique Wiewall

October 18, 2047. Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, Canada.

She wasn’t sure whether to feel ecstatic or dejected. They’d disabled five production facilities, but not seven. When those two were added to the Easter Island facility, the defenders could still roll out about 80 percent of the new troops they’d planned, if they ran the facilities full tilt, cracked the whip on the technicians. Security would be super-tight at those remaining facilities, so hitting them again wasn’t an option.

Someone knocked. “Come in!” she called, hoping it was Forrest.

It was. Gasping from the cold, he pulled off his gloves, a big, goofy smile on his face.

“What?” Dominique said.

“Nothing.” He went on smiling.

“What?”

“Have dinner with me?”

Dominique gave him a puzzled look. They had dinner together every night, though usually he didn’t phrase it quite like that. Usually it was “You going to dinner?” or “You ready?”

She checked the time on her screen. “Dinner’s not for another hour and a half. Unless you’re taking me to a swanky new restaurant I don’t know about.”

He clapped his hands together, spun in a half circle. “Damn. You guessed my surprise.”

Lila raised her eyebrows.

“Okay, maybe not a new restaurant. Blake agreed to cook us dinner early, so we could have the cafeteria to ourselves for a change.”

“Blake did? Wow, what did you have to trade for that, your last pair of warm socks?”

“Don’t even ask.” Forrest looked pained.

“Wait a minute,” Dominique said. She put her hands on her hips. “Are you asking me out?”

Forrest nodded. “Bad idea?”

Dominique shook her head. “Excellent idea. I could use some cheering up. Or should we be celebrating? I have no idea.”

The meal was creamed spinach and corned beef hash on toast, not exactly swanky restaurant fare, but they each claimed one of the remaining bottles of beer in their ration, and Dominique found herself excited by the idea of a shift in their relationship. Any change was welcome, but even if they weren’t trapped in this arctic hell, Dominique would have liked this guy.

“Did you hear Barry shot a walrus?” Forrest asked. On the way over they’d agreed not to talk about the resistance. All anyone ever talked about was what was going on through Earth2. There’d be plenty of time for that when the others arrived for dinner.

“I didn’t. How nice. I mean, nice that we’ll have fresh meat.” She tilted her head. “Do walruses have meat, or just blubber?”

“Mostly blubber, I think.”

“I can’t say I’ve ever had blubber.”

“It’s considered a delicacy in some cultures,” Forrest said.

Dominique grinned. “What cultures are those?”

Forrest cleared his throat, shrugged. “I can’t list any specific cultures, but rest assured, it’s a delicacy in some cultures.”

Laughing, Dominique put her hand over Forrest’s, which was resting on the table. He looked down at their hands, turned his over, spread his fingers.

“So what was it like, studying at COGE?”

Dominique turned her gaze toward the low foam-tiled ceiling. “Weird. Exciting, but weird.”

“You really weren’t allowed to leave the island?”

“Not for the first three years. I was in a college run by the equivalent of the CIA. They were teaching us things the US government denied it knew how to do.”

Forrest shook his head. “How times have changed. It’s hard to imagine there were such hard, fast lines between countries back then. State secrets. Cold wars. It all seems stupid now.”

The door flew open; Dominique and Forrest quickly unclasped their hands, as if they’d been caught doing something wrong.

It was the president. “We think the defenders have infiltrated Earth2.”

Both Dominique and Forrest leaped from their chairs and followed Wood through the supply room, into the operations room. Nora was at the computer. Dominique watched over her shoulder as she controlled Island Rain. Rain was in a bar, speaking to two male avatars. One was dressed in a black ninja outfit, the other in jeans and a T-shirt. Both were clearly newbies, given their generic appearance and the stiffness of their movements.

Nora glanced up at Dominique. “I have a very bad feeling about these two, but you’d know better than I.”

We both have military training. I’m conversant in all manner of explosives, and Daniel was a Navy SEAL. We’re ready and eager to strike at the enemy.

Dominique pressed her hands to her face. “Oh, shit,” she whispered.

“What should I reply?” Nora asked.

Dominique just stood there, her mind not working.

“Dominique? What should I reply? Something that’ll tell us for sure.”

“We can’t know for sure, but—” She cursed under her breath. “Give them an opportunity to brag, or try to piss them off.”

Nora typed. You don’t sound intelligent enough to be Special Forces and Navy SEAL. Are you sure I’m not talking to two kids playing G.I. Joe?

There was an inordinately long pause, during which no one in the room said a word, or even breathed heavily. Finally, a reply came.

My IQ is 147. Daniel’s is 139. If you suspect there’s a child in this conversation, check the mirror.

“Shit,” Dominique nearly shouted. “Oh, holy Christ.”

“You’re sure?” the president asked.

“They’re defenders. The awkward phrasing, the arrogance.” She gestured at the avatars. “The IQs he mentioned are right in the defender range.” She stared at President Wood, the implications sinking in. The defenders could locate them.

“Everyone be ready to leave in one hour,” Wood said. “Fuel the plane. Concentrate on packing survival gear—we’ll have to land and ditch the plane before we reach defender territory.”

Zipping her coat as she ran, Dominique headed for her quarters to get packed.

72 Lila Easterlin

October 18, 2047. Washington, D.C.

It took forty minutes to reach the Capitol Shopping Center’s parking lot, and another half hour to find a parking space. Most of that time Lila relived Danika’s execution, over and over. Only it hadn’t been an execution: It had been an exhibition on torture, a primer on all the things defenders would do to you if you defied them. Why was it that the mind insisted on lingering on exactly the things you most wanted to forget?

Lila tried to drag her thoughts back to the present, to the vehicles parked everywhere—in fire lanes, on the grass medians, along the road leading to the shopping center. No one was sure if the defenders had a reliable way to keep track of who was complying with their designated shopping day and who wasn’t, but no one wanted to risk finding out.

“Not Target,” Kai said.

Lila paused. She’d automatically headed toward Target, forgetting that it held bad associations for Kai. She scanned the big shopping center. There was a Hobby Town, but neither of them had a hobby. The grocery store didn’t count (food was a staple, so buying it didn’t stimulate the economy). She pointed their cart toward Office Depot.

“I wonder if the defenders understand that a lot of these people can’t afford to buy random shit. A rash of bankruptcies isn’t going to stimulate the economy.”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t say that too loud.”

As soon as they got inside, they split up and began filling their cart with things they could actually use—preferably bulky items that made the cart appear full.

Lila grabbed a printer and tossed it in the cart. She was heading toward the printer ink aisle, but it was slow going. The store was packed.

Everyone she passed looked at her intently for a moment, then quickly looked away. Fortunately her stitched lip, bandaged cheek, swollen left eye, and bruised forehead would heal. It was probably 50 percent better already.

When they weren’t gaping at her, Lila watched other people’s faces. She was morbidly fascinated by the shift in the default human expression since the defender occupation began. People rarely smiled, and rarely looked angry or even annoyed. They tried to keep their faces flat, emotionless, but undertones of fear and something like sadness, or self-pity, bled through. Back in the days of the Luyten War everyone looked openly afraid, but something about this situation caused people to try to tamp their emotions.

Kai found her in the printer ink aisle, limped over, and dropped four reams of paper in the cart. “You can never have too much paper.”

A defender came around the corner, his arms full of boxes.

“Shit,” Lila whispered.

“Here. People aren’t buying enough of these.” The defender dropped three identical boxes into their cart. According to the box, they were roll sorters. Lila had no idea what they were, but she now owned three.

“That should be enough,” Kai said. “Let’s get to the checkout line before he comes back with more.”

Another defender was patrolling the checkout line. Lila watched as he grabbed some big-ticket electronics at random from a pile and added them to an old woman’s cart. Evidently her cart wasn’t full enough. Lila was about to share a coded snide comment with Kai when a voice trumpeted in her head.

I have information for you.

Lila’s purse slipped from her fingers. She gripped the shopping cart with both hands to stay on her feet.

“You okay? What’s the matter?” Kai asked.

Why would a Luyten speak to her? As far as she knew, no Luyten had communicated with a human being since the invasion of Australia.

There are bathrooms in the back of the store. Beyond them is a fire exit. I’ve disabled the fire alarm.

“I have to go to the bathroom. I’ll be right back.” She forced a smile, left the line, and headed toward the back of the store.

The exit was at the end of an L-shaped hallway. When she got outside Lila eased the door closed, maintaining her composure despite the presence of the scarlet-colored Luyten, waiting between two Dumpsters. It was in the prone position, three appendages on the floor, three folded.

As she stepped toward it, Lila glanced around to make sure no one was around.

There are no humans nearby, or planning to come back here anytime soon. That much I can tell you.

“I’m not particularly worried about humans. What do you want? I need to get back inside before I’m missed.”

I’ll try to be brief, but it’s important I be clear. The defenders were more rattled by the attacks on their birthing facilities than you know. They’ve decided that, as things stand now, they’re far too outnumbered by humans to maintain control.

“I know. I got their marching orders. They’ve got me spitting out defenders as fast as the facility can create them.” The strangeness of the situation hit Lila anew. A Luyten was talking to her, probably the one that killed her father.

Their plan is to reduce the human population as well.

The Luyten’s words silenced all of her internal chatter. “They’re going to cull us to a manageable number?”

Yes.

“What’s a manageable number?”

Between a quarter and a half billion.

What was the current world population? Lila had no idea.

Two-point-three billion.

“You’re telling me they’re planning to kill off more than three-quarters of the human race?”

Yes. The Luyten sounded almost sad. She wondered if it was telling the truth.

The Luyten stood; it towered over her. Suddenly she wished she’d brought Kai with her. It could kill her in an instant.

I have no reason to hurt you. We’re not like the Defenders. Violence is not our default response.

But lying was, if Five was typical of their species. The Luyten would have much to gain if they could convince humans to go after the defenders in earnest. Much to gain.

Defenders have started clearing out of some heavily populated areas. They’re preparing to use chemical weapons in those areas. You can confirm that.

“All right. I appreciate the warning. I’ll pass it on.” She found herself monitoring her own thoughts as she reeled them out, then monitoring the thoughts of the monitor. It was a maddening loop.

If all we had to offer you was a warning, it wouldn’t do much good. You can’t beat them on your own. It took a step toward her; she tensed, resisting the urge to step back. We have a common enemy. You’ve come up with a brilliant plan to defeat them, but you need our help.

Don’t be shocked. The Luyten interrupted itself as Lila reacted to what the Luyten was suggesting.

“Holy shit.” The words just came out. Lila glanced around, relieved that there was still no one around, because she’d just shouted. You’re proposing we ally with you against the defenders? She thought it instead of speaking it. The words were enough to get her killed on the spot, if the wrong ears overheard. “Hold on. What ‘way to defeat them’ are you talking about?” That detail had slipped past while she absorbed the rest.

Restoring serotonin to the defender’s brain physiology. The new defenders will act as unwitting spies; we’ll pass on the defenders’ plans and strategies to your commanders.

Lila had forgotten about her wild idea.

Once the new defenders are in place, humans and Luyten attack simultaneously. We can serve as ground forces. As soon as your commanders know what they want from us, we’ll know, and we’ll follow their orders—

It was insanity. Yet what did the Luyten have to lose by proposing it? And if we did? What would keep you from turning on us once the defenders were gone?

There won’t be many of us left after such a war. And as I said, violence isn’t in our nature; we prefer compromise. Unlike the defenders. Its tone shifted; it whispered into her mind. They’re insane. You made them too quickly.

Lila barked a bitter laugh. “Yes, well, we were in a hurry.”

I know. I’m sorry. We’re sorry.

Lila couldn’t believe she was having this conversation. “Why are you talking to me? Why don’t you talk to the rebels? They’re the ones making the decisions.”

Because we trust you.

She laughed at the absurdity of the statement. “You trust me? I fucking hate you. I hate you more than I hate the defenders.”

We’re aware of that. More important, so are you.

Lila shook her head. Oliver was right—they were baffling. Their words were clear, but following their logic made your head ache. “I’ll pass this on, but that’s as far as I’m getting involved. I’m a scientist. I have a family. I’m not playing Joan of Arc for you.”

Fair enough. You can go now. That’s all I wanted to tell you.

“I can go now. Thanks—thanks for your permission.” She turned to go, then hesitated. She couldn’t resist asking.

“Are you the one who killed my father?”

Loblolly School, it said. All over soon.

The words chilled her. Barely a day went by when she didn’t hear those words, the twisted attempt to console her with words spit from the hole of a monster coming to tear her to pieces. She looked at the massive thing standing over her.

“You ruined my life.”

The Luyten made a draining sound, like water being flushed down a toilet. Maybe to them it was a sound of regret, or apology. Everything bad, all of the suffering in her life, could be reduced to this Luyten.

“I don’t need your apology, if that’s what you’re offering.”

No. But believe me, you need what I’m offering. The Luyten raised two of its appendages, as if waving goodbye. The defenders will go on killing until there’s no life left.

“No one’s going to trust you.”

Maybe not. But you’re right: We have nothing to lose by trying.

Lila turned to go back inside, saw there was no knob on the outside of the door. “Great.” She headed around the back of the strip of stores at a brisk jog. Kai would be worried.

She spotted him in the parking lot, heading back toward Office Depot after stashing their purchases in the car. When he saw Lila jogging toward him, he stopped.

“Where’d you go? I was worried.”

Lila slid her hand under Kai’s bicep, then turned him toward the car. “I just spoke to my father’s killer.”

They inched along toward the exit.

“Do you think it’s telling the truth?” Kai asked.

“I don’t know. It can’t be.” She looked at Kai. “It can’t be, can it?”

“I don’t know. I could see the defenders doing that. Let’s assume for a minute it is true. What do we do?”

Lila curled into the corner of her seat, pressed her temple against the cold window. “If it has to be done—and I’m not saying I’m convinced it does—I’m not the only one who could do it. The Hong Kong facility is still operating. We could pass along the Luyten’s message to someone involved in the rebellion. One of your poker friends, maybe. Let them decide if it’s a good idea, and if they do, they can contact Kim Han, the head genetic engineer at the Hong Kong facility.”

Kai shook his head. “Honestly, I’m not sure that’s a good idea. If we decided this had to be done, I don’t think we can risk telling anyone—no one at all—until the altered defenders are in place. There are bound to be people dead set against allying with the Luyten—people who’ll give us up to the defenders in a heartbeat to stop us from exposing our throats to the Luyten.”

The weight of Kai’s words felt like a rope around her neck. “Kai, we can’t possibly make this decision by ourselves. If we went ahead with this, we’d be putting everyone’s life at risk—”

“If the Luyten is telling the truth, everyone’s life is already at risk. Four out of five, Lila. I don’t like those odds, not for us, not for Errol, not for anyone.”

Lila was about to scream at Kai to let her finish, but she caught herself. She wondered if it had been a mistake to tell him at all. She hated herself for wondering that. “This is all moot, because I’m one of those people who are dead set against allying with the Luyten. I don’t trust them. No way. If I discovered someone was doing what we’re talking about doing, I’d squeal to the defenders, too.”

Kai pulled out of their lane, cut in front of a car doing its best not to let them out. The driver leaned on his horn. Lila gave him the finger and glared until he looked away.

Tell me what we can do to prove we can be trusted, the Luyten said in Lila’s head.

“It just said, ‘Tell me what—’”

“I heard it,” Kai said. He shuddered. “I forgot just how bad that feels.”

“There’s nothing they could do that would make me trust them.”

“They have no pinkies, so I guess a pinkie-swear is out.”

Lila burst out laughing. Maybe it was knowing the Luyten had heard Kai’s ridiculous remark that made it funny. Maybe she just needed an excuse to laugh, to release some of the tension building up inside her as it sank in that the Luyten might back her into a corner so she has no choice but to do this. If she could do it. She wasn’t even sure she could. It would be an incredible feat. “We don’t have the right to make this decision, either way.”

Kai chuckled humorlessly.

“What?” Lila asked.

“I’m the Boy Who Betrayed the World.” He waved a hand in the air. “This is what I do.”

Sometimes Lila forgot how heavily that weighed on Kai.

“What if we talk to my dad? We could get his opinion, at least,” Kai suggested.

“That sounds like a plan.” Anything to take the weight of this decision off Lila’s shoulders sounded good to her.

73 Dominique Wiewall

October 18, 2047. Over Alaska.

“Here they come,” Smythe said. The TV screen in front of Dominique’s seat sprang to life, giving her an aerial view of the compound that had been her home for the past eighteen months. The deep rumble of defender bombers dominated the audio feed.

Bright flashes lit the compound as the defenders’ bombs hit their targets. It reminded her of a Fourth of July finale—there was a cascade of intense explosions, followed by silence. She’d had no doubts the defenders would find their hiding place, but it was shocking to see it destroyed, unnerving that they’d located it so quickly.

“As soon as they discover there are no bodies in that rubble, they’ll be after us,” Forrest said.

“They’re already after us,” Dominique said. Forrest gave her a questioning look. “They’re thorough bastards. They’ll have launched two forces—one to bomb us, the other to hunt us down in case we run.”

Forrest only nodded.

Dominique appreciated that in all these months, no one had ever likened her to Dr. Frankenstein. It would be such an obvious connection to make. In fact, in all the time she’d been at CFS—and before that Colorado Springs—no one had ever made a snide comment about her role in creating the defenders.

“Do people ever say things behind my back, about my role in all this?” she asked Forrest in a whisper.

He leaned in close, whispered in her ear. “The president said if anyone ever criticized you, he’d have their head on a stick. They wouldn’t dare.”

That explained it.

Moments later, the little town of Gakona, Alaska, came into view a thousand feet below. After eighteen months at CFS Alert, Gakona seemed like a thriving metropolis. It consisted of maybe fifty buildings surrounded by nothing but wilderness. Not that they were going to be spending any time in Gakona. Their C-295 banked right, heading toward an airstrip at an air force atmospheric research compound six miles outside the town.

They descended quickly to minimize the risk of being spotted by a patrol, although they’d chosen the location because there seemed little reason for defenders to be in the area. The landing strip was set amid thousands of what looked to be windmills with rotors pointing skyward. Someone on board probably knew what they were, but at the moment Dominique wasn’t the least bit interested in them. They were in defender-controlled territory, and would only be going deeper in. They were the enemy, and if they were caught, they’d be killed.

When the plane came to rest, Dominique hustled outside with the rest and helped unload their supplies as Blake, Sheena, and a few others ran off to locate the BvS10 arctic transport vehicles they’d found in the base’s online inventory.

Before long, the vehicles rolled out from behind a lime-green aluminum building. They looked like oversized SUVs on tracks. As they pulled up, Dominique hefted a box of MREs to load into the flip-up storage compartment.

Two hours later, Blake’s portable radar picked up a squadron of defender fighters heading in their direction. They took the vehicles off-road, bouncing and jarring, weaving through the forest until, they hoped, they were hidden from view. They killed their lights and sat in the dark for twenty minutes before continuing.

With the sun sinking into the trees, they stopped for the night at a long-abandoned logging camp a hundred miles from the nearest paved road. A row of rectangular red clapboard cabins reminded Dominique too much of the barracks at CFS Alert. Rusting appliances—a meat locker, water cooler, washers, dryers—were piled by the weed-choked ruts that passed for a road in front of the cabins.

Dominique grabbed her gear and headed for one of the less decrepit bungalows. She glanced back, looking for Forrest. He was talking to Carmine Wood in front of the lead vehicle. Dominique didn’t want to invite him to share a cabin in front of an audience. She’d have to wait.

Between the cabins, she could see a rickety metal pier on a shallow river, with a contraption that reminded her of a giant sewing machine built into the pier. She pulled open the door, and stopped dead.

There was a Luyten nest in the cabin. Still clutching the doorknob, she watched as President Wood swung open the door of the next cabin. He paused as well, looked at Dominique.

“There’s one in there, too?”

Dominique nodded. She checked the next cabin down. Same thing. The Luyten must have used it as a safe base, back during the war. Normally you wouldn’t find this many nests together, so far from human targets.

“Chief? Look at this.” Forrest was squatting beside an abandoned truck. Dominique followed Wood over.

There was a Luyten tunnel entrance, camouflaged within a trash dump behind the truck. Forrest was kneeling amid the rotting paper, bottles, and cans, peering into the hole.

“They had quite a compound here,” Wood said.

“I wonder if there’s any chance they left weapons behind,” Forrest said. He pressed his face close to the ground, trying to get a better line of sight into the tunnel.

“You’re not thinking of climbing down in there, are you?” Dominique asked.

“I doubt you’d find much,” Wood added.

Forrest shifted left, then right, still trying to get a line of sight. “I don’t have anything else productive to do. I think I’ll grab a flashlight and take a look.”

Dominique resisted the urge to kick his leg, which was splayed beside her foot. She could think of something productive they could do.

“Jesus!” Forrest shouted, jerking back.

“What is it?” Wood asked.

He flattened onto his stomach and slid partway into the hole. “I thought I saw something. I swear, it looked like a baby Luyten. Then it was gone.”

A sharp cry of surprise startled Dominique. She whirled.

A Luyten was standing behind them. Dominique gaped at it, then noticed another standing between two of the cabins, fiddling with the exoskeletal battle suit it was wearing.

“They’re armed!” Dominique shouted.

She wasn’t the first to notice. Sheena stood unmoving, her rifle leveled at the Luyten closest to her.

“How the fuck did they get hold of weapons?” Wood hissed.

Dominique wasn’t concerned about where the weapons came from. If the Luyten chose to use them, they were all dead. But if the Luyten wanted to kill them, they would have done it by now.

“Sheena, put the rifle down,” Dominique said. “You know that’s not going to help us.”

Sheena lowered the muzzle, but held on to the rifle.

“They’re not killing us,” Wood said, half to himself. “Why aren’t they killing us?”

“You did sign a treaty with them,” Dominique pointed out.

Leave now. The words blasted through Dominique’s mind. From Forrest and the president’s reactions, they’d received the same message.

“That’s the best offer I’ve gotten in a long time,” Wood said. He raised his voice. “Let’s go, into the transports.”

No one had to be told twice.

As they crawled along the logging road in the dark, intent on putting a substantial amount of distance between themselves and the Luyten before setting up a camp, Dominique had an epiphany.

“They never gave up those weapons,” she said aloud.

Everyone looked at her.

“How could we possibly verify that all of the Luyten turned themselves in after the war? They knew we couldn’t. Some of them retreated deep into the wilderness instead. They know we’re on the run ourselves and not a threat, so when Forrest started poking around in their tunnels, they decided to simply come up and tell us to get the hell out of Dodge.”

“If you’re right, there must be more than one of those compounds. They could have them all over the world,” Forrest said.

“I’ll bet you anything they do,” Dominique said. They were like fleas on a dog; every time you thought you were rid of them, there they were again.

74 Oliver Bowen

October 20, 2047. Washington, D.C.

From his parked car, Oliver watched kids shooting baskets, a couple playing tennis, joggers circling the track. He marveled at the mundane scene. There wasn’t a defender in sight, nothing to indicate that everything had changed.

He spotted Kai and Lila, pulling into a space at the other end of the parking lot. Oliver stayed in his car as they got out and headed across the soccer field, slipped through the gate, and headed down the hiking trail. He allowed three minutes to tick off on the car’s clock before he stepped out of his old Toyota and followed them into the woods.

They were waiting about a quarter mile in, Kai sitting on a fallen tree, Lila pacing.

Lila gave Oliver a fierce hug; Kai smiled and nodded, clearly in pain from the short hike. Every time Oliver saw Kai, he hoped to see some noticeable improvement, but they were more than two years removed from Kai being shot. This might be the best he was going to get. It was a depressing thought.

“So what’s going on?” Oliver asked. He’d been surprised to find the note in his mailbox.

“We were contacted by a Luyten yesterday,” Lila said.

“A Luyten?” Oliver clutched Lila’s arm. “A Luyten spoke to you?” He’d never expected to hear those words again.

As Lila laid out a horrific story of plans to exterminate most of the human race, of the offer of a Luyten alliance, Oliver’s insides roiled. He would need to find a bathroom as soon as their meeting was over. It was a familiar sensation, one he hadn’t missed in the least since he went into hiding.

“You can’t trust Luyten,” he said when Lila was finished. “If we did manage to wipe out the defenders, they’d turn around and wipe us out. I have no doubt of that.”

“So what you’re saying is, with or without the Luyten’s help, we can never revolt, because if we win, the Luyten will turn on us,” Kai said.

Oliver hadn’t really thought about it like that before. He wondered if Island Rain’s people had. “If we overthrew the defenders, we’d have to get them to surrender before their numbers were too badly compromised, so they would still be an effective deterrent on the Luyten.”

“That’s quite a balancing act.”

Oliver’s feet were getting tired. He sat on the log, stared off into the bare winter branches. As far as he was concerned, it was too dangerous to do anything the Luyten wanted them to do. They were too powerful, too clever; they’d find an utterly unexpected way to turn things to their advantage. “As soon as we create defenders the Luyten can read, we’ve ceded all control to the Luyten.”

“I agree,” Lila said. “It’s too dangerous.”

Movement among the trees caught Oliver’s eye. Gold patterns, shifting among the bramble and tree boughs in the woods. Oliver stood, straining to see.

Kai stood as well. “What?”

Oliver knew what it was. As it moved closer he could make out the limbs, the eyes. The real jolt of terror hit him when he saw that one of the eyes was nothing but a ruined mass of scar tissue.

“Did either of you bring a gun?” Oliver asked. Although a gun wasn’t much use against a Luyten.

“Holy shit,” Lila said. Five was clearly visible now, passing between trees, branches cracking as it pushed through the underbrush.

I’m not going to hurt you, Five said. He stepped onto the path.

“Where did you come from?” Oliver said. “Of all the places in the world the defenders could have sent you, you ended up here?”

I ended up in San Antonio. I’ve been traveling for two days to get here.

“Traveling? How the hell can you travel?” Lila asked. “What, you told the defenders you had something you needed to do, and hopped on a bus?” So Five was speaking to all of them, not just to him. That was new.

The defenders stopped keeping track of us individually a long time ago. They’re impatient with mundane details. We keep things running without being told. They’re happy with that arrangement.

That confirmed Oliver’s experience, and was useful information to be filed away. The defenders were not without their weaknesses.

“I take it you’ve been sent to convince us to agree to this alliance?”

That’s right.

Oliver couldn’t help but laugh. “You send the Luyten who killed Lila’s father to pitch the idea to her, and the one who broke up my marriage to close the deal with me. You guys must be short on talent.”

We need to convince Lila because of her unique position. By extension, we need to convince you as well. Who better to reform your feelings about us than the ones most responsible for forming those impressions in the first place?

“I probably wouldn’t have taken the divorce as hard if you weren’t simultaneously trying to wipe out my entire species.”

That was never our intention. Once you surrendered, we would have stopped.

“Yeah. Things didn’t work out that way, though, so we’ll never know.” Oliver waved toward himself, like a guy in a fistfight offering his opponent a free shot. “Go ahead, then. Convince me.”

Five eased into the Luyten prone position. Neither of our species needs this entire planet. With your losses, and ours, there are enough resources for everyone. We would accept any reasonable arrangement, whether it be complete segregation or intense intermingling of our two species.

We feel the deaths of our own more acutely than you can imagine. If we’re allowed to live in peace, we’ll go to almost any length to avoid violent conflict with you.

Oliver waited until he was sure Five was finished. “You once warned me that you could be lying at any time. I learned that lesson the hard way.” He thought of Vanessa, let all the bottled-up anger in him come to the surface. “You took pleasure in fucking up my life. Personal pleasure. It had nothing to do with the war. You just wanted to see me suffer.” Oliver stepped closer to Five, stabbed a finger at him. “I treated you with respect. You were my prisoner, but I never treated you like one.”

No, you didn’t. That’s one of the reasons we’re coming to you, and Lila, and Kai. Five stepped around Oliver, went over to Kai. I’m sorry for your injuries, my friend.

Kai nodded tightly.

Yes, I used you when you were only a boy. I was desperate. I’m sorry. And I’m still grateful for the help you gave me.

Oliver thought Five was pouring it on a little thick. He could barely reconcile this warm, grateful beast with the slick son of a bitch he’d known back in the day. He suspected he was still a slick son of a bitch, manipulating them the way he’d manipulated both Oliver and Kai years before.

Five turned back to Oliver. You’re right. I was intentionally cruel to you. I hated you all the more because you treated me well, and made it harder for me to see you as a bug whose life wasn’t worth much. Killing something while simultaneously feeling her pain is truly indescribable. I think it drove us a little mad.

“You’re just bursting with sincerity, aren’t you?” Lila said. “I’m getting all misty-eyed.”

Five made a gurgling noise. We’re not all in agreement, either. Many of my kind are against this. You’re not sure you can trust us? Imagine if you knew with absolute certainty that nearly all of your potential allies hated and feared you, that they wished you dead. Imagine proposing an alliance with people who, after signing a peace treaty with you, immediately handed you over to monsters to be exterminated.

Oliver swallowed hard. How easy it was to remember all the atrocities the Luyten had committed, but forget the betrayal they’d perpetrated on the Luyten.

He had the urge to clap his hands over his ears and hum. Five’s arguments were compelling, but Oliver didn’t want to be convinced—he wanted to hold on to his certainty that the Luyten couldn’t be trusted.

We can be petty, just like humans. Can’t you allow that we might also share more noble human qualities, like remorse, kindness, integrity? I don’t want to be your enemy. I don’t want to stand by while two billion of your people are killed. I’m ready to fight at your side.

Oliver’s throat tightened. He turned away, took a few steps down the path. “Get out of here. I need to talk to my family.”

Without another word, Five left. None of them spoke until Five was out of sight, although they knew Five could hear them regardless of where he was.

“I think our first step is to confirm defenders are in fact evacuating some densely populated areas,” Oliver said.

Karachi, Shanghai, São Paulo, Jakarta, Calcutta, Tehran, Chicago—

“All right,” Oliver said, clenching his eyes shut. He pinched his temples, already sick of hearing that voice in his head. He looked at Lila and Kai. “I’ll find out if it’s true. It’s less risky for me to do it. Let’s meet back here in two days.”

Lila and Kai nodded. Oliver looked off through the woods, toward the spot where Five had disappeared. Was he lingering just out of sight? Was he going to stay within telepathic range of Oliver for the duration? Surely he was; that’s why he’d come. The thought made Oliver queasy.

“So, how are you, Dad?” Kai asked.

Oliver looked at him, thrown by the question. “I’m sorry I don’t get to see you and Lila as often as I’d like. I know it’s not ideal to have to meet like this—”

“No, Dad, it’s not about that. If I was in your position, I’d do the same thing. I’m just asking. How are you?” Kai started to say more, then stopped, folded his arms across his chest. “Isn’t that why we’re fighting them, so we can stay human? Talk to each other about nothing? We’re so boxed in. So blocked off. We don’t talk to each other anymore.” He shook his head sadly. “We’ve gotten so screwed up from all of this.”

Oliver wasn’t sure how to respond. Kai was right, but Oliver didn’t know if he remembered how to talk about nothing, how to relax and just be a family. All he could think to do was give Kai a hug, so that’s what he did. Kai hugged him back, nodded as they separated.

Oliver turned to find Lila waiting, arms open. He held her, blinked back tears, Kai’s words echoing in his mind. He was right, they needed to stay human. As human as they could, anyway.

“I’m okay,” Oliver said as he let go of Lila. “I’m still collecting my comics. DC now. I’m working on a complete run of Superman.”

She smiled. “That’s a tough run to complete.”

“How about you?” Oliver asked. “You finding any games to play in? Besides the fiascos with the defenders, I mean.”

As Kai ran through the players in his regular games, Oliver felt relieved to discover he could still have a conversation.

75 Oliver Bowen

October 23, 2047. Washington, D.C.

He was standing in the shower, drying himself off, when he heard the sound of a coin dropping into a vending machine. It was the sound his phone made when he had an incoming text message. He dropped the towel and rushed into the living room, dripping wet and cold.

He opened the attachment, scanned the numbers. His heart sank as he read down the columns. Shipments of filet mignon, jumbo shrimp, and leg of lamb coming into Karachi, Shanghai, São Paulo, and the other cities Five had listed had dropped precipitously. They were the foods only defenders could afford, the ones defenders favored. Shipments of those foods to major cities not on Five’s list had actually increased somewhat.

A human inquiring about defender troop movement was a dead human, but there were many ways to determine if a specific population was on the move.

“Oh, Christ,” he said under his breath.

Oliver began typing a quick note of thanks to Alissa Valeri, who’d been a top-notch data hound at the CIA.

The doorbell rang. Almost no one knew he lived there; the door hadn’t rung in a month. He went to the window.

For a moment he didn’t recognize the woman standing at his door, then it registered.

It was Vanessa.

Fingers trembling, Oliver flipped the lock and opened the door. “Hi. How did you find me?” She looked older than when he’d last seen her. That had been almost ten years earlier, when he bumped into her at a Nationals game. She was still beautiful. Oliver pulled the door open wider so Vanessa could come in, but she stayed where she was.

“Will you please get that thing out of my head?” she said.

“What? What thing?”

Vanessa’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t know about it? Honestly?”

“Vanessa, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Vanessa closed her eyes, spoke very slowly. “The alien is trying to convince me to reconcile with you.”

“What? Oh, no. You’ve got to be kidding.” It made sense. Five was trying to fix what it had done, to prove his sincerity.

Vanessa was studying him carefully. “You had nothing to do with it? You didn’t ask it to do this?”

“God, no. I wouldn’t inflict that monster on my worst enemy.” He reached out as if to touch Vanessa, but hesitated. “I’m so sorry about this, Vanessa. Believe me, I know what it’s like to have that monster in your head.”

She gave Oliver a sarcastic smile. “You’ll be happy to know it takes full responsibility for the misunderstanding between us.”

Even her indirect reference to his tragic blunder made him cringe. What an idiot he’d been back then. “Well, that’s big of him.”

“Can you get it to leave me alone? I’m going to jump off a bridge if it doesn’t stop.”

Oliver heaved a big sigh. “I’ll try. He has to be within telepathic range to hear me, and he has to be willing to speak to me. Although lately, the latter’s been less of a challenge than it used to be.”

“So you’ve been in touch with it recently?”

Oliver kicked himself for letting that information slip. He’d been a CIA bureau chief, for God’s sake. “Five contacted me, yes.”

“What did it want? To reminisce about the good old days?” A touch of bitterness leaked into her tone. She swept her long black hair, now infused with strands of white, out of her face in a gesture that was painfully familiar.

The smart thing would be to latch on to Vanessa’s suggestion, laugh it off, but Oliver couldn’t bring himself to tell her an outright lie. “If you really want to know, ask me again in six months and I’ll tell you.” One way or another, it would be safe to tell her in six months. By then the secret would be out. Because, Oliver realized, if he had a say in this, they were going to go through with it. Not because Five’s little gesture of remorse had moved him in the slightest; it was the cold, hard data in that email message that convinced him. If they did nothing, 80 percent of the world’s population would die. If they acted, they put the final 20 percent at risk, but at least everyone had a fighting chance. If the Luyten double-crossed them, so be it. They’d beaten the Luyten once; they could do it again.

Vanessa had said something. Oliver had been so lost in thought he’d missed it. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“I said, I’m sorry to bother you.” She glanced over her shoulder. For a moment Oliver wondered if someone was waiting in the car for her—a husband or boyfriend—but he couldn’t see the street from his door. “I would have called, but the Luyten refused to give me your number. Although this was probably too sensitive to talk about on the phone anyway.”

“You’re probably right.” He wanted to ask if she was married, or seeing someone. He knew that she and her second husband (whose name Oliver had forgotten—all he remembered was, it wasn’t Paul) had divorced six or seven years earlier. Fifteen years ago, he would have been stupid enough to ask that sort of question. Not now, though.

He held out his hand, and Vanessa took it. “It was good seeing you, Vanessa. I’ll get Five to leave you alone. I promise”

“Thank you. It was good to see you, too.”

She turned. Oliver closed the door and went to the window to watch her climb the steps. For a moment the terrible sadness returned, the hollowing loneliness that had tormented him after their divorce. He turned his thoughts to the work ahead, and the pain receded.

76 Lila Easterlin

October 24, 2047. Washington, D.C.

Kai pointed into the woods. “Look at that.”

Lila spun, scanned the terrain. She didn’t see anything through the lattice of bare branches, nothing moving on the floor of fallen brown and orange leaves.

“Higher.”

She followed his pointing finger up into the trees, and spotted it: a huge woodpecker perched on a dead tree, poking at it with her long beak.

“A pileated woodpecker,” Kai said. “They’re rare.”

She was about to ask where Kai the city boy had learned about woodpeckers when she spotted Oliver heading toward them, head down, hands in his pockets. Lila tried to read his face for a hint of what he might have found out, but Oliver always looked worried.

“Not good news,” he said as he reached them. “Defenders are definitely clearing out of the cities Five gave us, and not out of others. I think the Luyten are telling the truth.”

He looked at Lila. She knew what he was going to say, and she didn’t want to hear it.

“I think we have to accept their offer.”

Lila cursed, turned away.

“I wish I was more confident we can trust them. I’m not at all confident about that, but, honestly? I think it’s our only chance.”

She didn’t want to agree to this. She would be the one who would actually hand the Luyten the power to wipe them out; it would all be on her shoulders.

“What other choice do we have, Lila?” Oliver asked. “Do nothing, while the defenders gas two billion people, quite possibly including your family?” Lila looked up at him. “They wouldn’t kill you, because you’re too valuable, but I could picture them whisking you off to Easter Island just before they gas the entire D.C. area.”

“It would take at least three months to get enough altered defenders trained and in place. What if the defenders carry out their plan before then?”

That’s why they’ve pressured you to ramp up production. They want to reinforce their numbers before they act. They want overwhelming force before they reveal their intentions, in case you fight back.

“Hello, Five,” Oliver said. “Are you in the immediate vicinity.”

I’ll be there in a minute.

“Why do you risk coming here if you can communicate with us from eight miles away?” Lila asked.

I think it’s important that we meet face-to-face.

“You don’t have a face,” Lila said.

“If we do this, we’ll need able military commanders and strategists ready to go, all over the world,” Oliver said, ignoring her crack. “How are we going to recruit them, now that Earth2 is no longer an option?”

It hurt Lila to hear him say it aloud. Almost as soon as she’d learned Dominique was still alive, Lila was back to not knowing if she was or not.

We’ll contact them directly, as soon as the altered defenders are in place.

They could do that, couldn’t they? Every time Lila thought she grasped the magnitude of the Luyten’s advantage, another facet of it surfaced. If they were allied with the Luyten, humans would suddenly have an effective means of communication with no chance of defender interception.

“What about weapons?” Kai asked. “The defenders have total control of weapons.”

Five pushed out of the brambles behind them.

Getting access to weapons will be the focus of our initial attacks. We’ll use improvised explosive devices and suicide attacks. In the United States and Russia, there are large caches of outdated weapons buried in various unguarded locations. We’ll liberate those as well.

“You have all the answers, don’t you?” Lila said. Then she thought about what Five had just said. “Hang on, your initial attacks? Are you picturing a guerrilla war, like you fought against us?”

Of course. When you’re facing a larger, better-armed force, it’s the most effective—

Five stopped there, Lila assumed, because it was reading her thoughts. She laughed out loud, relishing a rare moment when a Luyten looked foolish. “You see it now, don’t you? That’s not going to fly against defenders.”

“What? Why?” Oliver asked.

This is why we need to work together.

“What is?” Oliver asked.

Lila turned to face Oliver. “Guerrilla wars work because the larger force can’t catch the enemy. They attack, then duck back into the woods, or melt back into the population.”

“So?”

Lila folded her arms. She was going to have to spell it out for him, wasn’t she? “The defenders don’t care who they kill. As soon as you start attacking, they’ll turn and lay waste to the population, just like they’re planning to do anyway.” Oliver was nodding now, and so was Kai. “They’re not going to go chasing after each individual attacker; they’re going to point their tanks at crowds and open fire.”

Oliver looked toward Five, but he’d gone silent. Lila kicked at a fallen branch, feeling a little smug, waiting for someone to pick up the pieces, if they could.

It was Five who broke the silence. The initial attacks will be Luyten only. They’ll be small. The defenders will think we’re attempting the coup on our own, and they’ll turn their guns on us. Soon after—very soon after would be our preference—humans will rise up, and we fight a war on a million fronts, all at once.

“How exactly are we going to get a billion people to rise up, more or less all at once?”

When the time comes we’ll push everyone able to fight. We can be very persuasive.

“You’re going to persuade a billion people?” Oliver looked dubious. “I’m not sure anyone’s going to respond to Luyten shouting orders at everyone at once.”

Oh, they won’t be generic orders. We’ll speak to each person individually, by name. If we have to we’ll shame them into fighting, or scare them.

“A billion people? Have you done the math on that? It’ll take forever,” Kai said. “We’ll have to target certain block leaders, rely on them to spread the word.”

Oliver, do you remember the MRIs and CT scans you subjected me to while I was your prisoner? Remember the curious repetitive nature of my brain structures?

“Sure.”

If a species evolved with the ability to exchange thoughts with many others at once, wouldn’t it make sense that this species also develop separate, parallel processing centers of conscious thought?

Oliver looked stunned. “You can think—and communicate telepathically—on multiple tracks simultaneously?”

The implications of that boggled Lila’s mind. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of separate lines of thought all going on at the same time in one head? The entire species thinking like that, and communicating telepathically. All of those lines of thought connected in a vast web. They were even more alien than she’d imagined.

Do we have a deal? Five was looking at her.

Lila grunted. “I imagine you knew we had a deal before I was aware I’d made up my mind. That’s not to say I don’t have deep reservations about this.”

Humans draw a hard line between thinking something and saying it aloud. I’m asking you to say it aloud.

Lila considered Five. How had they arrived here, at this insane moment? She wanted to tell this creature to go to hell. But that wasn’t an option; even she understood that now.

“Yes. We have a deal.”

77 Dominique Wiewall

October 24, 2047. Southeastern Alaska.

A Harrier swooped by, just above the tree line. Forrest, who was driving their BvS10, jerked the wheel, taking them off the road and pulling to a stop.

They listened to the thump of the Harrier’s propellers. Dominique watched out the window, praying it didn’t turn back.

“Do you think it saw us?” Forrest asked.

“I don’t know. It was close. It could have.”

“If it did, they wouldn’t necessarily engage us,” Peter Smythe said from the back, crowded in with a dozen others. “They might call in reinforcements first.”

What was there to do, though? Ditch the vehicles and head off into the woods with whatever they could carry? In the side-view mirror Dominique saw the door open in the next vehicle back. The president stepped out, his eyes turned toward the sky. Dominique and Forrest got out as well.

“Do we just hope they didn’t see us?” Wood asked.

No one answered.

“What are the odds? Sheena?” He turned. “Did they see us? Your professional opinion.”

Sheena looked into the treetops. “It’s a close thing, but I’m going to say no. The foliage is too thick, and we’re on something that’s barely a road; they wouldn’t expect to find us here.”

Wood nodded, satisfied. “Let’s take a break since we’ve already stopped.” He raised his voice. “Twenty minutes, everyone.”

It was fascinating to Dominique to watch Anthony Wood lead. Not once had she heard anyone question why Wood should be in charge, given that the United States no longer existed, and his brother, not him, had been the sitting president when it fell. No one questioned him because everyone wanted him to be in charge. He was that good at it.

“I’m going to take a walk, stretch my legs a little. Want to come?” Forrest asked.

“Sounds good.” Dominique barely remembered what it felt like to take a walk, let alone a run. She’d run almost every day of her life until she found herself at CFS Alert, where there was nowhere to run but outside, where the snow was always three feet deep.

They headed off down the logging trail. Forrest checked his watch. “We’ll go nine minutes, then turn around.”

There was nothing to see except trees and brush, the same view they’d had for days, but it was nice to pass it slowly, to hear the wind and the occasional bird. “How far do you think we are from the nearest town?” Dominique asked.

“Probably less than fifty miles. We’re getting into more densely populated territory.” Forrest took her hand, and, glancing back, Dominique realized he’d waited until they were out of sight of the caravan before doing so. The few people who had coupled up over the past eighteen months were all discreet about it, probably because they were aware of how many of the others were lonely, and recently widowed. Some didn’t know whether they were widowed, whether their children were dead or alive. She was so grateful she didn’t have children.

“I’m so tired.” It came out before she could stop it.

“Me, too.”

“I’m not sure I understand the plan. We’re just going to slip into some town and hope the defenders don’t notice us?”

Forrest glanced at his watch. “I’m not sure there is a plan. Maybe a few of us slip into one town, a few into another.”

“I doubt the president would split us up like that. It would mean we were giving up the resistance.”

“No, you’re right.”

Forrest paused, frowning. Dominique was going to ask him what was the matter, then she heard it, too: an aircraft engine, getting louder. They bolted into the woods. Dominique ran, arms up to keep branches from whipping her face, following Forrest’s back. The engine grew louder. She heard another, farther away.

Forrest stopped abruptly, ducked behind a tree. Dominique squatted behind him, panting, a plume of vapor jetting from her open mouth.

A Harrier roared past, flying low, following the logging trail. Just before it flew out of sight, a defender in full battle gear appeared in the rear doorway and leaped out. A small chute deployed as it dropped.

“Oh, no.” Dominique leaped up.

Forrest caught the back of her jacket and tugged her back down. “We’re unarmed. We’re no help to anyone.”

Gunfire erupted in the distance. Panicked shouts. Dominique squeezed her eyes shut as screams reached her, the sounds of people dying, of her friends dying.

“We have to get out of here,” Forrest said.

“There might be survivors. Wounded. We have to see.”

“Right now we have to run.” Forrest took her hand, led her deeper into the woods. They ran down a slope, and when they came to a stream Forrest surged right through; Dominique followed, her feet numb as soon as they hit the water.

Far behind them, she heard the whump of an explosion, followed closely by two more. They were taking out the vehicles, so anyone they missed would be left to freeze, with no shelter, no supplies.

They had nothing, Dominique realized. No blankets, no food, no weapons. She slowed, called out, “Wait.” Forrest stopped. As he turned she could see from his expression that there was no need to point out the seriousness of their situation.

The sharp crack of a branch sent a fresh jolt of fear through her. She and Forrest dropped to the ground and crawled on their bellies until they were hidden by a copse of trees. Slowly, carefully, Dominique raised her head to look in the direction of the sounds.

Two defenders topped the rise a hundred yards away, both clutching rifles. She looked at Forrest, passed a silent question: Should they run, or stay down and hope the defenders missed them? Neither seemed a good idea.

A voice boomed in her head. Dominique nearly cried out in surprise. Run. Two hundred yards, directly away from them.

She exchanged another look with Forrest, who nodded. What did they have to lose? They sprang up as one, sprinted away. A clump of trees was between them and the defenders, masking their flight. They’d covered a hundred yards before Dominique heard a shout of discovery from the defenders. Ahead through the trees, she could see bright shifting colors—four Luyten, heading toward them.

We’ll carry you: Dominique, run to me, orange; Forrest, run to violet.

She didn’t want to put her life in the hands of a Luyten, but she saw no choice. As she approached the orange Luyten, it swept her up with its powerful cilia, like ropes roughly lashed around her legs and waist, pressed her to its stony body, and ran like hell.

Dominique’s head bounced and jostled; the forest passed in a sideways blur as the defenders’ shouts grew louder. A blast rocked the ground a dozen yards short of them, just as they reached a steep hill—a cliff, really. The Luyten kept going; Dominique wanted to shout for it to stop but couldn’t muster the breath. The Luyten half climbed, half fell down the steep ravine, using the cilia on all of its free limbs to clutch and scrape at the rocks and dirt as they plunged hundreds of feet.

It hit the ground upright and galloped across a shallow river, then broke into trees on the opposite bank. Forrest was nowhere in sight; Dominique wondered if they’d fled straight into an even worse fate. If the Luyten had wanted her dead, all they would have had to do was wait. But if they didn’t want her dead, what did they want with her?

What we want right now is to keep you safe, the Luyten said. Then we want to get you and Forrest to Washington, D.C.

Dominique was stunned. “Why would you want to do that?”

Because we’ve agreed to an alliance with your people, and you have expertise that can help us.

Dominique was positive she’d misunderstood, or more likely the Luyten had misspoken. An alliance? The idea was simultaneously chilling and absurd.

Yet as the Luyten slowed, and uncovered the camouflaged entrance to a tunnel in the ground, Dominique had to admit the idea also made an odd sort of sense.

78 Lila Easterlin

October 25, 2047. Washington, D.C.

Lila’s hands were shaking as she called up the defenders’ specifications—the genetic recipe Dominique Wiewall had developed to create the defenders. To introduce an entire neurotransmitter system into the existing framework, which had been meticulously designed to create an intelligent organism that functioned without that neurotransmitter, was a staggering proposition. Even with a trained staff assisting her, it would have been a challenge. But alone? It was going to take a long time. How long, she couldn’t guess, because she wasn’t sure how she was going to do it. It would be far easier if she could redesign the defenders from scratch, if she weren’t also trying to hide the fact that she was doing this. Then she could simply back up and start over with the specifications for a human brain, and design something close to a defender. But these defenders had to look exactly like the existing ones, and to act like them.

As she typed a few tentative variations, she watched the genetic code transform before her eyes. Without the Mizrahi protocol, which translated genetically expressible characteristics into genetic code, it would take years to design these changes. It was amazing, really, that she hadn’t had to think in terms of adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine since graduate school. All of that was automated.

Lila jumped as a voice blared in her head.

Minka is coming to see you about an employee. She’ll be at your door in less than two minutes.

Lila masked the program she was working on, called up a productivity report. She had no idea the Luyten was eavesdropping, but it made sense—they had as much riding on this as she.

After Minka left, Lila waited, in case she thought of something else and returned.

All clear, the Luyten said before she could resume work on her own.

When darkness came Lila texted both Kai and Erik to tell them she wouldn’t be home until late. She went on working, knocking back coffee, driven by anxiety, blocked not only by a dawning understanding of how difficult, if not impossible, this was, but by doubts about whether she should be doing it at all.

At 3 a.m. she packed up and went home. If she stayed all night it might raise suspicion. On top of that, she wasn’t making progress. Not real progress, anyway. So far she was only learning what wouldn’t work. As she turned off the lights, it occurred to her that if the Luyten were telling the truth about the defenders’ plans, then in a very real sense every day she failed to create the blueprint for the altered defenders, millions of lives could be lost. Not that she needed to feel any more pressure.

Halfway home, the Luyten’s voice blared in Lila’s head again.

Please turn around and go back to your office. Make a portable copy of the defenders’ blueprint. Take it to Oliver’s apartment.

“Are you fucking kidding me? If I’m caught carrying a copy of—” She shut her mouth, thought the rest. Of the blueprint, I’ll be killed on the spot, and if I’m followed to Oliver’s apartment, he’ll be killed.

I’m passing on this request from Oliver. You’ll understand when you get to his apartment.

“Why can’t you just tell me now?”

I could, but it would ruin the surprise.

Lila slowed, pulled into an empty Wendy’s parking lot, and turned around. The surprise? Lila couldn’t help but laugh. How long had it been since she’d had a surprise that wasn’t a shitty one?

Surprise. Your own people are dropping bombs on your head. Surprise. While you were a POW, your husband was shot a half dozen times.

This is a good surprise.

“Stop eavesdropping.”

I literally can’t.

“Then have the courtesy to pretend you’re not eavesdropping.”

That seemed to shut the thing up.

As she knocked on Oliver’s door, Lila tried to imagine what could possibly be on the other side that would surprise her. What she really wanted was to hear that she didn’t have to do this, that they’d come up with another plan to avert the coming genocide, but that seemed too much to hope for.

The door swung open; instead of Oliver, Lila found herself face-to-face with a ghost.

“Oh my God,” Lila whispered. “I can’t believe it.”

Dominique grinned. “I can’t believe it, either.”

Lila launched herself, wrapping both her arms and legs around Dominique, who dropped to the floor under her weight, laughing.

“You’re going to help me?” Lila asked, speaking into Dominique’s shoulder. She noticed Oliver, standing in the doorway to the kitchen, watching the two of them and grinning. Another man Lila didn’t recognize stood behind him, watching over Oliver’s shoulder.

“Let’s get to it,” Dominique said.

“I’ll make some coffee,” Oliver said.

Lila leaned back so she could look into Dominique’s eyes. “Tell me we’re doing the right thing.”

Dominique shook her head. “I used to think I knew when I was doing the right thing, but no more. At least we’re doing something. I’m not much in love with the status quo.”

Lila wished she could be so laissez-faire about it. The tightness in Dominique’s brow suggested she might be putting on a brave front, to take some of the pressure off Lila. That would be just like her.

79 Oliver Bowen

December 28, 2047 (two months later). Washington, D.C.

Oliver stared down at the phone, his heart pounding. If he was going to call her, he needed to just do it; there was never going to be a moment when he felt calm and collected making this call.

He punched Vanessa’s number, raised the phone to his ear.

Vanessa answered on the third ring. When she heard his voice, she said, “How did you get my number?” She didn’t sound angry, only surprised.

“The same way you got my address.”

“Ah. Of course.”

“I just wanted to check in, make sure my friend stopped bothering you.” Since the defenders had taken over, talking on the phone had become an art. You had to avoid using key words that would trigger their automated filter and bring your call to their attention.

“Yes, he has. Thanks for intervening.”

“I’m just glad I was able to get in touch with him.”

Vanessa started to speak, stopped, breathed a sigh into the phone. “I have to say, it’s given me a new appreciation for what you went through. Your friend knows just what buttons to push.”

Oliver felt a weight lifting from his shoulders. “Thank you for saying that.” He looked up, found himself staring up at his Marvel superhero FOOM (Friends of Ol’ Marvel) poster. It reminded him of Five’s take on why he’d gone back to collecting comics, all those years ago.

“It’s impossible to understand what it’s like, until you experience it yourself,” Vanessa said.

Oliver wondered if that had been Five’s strategy all along—not to try to convince Vanessa to reconcile with Oliver through his words, but to give her a taste of what Oliver had gone through. Although Five never would have been able to capitalize on Oliver’s doubts about Vanessa’s fidelity if the doubts hadn’t been there to begin with.

“It still doesn’t excuse what I did,” Oliver said.

“Let’s not go there,” Vanessa said. “That was a lifetime ago.”

“It certainly feels like a lifetime.”

“‘May you live in interesting times.’ That’s what the Chinese used to say, if they wanted to curse someone.”

Oliver laughed. “We’ve certainly lived in interesting times.”

“We certainly have.”

There was a pause. Oliver listened to the sound of Vanessa’s breathing.

“Well,” Vanessa said, “thank you for calling. I’m glad we talked.”

“I am, too. You have no idea.”

Oliver set his phone on the coffee table. That one call, those four or five minutes, had brought him more peace than all the hundreds of hours of psychotherapy he’d undergone after the war. He went over Vanessa’s words in his mind, wanting to commit them to memory so they could go on salving that wounded place.

What would his life have been like, if he and Vanessa had stayed together? Certainly he would have laughed more. She’d been such a light and playful presence, had been able to bring out a playful side of him he hadn’t even known about. That side of him had shriveled and died during the divorce, and the war. Maybe he would have rediscovered it with Galatea, who had reminded him of Vanessa in a lot of ways, but really, how well had he known Galatea?

He wished he could talk to Vanessa again, but next time he wouldn’t have a handy excuse. Maybe that was okay, now that Vanessa had apparently forgiven him.

Did he still have feelings for her after all these years, or were they only memories of feelings? Over the years he’d spent so much time thrashing himself for losing the love of his life that he’d rarely stopped to think about whether the present-day, flesh-and-blood Vanessa was still the love of his life. How would he know that, unless he got to know her again?

He picked up the phone. What was the worst that could happen?

She answered on the first ring, sounding surprised. “Hi, again.”

“Hi. I was just wondering: Would you like to have coffee sometime?” He closed his eyes, held his breath.

“Sure. That would be nice.”

“Great. Great.” Oliver stammered, feeling like the awkward doofus he’d been that first time he called Vanessa and left a message. He’d asked her to go to the Smithsonian. He winced at the thought of it. The Smithsonian. How romantic.

Is this a good time to ask for your forgiveness? Five asked, as soon as Oliver was off the phone.

Oliver considered. “I appreciate the gesture you made,” he allowed.

We’re going to be allies. It’s important we trust each other.

Oliver chuckled at that one. “It’s a lot easier to trust someone when you can read his mind. You don’t have to take it on faith; you know that if I have any say in it, we’ll keep our word to you.”

I wish I could open my mind to you, so you could know I feel the same.

“Yeah, well.” Oliver went over to look at the FOOM poster. All of the major Marvel superheroes were represented, racing, jumping, and flying like they were coming right out of the poster at you. Silver Surfer led the way. Usually it was Spider-Man, or the Hulk. Wasn’t Silver Surfer the only alien among the Marvel superheroes? Oliver was pretty sure he was.

So far we’ve contacted two hundred fifty-seven people with strong military leadership experience, all over the world.

“What? I thought we agreed to tell no one until all of the defenders were in place.”

We’re not telling them about the defenders. Each thinks we’re negotiating only with him or her, about humans and Luyten mounting joint attacks. We have to get your commanders used to the idea of this alliance.

Oliver was not at all comfortable with the idea of the Luyten choosing the human leadership, but he didn’t see another option. They knew who might be open to this alliance, and they would know immediately if someone could not be trusted.

Exactly.

“Now if only I were sure I could trust you.”

We’ve also salvaged more than two thousand tons of weapons the US and Russian governments stashed during the cold war, Five went on, ignoring the comment. As the first altered defenders are put in place, we’ll begin the Luyten-only attacks on the defenders’ least-defended weapons storage facilities. The first wave of altered defenders have been produced, by the way. They’re a week into language training.

Oliver felt a surge of adrenaline. There was no turning back now; this was really going to happen. “Do they seem all right?” He hadn’t spoken to Lila and Kai in more than three weeks, he realized.

I think so. Since I can’t read the others, I have no basis for comparison. They’re not like you.

“How so?”

Their minds are howling storms. Even before they learn language, their minds are always churning. If these are the minds of defenders with a crucial neurotransmitter added, I can’t imagine what the others’ minds are like.

80 Kai Zhou

January 8, 2048. Washington, D.C.

Erik leaned forward in his chair, looked past Lila, over at Kai for the third or fourth time. Kai suspected Erik was looking for signs that Kai was pleased about the Luyten attacks. Short of giggling and pumping his fist in the air, Kai couldn’t imagine what it would take for Erik to pick up on Kai’s feelings. Kai was taking no chances, though; he was wearing his best damned poker face.

“I hope you appreciate my allowing you to watch this,” Erik said to them. “I’m not supposed to.”

“Oh, we do appreciate it,” Lila said. Kai piped in with an enthusiastic grunt. If only Erik knew who he was sharing the defenders-only news with. Not that this was all new information—the Luyten kept them updated.

On TV they were showing a satellite image of six or seven Luyten dragging two stunned defenders out of a high-speed locomotive that was lying on its side. The Luyten had blown the track moments earlier, sending the train spilling across the desert sand in sub-Saharan Africa. Looking down from above, Kai couldn’t make out how the Luyten were killing the defenders, but it was clear they were. The stolidly toned news commentator explained that the train had been carrying portable rocket launchers, Tasmanian devils, and other small arms, which were now in the hands of rogue Luyten.

“We were wrong, to let the Luyten live,” Erik said. “We should have executed them all. Plans are being set in place to do just that. Humans can just as easily perform the tasks Luyten do.”

Why bother with two species of slaves, when one will suffice? Erik’s logic was impeccable. Kai couldn’t wait to see Erik’s expression when the real uprising began, when humans and Luyten fought together.

The defenders would go berserk. He hoped the human population wouldn’t lose its nerve.

Erik glanced over at him again, and Kai had a moment of clear, almost prophetic insight: When the uprising began, the first thing Erik would do was hunt Kai down and kill him. The only way Kai could prevent it was if he killed Erik first. The realization knocked the wind out of him.

It wouldn’t be easy; Kai wasn’t going to beat Erik in a shootout. He would have to come up with something Erik would never expect.

81 Lila Easterlin

January 10, 2048. Washington, D.C.

“These in-person meetings are getting too dangerous,” Oliver said. Like everyone there, he was wearing black and silver, the defenders’ colors. The Luyten were taking the brunt of the defenders’ rage, but the defenders were tense, and they were quicker to kill humans as well. Not that there was much evidence that wearing their colors improved your chances of surviving, if you crossed paths with a particularly cranky defender.

“Maybe from now on we should only communicate remotely, through Five,” Dominique said.

As if on cue, Five galloped out of the woods. Lila felt a surge of something like affection. She tried to tamp it down, but couldn’t. It was hard to remain suspicious of someone (or some thing) when your life was in its hands (or appendages), and vice versa. Maybe that was part of their plan, to lull the human race with the warmth of camaraderie.

Or maybe she should get over it, and stop being so suspicious.

It was astonishing to think this was really happening. People and Luyten were going to be fighting, and dying, side by side.

We’re recruiting more humans for leadership positions every day, Five said. As we launch new attacks, we’re able to gauge people’s reactions, and identify those who not only approve of the attacks, but wish they could take part in them.

“Not everyone approves of the attacks?” Oliver asked.

Oh, no. Some are afraid the defenders’ retaliation will spread to humans. Others are working for the defenders—they’re only interested in ingratiating themselves by feeding the defenders information.

“If you know who those people are, shouldn’t we be doing something about them?” Kai asked.

“Like what?” Lila asked. She didn’t like the implications of the question.

I’m glad you brought that up, Five said. Do you want us to supply names?

“Hang on,” Lila said. “Why would we want their names?”

“Because they have to be killed,” Kai said.

After all this time, she realized, Kai still felt some sort of connection with Five. Both of them did—father and son. The Luyten had been right, to move heaven and Earth to get Five here in person.

Lila looked from Kai to Five, and back again. As Kai followed her gaze, his stolid expression turned dark, almost accusatory. Lila had a moment of wondering if Kai knew her so well he knew what she was thinking, or if Five had plucked it out of her mind and passed it on to Kai. That was the thing about having a Luyten present—you couldn’t help but feel paranoid.

“Let me get this straight,” Lila said. “We’re going to kill people—humans—because aliens tell us they’re spies?”

“We’re all in, Lila,” Kai said. “If we can’t trust the Luyten, well, we’re fucked. We’ve already crossed that bridge.”

“So we’re just going to off people? What are we going to do, slip into their houses when they’re asleep and cut their throats, trying our best not to wake their kids? Lure them into alleys and beat their skulls in with steel pipes?” She looked at Oliver, Kai, and Dominique. “Who’s going to do this? Us?”

We can identify former Special Forces, CIA operatives, army snipers, and provide assignments directly to them. Most will want contact with some sort of human leadership first, to make sure our authority is legitimate.

“And we’re the human leadership?” Lila said. She brushed her hair out of her face. “Is no one else getting uncomfortable with this?”

“We’re all uncomfortable with it,” Dominique said. “None of us wants to decide who lives and who dies.”

“But when push comes to shove, you will.”

Dominique didn’t answer.

“While we’re on the topic of leadership,” Oliver said, “I think I should point out that Dominique is the highest-ranking government official involved in this action. I’d like to suggest we officially acknowledge that, ultimately, she’s in charge.”

Dominique raised both of her hands. “Whoa, hold on. Don’t put that on me. Four voices, four votes.”

“What happens in the event of a tie?” Oliver asked.

“We talk it out.”

Lila nodded agreement. “Can we vote on this assassination idea?”

“Yes,” Dominique said, her voice clipped. “All in favor of authorizing the assassination of known human traitors?”

Everyone but Lila raised a hand.

For the record, most of us are in favor as well, Five said, although we won’t personally kill humans under any circumstances, for obvious reasons.

Somehow Lila didn’t find that reassuring.

We’re planning to escalate the attacks tomorrow. We’re going to hit armories where at least one altered defender is stationed.

“They’re not going to like that,” Kai said.

No, they’re not. More of us are going to die, but we can’t let up. A few more days, and then the real war begins. Is three days from now an acceptable time frame?

They looked at each other, then Oliver said, “Yes.”

Good. In the meantime, we’re going to try to evacuate the cities where gas attacks are planned. Those are obvious first-strike targets, with the defenders already cleared out.

82 Oliver Bowen

January 12, 2048. Washington, D.C.

In the end, Oliver suggested he and Vanessa go for a walk. Oliver was a nonperson, so meeting at a coffee shop or restaurant carried risk, and he felt uncomfortable suggesting they meet in his apartment. So they met near his apartment and circled the block, their chins tucked against a chilly wind.

They caught each other up on their lives. Oliver told her what it had been like to be in Australia when the war broke out. How he’d be dead if not for Lila.

Vanessa described watching from her bedroom window as the first bombs dropped on D.C., then hiding in her basement, terrified, as the bombers flew overhead, evidently saving their bombs for more densely populated areas.

“I’ve never felt as alone as I felt in that basement,” Vanessa said. “Most of the time, I’m happy on my own. I enjoy my own company; I thrive in the silence. But when you’re terrified, when you’re watching bombs drop on the roofs of your city, suddenly it’s awful to be alone.”

Oliver was surprised by Vanessa’s honesty. It reminded him of the early months of their marriage, when he’d felt closer to her than he’d ever felt to anyone.

“I tried calling my mom, but the phones were out by then. The power was out; I was in the dark. I would have given anything to hear another human voice.” Vanessa’s mother, who’d lived in Albuquerque, died in the war. So did her brother, and an uncle.

A defender came around the corner. Oliver tensed, ever afraid one of them would demand ID and somehow see that his was fake. He and Vanessa pressed close to the wall to give the defender plenty of room to pass. As the thump of the defender’s boots faded, Oliver’s pulse returned to normal.

Vanessa noticed how tense he’d become. “I don’t know how you do it. I could never disappear like you did, and worry all the time about being discovered.”

Oliver shrugged, put on a brave face. “The trick is to hide in plain sight. If you seem to be avoiding them, they get suspicious. I really had no choice; even with Lila’s protection, sooner or later they would have killed me because of who I was.”

“You hated it when they drafted you into the CIA. Do you remember? You absolutely didn’t want to do it.”

Oliver nodded, watched a concrete mixer roll by, driven by a man who must have been ninety.

“But you adapted. You thrived.” After a pause she added, “I didn’t think you would.”

The comment took Oliver by surprise. He nearly stopped walking before regaining his composure. “No?”

She touched his shoulder. “You were such a gentle man; too gentle to fight a war, I thought.” She must have seen something in his expression, because she quickly added, “Don’t get me wrong, I liked that you were gentle—it was one of the reasons I married you. But I confused gentle with weak. You’re not weak.”

“Thank you” was all he could think to say. When he first joined the CIA, he’d been afraid he was too weak. He wouldn’t necessarily have used that word, but that was the crux of it. Over the years those fears had vanished. Still, it did his heart good to hear Vanessa say she didn’t think he was weak.

“We probably should have done this a long time ago,” Vanessa said. “Get things right with each other. Lots of divorced people reconnect and become friends after some time passes.” She glanced at him, smiled. “We shouldn’t have waited twenty years.”

Oliver nodded. His throat had tightened; he didn’t trust himself to speak, but he was afraid Vanessa hadn’t seen him nod, and he didn’t want her to think he didn’t agree with what she’d just said. So he added, “I missed you,” almost choking on the last word.

Vanessa studied his profile. Oliver kept his head down, face forward, not wanting her to see how choked up he was.

“I missed you, too.”

How long had he imagined taking this walk, having this conversation? He felt… he couldn’t put it into words. His senses felt sharpened; he felt lighter than he had in ages. The wars hadn’t made Vanessa sour and brittle, or depressed and anxious, as it had so many people. At her core she was still the same woman. There were wrinkles around her eyes, the softness of middle age showing under her chin, but it was still Vanessa. She’d made it intact through two wars; Oliver wondered how she’d fare in a third.

“I want to tell you something I’m not supposed to tell anyone. But for now, you can’t ask me for details.”

Vanessa swallowed. “This is the thing you talked about on the phone. ‘Ask me again in six months,’ you said.”

Oliver scanned the street, looking for any sign of defenders, or security cameras. It would be too dangerous to go into specifics, but he felt he had to say something, or he would be lying to Vanessa in a very real sense. “There’s another storm coming, Vanessa. Very soon.”

She slowed. She understood exactly what he was saying—Oliver could see it in her reaction. “You’re sure?”

“I’m positive.”

“As bad as the other storms?”

Oliver squeezed his eyes shut for a second. “Just as bad.”

Vanessa took this in, then nodded. “Good to know.”

A few blocks ahead, the row of colorful three-story connected houses ended, replaced by the towering frames of new defender construction, cranes and bulldozers, and piles of rubble—the remains of the human buildings that had been demolished to make room for more defender dwellings. Hopefully, they would never be completed.

“We’d better turn around,” Oliver said.

They headed back the way they’d come.

Vanessa took out her phone, tapped the keys for a moment, then held it up. “I haven’t listened to this in twenty years, but today, I need a laugh.”

Sounding like he was speaking from inside a can, Oliver heard his own quavering voice. “Yes, Vanessa, this is Oliver Bowen? My sister, Leslie Bowen, gave me your number, and I hope you don’t mind my calling you, but—”

As they laughed, Oliver watched for defenders. If a defender happened by and saw two humans laughing as hard as they were, it would raise suspicion.

83 Kai Zhou

January 12, 2048. Washington, D.C.

The crawlspace under Erik’s house was large enough for Kai to walk upright. When Kai and Lila had owned their own house, it had been a struggle to move around in the crawlspace with his back bent, squatting. And that had been before the war, when his body was strong and fully intact.

Kai located the plumbing that went up to the kitchen, listened to each of the pipes in turn with the stethoscope he’d brought. He marked the one connected to the sink, which he’d purposely left running, with a red X, then went to find the main circuit panel.

He felt like he was deceiving Lila by planning this without telling her. But there was no doubt in his mind that Erik was going to try to kill him; he was too good a poker player to misread what he’d seen on Erik’s face.

He flipped the breaker switch leading to the heater for Erik’s pool. Erik would never notice it was off; as far as Kai knew, Erik had never been in the pool—it was just a prop, a display of his wealth and power.

Rerouting the wiring was the hard part, especially with only one good hand. During basic training he’d received cursory instruction in booby-trapping, including about two minutes on how to electrocute someone using a house’s typical 110-volt setup.

An hour later, shaking from the exertion, his hip throbbing, he had the wires from the pool’s heater wrapped around the pipe leading to the kitchen faucet. In theory, when the time came all he had to do was flip the breaker, then get Erik to touch the faucet. He hoped he’d done it right.

84 Dominique Wiewall

January 18, 2048. Washington, D.C.

It was a pathetic war room. In place of interactive high-definition electronic maps, they had paper maps and push-pins on the walls. And Spider-Man. Dominique didn’t even feel qualified to participate in planning an insurrection. She was a geneticist, for God’s sake.

We’re in direct contact with hundreds of high-ranking officers with combat experience, Five said in her head, probably from miles away. They’ll be making the military decisions.

“I know, I know,” Dominique said. “They’re just my thoughts, Five. That’s where we express our private doubts and insecurities. If we’re all going to live together in peace and harmony, your kind is going to have to learn to politely ignore what you hear us thinking.”

Sorry. You’ll have to excuse my manners, but thousands of my people are being slaughtered at the moment, and each time it happens, it feels a little like dying myself. I’d appreciate it if you’d cut me one fucking inch of slack.

Dominique swallowed. “I’m sorry. I forgot for a moment.”

Oliver took a sip from his third or fourth cup of coffee, politely ignoring the altercation. He had three days’ growth of dark stubble on his face, and smelled like a defender. Dominique wasn’t sure how to tell him that if he didn’t have time to shower, he should at least change his shirt.

They were all on edge. Forrest had his face buried in his computer, trying to find a way to hack into the defenders’ video feeds to give them a better idea of what was going on out there. He cursed under his breath as he pounded away on the keyboard.

“Five, how are the evacuations in those cities going?” Oliver asked.

Chaotically. Some people are trying to get out, others are staying put. The defenders are saying no one who stays will be harmed, and anyone who tries to leave without a pass will be killed. Meanwhile, we’re doing our best to panic people into fleeing. If we can create stampedes out of the cities, the defenders won’t be able to kill as many refugees. The defenders are frantically trying to understand what’s happening.

“How do they think people learned about their plan to gas those cities?”

They’re guessing it happened through an intercepted communication.

Oliver nodded. “So they’re not suspicious that some of their own have been altered?”

That would be an impressive leap of logic, don’t you think?

“Don’t underestimate their capacity for paranoia,” Dominique said.

Someone knocked on the door.

Oliver jumped like he’d been goosed. He looked at the Invincible Iron Man alarm clock sitting on a nearly empty bookshelf. “Oh, shit. I invited Vanessa over. I didn’t realize what time it was.”

Dominique surveyed the room. “How were you planning to explain the battle maps?”

“I told her to come for coffee, but the real reason I invited her was to warn her of what’s about to happen, and hopefully convince her to stay here with us.”

Another knock. Oliver went to answer it.

It wasn’t Oliver’s ex, it was Lila, who stormed in, dropped her bag on the couch, and went to the map. “What’s happening?” Her eyes were red, and her nose sounded plugged.

“Didn’t we agree you should go to work, as usual?” Oliver asked.

“I infected myself with rhinovirus yesterday, then played up the symptoms like I had the flu.”

That seemed risky to Dominique, but she kept her mouth shut. Lila liked to be in the middle of things. Dominique could relate.

“Here we go!” Forrest shouted. “I got it, I got it.”

Everyone hustled to see the laptop screen. “We can choose country, then city or town, over here.” Forrest pointed at a menu to the right of the screen. “Then scroll through the various feeds.” He toggled through a dozen views of D.C. until he found one that showed a handful of defenders with rifles shooting dozens of Luyten, who’d evidently been hiding in a warehouse. The Luyten were fighting back (in fact, one defender was down and unmoving), but they were cornered and outgunned, and they were dying. There were twitching, bullet-riddled Luyten everywhere.

“It’s time,” Oliver said, staring at the carnage. “Let’s send the call out to the human side of the resistance. They’re being slaughtered.”

Not yet—we have to allow the images of Luyten resistance to spread. It will make it much easier to convince your people to fight at our side.

“Are the images spreading?”

Yes. Quickly. We’ve recruited human allies who are making sure.

“What about the Luyten in the wild, the ones who are armed?” Dominique asked. “Couldn’t they help?”

Lila turned. “What Luyten in the wild?”

“We stumbled on a camp of armed Luyten in Alaska. They looked like they’d been there since the war. If there’s one camp, there must be others.” She was surprised this was news to them; she’d assumed if she knew about them, the others would by now.

“Five?” Lila sounded supremely uneasy. “Are there others?”

There was an uncharacteristically long pause. Yes. Some of your military strategists are aware of them, and have plans for them.

“How many?” Lila asked.

Several million worldwide, Lila. And yes, to what you’re thinking. That was the original plan.

Dominique looked at Lila. “What was the original plan?”

Lila folded her arms. “They were planning their own rebellion. Why else would they have secret camps all over the world? And I’ll bet they were breeding as fast as they could, weren’t they, Five? You were biding your time, waiting to grow an army big enough to wipe out the defenders, and then us.”

Look out your fucking window, Lila. We’re dying by the thousands. If you still can’t see past your own hatred of us, then I give up. We’re monsters, bent on killing. You’re angels, with nothing but noble intentions. Are you satisfied? Now, get the hell out of our way. The rest of us have work to do.

There was no missing Five’s rage. It burned inside Dominique’s head like a blowtorch.

“He’s right, Lila,” Oliver said, speaking gently. “Since we formed this alliance, they’ve done everything they promised, and more.”

“Except tell us about the existence of millions of other Luyten.”

“They told others. I’m guessing they withheld the information from us because they knew how you’d react. Can you blame them?”

Lila looked at Oliver, her eyes like razors. Dominique had seen her angry like this a few times before; it had never ended well. She needed to defuse the situation before things got out of hand.

“Well, you can’t blame them, that much is clear,” Lila said, her tone acid. “What is it about Five that makes you crave his approval so desperately? Even after he broke up your marriage, you still want his approval more than you want your wife back.”

Oliver’s face trembled, with rage, hurt, or both. “You don’t know anything about what I want.”

Lila opened her mouth to reply just as the doorbell rang.

“That’s Vanessa,” Oliver said. He went to the door.

“Five, tell us the Luyten’s original plan, so we can understand,” Dominique said.

Oliver led Vanessa into the room; Dominique nodded a brief greeting, as Five replied.

Stay out of sight. Multiply. In about thirty years, if we weren’t discovered, we’d have had enough strength to rise up against the defenders. Humanity would be forced to choose a side.

“But you changed your plan when you learned about the defenders’ plan to cull the human population. You couldn’t stand idly by while it happened,” Dominique suggested.

Vanessa looked utterly confused. She was hearing only half the conversation. Oliver whispered something to her.

“Or they saw it as an opportunity,” Lila said. She headed for the door. “I’m going to go. Five is right; I’m only getting in the way.”

No one tried to stop her. Dominique was tempted, but it was probably best for her to be elsewhere; the stress was getting to her. The stress was getting to everyone, even Five. Hell, Dominique wished she could leave, too.

Oliver was still whispering to Vanessa. Her mouth dropped open. “Oh my God.”

Your military strategists are offering a range of opinions, from launching the human side of the uprising immediately, to waiting several days. The consensus seems to be to wait another hour or two. So that’s what we plan to do.

“Explain to me again how you’re going to convince people to pour into the streets, poorly armed, against defenders armed to the teeth?” Dominique asked.

Wake up, John Smith, your people are rising up, and they need your help. Get the ax from your garage and report to your commander on Main Street. I’m hiding under your house. Don’t make me come in there and get you.

The room erupted with laughter, except Vanessa, who looked confused, and scared. Oliver whispered something else, clearly trying to console her.

“That would get my ass into the street,” Forrest said.

It won’t take much prodding. Most humans are ready to fight.

Forrest nodded. He looked dead on his feet, his eyes half shut, his hands shaky. It occurred to Dominique that this might be a good time for them to go back to the little apartment they’d commandeered and get a couple of hours’ sleep. Oliver would probably appreciate some time alone with Vanessa, and in this little studio apartment that wasn’t going to happen unless Dominique and Forrest left for a while. When she suggested getting some sleep to Forrest, he didn’t argue.

85 Kai Zhou

January 18, 2048. Washington, D.C.

Kai went to the kitchen, plugged the sink, and turned the water on full-blast. He was so nervous his stomach ached. The water overflowed, spilling across the counter and onto Erik’s tile floor. Erik would turn off the water when he saw this; he wouldn’t be able to resist. He’d better not be able to resist.

Kai left the sliding glass door open and went around to the crawlspace entrance, then contemplated the circuit panel for a long moment before flipping the breaker on. He went back inside to wait for Erik. If Erik stuck to his usual routine, he’d be back for lunch.

“Kai?”

The front door banged open. “Kai?”

From his hiding place in the laundry closet, Kai heard Erik curse. He peered through the crack between the sets of folding doors into the empty kitchen, his heart racing. Something scraped along the wall and clattered to the floor, then Erik stepped into view, cursing a blue streak, glaring at the faucet.

“You did this on purpose, didn’t you?” He reached toward the faucet. “Because you—” As Erik’s fingertips brushed the handle, there was a blinding flash. Erik was blown backward into the wall of cabinets. He landed on his feet, then tipped forward, his face slamming into the counter before he crumpled to the flooded tile floor. It wasn’t what Kai had expected. He’d pictured Erik dancing like a marionette, unable to let go of the handle while the current flowed through him, seeking ground.

Then he noticed the lights had dimmed. He’d thought it was the aftereffects of the bright flash, but it wasn’t—the lights in the kitchen were out, and so were the ones in the hallway. The circuit had blown.

In the kitchen, Erik groaned.

Kai stopped breathing, strained to see Erik in the dim light filtering through the living room windows.

Erik lifted his head. His normally flat, fishlike eyes were lit with astonishment. Kai felt a terrible, sinking dread as Erik pawed feebly at the wet floor. He looked as weak as a puppy, but he wouldn’t stay that way. He’d get up, if Kai didn’t stop him.

Kai burst from the closet, cast about for a weapon. He spotted the row of kitchen knives jutting from the block above the counter. He pulled out the biggest one with his good hand.

His heart was tripping, his breath coming in a wheeze as he splashed through the inch-deep water. Erik muttered something, rolled onto his back, raised an arm as Kai lunged. Kai knocked Erik’s weakened arm away and stabbed him in the chest.

Erik hissed like he was filled with air and Kai had popped him, but it was blood, not air, that spattered Kai’s hands and face. He pulled the knife free and stabbed again, harder this time, horrified by the feel of it sinking into Erik’s chest.

This time Erik screamed in pain and rage; his big fist came down on Kai’s head, knocking him to the floor. Kai struggled to his knees, raised the knife, and stabbed again with all of his might as Erik howled.

Suddenly Kai was on his back. Lila was standing over him, her screams merging with Erik’s.

“What are you doing?”

Kai stared up at her, gasping for breath, feeling like he’d been caught doing something unspeakable.

Lila knelt beside Erik, her knees in pink water.

Kai sat up. He watched Lila, who was sobbing and holding Erik’s face. She looked back at him. “Where is Errol?”

“He’s at Charlie’s. He’s safe.”

“What happened? Did he attack you?”

“He would have,” Kai said. He spotted an assault rifle lying on the floor along the wall. That’s what he’d heard clatter to the floor after Erik barged in. Kai pointed at it. “He brought that with him.”

“Lila,” Erik said, his voice a deep gurgle.

Lila put her face close to Erik’s. “I’m here.”

In that moment Erik looked as human as Kai had ever seen him. His face was twisted in pain, or regret, or something, and spattered with blood. His forehead was a series of ripples. Kai wasn’t sorry he’d done it, wasn’t sorry Erik was dying, but he was sorry Erik was suffering. Kai knew what it felt like.

Outside, he heard the sound of gunfire, then the boom of a howitzer, or tank. It was starting.

“Are you sad to see me this way, Lila?” Erik asked.

“Yes, Erik, I am.”

That seemed to console Erik. Kai watched as he shuddered and died in Lila’s arms.

Lila stood, looked around the flooded kitchen, clearly trying to make sense of the scene. She looked at Kai. “What happened?”

Kai gestured toward Erik. “He was going to kill me. I could read it in his face this morning when he left. So I rigged a trap and killed him first.”

Lila frowned. “You rigged a trap? What do you mean?”

“I ran an electrical current through the faucet.”

“You ran…” Lila absorbed this for a moment, as outside, the booming and popping of battle intensified.

“Lila, don’t blame me for being the one who’s not dead.”

Lila covered her eyes with her palm. “But you stabbed him. I saw you.”

Kai stood slowly. He looked at his hands, caked with drying blood. The water was still running. He thrust them under the faucet; the chilly water turned light pink. Tendrils of deeper red carried up and out of the sink, over the counter.

Lila left the kitchen as he dried his hands on a towel hanging from the oven door. He could hear her in one of the bedrooms, opening and closing drawers.

Erik’s assault rifle still lay on the floor in the living room. Kai went and picked it up. It weighed at least thirty pounds.

Lila reappeared carrying an oversized beige bedspread. She used it to cover Erik.

“I have to get out there and help,” Kai said.

Lila looked at the rifle in his hands. “What? No. You’re part of the command team. We need you.”

A red stain had bloomed on the bedspread; it grew as Kai watched. “No, you don’t. I’m not CIA, or State Department, or a genetic engineer. I’m a poker player and a war veteran. I’d be more useful out there.” He motioned toward the door with his head.

Lila reached up, grabbed his face with both hands, and turned it toward hers. He hadn’t realized it, but he was avoiding her eyes. “You’ll die out there. Please don’t go.”

Kai didn’t answer.

“You’re going out there to prove you didn’t have anything against Erik personally. Forget what I said; I shouldn’t have said it.” She drew him into a hug. “This is all so fucked-up. Sometimes I’m not even sure whose side I’m on.” She pressed her face into his shoulder.

“It’s not that. Honestly.” He wanted to explain why he felt the need to go out there, but he wasn’t sure himself. He had to go for the same reason as everyone else. To fix their fucked-up world.

“You’re still trying to live down The Boy Who Betrayed the World,” Lila said. “You took four bullets. You’ve done your part, okay?”

Kai smiled sadly. “Everybody’s done their part. There’s no one who’s coming fresh to this fight.”

Lila inhaled to say something, then simply hugged him tighter. “I don’t know what I’ll do if you die out there.”

He didn’t want to make a promise that was outside his control. “Soon we’ll be able to live a normal, boring life. You, me, and Errol.” He lifted the rifle, turned toward the door. “I’ll meet you at Oliver’s apartment.”

“That’s another reason I wanted you to come,” Lila called after him. “They kicked me out. I’m not being a team player.”

“Be a team player. Just go, before things get too bad out there. They love you.”

“Five doesn’t love me.”

Kai laughed. “Well no, Five doesn’t.”

“When will you meet me there?”

He looked back at her. “When I’m too tired to fight. Figure twenty-four hours.”

86 Kai Zhou

January 18, 2048. Washington, D.C.

As soon as Kai was outside, a Luyten was in his head.

Head toward Lester Avenue. Eight blocks.

When Kai reached for his keys, the Luyten added, We’re setting up roadblocks to slow the defenders’ tanks. Go on foot. We can use that assault rifle. And congratulations on your kill. Sometimes Lila’s past blinds her to some harsh realities; put her reaction out of your mind and focus on the fight at hand. She loves you. She’s thinking about how much she loves you right now; she regrets the accusation she made.

Kai was sure the Luyten speaking in his head was neither Five nor the crimson one, yet it spoke as if it were an old friend, or, better yet, his shrink. He hadn’t realized they were offering soldiers psychological services as well as tactical direction.

He also hadn’t realized he was letting the encounter with Lila bother him, but he’d take the Luyten’s word for it. He willed himself to focus on the landscape, the smell of oily smoke, the sound of gunfire and, farther off, artillery fire. A defender fighter jet roared past overhead, flying close to the ground.

The streets were nearly empty. People appeared and disappeared, running bent at the waist, carrying axes or knives. They were men and women, young and old. Occasionally someone passed who looked to be flat-out fleeing. Kai wondered if some were refusing to follow the Luyten’s directions.

Some. About a third, although the number is dropping as they see others fight alongside us. You’re highly social animals. Like us.

As he approached Lester Avenue, the Luyten said, Change of plans. Get inside the copy store up ahead. The red door.

Kai saw the door it was talking about and hurried inside, his bad leg throbbing.

There’s a staircase in the back.

It led him to an upstairs storage room with windows facing the street, instructed him to bust in the window with the nose of his rifle. He pushed a pallet of boxes filled with reams of paper into place to brace the butt of the rifle, got situated just as a defender trotted into view across the street. It was in full body armor.

Several dozen people advanced on it, surging toward cover behind parked vehicles, behind the corners of buildings. The defender raised his rifle, fired, hit a woman square in the chest. She fell backward, lay unmoving.

Kai didn’t notice the Luyten on the roof above the defender until it leaped, dropping three stories, landing right on the defender’s back. Somehow the defender stayed upright. He tried to angle his rifle to get a shot at the Luyten, while struggling to keep the butcher knife the Luyten was gripping away from his throat. The humans used the opportunity to charge. They closed on the defender from both sides, hacked at his thighs and feet with their makeshift weapons.

Howling in pain, the defender lashed out, slashing them with the blades on his legs and arms. Blood sprayed across the pavement as people suffered terrible wounds and dropped like sacks.

A second defender surged into view. Kai didn’t need the Luyten to tell him what to do: He trained his sights on the defender and squeezed a quick burst from the rifle. It bucked violently. He gripped the rifle with his left hand, held it in place with all of his might, and squeezed off another round, then another, hitting the defender squarely in the chest and knocking it to the ground.

The defender’s body armor meant the shots weren’t lethal, but as soon as it was down, people attacked it, aiming for the face with their blades and bats.

A woman showed up holding a handgun like she knew how to use one, probably former police or military. She pushed into the crowd of assailants and put two slugs in the defender’s face, point-blank.

Thirty seconds later, the street was deserted except for the dead. They were listening to the Luyten. And why not? It was working; the Luyten were coordinating them into an incredibly efficient force, using a million sets of eyes and ears to know what was happening everywhere, benefiting from brains that allowed them to think a dozen things at once, able to move their forces with a split second’s notice. Kai hadn’t realized just how lethal the combination of humans and Luyten would be.

The defenders in your area are withdrawing. That means an air strike is coming. Move.

Kai grabbed the rifle and bolted down the stairs and through the store, out into the street, his hip screaming from the exertion.

Head west—to your left. Run. As fast as you can.

Kai ran.

87 Oliver Bowen

January 18, 2048. Washington, D.C.

“What are they doing?” Oliver’s heart had been racing for so long, he was sure a heart attack was imminent. He watched as, on a half dozen of the feeds, the defenders hopped into transport vehicles, or ran, away from the fight.

They’re executing a retrograde action. A tactical retreat. We have an overwhelming advantage in troop numbers, so we’re trying to take the fight close-in, to capitalize on that advantage. Their strength is their weaponry. They want to get their troops away from us, into tanks and bombers. This was one of the weaknesses your military strategists identified: The defenders have plenty of weapons, but most of their troops are embedded within human communities. If we can keep them from reaching those weapons, they can’t use them.

“How are we going to stop them?” Vanessa asked, watching the screen from behind Oliver. Oliver was acutely aware of her hand resting on his shoulder. He thought that maybe, finally, Vanessa was back in his life. This time, he wasn’t going to lose her.

Thanks to our defender “spies,” we know most of their rendezvous points. We’ve been sending our troops to those places, to get between them and their weapons.

“Yes, but Oliver said our troops are poorly armed. They’ll be cut to pieces,” Vanessa said.

Remember all of those armed Luyten encampments we discussed? The ones that made Lila so angry?

“Holy shit,” Oliver said. “They’re heading to these rendezvous points.”

Bingo.

88 Lila Easterlin

January 18, 2048. Washington, D.C.

It was Armageddon. No one was going to win. There would be nothing left by the time it was over, nothing but piles of rubble, and a few bloodied humans, mangled Luyten, and burned defenders, still fighting.

Lila hurried down Lester Avenue, past people carrying knives and machetes, past burning buildings. The thump of rounds hitting targets registered deep in her belly, reminding her of Australia. The rising chaos played out over flashbacks of Kai lifting and plunging that knife while Erik screamed. She would never have believed Kai capable of that kind of violence, even to save his own life.

But she was thinking of the prewar Kai, the one who hadn’t fought the defenders, hadn’t been shredded by their giant bullets. He wasn’t the same Kai; she had to accept that, and love him just the same.

Up ahead, the road was blocked by a semi tipped on its side. It blocked the intersection so perfectly that Lila was sure it had been put there on purpose. She pulled her Lightfoot to the curb and stepped out. It was four blocks to Oliver’s apartment. She took off at a brisk jog, thankful she’d sworn off heels in favor of jogging shoes since that fateful day in Australia.

Defenders are headed your way. Duck inside—the white door just ahead on your left. It was her old friend, the crimson Luyten. The door opened before Lila reached it; a plump old woman with dyed red hair waved her in.

“Thanks,” Lila gasped as the woman swung the door closed. The apartment was small and cramped, the walls covered by paintings, all in the same style. “Are you an artist?”

“My daughter.”

Lila nodded as she peered out the living room window. A phalanx of defenders rolled by in big, black troop transport vehicles. The streets were left utterly empty in their wake.

All clear.

“Thank you,” Lila said to the woman as she slipped out. She took off at a run. Less than two blocks. She wondered how things were going. Maybe it was too early to tell. One thing was certain: There would be far fewer beings left alive when this was over. It was hard to believe that not long ago, there had been eight or nine billion humans on the planet. Assuming they won, would there be even one billion left?

Lila spotted Oliver’s apartment less than a block away. She wondered if they’d be happy to see her. When she’d left she’d felt like an outsider, a gadfly. Maybe they needed a gadfly to stay on their guard—

An explosion knocked her to the ground. Chunks of stone and wood rained down, most of it landing short of Lila. The air was suddenly choked with gray smoke; some of the buildings ahead were missing, leaving a ragged gap.

A gap where Oliver’s apartment building had been.

“Oliver. Dominique.” Lila scrambled to her feet, ran for the place where the bomb had hit, stumbling through increasingly thick rubble. She had to be wrong; the sudden devastation had disoriented her. That couldn’t have been Oliver’s building. Maybe it was the next block…

It was, Lila. I’m sorry.

“No!” Lila pushed through the rubble until she couldn’t get any closer. She gripped a two-by-four, pulled it out of her way, trying to identify where she needed to dig, where Oliver’s living room had been.

She stood, raised her arms toward the sky. “Where are you? Help me. God damn it, help me find them.”

Dominique and Forrest are safe, at their apartment. But Oliver, I’m sorry, he’s—

“Don’t say it. Don’t you dare say it. You come here and help me.” She brushed her hair out of her eyes; her fingers came away bloody. “Why didn’t you warn them? Why didn’t you get them out of there? You warned me.”

She spotted the crimson Luyten coming around the corner, bolting toward her on all seven limbs. We didn’t know. Your spies aren’t everywhere; we only hear pieces of their plans. I’m sorry.

“Get Kai. Tell him we need him.”

All right. We’re telling him now.

“Now help me find them.”

The crimson Luyten joined her among the wreckage. It leaned in, grasped what seemed to be an entire wall tented onto a pile of bricks, and pushed it aside.

“Oliver?” Lila called. He couldn’t be gone; Lila’s mind clamped shut on the possibility. He just couldn’t. “How far away is Kai?”

The crimson Luyten had been straining to lift a support beam; it let the beam drop. They’re going to firebomb the entire downtown.

“What? When?”

Humans and Luyten keep following their troops, staying close so they can’t use their WMDs. They’re not going to wait for the defenders to get out. We have to run.

“Not until we find him.” She dug at the wreckage. The jagged edge of a window frame sliced her palm as she pushed it aside. “Oliver? Was Vanessa with him?”

The Luyten rushed at Lila, getting far too close to her for comfort. Adrenaline coursed through her as it gripped her wrist and ankles with its cilia, hoisted her effortlessly.

She shrieked, thrashing with all of her might. Its skin was rough and lumpy, uncomfortably warm.

We have to get out of here. Please stop struggling. It took off, hurtling down the street, jostling her violently as it dodged and leaped over debris, sometimes moving on three appendages, sometimes four or five. Suddenly it cut toward the sidewalk, cut into a shaded, open-air mall, and ducked against the wall. It went motionless, not even breathing.

Lila heard defenders pass, their boots thumping.

When the noise receded, the Luyten released an enormous puff of air, then rose and bolted.

As the Luyten galloped, its cilia clenched and relaxed, clenched and relaxed, squeezing Lila. She felt like she was being crushed.

Then she suddenly remembered Kai. “Where is Kai? We have to get him.”

He’s on a bicycle. I can’t carry two.

They turned a corner, where dozens of people were running, all in the same direction, away from the heart of the city. If Kai was still near Erik’s house, he wouldn’t have as far to run. If she lost Kai, too, she might as well race back into the heart of the city so she could die quickly.

She couldn’t believe Oliver was gone. How could that be possible?

The streets were teeming with people now, all of them running, many clutching weapons. There was no screaming, though—no panic. Even women carrying children were saving all of their breath to run, to keep running. The crimson Luyten weaved left and right, surging past others.

As they crossed Key Bridge and ran along Lynn Street, the buzz of defender bombers rose. Lila couldn’t see the horizon behind them because the Luyten blocked her view, but she could hear them growing louder. People around her found energy somewhere to run faster.

The sharp boom of explosions began, far off. They were bombing the downtown area into oblivion, although hopefully most of the people had heeded the Luyten call to flee. The old and infirm were probably still there, unable to run fast enough, or at all.

The sound of bomber engines grew louder, punctuated by bombs hitting their targets. It sounded like they were leveling the whole area.

The explosions were deafening; they sounded as if they were right behind her.

The wall of a nearby building exploded, spitting bricks and glass. The world flipped upside down, then righted itself, then flipped again. They were hurtling end over end; heat scorched Lila’s face, flames, rooftops, screams closing in from all sides.

She hit the ground with a tooth-rattling jolt, and she and the Luyten lay still.

Lila tried to lift her head, but it dropped back to the pavement. Huge feet rushed by—a defender.

“Come on,” she called to the Luyten. She was confused about what had happened, where they were. She closed her eyes for a moment, opened them again. The world came into better focus.

Two of the Luyten’s appendages were gone. Its dark blood was pinwheeled across the pavement and up the side of a half-standing storefront. Puffs of hot air pushed past Lila as the Luyten’s center rose and fell, rose and fell.

That way. Under. There was a sewer grate in the street ahead, swung open.

She scrabbled at the pavement, trying to pull free. One of the Luyten’s remaining limbs was on top of her. She came out a few inches, then slid back. She pulled harder, groaning with effort, and felt the Luyten’s muscles bunch as it struggled to raise the limb. She spilled onto the pavement.

“Thank you,” she said. The Luyten was still, its center no longer puffing.

A woman lay close by, dead, her face caved in, her legs smoking.

There was no way for Lila to make sense of what she was feeling, so she didn’t try. She wiped tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand, roughly, as if they had no business being there.

89 Kai Zhou

January 18, 2048. Washington, D.C.

Kai let the mountain bike coast as close to the pile of debris as possible, then swung his good leg over and jumped off. Pain shot up his hip. Ignoring it, he lifted the bike over his shoulder and carried it through the piles of concrete blocking his path. As soon as he was clear he set the bike back on the street and took off, pedaling as hard as he could. He checked the crossing street; he was on Taylor Street. The train depot was less than a dozen blocks away. It looked like he might make it out.

What worried him wasn’t so much his status; it was Lila and his dad’s. His Luyten guardian angel had been silent since warning him about the impending firebombing and telling him to head for the King Street Station in Alexandria.

“How about it?” Kai said, huffing. “Are they okay?”

Lila is safe. It was a different Luyten.

“What about my father?”

I’m sorry. Your father is gone.

Front tire wobbling, Kai skidded to a stop. He buried his eyes in the crook of his elbow as a terrible, howling grief filled him. He was falling, with no one to catch him. “What happened?”

The defenders bombed his house. A precision strike. We think they traced Forrest’s laptop when he linked into their channel.

The loss was hitting Kai so much harder than he ever would have guessed. He felt frozen; he wanted to go somewhere and cry under a blanket.

We’ve all suffered terrible losses; we can’t let it keep us from carrying on. Not now.

Kai forced himself onto the bike. He pedaled. Maybe he could funnel his grief into rage. As he picked up speed, he became increasingly confident that he could.

The train car was so tightly packed, and moving so fast, there were moments when Kai was lifted off his feet by the bodies pressing on all sides. It was a mercifully short ride, but as soon as Kai stepped out, part of him wished he could climb right back in. There was no fighting in the area around the train station, but by the sounds—tank engines, mortar fire, gunshots—there was an awful battle raging nearby.

Luyten were handing out weapons from open cars on a freight train, but selectively. Kai guessed they were digging into people’s minds, giving them only to war veterans who knew how to use them well.

Follow the others into the woods across the highway, a Luyten instructed. Kai trotted toward the highway, limping heavily on his bad side. The defenders are trying to withdraw their forces into Fort Meade. Most of them have yet to arrive, because we’ve been harassing them, slowing their retreat. We’re placing you between them and Fort Meade. Your job is to hold them back until enough of them have arrived. Then we’ll send our reinforcements in behind them.

A pincer movement. The defenders used the same technique to devastating effect against the Luyten. “Won’t they be expecting that?” Kai asked, as he climbed the rise beyond the highway and pushed into the underbrush, trying hard not to think of his father. He could do that later; right now he needed to stay focused.

They don’t know these reinforcements exist.

“They’re Luyten?”

Well armed. Just keep as many defenders as possible from reaching their heavy weapons.

Kai pushed on, his leg and hip burning fiercely. Others passed him, many looking downright eager to fight. He passed rows of dead bodies, lined up shoulder to shoulder, and grim-faced people dragging more toward the rows.

There was a break in the forest ahead. He reached a big winding road fringed with blood-soaked grass. People, along with a few Luyten, were crouched behind trees on either side. A dozen or so dead defenders were piled in the road, creating a makeshift roadblock.

This is the primary route into and out of the base. Cross it and keep going, but hurry—another convoy of defenders is about to make a push to break through. I’m going to station you toward the back of the base, away from roads, and put you in charge of a platoon.

“I don’t want to be in charge of a platoon,” Kai protested.

I don’t want to be in charge of ten thousand humans. We do what we have to, Boy Who Betrayed the World.

Kai would have laughed at that, if he hadn’t lost his stepfather an hour earlier. What a strange, strange world he lived in, that he would be having this conversation.

He passed a bright orange sign, warning that he was trespassing near a defender military installation and would be shot on sight. “Tell me something I don’t know,” he muttered, nodding to two women who were hurriedly setting up a machine gun beside the bough of a big ironwood tree.

The air was saturated with the sound of gunfire. The woods thinned out and gave way to scorched open fields. Thousands of people dotted the landscape, some of them crouching or lying on their stomachs, pointing rifles. Others stood clutching bladed weapons. Many others were already dead—bloodied or blackened, dismembered and disemboweled. Kai counted five Luyten as well, two dead. Power lines supported on big steel towers hung overhead.

A dozen or so people, and one Luyten, were running toward Kai. Your platoon. There’s a lull right now, but the bombers the defenders have managed to get in the air are battering our positions, and in ten minutes a dozen defenders will attack.

“Wonderful,” Kai said.

I positioned you where resistance was lightest, because of Five.

If this was light, he couldn’t imagine what the people defending the roads were facing. “How is Five doing?”

Five is alive. He’s fighting. He says he hopes to break bread with you when this is over.

“Tell him I’d like that.”

He also sends his condolences. Despite their past, he had deep respect for your father.

Kai blinked back tears. “Thanks. We’ve all lost a lot.”

Yes, we have.

Kai turned to greet his platoon. “How many of you have guns? Hold them up.” Three people raised weapons: two pathetic 1911A-1 pistols—standard twentieth-century US Army sidearms—and one M-4 carbine.

The growl of an enormous engine cut through the other battle sounds.

Bomber, a new Luyten voice warned. It took Kai a moment to realize the Luyten speaking to him now was the one who was part of his platoon.

There were no ditches, and the tree line was too far away, so their only defense was to lie flat on their stomachs.

The first bomb landed on the opposite end of the long, rectangular field. Each subsequent explosion shook the ground a little harder until one landed close enough that Kai felt a blast of scorching air on his left side. He clung to the ground, his face pressed into the dry wild grass.

The bomber roared out of sight over the trees. Kai jumped up, scanned the tree line where the defender infantrymen would appear soon. Kai waved his rifle in the air to get his platoon’s attention. “As you can see, I have an awesome weapon. We’re going to fuck up some defenders with it.”

A tank is coming. It will try to provide cover for the infantry trying to break through. They’re desperate to get troops inside. They’ve got parking lots full of idle weapons.

The crack of falling trees preceded the enormous tank, which broke into the field and immediately started firing, its turret swiveling left and right, its report deafening.

Kai led his platoon left, trying to get out of its range.

A dozen defender infantrymen broke from the trees close by. Kai dropped to the ground, bracing his rifle against the edge of a bomb crater. He chose a defender, pointed him out. “That one’s ours. Harass him. Draw him this way. As close to me as you can.”

Easy, his Luyten platoon mate said. They’re engineered to hate me; I’m like a red cape to a bull. The Luyten headed toward the defender.

The faces kept changing, but Kai always had twenty, as new troops poured into the battle faster than the defenders could kill the old ones. There had to be forty or fifty defenders firing from the trees. A dozen charged onto the field, trying to make it to the base.

Kai closed one eye, squeezed off a few rounds. He was almost out of ammunition, then he’d be nothing but a guy with a gimpy leg swinging a shovel or a butcher knife, whatever he could pry out of a corpse’s hand. The people who had to get that close to a defender to hurt it died quickly.

There were bodies everywhere, just everywhere. So many wounded, dragging themselves through the dirt, or just lying there screaming. Kai could no longer hear them; his ears had stopped ringing an hour earlier. The explosions and gunfire now registered as nothing but thumps in his chest and gut; otherwise, the battlefield was blessedly silent. His foot throbbed; the toe of his boot was gone, and, Kai assumed from the pain, some of his toes with it. There was a bloody shrapnel wound in his good side; Kai had no idea how bad it was.

He was glad he hadn’t promised Lila he wouldn’t let himself get killed. Surely some of them would survive this, but not many.

More defenders broke from the trees, rifles blazing. An explosion threw Kai forward; razors of agony tore through his back. He struggled to his hands and knees, wiped dirt out of his mouth. It felt like there was something stuck in his back, near his left shoulder blade.

“Jesus, this is a slaughter!” Kai shouted into the air. “Where’s the help you bastards promised?”

Soon. Hold on. Hold them back.

Kai wasn’t sure he could stand. He found his rifle, dragged it toward him, wedged the butt into a long scar in the ground, thought of Oliver, and looked for a target.

The defender closest to him was cutting people to pieces with his assault rifle, turning and spinning to keep people from coming up behind him. But people just kept coming, even the ones who had nothing but knives.

Look in the woods.

Kai lifted his head, strained to see. Bright colors were moving around in there, and the wall of defenders that had been pummeling them from the edge was now facing the other way, some of them backing into the open field.

A Luyten in full battle gear burst from the trees. Kai let out a full-throated scream of joy. Two more appeared, then a third, swooping down from above the trees in a flight sleeve. It sped right at the defender Kai had been watching, leveled a heater at it. The defender’s head and shoulders blackened; it collapsed to the ground, smoking.

Struggling to his feet, Kai limp-trotted toward the tree line, wanting to help. He made it halfway before he stumbled and fell hard, felt searing pain in his shoulder blade. He pressed the ground, got back on his feet. Thousands of people were storming the tree line, burying the defenders under a crush, hacking them with knives, machetes, axes. Kai desperately wanted to join them, but he fell again.

He stayed on the ground this time, content to watch the others cut every last defender down.

90 Lila Easterlin

January 29, 2048. Washington, D.C.

Lila dropped the shovel on top of the pathetic pile of dirt she’d managed to accumulate. She looked at her palms. There were blisters on the pads below each finger, plus the jagged cut in her left palm she’d gotten trying to move debris to get to Oliver. Surveying the eight-inch-deep rectangle she’d managed to carve out, Lila sighed, gave the handle of the shovel a kick. How could anyone dig a hole six feet deep?

Tongue jutting from the side of his mouth, Errol retrieved the shovel and gamely tried to pick up where Lila had left off. The shovel looked enormous in his little hands. Lila knew she should take Errol inside where they were relatively safe, but Erik was still in there.

Squatting on her haunches, she watched Errol. He was an even worse digger than she, but far more enthusiastic. He was oblivious to the rubber stink in the air, the rumble of faraway jets, the pop of distant bombs. At least the fighting had moved off to somewhere else.

Lila pulled a tissue from her pocket and wiped Errol’s runny nose, then went to the fence. She swung the gate open and surveyed the street. Surely Kai knew to come here, when he found Oliver’s house was gone. Surely Five would tell him where Lila was, even if he wasn’t speaking to her.

If Five was still alive. If Kai was still alive.

She had no idea what she would do if Kai died. She’d have no one but Errol. She’d never been adept at making friends; most of their friends were Kai’s poker friends. Most of his friends would be dead when this was over, in any case.

Out on the street, a Luyten bridged the rise, heading toward Lila. After a glance back at Errol, who was hard at work with the shovel, she went through the gate to meet Five halfway.

“I’m sorry,” she said when she reached him.

Come on. Five led her back into the yard, sidled up beside Errol. Errol looked at Five, held up the shovel. Five accepted it and began to dig.

“I really am sorry.”

There’s no need. I know what’s in your mind, what’s in your heart. I don’t care about what you felt yesterday, only what you feel now. If you do lose Kai, you’ll have one friend, at least.

“He’s still alive, then?” She’d been afraid to ask.

Yes. He’s wounded, but should survive.

Lila broke down then. Out of relief, out of grief for Oliver, out of gratitude, out of despair. She hated crying, but too much had built up; there was no holding it back.

Errol came over and wrapped his little arms around her legs, and that made her cry harder. She knelt and squeezed Errol to her. “Tell him to get his ass home, right now. Why are you digging?”

The grave was three feet deep. The only thing slowing Five was the human-sized shovel; he carved through the hard-packed earth like he was digging on a beach.

He’s already on his way. So are Dominique and Forrest.

Only then did it occur to her to ask the most obvious question.

Yes, Five answered before she could ask. It will be weeks before the defenders realize they’ve lost—bloody weeks, awful weeks—but they’re taking too many losses. Whatever brilliant military maneuver they attempt, we’re always a step ahead of them, and they can’t figure out why. Thanks to you. Five climbed into the grave, because it was too deep to dig from ground level.

Only the top third of the Luyten was visible as dirt flew out of the grave. Errol was mesmerized.

“What will we do when it’s over?”

In theory, that’s up to you, up to the human race. As we said, we’ll accept any reasonable arrangement. So the question is, what kind of world do you want? Humans and Luyten can try to forge an integrated society, or we can go to Australia, where we’re too far away to read your minds.

“I want you to stay.”

You do, and I appreciate that. I know how hard a climb it’s been for you to trust us. Five pulled himself out of the hole. His movements were slightly awkward, because of his missing limb.

“You said, ‘in theory, it’s up to us.’ Why in theory?”

Because we know what you’ll decide.

The answer startled her. “What will we decide?”

You’ll want us to go away. Australia won’t be far enough, but if that’s as far as we can go…

Lila nodded. It wasn’t what she felt—not anymore, anyway—but she could understand why people would feel that way. “We’re afraid of you.”

If it makes you feel any better, we’re afraid of you, too. Five headed toward the sliding glass doors in the back of the house. Do you want to take Errol around front while I do this?

Lila didn’t bother answering aloud. Death was everywhere; there was no way to protect Errol from it. Better he see it like this first, rather than bulldozers and mass graves, or bodies in the streets.

Moments later, Five dragged Erik into the yard. He’d wrapped him in bedsheets, and as he approached the grave he slowed, took one single step at a time, as if he were a pallbearer. It made Lila smile. As Five eased him into the grave, Errol pulled his hand free from Lila’s and took off.

“Daddy!”

Lila turned to find Kai limping toward them. She rushed over, took in the gash in his side, the bloody, ruined boot. Wrapping an arm around his waist, she led him toward the house.

“No,” he said. He gestured toward the grave. “Let’s finish first. I can wait.”

They gathered at the edge of the grave in silence. Lila stared down at Erik, his form visible beneath the sheets, and remembered the day she’d discovered him walking beside her, wanting to be her friend.

Five picked up the shovel. I can take it from here. Why don’t you and Kai go inside so you can help him?

Lila led Kai inside as Errol, fascinated by the filling of the hole, stayed behind with Five as the daylight began to fade.

Epilogue Lila Easterlin

March 9, 2050

“Can you see anything yet?” Kai moved his head left and right, trying to see past Lila and Errol, out the tiny window.

Lila tried to see past Errol, who had his face plastered to the window, his hands cupped around his eyes to reduce glare.

“I don’t see anything,” Errol said. “Just clouds.”

Lila suspected they would hear from Five, or some Luyten official, before they saw Australia. She hoped it was Five; she’d feel more comfortable peppering him with questions, starting with the rumor the Luyten had begun construction on a new starship. If the Luyten picked up and left, it would present some serious problems for Lila and Kai, given they’d de facto renounced their citizenship.

“Do you think there’ll be a reception committee on the tarmac to greet us, or just some Luyten holding a sign with our names on it at baggage claim?”

“I kind of doubt they have a baggage claim,” Lila said laughing.

“What’s a baggage claim?” Errol asked, turning from the window.

“It’s where you pick up your suitcases,” Lila answered.

“Why wouldn’t they have one?” Errol asked.

“Because Luyten don’t have many possessions, and humans don’t visit Australia very often.”

Errol thought about this for a moment, his big, dark eyebrows pinched. “If we’re not traitors for coming here, how come not many people come?”

For the hundredth time, Lila wondered if they were making a terrible mistake. It was too late now; she might as well stop worrying about it. If they tried to go back to the United States, Willis would hang them for treason. “They’re afraid, that’s all.”

“The whole damned country. Most of the world,” Kai muttered.

Lila wondered if Kai muttered the words because he didn’t want Errol to hear them, or out of habit. There was nothing General Willis and his henchmen could do now that they’d made it this far.

She wondered if the crimson Luyten’s sacrifice had led her to swing too far in trusting the Luyten. Willis was a paranoid xenophobe, yes. But no one could deny the Luyten were manufacturing weapons, and had an active genetics program under way. Lila couldn’t blame them, given the mistrust and hatred for Luyten that was resurfacing among humans. Still, Lila had no idea what the Luyten felt. No one did.

We feel sad, but we haven’t given up hope. Your decision to come here, to show the world that humans and Luyten can live together, keeps that hope alive.

“Hello, Five.”

At Lila’s words, Kai sat up straighter in his seat, looked at Lila expectantly. Then he chuckled, evidently receiving a communication of his own. He went on chuckling softly, shaking his head.

“What did he say?” Lila asked.

“He said, ‘Welcome, Boy Who Betrayed the World.’”

Before you ask, there’s no starship under construction. It’s just wishful thinking on the part of humans.

Lila was relieved, but also a little disappointed. It would make things a lot simpler if the Luyten left. “Why not? I mean, why stay on a planet with an intelligent species bearing a grudge?”

Because the trip here was awful, and it took generations. The nearest potentially habitable planet from here is three times as far. And who’s to say that one isn’t inhabited?

“Good point,” Kai said.

I’d like to say hello to Errol. Can you prepare him, so he won’t be startled?

“Errol, Five wants to say hello to you,” Lila said. “Is that okay? It’s a little scary at first.”

Errol’s eyes widened. He drew his legs up to his chin, clapped his palms tightly over his ears, then nodded eagerly. “Okay, go.”

Watching Errol grin, and then answer Five with a string of “Yeses” and “Okays,” Lila thought maybe everything would be okay. If they could just manage to get along for a generation or two, maybe this would all seem normal, and people would stop being afraid.