It all worked smoothly, until Alec saw Russian soldiers up ahead. He didn’t want to lead these Americans right to them—the Russians weren’t acting like they expected a squad of infantry to arrive.
Tayler saw them, too, and motioned at Alec to call for the rest of the squad. Instead, Alec took aim toward the Russians.
“Don’t,” Tayler whispered. “You’ll just attract their attention.”
At the last second, Alec dropped his gun to the space between Tayler’s helmet and his body armor. He fired twice, and it was the second shot that did it.
The Russians were suddenly on full alert, and Alec twisted around the side of the tree, the Russians to his back. One American peeked around the corner of the fence and Alec shot him in the face.
There was a sound like the world’s largest zipper and Alec could see the gunner on the Bradley was using the machine gun. He couldn’t use the chain gun without power but he could use the big 7.62mm. He was pummeling the Russians, and they were scattering for cover.
Alec ran into the closest yard, but as he ran up the stairs he fell. He tried to get up, but his legs weren’t responding. He looked down and saw blood oozing from at least four holes. At first there wasn’t any pain—it just felt funny; his legs didn’t work. He didn’t know who had shot him. Was it the Americans, realizing he was a traitor, or was it the Russians, shooting anyone in American clothes?
Alec clawed at the doorknob, felt it slipping in his bloody, wet grip.
The door opened, and a girl stood there. She wore American gear, but not the bulky body armor or helmet.
“It’s okay,” she said, with a grim smile.
She pulled him by the shoulders, like a soldier would, he thought, but she was too young to be a soldier. Inside, another girl lay on the couch, obviously in pain.
He wanted to play with her mind—but he was in too much agony himself.
For now he had to be content to be a soldier together with two other soldiers, all of them injured.
FORTY-TWO
IT WAS EVENING WHEN AUBREY woke—still light, but gray.
She was crammed in the alcove behind the evergreen tree and the wall, and everything around her was silent.
She flexed a hand to see if the feeling had returned to her fingers. It had, and her sight was back, too. She was surprised to find she was still wearing her glasses—she’d thought they’d gotten lost.
She felt at her vest for a PowerBar, suddenly ravenous. There was one tucked into a pocket—a thick, dense protein bar that the doctors told her would help her with her recovery.
Like they really knew what would help. Aubrey was the first and only invisible lambda they’d ever seen. Still, she ate the bar—she was starving, and it was food. She felt for her canteen, but it was missing—probably came off while she was crawling.
There were noises from inside the wall. The house was occupied.
But there were noises everywhere, as though this little farm had become a forward base.
Or was it? Her team had been overrun by the Russians. Maybe the front was well past them, and Aubrey was deep behind enemy lines. Had the Russians captured the town of Ellensburg? Had they made it down to Yakima, to the army base?
Their electronic-interference tactic wouldn’t work as well without the flyer. Aubrey could still see that shot burned into her eyes. Captain Gillett running, yelling at Aubrey to fire, Aubrey sighting the flyer just as she was lifting off the ground, just as the latch on the harness holding the lambda was pulling taut. Aubrey aimed for the center of the chest from only forty yards away, and fired. The flyer had dropped from the air immediately, collapsing on top of the other lambda. Instantly killed. A bloody stain on the white, wooden wall behind her.
Was that why Aubrey hadn’t thought to shoot the other lambda? Because they were lying in a bloody heap together? Because she still expected Captain Gillett to come in and take the lambda? Because she was just a weapon to be pointed and fired, like Tabitha always said?
Aubrey flexed her legs, testing the strength in them. She seemed to be back to her old self. Her old, stupid self, who botched this mission.
She stood up, disappeared, and slid out from behind the tree. She checked her Beretta. The magazine was full. She chambered a round and held the gun in a two-handed grip as she snuck out of the alcove.
She might be able to solve all of this at once. Before she’d fallen asleep—hours ago—the lambda had been taken down to the barn. If he was still down there, she could fulfill the mission right now.
There were lights coming from the open barn door, which wasn’t a good sign. She didn’t know how the lambda worked, but unless he could turn his power off and on, he’d have to be eight miles away for the lights to be on. Granted, almost every other lambda could turn their powers on and off, but this boy hadn’t even seemed fully conscious. Could he control himself at all?
She walked to the barn door, past two soldiers who stood as sentries, and stepped inside. Long tables had been set up, each with rows of computer terminals. But there was no body, and no one was saying anything in a language that she could understand.
“Jack,” Aubrey said. “I don’t know if you can hear me. I don’t know if you’re anywhere nearby. Probably not. I think I’m stranded. Way behind enemy lines. They must have rolled right over this area. I’m at the barn—at the farmhouse—and they’ve set up some kind of base here. They wouldn’t do that if this were the front lines. I think I’m screwed.”
She left the barn and headed into the house. It was a similar hive of activity, but there seemed to be more officers inside. It was a place for them to eat and talk, rather than a place for the soldiers to do their work.
“I’m checking all the rooms,” Aubrey said. “I’m going upstairs right now. But I don’t think the lambda is here. I failed, Jack. I got the flyer, but I didn’t get the important one.”
She paused at the top of the stairs, feeling her hand shaking on the banister. “And I don’t know where you are, Jack. Or if you’re anywhere. I saw Captain Gillett die. I don’t know what happened to the others, but it was bad. I was right in the middle of it, and we were horribly outnumbered. Like, a hundred of them to our twelve.”
Aubrey checked the first bedroom and found a sleeping man. He was still in his uniform, and definitely not the boy she’d seen. She moved to the next room. “I don’t think the lambda is here. We had him and we missed him—I missed him—and now the Russians are free to keep tromping all over the Americans, and the Americans can’t do a damn thing about it. They’re going to win this war, Jack.”
She’d cleared all the rooms on the top floor, and unless there was a basement she couldn’t see, there was no lambda in this building. She moved into the dining room, to where papers were splayed out on the table. She flipped through them, but not only did she not understand the language, she couldn’t even read the alphabet. There were a few maps, and she inspected them, all while men were moving around her. The satellite maps showed a town surrounded by the circular plots of farmland she knew so well from home. Was this a map of where they were?
She flipped through another scattering of maps. The city center, the bridges, the airfield. But nothing with a big, red circle that blinked Lambda Here.
“Okay, Jack,” she said. “I’m going to leave. If you guys are anywhere nearby—if you can hear me—I’m going to go south out of the farmhouse. I’m going to head where there aren’t any Russians around. Find me if you can. If no one is listening to me jabber, then I’m just going to—well, if no one is listening, then I don’t think it matters.”
She stepped out the front door of the farmhouse and into the evening air. It was chilly, and she was glad she was walking. She unclasped her helmet—the straps had been digging into her neck all day. She holstered the pistol, too. She wasn’t going to shoot anyone. She didn’t want to bring the weight of the Russian army down on her head.
Once she got far enough away from the farmhouse and was walking along a wooded fence line, she reappeare
d. She needed to save her energy.
She paused once, remembering the bottle in her pocket. She sprayed on some Flowerbomb perfume, hoping that it might help Jack to find her. Still hoping against hope that he was even out there.
“Jack, do you know what I want right now?” she said as she walked. “A mushroom burger from the Dairy Freez. I can’t even remember the last time I went there with you. It’s been a year? Before everything with Nicole. Wow, even a year seems short, though. It feels like a year since the homecoming dance. But it’s only been, what? Two and a half months? Something like that. The world changes so fast.
“We need to plan something special for when we get out of here. When this war is over and we’re done being lab rats in whatever experiments they have planned for us. We’ll go back to town, and we’ll—I don’t know. Something great. I’d say we could go hunting, but I don’t know if I ever want to carry a gun again. Let’s go fishing. We can go to Nicole’s cabin. I know what you’re going to say, but Nicole’s got to have normalized a little bit. She’s in the middle of this, too. Besides, I can blackmail her. So we go to Nicole’s cabin, and we’ll invite the whole team, and I mean everyone. Even Tabitha, as much as she drives me crazy. We can even invite the Green Berets. Invite Nick Sharps, and all the others.
“It’ll be nice. Everyone together again.”
FORTY-THREE
JACK WAS FREEZING, HIS FEET wet and his ACUs muddy, as he, Rich, and Josi stalked along the ditch bank. It was breezy, and he couldn’t hear Aubrey—he hadn’t been able to zero in on her voice—but a gust of wind had brought a strong, sweet scent of her perfume, and it had made him run to the edge of the culvert and breathe it all in.
“Power’s out again,” Rich announced, looking at his wristwatch.
“You’re kidding,” Josi said.
“That or my watch got wet.”
“Mine’s out, too,” Jack said.
“So we did all of this for nothing?” Josi stopped walking, hands on her hips. “Seriously?”
“You know what happened,” Jack said. “Tabitha was giving Aubrey the wrong orders.”
“If the lambda wasn’t dead, then why would Gillett give us the order to fall back? Wasn’t that more important?”
“Maybe he thought it was dead.”
“Or maybe he was trying to save his team,” Rich said.
“No way,” Josi said. “Green Berets don’t run if they can complete their mission.”
Jack turned and kept walking. “We’re the only ones who fell back. Maybe they had a different signal for the rest of them. Maybe he was trying to save us.” He could smell Aubrey off to their left, and pointed. “We need to cross this field.”
“You’re the recon guy,” Josi said. “Are we clear to run?”
He could see everything as though it were noon, even under the shadows of trees. It looked clear, and it sounded clear.
“—never would. And that dress I was wearing? It cost six hundred dollars. Six hundred dollars. Who would pay that much for a homecoming dress? I’ll tell you who: Nicole Samuelson. But I stole mine. I hope you’re listening to this, Jack, because I’m running out of things to talk about.”
“Found her,” Jack said, turning to the others with a broad smile. “She’s safe.”
Josi breathed out a sigh of relief, and Rich raised his hand to give Jack five.
“Follow me.” Jack held his rifle in front of him and ran across the field. He was sure there was no one in the field, or along the bank of the ditch, and he hadn’t seen anyone on the far side.
They reached the fence, and stopped.
“My watch is working again,” Rich said. “It started up while we were running.”
“What does that mean?”
“The lambda is on the move. Probably flying. Going fast.”
From his place on the field, Jack didn’t have a good view of any buildings. He couldn’t tell which lights were out and which weren’t. He focused on Aubrey.
She was coming along this fence line, maybe three hundred yards away. Jack ran up and down the fence with his mind, listening for anything. He heard the chatter of a squirrel, the swaying of branches.
The zip of a lighter catching flame.
“Damn it,” he breathed. “There’s a sentry. Maybe a hundred yards up.”
“She’s invisible, right?” Josi said. “She can slip right past him.”
“If she’s invisible,” he said. “I doubt she is. She doesn’t sound strained or tired.”
“What do we do?” Rich asked, already bringing up his rifle.
“You can’t see him,” Jack said. “That’s the problem. I can’t see him either. He’s in the trees. Maybe she’ll catch scent of the tobacco smoke, but the wind is blowing toward us, not toward her.”
Aubrey spoke. “I’m beginning to think there’s no one out here, Jack. That I’m talking to myself. Which is really too bad, because I’ve been spilling my guts about a lot of stuff.”
“If we fire on him, everyone will come running,” Jack said, putting a hand on Rich’s barrel and lowering it.
“But if we don’t,” Josi said, “he might fire on her. And everyone will come running.”
Jack reached to his belt and drew his knife. It was a bayonet knife, twelve inches long with a seven-inch blade. He’d always thought it felt clumsy in his hand.
“You’re going?” Rich asked, surprise and worry in his voice.
“At least I can see in the dark,” Jack said. He handed his M16 to Josi. “I’ll be back.”
Aubrey’s voice was dry. “Jack, I’m going to keep talking a while longer, and then I’m going to shut up. If you haven’t heard me by now, then you’re probably not here anymore. I don’t want to think about what that means.”
Jack was jogging forward, smelling the cigarette now, listening to the sentry’s breathing, short inhalations of smoke and then slow, relaxed exhalations. Aubrey was getting closer to him, and she was plodding through the dry November grasses sounding about as quiet as a truck.
No, he told himself, trying to calm down. Only he could hear her like that. The sentry probably couldn’t hear her at all.
Short inhalation. Slow, relaxed exhalation.
Jack was picking his trail as lightly as possible, moving across the dampest grasses on the bank, stepping on tree roots and rocks.
“If you can hear me,” Aubrey said, “I miss you. I really don’t know what I would do if you were dead, so you can’t be dead, you hear that? If you were dead, I don’t think I could keep going. I don’t think I could keep up the fight. Even if the other guys were still around, which I don’t think they are. I think a lot of people died in that firefight. More than just Captain Gillett. You’d better not be one of them. I’m doing this for you.”
She was talking too loud, and she was getting too close.
Short inhalation, short exhalation.
The sentry moved. There was a rattle that could only have come from the strap on his rifle.
Jack heard the hiss of hot ash as the cigarette was tossed into the ditch.
“Jack, I’m going to give this up. When I reach the end of this field, I’m going to stop talking. I don’t think there’s anyone out here to hear me.”
Very slowly, the sentry chambered a round into his Kalashnikov. Aubrey probably never heard it, but it sounded like a freight train to Jack.
He could see the man now, and Aubrey forty yards down the fence line. She was walking normally. The Russian was setting himself into shooting position against the tree.
Jack was nearly on top of him. If Jack couldn’t see Aubrey, he didn’t know if he’d have had the will to kill the man, but he did see her, and he did have the will. He ran the last dozen yards in a heartbeat.
The Russian turned just as Jack reached him, and Jack plunged the knife into the side of the man’s chest, in the gap between the front and back of the Kevlar vest. There was resistance on the knife as it hit ribs, but Jack shoved it hard, twisting it flat, and it slid hilt-
deep into the man’s body.
His face was a stunned, quiet grimace, and Jack pulled the rifle from the man’s hands, wrenching his finger from the trigger. A moment later the Russian slumped to his knees, coughing blood. It was Jack’s first kill up close and personal, but the trained warrior in him came out. He yanked the knife free, smelling the coppery scent of pouring blood, and he slashed the knife into the man’s neck, severing the jugular.
Jack stood over the body, staring down at it—at what he’d done, at the death he’d caused—when Aubrey suddenly appeared beside him. Jack felt the familiar confusion of her invisibility, and he dropped the knife into the dirt and turned to face her.
“Jack,” she said, her face a stunned, uncertain smile.
“Aubrey.”
He grabbed her, and they collided into each other, body armor to body armor, and their helmets clunked as they hugged closer.
She pulled back, her fingers entwined in his. “He was going to kill me.” It wasn’t a question, just an amazed statement.
“Yes,” Jack said simply, staring into her eyes.
“And you killed him.”
“Yes.”
She threw her arms around him again, and this time they were both weeping, crying for the lives they’d both taken, for the innocence they’d lost, and for the miracle of being together again.
FORTY-FOUR
TABITHA WAS ROOTING THROUGH THE bathroom cabinet, looking for something clean and sterile to staunch the bleeding. She finally grabbed a tube of Neosporin and a box of Band-Aids. They were worthless against a bullet wound, but she took them back into the living room anyway, where Alec had his foot up on the ottoman.
Gingerly she began cutting away his ACUs just above the knee.
“This is good,” Tabitha said, trying to stop her own gag reflex at all the blood. “It’s not four bullets—it’s two that went in and out.”
Krezi strained to look from her place on the couch.
Tabitha prodded a little more firmly, feeling bone and watching Alec wince. “I don’t know who’s worse off. Your shots went through and through, just muscle. Krezi, I think, has broken most or all of her ribs.”