Book Reviews

Static and shockingly bright colors. Again, Janie nearly crumples to her knees, but this time she is more prepared. She steps blindly toward the bed and Cabel helps her safely to the floor as her head pounds with noise. It’s more intense than ever.

Just when Janie thinks her eardrums are going to burst, the static dulls and the scene flickers to a woman in the dark once again. It’s the same woman as the day before, Janie’s certain, though she can’t make out any distinguishing features. And then Janie sees that the man is there too. It’s Henry, of course. It’s his dream. He’s in the shadows, sitting on a chair, watching the woman. Henry turns, looks at Janie and blinks. His eyes widen and he sits up straighter in his chair. “Help me!” he pleads.

And then, like a broken filmstrip, the picture cuts out and the static is back, louder than ever, constant screamo in her ears. Janie struggles, head pounding. Tries pulling out of the dream, but she can’t focus—the static is messing up her ability to concentrate.

She’s flopping around on the floor now. Straining. Thinks Cabel is there, holding her, but she can’t feel anything now. The bright colors slam into her eyes, into her brain, into her body. The static is like pinpricks in every pore of her skin.

She’s trapped.

Trapped in the nightmare of a man who can’t wake up.

Janie struggles again, feeling like she’s suffocating now. Feeling like if she doesn’t get out of this mess, she might die here. Cabe! she screams in her head. Get me out of here!

But of course he can’t hear her.

She gathers up all her strength and pulls, groaning inwardly with such force that it hurts all the way through.

When the nightmare flickers to the picture of the woman again, Janie is just barely able to burst from her confines.

She gasps for breath.

“Janie?” Cabel’s voice is soft, urgent.

His finger paints her skin from forehead to cheek, his hand captures the back of her neck, and then he lifts her, carries her to the chair. “Are you okay?”

Janie can’t speak. She can’t see. Her body is numb. All she can do is nod.

And then, there’s a sound from across the room.

I can't even concentrate these days.

There's an old fireplace here in the front corner of the school library, but there's never any fire in it. Probably against code now or whatever. In front of it is a big grate, but there are still some ashes deep inside from a million years ago after this part of the school was built. I sit by it now, stare into it anyway, wishing for it. Wishing for something to warm me up inside.

It's so cold here in this corner.

I can't see her from here, and it bothers me more than I feel like admitting. But I made the stupid move over here from my regular library table, and I really can't go back now. It would be admitting defeat, and I'm not ready for that. Not ready to cave. Plus, I can't. I just . . . See, I figured out I'm just not wired for love. It's too hard. Too hard when they go away, or fuck with me. Or disappear. I'm done with that. I'm better off this way. It'll get easier eventually. Like it was before.

And shit, anyhow. Can't a guy take a nap without worrying? Without having somebody watching everything, getting too close? I don't do close. Not anymore. Tried that once and it messed up everything.

But what if she falls again? What if somebody sees her like that? What if she . . . I just force myself not to stand up, not to go, not to walk by to make sure. This sucks, it really does. Because I can't sit here, nervous for her anymore. It's wrecking me.

It's true. I did what I had to. The best thing for me is to just keep doing what I'm doing. Stay away from her. Don't let her catch my eye again . . . no way. Because damn, that's brutal. I can't stand looking into her eyes anymore. I just need to look down, get past this. Slog through it. Graduate and get the hell out of Fieldridge. Away.

Find something else to fix me. Or just go numb.

Janie Hannagan's math book slips from her fingers. She grips the edge of the table in the school library. Everything goes black and silent. She sighs and rests her head on the table. Tries to pull herself out of it, but fails miserably. She's too tired today. Too hungry. She really doesn't have time for this.

And then.

She's sitting in the bleachers in the football stadium, blinking under the lights, silent among the roars of the crowd.

She glances at the people sitting in the bleachers around her -- fellow classmates, parents -- trying to spot the dreamer. She can tell this dreamer is afraid, but where is he? Then she looks to the football field. Finds him. Rolls her eyes.

It's Luke Drake. No question about it. He is, after all, the only naked player on the field for the homecoming game.

Nobody seems to notice or care. Except him. The ball is snapped and the lines collide, but Luke is covering himself with his hands, hopping from one foot to the other. She can feel his panic increasing. Janie's fingers tingle and go numb.

Luke looks over at Janie, eyes pleading, as the football moves toward him, a bullet in slow motion. "Help," he says.

She thinks about helping him. Wonders what it would take to change the course of Luke's dream. She even considers that a boost of confidence to the star receiver the day before the big game could put Fieldridge High in the running for the Regional Class A Championship.

But Luke's really a jerk. He won't appreciate it. So sheresigns herself to watching the debacle. She wonders if he'll choose pride or glory.

He's not as big as he thinks he is.

That's for damn sure.

The football nearly reaches Luke when the dream starts over again. Oh, get ON with it already, Janie thinks. She concentrates in her seat on the bleachers and slowly manages to stand. She tries to walk back under the bleachers for the rest of the dream so she doesn't have to watch, and surprisingly, this time, she is able.

That's a bonus.

1:01 p.m.

Janie's mind catapults back inside her body, still sitting at her usual remote corner table in the library. She flexes her fingers painfully, lifts her head and, when her sight returns, she scours the library.

She spies the culprit at a table about fifteen feet away. He's awake now. Rubbing his eyes and grinning sheepishly at the two other football players who stand around him, laughing. Shoving him. Whapping him on the head.

Janie shakes her head to clear it and she lifts up her math book, which sits open and facedown on the table where she dropped it. Under it, she finds a fun-size Snickers bar. She smiles to herself and peers to the left, between rows of bookshelves.

But no one is there for her to thank.

Evening, December 23, 1996

Janie Hannagan is eight. She wears a thin, faded red-print dress with too-short sleeves, off-white tights that sag between her thighs, gray moon boots, and a brown, nappy coat with two missing buttons. Her long, dirty-blond hair stands up with static. She rides on an Amtrak train with her mother from their home in Fieldridge, Michigan, to Chicago to visit her grandmother. Mother reads the Globe across from her. There is a picture on the cover of an enormous man wearing a powder-blue tuxedo. Janie rests her head against the window, watching her breath make a cloud on it.

The cloud blurs Janie's vision so slowly that she doesn't realize what is happening. She floats in the fog for a moment, and then she is in a large room, sitting at a conference table with five men and three women. At the front of the room is a tall, balding man with a briefcase. He stands in his underwear, giving a presentation, and he is flustered. He tries to speak but he can't get his mouth around the words. The other adults are all wearing crisp suits. They laugh and point at the bald man in his underwear.

The bald man looks at Janie.

And then he looks at the people who are laughing at him.

His face crumples in defeat.

He holds his briefcase in front of his privates, and that makes the others laugh harder. He runs to the door of the conference room, but the handle is slippery -- something slimy drips from it. He can't get it open; it squeaks and rattles loudly in his hand, and the people at the table double over. The man's underwear is grayish-white, sagging. He turns to Janie again, with a look of panic and pleading.

Janie doesn't know what to do.

She freezes.

The train's brakes whine.

And the scene grows cloudy and is lost in fog.

"Janie!" Janie's mother is leaning toward Janie. Her breath smells like gin, and her straggly hair falls over one eye. "Janie, I said, maybe Grandma will take you to that big fancy doll store. I thought you would be excited about that, but I guess not." Janie's mother sips from a flask in her ratty old purse.

Janie focuses on her mother and smiles. "That sounds fun," she says, even though she doesn't like dolls. She would rather have new tights. She wriggles on the seat, trying to adjust them. The crotch stretches tight at mid-thigh. She thinks about the bald man and scrunches her eyes. Weird.

When the train stops, they take their bags and step into the aisle. In front of Janie's mother, a disheveled, bald businessman emerges from his compartment.

He wipes his face with a handkerchief.

Janie stares at him.

Her jaw drops. "Whoa," she whispers.

There.

Gone.

No "poof." No flash of light. No explosion.

Sam Temple was sitting in third-period history class staring blankly at the blackboard, but far away in his head. In his head he was down at the beach, he and Quinn. Down at the beach with their boards, yelling, bracing for that first plunge into cold Pacific water.

For a moment he thought he had imagined it, the teacher disappearing. For a moment he thought he'd slipped into a daydream.

Sam turned to Mary Terrafino, who sat just to his left. "You saw that, right?"

Mary was staring hard at the place where the teacher had been.

"Um, where's Mr. Trentlake?" It was Quinn Gaither, Sam's best, maybe only, friend. Quinn sat right behind Sam. The two of them favored window seats because sometimes if you caught just the right angle, you could actually see a tiny sliver of sparkling water between the school buildings and the homes beyond.

"He must have left," Mary said, not sounding like she believed it.

Edilio, a new kid Sam found potentially interesting, said, "No, man. Poof." He did a thing with his fingers that was a pretty good illustration of the concept.

Kids were staring at one another, craning their necks this way and that, giggling nervously. No one was scared. No one was crying. The whole thing seemed kind of funny.

"Mr. Trentlake poofed?" said Quinn, with a suppressed giggle in his voice.

"Hey," someone said, "where's Josh?"

Heads turned to look.

"Was he here today?"

"Yes, he was here. He was right here next to me." Sam recognized the voice. Bette. Bouncing Bette.

"He just, you know, disappeared," Bette said. "Just like Mr. Trentlake."

The door to the hallway opened. Every eye locked on it. Mr. Trentlake was going to step in, maybe with Josh, and explain how he had pulled off this magic trick, and then get back to talking in his excited, strained voice about the Civil War nobody cared about.

But it wasn't Mr. Trentlake. It was Astrid Ellison, known as Astrid the Genius, because she was . . . well, she was a genius. Astrid was in all the AP classes the school had. In some subjects she was taking online courses from the university.

Astrid had shoulder-length blond hair, and liked to wear starched white short-sleeved blouses that never failed to catch Sam's eye. Astrid was out of his league, Sam knew that. But there was no law against thinking about her.

"Where's your teacher?" Astrid asked.

There was a collective shrug. "He poofed," Quinn said, like maybe it was funny.

"Isn't he out in the hallway?" Mary asked.

Astrid shook her head. "Something weird is happening. My math study group . . . there were just three of us, plus the teacher. They all just disappeared."

"What?" Sam said.

Astrid looked right at him. He couldn't look away like he normally would, because her gaze wasn't challenging, skeptical like it usually was: it was scared. Her normally sharp, discerning blue eyes were wide, with way too much white showing. "They're gone. They all just . . . disappeared."

"What about your teacher?" Edilio said.

"She's gone, too," Astrid said.

"Gone?"

"Poof," Quinn said, not giggling so much now, starting to think maybe it wasn't a joke after all.

Sam noticed a sound. More than one, really. Distant car alarms, coming from town. He stood up, feeling self-conscious, like it wasn't really his place to do so, and walked on stiff legs to the door. Astrid moved away so he could step past her. He could smell her shampoo as he went by.

Sam looked left, down toward room 211, the room where Astrid's math wonks met. The next door down, 213, a kid stuck out his head. He had a half-scared, half-giddy expression, like someone buckling into a roller coaster.

The other direction, down at 207, kids were laughing too loud. Freaky loud. Fifth graders. Across the hall, room 208, three sixth graders suddenly burst out into the hallway and stopped dead. They stared at Sam, like he might yell at them.

Perdido Beach School was a small-town school, with everyone from kindergarten to ninth grade all in one building, elementary and middle school together. High school was an hour's drive away in San Luis.

Sam walked toward Astrid's classroom. She and Quinn were right behind him.

The classroom was empty. Desk chairs, the teacher's chair, all empty. Math books lay open on three of the desks. Notebooks, too. The computers, a row of six aged Macs, all showed flickering blank screens.

On the chalkboard you could quite clearly see "Polyn."

"She was writing the word 'polynomial,'" Astrid said in a church-voice whisper.

"Yeah, I was going to guess that," Sam said dryly.

"I had a polynomial once," Quinn said. "My doctor removed it."

Astrid ignored the weak attempt at humor. "She disappeared in the middle of writing the 'o.' I was looking right at her."

Sam made a slight motion, pointing. A piece of chalk lay on the floor, right where it would have fallen if someone were writing the word "polynomial"—whatever that meant—and had disappeared before rounding off the "o."

"This is not normal," Quinn said. Quinn was taller than Sam, stronger than Sam, at least as good a surfer. But Quinn, with his half-crazy half-smile and tendency to dress in what could only be called a costume—today it was baggy shorts, Army-surplus desert boots, a pink golf shirt, and a gray fedora he'd found in his grandfather's attic—put out a weird-guy vibe that alienated some and scared others. Quinn was his own clique, which was maybe why he and Sam clicked.

There was no response. He stood with a few other stiff-backed men, among them the nation’s secretary of defense, in a room divided in half by a wall of thick—and perfectly soundproof—glass. Behind the glass was something that resembled the kind of fake habitat found in a zoo, like an enclosure for keeping penguins or seals. Bubbling salt water filled most of the tank to a depth of about five feet, but on the right there was an artificial shore of baby blue cement sloping down into the water. That was where the resemblance to a zoo display ended, though. A giant flat-screen television blazed high on the wall above the tank’s deep end, playing what appeared to be a reality show about rich teenagers. Flouncy pink satin cushions were heaped along the shore just above the waterline, and a large white dresser decorated with golden scrolls perched on a ledge at the back. Various electronic gadgets were scattered on the cement, but beyond the clutter the tank gave no sign of being inhabited. “You have a very important visitor today, so . . .  your full cooperation . . .”

The crowd behind him shifted impatiently, and the young man flinched as if he could feel their disapproval pricking his skin. “Getting on with it! I’m going to be turning on your microphone so you can talk to these men. But I have to warn you . . .” Far back in the tank something sky blue and pearlescent flicked up for a moment from behind a pile of cushions. For a second the young man’s voice grated to a halt, and he stared urgently before he mastered himself enough to keep going. “We’ve programmed the computer to recognize any hint of singing. If you try anything, it will send out an electric shock automatically. A pretty severe one. All right? I’d like you to be on . . .” There was that blue flash again, and a trace of rippling gold. “On . . . your best behavior, please.” He turned to look at the secretary of defense and offered a tight, ingratiating smile. Then he flicked a switch in a small control panel set into the glass beside the speaker. “Please meet the United States secretary of defense. Secretary Moreland?”

Moreland leaned toward the glass, an odd smirk rippling over his heavy reddish face with its sagging jowls. His white hair shone like meringue above his gleaming pate. “Anais,” he snapped, then waited, scowling, for a reply. It didn’t come. “I’d suggest you get your damned tail over here. You’re our little mermaid now.”

The sky blue tail rose above the water again, twitching irritably. Pinkish iridescence shone on its scales, and the cushions stirred as a golden head shifted up into view. Dreamy azure eyes turned to gaze through the glass. Several of the men stepped forward as if involuntarily, and others visibly braced themselves. She shook herself, and her inhuman beauty came at them like a living wave. Moreland’s smirk tightened, and his upper lip jerked sharply higher to expose his perfect teeth. “Hello there.”

“Hi.” She examined Moreland’s crisp, expensive suit with a trace of approval. “Are you really important?”

It was hard to tell if Moreland was leering or snarling in response. “Oh, I’d say so.”

“Then I only want to talk to you.” She scanned the other men disdainfully. “Having all these people staring at me makes me feel so shy!”

She didn’t look shy, but Moreland smiled almost indulgently. He made a quick motion to the young man in the lab coat, who hurried to tap at the control panel, cutting off Anais’s sound. “Do you mind, gentlemen?” Moreland asked.

“We can observe through the monitors in the next room?” the lab-coated man asked anxiously. “She is—I mean—I am her primary handler, and I should know—”

“Oh, I don’t think so.” Moreland’s lip hiked up again. “I don’t think you should observe. I’d like to allow her”—he cocked his head toward the tank, where Anais, piqued at not being able to hear what they were saying, was now swimming toward the glass—“a chance to confide in me. Privately.”

“But—of course you’re aware, Mr. Secretary, that she’s suffered some very serious trauma. Those mermaids she was living with all . . .”

“A fragile flower,” Moreland agreed, grinning horribly. “I’ll use my most delicate touch.”

The young lab-coated man didn’t look particularly reassured, but he still nodded. “The blue switch controls sound going into her side. The red cuts her off over here. Given the precautions we’ve taken, though—”

“Thank you, Mr.  . . .”

“Hackett. Charles.”

“Thank you, Mr. Hackett. I’ll let you know when I need your assistance.”

Anais was tapping, though inaudibly, on her side of the glass. She was supporting herself in the deepest water with a slight circulating motion of her fins so that her face and shoulders floated just above the surface. Her golden hair rippled and shone around her, and she looked sulky and eager. Hackett gave her a coy little smile and a wave as he turned to leave. “Even without any singing,” one of the men observed as they walked to the door, “she’s still remarkably . . .

“Remarkably?” one of his companions asked archly, eyebrows raised.

“Compelling, I would say.”

“I’d use a different term, frankly.”

Secretary Moreland didn’t watch them go. Instead he was staring fixedly into Anais’s blue eyes, though the look on his face didn’t exactly suggest attraction. It was somewhere between caressing and murderous, and a smirk kept tweaking his lips. Once everyone was gone he reached to flip the sound back on, still keeping his gaze locked on Anais’s face. “Better now, tadpole?”

Anais pouted. Her lips were slick with strawberry pink gloss. “You have a problem.”

“I’d say there are some other—you really can’t call them people—some other nasty animals who have much bigger problems these days, tadpole. You should be very, very thankful that we’re taking such good care of you. When you could be in the same mess as your little killing-machine friends . . .”

Anais shrugged impatiently, sending a quick surge through the water around her. Her golden hair lapped at her shoulders. She was wearing a sparkly, sky blue tank top that matched her tail almost perfectly, and diamond studs sparked in her ears. “I don’t care about that! Charlie told me about that boat of yours that got trashed.”

“Charlie?”

“Mr. Hackett. He said there was a big wave that came out of nowhere and, like, totaled the boat with your guys on it after . . .” Anais suddenly seemed a bit uncomfortable. “After . . . I surrendered. I knew you’d want to talk to one of us, if we just acted nicer. And—”

“That wave didn’t come out of nowhere, I think, tadpole. You shouldn’t assume that Mr. Hackett’s information is entirely reliable.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you!” Anais was getting exasperated. “I just didn’t want to tell . . . Mr. Hackett because I didn’t think he could really do anything. I figured it all out. You can go and kill mermaids without the singing stopping you now. Right? But you don’t have any way to stop her from bashing your guys with those waves. You have to kill her. Soon! Like, right now she’s the only one who knows how to do that, but she’ll probably start teaching everybody else, and then you won’t be able to get rid of mermaids anymore at all . . .”

Secretary Moreland was clearly trying to keep his expression steady, but it wasn’t working. Tiny spasms of excitement bent his features and shimmered in his eyes. “So you’re claiming you know the mermaid who committed the assault on the Special Ops boat?” He paused for a moment, assessing. “Several of our men were killed. This isn’t something we take at all lightly. You wouldn’t want to be anything less than perfectly candid on the subject.”

“Of course I know her. We had to kick her out of the tribe because all she did was causeproblems.” Anais’s tail was swishing faster now, its pink iridescence flashing candied reflections on the glass.

Moreland looked disappointed. “So she wouldn’t consider you a friend? Try to find you?”

“No way! She knows I see right through her. Though she did keep trying to get me to payattention to her.”

Moreland nodded. The sparks in his eyes seemed agitated. “I see. But you’ll tell me all about her, won’t you, tadpole?”

Anais leaned back from the glass with a motion that suggested someone settling into an armchair, although there was nothing but water around her, and smiled slyly. Her fins lightly stroked across the tank’s blue cement floor. “That depends.”

“Does it? On what?”

“On you letting me out of here!” Anais shook her head, golden rays of hair swinging with the movement. “I mean, I know my parents must have left me a ton of money. And the house! And there’s a pool, and I could get our servants to come back, and—”

“Tadpole, tadpole . . .” Moreland shook his head, and his smile was much softer, much more slippery, than before. “You haven’t thought this through.”

“I totally have! I—”

“You aren’t human, little tail. Not remotely.”

“So?”

“So the law doesn’t apply to you. Not one teeny bit. And that’s including due process and inheritance law. Legally you don’t exist. There’s no provision in the law for leaving a house to a precious little monster . . .”

This clearly hadn’t occurred to Anais before. Her eyes widened in dismay and her mouth opened onto a round darkness that seemed to threaten the unleashing of terrible music. Moreland grinned stonily and raised his eyebrows at her. She paused and glanced around her tank, then shut her mouth again.

“Exactly,” he hissed. Anais scowled. “But you don’t like this troublemaker mermaid, do you, tadpole? She absolutely deserves to die, doesn’t she?”

Anais was still sulking. “Of course she deserves it!”

“So maybe helping us track her down would be worth your time anyway. I promise you we’ll tear her guts right out. Maybe we’ll even take our time doing it. Remember, legal protections don’t apply to her either, and we’re very, very annoyed with her.”

Anais cocked her head, brazenly intrigued. “You should be. She’s a bitch, and she’s really nuts. And just, like, weird.”

“Tell me her name.” Moreland’s voice was suddenly rough.

“Luce.” Anais spat it out.

A shadow passed through his pale eyes. “Luce. I believe I’ve heard her mentioned before. And what about her human name? Do you know that much?”

“Will you at least show me pictures? Once you kill her?”

“Oh, certainly. Probably even video. We’ll watch it together. It will be my great pleasure. Virtue should always be rewarded.” Aqua light from the tank gleamed on Moreland’s wet teeth as he spoke.

“Lucette . . .” Anais visibly struggled to remember. “She said it . . . No, Catarina said it once when they were fighting. Lucette Kip . . . No. Lucette Korchak?”

“A very good beginning, Anais.” Moreland smiled. “You know, at first I wasn’t sure your information was reliable. But I’m beginning to think we can come to an understanding after all.”

“What about Sedna? Will you at least make sure you kill her, too? And Dana and Violet.”

“Sedna was the leader of the group you identified? In southern Alaska?”

“Yeah. She—”

“Ah, but that’s why I didn’t think we could trust you, my dear. We couldn’t find any trace of mermaids anywhere near the location you described to us. Unless you can do better, I’m afraid I won’t be able to show you video of Sedna’s dismemberment.”

“I told you the truth.” Anais’s pout tightened moodily, and her head tipped sideways. “I bet Luce got there first. I bet she warned them.”

Moreland nodded, a bit curtly. “Very possibly. I need you to understand something, Anais. It won’t be easy, and it won’t happen anytime soon. But if you help us enough, I might eventually see my way to . . . encouraging special consideration of your case. Maybe a judge could be persuaded that you deserve your inheritance after all, in view of your services to your country.”

Anais mulled this, her blue fins rippling irritably. Then her face changed completely. All at once she beamed with gentle innocence. “Of course I’ll help. It isn’t safe for anyone to have Luce swimming around out there! She’ll just kill so many of your men if no one stops her!”

“Quite so.” Moreland’s tongue slid across his bluish teeth, and his eyes widened with a fake sincerity that almost equaled Anais’s, except that his smile kept twisting into a leer. Every tiny disturbance of the water sent greenish light crawling across his stiff white hair. “We’re very grateful for your patriotism. Now, did . . . Lucette ever mention the name Dorian to you? Dorian Hurst?”

“Who?” Anais asked. Her confusion looked genuine enough.

Moreland was disappointed again, but Anais suddenly leaned forward in excitement. “Wait, wait, wait! A guy? You’re saying that Luce was seeing a human guy? That is so sick!” She squealed with laughter. “And she thought she was supposed to be queen! Oh, I can’t wait to tell . . .” Anais’s laughter faltered abruptly, and she looked down.

Moreland observed her for a long moment. His gray eyes were covetous, cold. “Oh, but there’s no one left to tell, is there, tadpole? The abominations who would have liked to hear your gossip about Lucette and her human boyfriend are all dead.” He gazed at her with something that might have almost passed for compassion. “We destroyed every last one of them in front of you. And even as we speak the teams are out there, hunting down other groups of your kind.”

“I didn’t want to be a mermaid!” Anais snarled. “I never wanted to! They’re not my kind! I loved being human. Everything was so perfect . . .”

Moreland considered this. “You didn’t want to be a mermaid. Were you somehow changed against your will?”

“Of course I was!” Anais was staring down, plainly on the verge of tears. Maybe they were even real.

The secretary of defense didn’t look convinced. “Then who changed you?”

“Luce did it.” It came out in a sullen whimper. “She forced me, but I . . .”

   "Dorian? Can you continue?"

   He looked up, blank. Images of plummeting bodies still streaked through his head.

   " ‘ Shall I part . . .’ " Mrs. Muggeridge prompted. Dorian pulled himself up from terrible daydreams and forced his eyes to focus on the page in front of him. Acting normal was a way to buy himself the privacy to think not so normally. He found the line and cleared his throat.

   " ‘ Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?’ " His voice sounded too fl at. He tried to squeeze more emotion into it, though the words seemed uninteresting. " ‘I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.’ " Now Dorian saw what was coming in the next line and started to panic. He struggled to suppress the memory of those dark eyes looking at him from the center of a wave, the gagging taste of salt, that unspeakable music. Did Mrs. Muggeridge have any idea what she was doing to him? " ‘I have heard the mer . . .’ " He choked a little. " ‘The mermaids singing, each to each.’ " Now there was an audible tremor in his voice, and something rising in his throat that felt like a throttled scream.

   "Please read to the end."

   " ‘I do not think that they will sing to me!’ " Dorian spat it out aggressively and dropped the book with a crash. The rest of the students in the tiny class were staring, too shocked to laugh. But what did they know, anyway? "This poem is garbage! It’s all lies!"

   "Dorian . . ."

   "If he’d heard the mermaids singing, he wouldn’t be blathering on like this! He would be dead! Is this poem just trying to pretend that people don’t have to die?"

   Mrs. Muggeridge didn’t even look angry. Somewhere between alarmed and amused.

   "If you could read on to the end, Dorian, I think you’ll see that T. S. Eliot isn’t trying to evade intimations of mortality." Students started snickering at that. She always used such weird words. It was a mystery to him how Mrs. Muggeridge had wound up in this town. She was even more out of place than he was, with her dragging black clothes and odd ideas.

   "No!" Dorian didn’t remember getting out of his chair, but he was standing now. His legs were shaking violently, and the room seemed unsteady. Mrs. Muggeridge looked at him carefully.

   "Maybe you should step out of the room for a few minutes?" He couldn’t understand why she had to react so calmly. It wasn’t fair, not when she’d made him read those horrible lines. He stalked out of class, leaving his English anthology with its pages splayed and crushed against the floor. In the hallway he pressed his forehead against the cold tile wall. His breathing was fast and hungry, as if he’d just come up from under the deep gray slick of the ocean.

   He could hear Mrs. Muggeridge serenely reading on. " ‘We have lingered in the chambers of the sea, by sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown. Till human voices wake us, and we drown.’ "

   He felt like he was going to faint. But at least the poem got something right. Maybe he’d survived the sinking of the Dear Melissa, but he still felt like he was drowning all the time. Every time his alarm clock went off, he lunged bolt upright in bed, gasping for air.

   When the class finally poured out into the hall, he straightened himself and trailed after them to chemistry. It was such a suffocating, sleepy, ragtag school, with only sixty students and three teachers. His high school in the Chicago suburbs had been twenty times the size of this place. Everything felt crushingly small.

   Other students turned to stare at the two men in dark suits standing near a drinking fountain, but Dorian didn’t notice them. He was concentrating on fighting the wobbly sensation of the floor.

   The men noticed him, though. Their eyes tracked him intently as he walked away, sometimes leaning on the row of lockers. A few minutes later Mrs. Muggeridge emerged, gray corkscrew curls bobbing absurdly above her head as she chattered to another teacher, the scarlet frames of her glasses flashing like hazard lights. "I suppose I’m behind the times. Apparently now it’s politically incorrect to make your students read poems with mermaids that don’t kill people. What a thing to get so upset about!"

   The suited men glanced at each other and followed her.

* • *

Dorian kept trying to draw the girl he’d seen. If he could set the memory down in black ink, slap it to the paper once and for all, then maybe he could finally get her out of his head. He drew exceptionally well, but every time he finished a new picture he couldn’t escape the feeling that something was missing. The drawing he was working on now showed a towering wave with a single enormous eye gazing out from under the crest. The eyelashes merged with curls of sea foam.

   He couldn’t understand why he hadn’t been afraid at the time. The fear had come much later, after he was obviously safe, and the fits of nauseous terror that seized him were infuriatingly senseless. But when the ship was actually crashing, wrenching up under his feet, and people were dying all around him, he’d felt perfectly composed and confident.

   He also didn’t know where the instincts that had saved him had come from. If he’d done even one thing differently, he knew, he wouldn’t be the sole surviving passenger of the Dear Melissa. He’d be as dead as the rest of them, as dead as his whole family. If he hadn’t faced down that girl in the waves—or that thing that wasn’t a girl, not really, but a monster with a beautiful girl’s head and torso—if he hadn’t sung her own devastating song right back at her, then it would have been all over. She would have murdered him without a second thought. But sitting under the cold fluorescent lights of the chemistry lab, he knew that singing in the middle of a shipwreck had been a bizarre impulse. Inexplicable. How had he known?

   Who would have ever guessed that the way to stop a mermaid from killing you was to sing at her?

   She’d dragged him out from the wreckage, swimming away with him clasped in one arm. They’d raced at such speed that the blood had shrieked in his head. The foam-striped water had rushed across his staring eyes. He’d struggled not to inhale it, and he’d failed again and again. Salt burned his lungs, and the cold water in his chest swelled into a bursting ache. But every time he’d thought that he was really going to drown, she’d pulled him up above the surface and let the water hack out of him, fountaining down his chin. She’d let him live. Only him, out of all the hundreds who’d set sail together.

   She’d even spoken, once. Now that he had time to think it over, he realized one of the weirdest things about it all was the fact that she’d used English instead of talking in some kind of mermaid gibberish. Take a really deep breath, okay? We have to dive under again. Her voice was gentle and much too innocent-sounding for something so utterly evil.

   He hadn’t answered. He’d been too pissed off to speak to her, though now looking back, he realized that he hadn’t felt nearly furious enough. He’d felt the kind of anger that would have made sense if he’d been having a fight with a friend, say. As if that monster with the silvery green tail was just a girl he knew from school or something. Worse, as if she was someone he liked.

   She’d belonged to the pack that murdered his mother and father; his sweet six-year-old sister, Emily; his aunt and her husband; and all three of his cousins. He should hate that mermaid girl more than anything in the world. He should dream about dismembering her with his bare hands.

   Instead he dreamed about her dark eyes watching him as he sprawled on the shore gagging up a flood of sour, brackish liquid. She hadn’t swum off right away after she’d shoved him up onto the beach, and he’d had time to memorize her pale face and dark jagged hair set like a star in a gray-green curl of sea.

   He dreamed about her song.

* • *

"Charlotte Muggeridge? We were wondering if we could speak to you for a few minutes." The taller of the two men folded back his suit lapel to show her his badge. Mrs. Muggeridge goggled at him in absolute confusion.

   "Anyone can speak to me!" She was alone with the men in the teachers’ lounge. The grubby vomit orange sofas sagged in patches like rotting fruit. Inspirational posters urging them to strive for their dreams had faded to anemic tints of jade green and beige. No one sat down. Instead she swayed a little, staring from one glossy, polite face to the other. Both the suited men met her gaze with bland determination. Both had empty blue eyes and freshly shaved cheeks. "You can’t actually be FBI! That is, of course you can speak to me, but . . . I couldn’t possibly have anything to say that you might find interesting . . ." She trailed off, then glanced up at them with new sharpness. "I hope none of our students is in trouble."

   "No one is in any trouble, ma’am." Mrs. Muggeridge’s eyes were darkening with a feeling of aversion for the tall man, though she couldn’t justify her dislike. He was perfectly well-mannered. "There was an incident in your third-period English class?"

   That bewildered her, again. "Certainly nothing I couldn’t handle without help from the FBI!" She gaped at them. "Don’t you have more important things to worry about than an outburst from a fifteen-year-old boy?"    "In this case, ma’am, we think it might be important."

   "A tenth grader didn’t care for T. S. Eliot. Send in the feds!" Her voice was heavy with sarcasm. The agents were glowering at her.

   "Just describe the incident. Ma’am." The politeness was slipping now.

   "Well . . . It was only that we were reading ‘Prufrock’ in class. We reached the closing stanzas, about the mermaids. And Dorian Hurst became very upset, for some reason. He jumped out of his seat and started yelling. But he’s generally been a very good student since he enrolled here."

   The two men were obviously trying to keep their faces smooth and vacant, but something excited and a little disturbing started to show in the quick pointed looks passing between them.

   "And what did Dorian say?" It was the smaller man speaking now. He had hanging jowls and a high, almost girlish voice. Mrs. Muggeridge thought it contrasted unpleasantly with his blocky gray face.

   "He said that if Prufrock had really heard the mermaids singing, he wouldn’t have lived to talk about it." An eager twitch passed through the shoulders of the taller agent. He leaned in on her, and his blue eyes were as brittle as hunks of ice. But why on earth did he care? "It was a peculiar detail to quarrel with, but Dorian seemed very passionate about it. He accused Eliot of pretending we don’t have to die."

   "I thought you said the name was Prufrock?" It was the shorter agent squeaking again. Mrs. Muggeridge looked at him with fresh outrage.

   "T. S. Eliot is the poet who wrote ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’! How can you be so ig—" Mrs. Muggeridge stifled a number of extremely rude endings to the sentence.

   "Did he say anything else?" The tall man sounded bored.

   "That was all I let him say. He was being disruptive, so I asked him to step out of class." The shorter man’s upper lip suddenly jerked up in sneer, as if Mrs. Muggeridge had just confessed to doing something extremely stupid. It was all too much for her. "Now, would you pleaseexplain why all of this is important?"

   "We don’t discuss ongoing investigations, ma’am." The tall agent turned abruptly toward the door, rapping a pen against his mouth.

   "Do you know anything about Dorian’s family?" The short agent twittered the question in a shrill, malicious tone. His eyebrows arched suggestively. The tall one swung back around, shooting what was obviously meant to be a quelling glance at his partner, but the little man only grinned.

   "His family? No, I don’t. I think someone mentioned that he doesn’t live with his biological parents, but that isn’t so uncommon."

   "They’re dead, is why. Sister, too. They all died in June." He seemed to enjoy the look of shock on Mrs. Muggeridge’s face. "Drowned."

   Mrs. Muggeridge felt her mouth fall into an O of dismay as the tall agent jerked his partner’s arm and towed him from the room. She stumbled a few steps to the sofa and flopped down, leaning her head on her hands. "Oh, that poor boy!" She gasped the words out loud. "Oh, no wonder he was so upset!"

   It still didn’t explain why they were so interested, though. Not unless they thought Dorian was hiding something.

* • *

His father’s second cousin once removed Lindy and her husband, Elias, had made it clear that they didn’t want to keep Dorian permanently. They were too old and tired to cope with a teenager. It was just their bad luck that they happened to live right in the town where he’d literally washed up and that his parents had included their phone number on some form they’d filled out. The result was that Dorian had been left with them more or less by default. They reminded him occasionally that this was just a temporary arrangement until something better could be worked out, but since nobody else was exactly clamoring to take over as his guardian, he had the impression that he’d probably be stuck with them for a while. They acted skittish around him, mincing and whispering in a way that made him queasy and impatient. The only good thing he could say for them was that they’d at least followed the psychologist’s advice to keep quiet about his connection to the sinking of the Dear Melissa. No one in his school knew he’d been on the ship, not even the principal, and he liked it that way. If everyone had kept asking him questions about it, he was pretty sure he would have gone insane.

   He’d been asked way too many questions already, by a parade of out-of-towners flown in to investigate the ship’s crash. Therapists and cops, insurance agents, and even someone who claimed to be from the FBI. What had happened? Had he noticed anything unusual? And, of course, how on earth had he swum twelve miles alone in less than an hour? Some of them seemed to doubt that he’d been on the ship at all, though his name was right there on the passenger manifest.

   He gave the same answers to all of them: he didn’t remember anything. He’d been standing on the deck, and everything had gone black. He’d come to on the shore.

   It had turned into a kind of game. They asked the same questions; he gave the same answers. Like some kind of nightmare merry-go-round: I don’t remember, I don’t remember, I don’t remember.

   He wasn’t about to tell them that he’d been rescued by a killer mermaid.

   His reserve wasn’t only because they wouldn’t believe him or that they might even throw him into an asylum for hopeless lunatics, though those were definitely factors.

   It was all just too private: the mermaid girl’s painfully beautiful face, the searing amazement of those voices, the squeezing closeness of death. He wouldn’t have described it even to his best friend, much less to a bunch of pushy, self-important strangers.

   For all he knew, he might be the only person on earth who had heard the mermaids singing and lived. The memory was his. It was all he had to make up for the loss of his family. The dark-haired mermaid’s song burned his sleep, twined through all his waking thoughts.

* • *

Over dinner Lindy asked him at least five times if he was enjoying his macaroni and cheese mixed with hamburger meat; every time she asked in precisely the same simpering, anxious voice. Pink scalp winked through the wisps of her fuzzy, apricot blond hair, and her pale eyes looked permanently frightened inside their red rims. She made Dorian think of a sick, senile rabbit.

   "It’s delicious," Dorian replied automatically. He kept looking over at the window, where early twilight glowed between red checkered curtains. The kitchen was prim, secure, and always extremely clean. A painted wooden bear in a chef’s hat and apron stood on the counter, forever frying a wooden egg. A game show host jabbered on the TV about how fabulous that evening’s prizes were. How long would it be before he could get away? "I’m going to go study at a friend’s house. Okay?"

   Lindy and Elias both nodded so cautiously that it was like he’d just confessed to suicidal impulses and they were terrified of saying something that would push him over the edge. Not that suicide seemed like the worst idea ever sometimes.

   Dorian scraped and washed his plate. It was important to keep going through the motions. Convince them that he hadn’t been driven totally crazy by the trauma. It was bad enough that he screamed in his sleep sometimes. They were probably already afraid that he was going to come after them with an axe.

   He had to find the mermaid who’d saved him. Not to prove to himself that she hadn’t been some kind of hallucination—he knew what he’d seen. But she owed him an explanation at least. After all, what kind of reason could she have had for murdering so many people? Absolute evil? If that was it, though, why make an exception for him, singing or no? He didn’t deserve to be alive when his parents and Emily were dead.

   He needed to talk to her, needed it urgently, and he told himself that it didn’t matter why. He just had to hear what she would say. But how was he supposed to find a mermaid? Steal a rowboat and go paddle around in the open sea like an idiot? He’d been brooding over the problem for weeks, and tonight he thought he might have found an answer. It was worth a try at least.

   It was only the middle of September, but it was already cold enough that he pulled on a parka and hat before stepping out into the wild dusk, where the wind reeked with the weedy, fishy breath of the harbor. The smell always brought back the sickening taste of mingled bile and salt water horribly flecked with the sweetness of the previous night’s chocolate cake that he’d disgorged that day on the shore. His stomach lurched a little from the memory, but he did his best to ignore it.

   The small tan house stood on a narrow street that ran straight down to the tiny harbor. The hill was steep enough that the sidewalk was a staircase with broad cement steps. He could see the black masts of a few sailboats crisscrossing like chopsticks in front of the electric blue sky while farther up clouds sagged in a violet jumble. He walked between glowing windows, heading for the sea. It was obvious he’d have to walk for a mile or two, past the beach north of town where she’d left him, then up onto the low, ragged cliffs where a path wound through stands of half-dead spruce. The farther the better, really. She wouldn’t want to come too close to a town.

   He didn’t want to care how she felt about anything, but sometimes he couldn’t help wondering if she still thought about him. Maybe she’d completely forgotten him in the three months since she’d swum with him in her arms.

Now, I know I was preoccupied and everything, but I am certain that there were only five people in the room as I grunted, strained, and (let’s be perfectly frank here) farted the Goober out of my womb and into the world. Besides me, there was Cole (my baby daddy), Dad (my dad), Ducky (world’s best bestie), and one smokin’ Almiri doctor. And baby makes six. Or so I thought. Now I realize that several others were either waiting in the wings the entire time, or standing elsewhere out of sight. And now that my little bundle of joy is lying in my arms, they have all stepped forward, each one looking grimmer than the last.

“It’s female?” one of the dudes asks the doc gravely.

The doctor nods, stunned. And everybody in the room—even my own father—is staring at me and my newborn like we just snuck a jumbo-size combo meal past the ticket guy into the movie theater.

“I’m confused,” Ducky says, scratching his head. “I thought Almiri were always male.”

“I was under a similar impression, Donald,” my father says beside him. “Fascinating.”

Maybe “fascinating” isn’t the word I would use, but yeah, I’m a little perplexed myself. From everything Cole’s told me about his race (or species, or whatever you want to call an extraterrestrial group that traveled to Earth thousands of years ago to use human women as hosts for their offspring), I took it as fact that the Almiri only have one gender—a gender that requires a dongle. And yet . . . looking down at the gooey infant in my arms, it’s hard to argue that she most definitely has a full array of girl parts.

“Take it,” one of the Almiri snaps. “And secure the host and the father for questioning.”

No sooner are the words out of his mouth than all of the Almiri burst into a flurry of panicky action. One of the fellows standing in my peripheral vision rushes forward and snatches the Baby-Formerly-Known-as-Goober away from me before I can even react.

“Hey!” I shout, reaching clumsily to grab my baby back, but the thief is already moving toward the exit. Another Almiri falls into step behind him.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I hear Cole demand.

“Ibrida,” the baby-napper says . . . to which Cole (who, I should mention, can barely speak English most days, let alone whatever language that was) responds with a completely blank stare. “It’s a mule,” the guy says—as though that clarifies anything. His voice is even but strained. “Did you know about this?”

“Know about what?” Cole asks. “What are you talking about?”

“What’s going—ahhh!” I turn at the sudden sharp pain and see the doctor remove the syringe from my arm. “No, please, I . . . ,” I begin, but words are failing me. They have my baby. They took my baby.

I turn my head—which, holy crap, just got forty pounds heavier on my neck—to see if I can catch another glimpse of my daughter. Instead, I see only the second Almiri, who turns to Cole with a disgusted look on his face. “You just can’t help finding shit to step in, can you, Archer?”

“I don’t even . . . Hey, come back here with my kid!”

That’s when whatever night-night cocktail the doc has fed me begins to set in, so the Almiri at the door blocking Cole’s path and clasping him by the arms, trying to immobilize him, goes kinda fuzzy. Little swirlies dance in my field of vision, mixing in with the sight of Cole head-butting his restrainer—but that can’t be right, I think. The guy was his friend just moments ago, when they arrested the Jin’Kai heavies who chased us here in the first place. I’m pretty sure the head-buttee crashes to the floor, but there’s three more of him who take his place. And then I know the happy mommy juice is really starting to get to me, because I see two more Almiri move in beside Dad and Ducky, and calmly but forcibly escort them out of the room. And that shit just doesn’t make any sense.

“It’s all right, Elvie!” I hear Cole call, his voice growing fainter. “Don’t worry about anything! I’m here!”

The rest is all purple unicorns and gold stars singing show tunes, until everything goes black.

•  •  •

The first thing I wonder, as I come to, is whether or not the handcuffs shackling me to the hospital bed will be covered by my health insurance. My second thought, obviously, is what the flip am I doing handcuffed to a hospital bed? And where in the hell am I? This certainly doesn’t look like a recovery room at Lankenau Medical Center.

The haze quickly lifts, and I shuffle through a few blurry memories, mostly overheard snippets of conversation.

“. . . did we have any indication . . . ?”

“. . . Archer doesn’t seem to have a clue . . .”

“. . . never met a bigger numbskull . . .”

“. . . wreck was not salvageable . . .”

“. . . decrypted full records from the ship . . .”

“. . . last time this happened . . .”

“. . . what Byron has to say when we get there . . .”

“. . . have you seen my lip balm . . . ?”

None of which is helping me solve Elvie Nara and the Case of the Mystery Room. There are no monitors, nursebots, or any other medical gear keeping track of vitals or anything like that. As far as I can tell, the room consists of four white walls, a door, and a bed.

And me, of course.

“Hello?” I call out. There is no response for, like, a while, and I start to worry that I’m in some sort of soundproof room, or that maybe I’m just hallucinating the whole weird scene. Creepy dead silence, that’s all I get. But right when I’m really about to panic, the door slides open and in walks the same doctor from the delivery room, carrying a slender lap-pad and a scowl.

“Hey, are you my OB/GYN?” He scrolls through something on his lap-pad and does not respond. “What’s with the cuffs?” I try again. “You guys afraid that I’ll Hulk out on you?” I’m trying to play it light, hoping my gay spirits will take the edge off the fact that they’re treating me like a Jin’Kai POW, instead of, you know, their old pal Elvie. But the doc doesn’t seem to want to play along. “How long have I been here?” By the way my stomach’s growling I’m guessing it’s been at least a day, if not longer.

At last the doc looks up. “You’re feeling normal? No discomfort or odd sensations?”

“I’m hungry.” Understatement of the millennium. “Where is every—”

“I’ll see about getting you some food. In the meantime, Alan here is going to take you upstairs for a little while.”

Before I can ask if Alan is the doc’s imaginary six-foot white rabbit, the dude comes walking through the door.

Most of the Almiri are young-looking, but this guy’s stiff demeanor makes him look even younger, like he’s fresh out of the Almiri Acadamy for Impregnating Unsuspecting Earth Girls. He’s bland as toast, too. Standard-issue haircut, no scars or wacky tattoos to help place him in a lineup. As Ducky might put it, if Alan were on Star Trek, he’d be wearing a red shirt and an expiration date.

Alan glances at me. “Uh, what am I supposed to do, wheel her?” he asks.

“She can walk,” the doc replies. “We can undo the cuffs for now, I think.”

The doc strolls over and jabs a code into the handcuffs, quickly ridding me of my shackles. I rub my wrists like they’re terribly sore, but it’s mainly just an effort to garner a smidgen of sympathy.

My captors do not seem to notice.

“Hey, guys?” I say as they help me to my feet. “Two questions for you. First, where’s my baby? And second, could I get something to wear besides this gown? My butt’s, like, flapping in the wind.”

“There’s a robe in the closet,” the doc replies. And with that, he walks out the door, leaving me alone with Alan.

“He didn’t answer my first question,” I say. “That was kind of the important one.”

“Come on,” Alan says, clearly anxious to be rid of me. “Byron’s waiting.”

•  •  •

I sit quietly in the middle of the room where Alan has deposited me, tugging nervously at the trim of my not-quite-long-enough terrycloth robe. It solves the butt-on-display-to-the-world problem I was having, but I’m still flaunting enough leg to make a burlesque dancer blush. If I was feeling particularly whimsical, I might enjoy conjuring the image of the Almiri prancing around in these robes that, at best, are going to cover them to mid-thigh.

I can hear several voices coming through the adjoining side door keep rising and falling—some sort of group powwow. The volume occasionally reaches a decibel that indicates that nobody inside is feeling very polite.

Alan didn’t leave anyone to guard me while I wait. Well, I should say, he didn’t leave any person. I am currently surrounded by a literal menagerie of assorted animals. And we’re not just talking goldfish and kittens and parakeets, your typical household pets. Oh no. There are two large flamingos crowding me on the faux leather chair that’s busy sticking to my thighs. Seated across from me on the ornate stone desk are the three smallest monkeys I’ve ever seen, fighting over a banana that’s bigger than they are. Behind me, two foxes and a badger are wrestling with one another, and a peacock fans its feathers in a defensive stance as it tries to convince the meerkat to look elsewhere for a playmate.

And then, of course, there’s the bear.

It’s probably not a real big one, by bear standards, but honestly, when you’re sitting three feet away from a bear—any bear—it seems like the most gigundous thing in the entire universe. This particular Ursus whateverus has been blocking the main doorway, licking its own cinnamon fur, for the past ten minutes, oblivious to anything else in the room.

I look away (because everyone knows it’s rude to stare at animals that can eat you) and find myself studying an oddly familiar oil painting hanging over the mantel of the fireplace. I know I’ve seen the thing before somewhere, but I can’t place it. Old-school mustachioed dude with a chin dimple, sporting a seriously ugly orange-and-green headscarf.

Lots of terrible thoughts are running through my mind at the moment, and only a few of them are bear-related. Obviously, my Almiri hosts are not quite as benevolent as they once appeared. The fact that my baby turned out to be a girl must either have them confused, scared, or both. They’ve done something with the baby, something with Cole, something with my dad and Ducky. And they’re clearly planning something for me. A sane person would sit quietly and pray to come out of this whole situation in one piece.

I have never been accused of being a particularly sane person.

I rise to my feet with thoughts of bursting into the side room, all bravado and bluster, and shouting that I’m tired of being shoved around by different factions of extraterrestrials who think they’re entitled to mess with my reproductive organs, and that I’m sick of waiting in this zoo, and if they’re going to interrogate me or torture me or whatever, could they please just get it over with already? But I don’t get that far, because that’s when Cinnamon finally realizes I’m in the room. He flops forward onto all fours with a harrumph and plods toward me.

“Okay, okay!” I shout. My mind is racing. Which are the sorts of bears you’re supposed to try to scare off, and which are the ones you’re supposed to play dead with? Shit. “I’m sitting,” I tell it, more gently. And I plop back down on the chair. “See how well I’m sitting? Like nobody’s business. So heel. Or mush. Or . . . go away.”

Cinnamon does not go away. He shuffles over to me, and I realize with a great amount of uneasiness that even on all fours he’s looking down on me. He starts nuzzling my shoulder, and his head is so huge that he practically pushes me off the chair into a pile of something one of the birds has left behind. His fur is rough and scratchy, prickling my neck. Less “teddy bear” and more “roadhouse creeper.” I want to grab the thing’s jumbo noggin and shove him away, but I have this overwhelming desire to keep all my limbs attached to my body, so I just grip the edge of the seat until my fingers turn white, and try to look nonchalant. Like I get nuzzled by bears all the time.

“I’m just sitting,” I mutter. Cinnamon continues to get his nuzzle on. The giant furball is now licking my neck and the side of my face, long leathery slurps that leave trails of sticky bear saliva on my skin. “Not going to let a big-ass bear licking half my face off get in the way of a good sit,” I squeak out in between slurps. “Why don’t you try sitting too?”

The door to the side room opens up, and the muffled voices from within are suddenly clear.

“You cannot expect us to go along with this,” comes a strident voice. It’s angry. Pissed, even. “It goes against every protocol!”

Then I hear another voice, calmer and steadier than the rest.

“I’ve made my decision, gentlemen.” I look past the furball assaulting my personal space to see a tall, slender figure in a red jacket standing with his back to me in the doorway. “I do not make it lightly, nor should you take it as a point of debate.”

That’s when another angry voice chimes in. “The Council will never stand for such a blatant disregard for procedure!”

The figure in the doorway shifts casually. “The Council will have their say, of course. But so long as I’m the commander of this station, I will make the call.”

“But—”

“Thank you, gentlemen, that will be all for now,” the man in the doorway interrupts. “Alan, please see that the arrangements are being made. There’s a good lad.” And with that, he turns and steps inside to join me, closing the door behind him. And the moment he enters the room, he owns it.

Byron.

That’s what the Almiri call him. Their leader. I’ve seen him before, of course—on the communication view screen back on the Echidna, when we were trying to avoid being blown to smithereens. But I’ve seen him elsewhere, too. East of Eden. Giant. Rebel Without a Cause. No matter what the leader of this group of parasitic alien life-forms chooses to call himself, I will always think of him as James Dean, my mother’s favorite 1950s flat-pic dreamboat.

“Drusilla!” he booms to the gargantuan mound of fluff that’s currently using my face as a tasting menu. “Get down off of Elvie, please. That’s a good girl.” And just like that, the licking stops. Drusilla backs away from me, giving me one last sneeze as a parting gift before retreating to her master.

I’ve got to say the guy looks pretty good for a dude who’s supposedly been dead for 120 years. He pets Drusilla on the head as he makes his way over to his desk. He’s followed by two dogs, a black-and-white long-haired Newfoundland and a large husky. Drusilla grumbles at the dogs as they pass, and the husky scurries away, tail between its legs. The Newfoundland, though, despite weighing approximately as much as one bear poop, defiantly nips at Drusilla before wandering right up to me and putting his head in my lap.

“Boatswain likes you,” Byron says as he flops down in his big swivel chair. “That’s a good sign. Poor Thunder here”—he rubs the timid husky under the chin—“has always been a little shier with new people. Haven’t you, girl?”

I scratch Boatswain behind the ear, because it seems like the most normal thing I can do. Bears, peacocks, James Dean talking to me about his pets—those are the things that I’m not quite ready to process yet. “Dogs seem to have a thing for me,” I say, kneading the bed of Boatswain’s floppy ears a little harder, until he lets out a satisfied whine.

“Amazing creatures, aren’t they?” Byron replies, putting his feet up on the desk. He looks very much like he did when he was James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, perhaps a bit older but not by much. He’s even wearing a red windbreaker and some antique-looking jeans, which should seem ridiculous and sad, but somehow he pulls it off effortlessly. Utterly assured of himself, cool, and in charge of the whole room without even trying—that’s James Dean, all right. “The poor dog,” he goes on, leaning back in his chair with his eyes closed, as though reciting words he’s said many times before. “In life the firmest friend, the first to welcome, foremost to defend.”

“Uh,” I say. “Yeah. Sure.”

Byron’s eyes pop open, and he smiles warmly. “It’s nice to meet you at last, Elvie Nara.” He seems awfully friendly for someone who’s kidnapped me and taken my newborn child. “I’ve heard only good things.”

I nod and clear my throat. “Look,” I start, as much of an edge to my voice as I dare use with a guy who has a pet bear, “you’re a very busy alien, I’m sure.” His smile shifts sideways a little, amused. “So I’m not going to waste your time with the totally appropriate amount of indignation that I should feel right now.”

“That’s awfully understanding of you.”

I fold my arms across my chest, ignoring Boatswain’s whines for more scratching. “Why don’t you just cut to the chase and tell me what the hell is going on?”

Byron’s eyes brighten, like I just complimented his haircut. I cannot detect even an ounce of the cruelty that someone like, say, Dr. Marsden had when he had me at gunpoint back on the Echidna. By contrast, this Byron guy doesn’t seem to find the whole situation all that serious. Like hospital bed abductions are as common as artificial grass.

“Elvie, everything’s going to be fine, don’t worry. You haven’t done anything wrong. Your baby is in perfect health, and your father and friend are safe and in our care.”

It’s his casual tone that’s more disconcerting to me than anything else. I was kind of expecting a villainous speech. Boatswain starts licking the sweat from my palm. As interrogations go, I have to admit, this is all pretty chill. Everything, as Byron says, seems to be going fine.

“What was all that shouting about? Me?”

Byron waves me off dismissively. “Don’t worry about all that. Some of the lads have their knickers in a bunch over this whole Ares mess.”

“Ares?” I ask, confused. “The Ares Project?” The Ares Project is the multitrillion-dollar government program whose purpose is the wide-scale terraforming of the surface of Mars for human habitation, the first such attempt of its kind. The idea that the Almiri are behind it in some way probably shouldn’t shock me as much as it does—since I’m well aware of how technologically advanced they are, and how they’ve made a habit of getting their hands into every major scientific breakthrough of the past several thousand years. It’s more of the fact that Byron’s dropping the information so nonchalantly that has me baffled. After all, aren’t I some sort of prisoner here?

“A bit of an issue with some cyberterrorism, nothing that should slow matters down terribly, but enough of a breach that some folks are nervous.” Byron leans forward in his chair. “Cole told me how keen you were on being a part of the project someday. You don’t know how happy that would make—”

“Cole,” I say. “What have you done with Cole?”

Byron’s face turns slightly more serious, but it’s undercut by his tickling one of the miniature monkeys with his index finger. Seriously, the thing is the size of a Ping-Pong ball.

“Cole has broken our cardinal law,” he says simply, “and will have to be dealt with accordingly.”

I can feel the color leave my face. “What do you mean, ‘dealt with’?”

“Don’t worry. It’s not—”

“Don’t worry?” I screech out. He might as well tell me not to blink. “Don’t WORRY?” Drusilla lurches to her feet at my sudden outcry, like there’s some threat she needs to deal with, but one low growl from Boatswain and she backs off. “Please don’t hurt him.” My voice is shaky, and I am this close to crying, but I use every ounce of strength to hold it together. Boatswain drops his head into my lap.

Again, Byron’s pretty chillaxed about the whole scene. “Ah,” he says calmly. “The drama of young love.” And he closes his eyes once more. “I tell thee, minstrel, I must weep, or else this heavy heart will burst; for it hath been by sorrow nursed, and ached in sleepless silence.” He opens his eyes once more and gives me a bittersweet smile.

“Cole told me all about your Code, or whatever,” I say, petting Boatswain with both hands in an effort to calm myself. “I know that what he did was bad. I mean, I know you guys think it was bad.” Cole was not supposed to sleep with me. The Almiri have superstrict rules about which human ladies are meant to be knocked up and how frequently an Almiri can do the deed, in order to avoid overpopulation and the eventual destruction of both our species, since Almiri pregnancies lead to sterility in their human hosts. Cole was originally sent to Ardmore, PA, to knock up übercheerleader-mega-skank Britta McVicker, but he disobeyed orders because, as he put it, he “fell for me.”

Also, he’s sort of a chromer.

“But it wasn’t his fault,” I go on. “I, like, totally seduced him. He tried to resist, but . . . what’s going to happen to him?” I whisper around the lump forming in my throat.

“You’ve learned quite a bit about us the past few weeks, Elvie,” Byron says. And perhaps I’m misreading things, but there seems to be some sympathy in his voice. “And seeing that this is the case, I hope that you can appreciate the reason for the Code, and why our adherence to it is so important. I can’t overemphasize what a big deal it is.” The monkey lets out a miniature cheep of insistence until Byron returns to tickling him. “Like, humongous big.”

“But Cole didn’t mean—”

Byron cuts me off. “I’ve tried to shield Cole from repercussions with regards to your situation, as best I could. It was no easy task, mind you. The fact that Cole violated protocol and had relations with a second host—someone who clearly had not been vetted for hosting—was not only foolish but dangerous. For both our species.” He clears his throat. “However, in light of the heroism Cole displayed on the Echidna, I felt compelled to petition for some degree of leniency for the boy. It was not the most popular sentiment, I can assure you, but I was able to arrange a sort of . . . tenuous probation for young Mr. Archer. Which might have been the end of it, were it not for his unfortunate behavior at the hospital. At this point, my hands are tied. One simply does not head-butt a superior and walk away, even under the cheeriest of circumstances.”

So Cole did head-butt that dude. At least I wasn’t hallucinating.

Byron shakes his head in a mannered gesture of regret. “He will be punished, Elvie, but I swear on my life, he will not be harmed.”

“Oh, well, if you swear on your life,” I reply. Still, I am relieved by the news. But . . . “That doesn’t explain why you’ve taken me or my dad. Or Ducky. And where is my baby girl?” I shove Boatswain away, suddenly very frustrated. The dog whines piteously.

Byron stands up, and Boatswain and Thunder snap to attention and move into flanking position beside him as he walks to the front of the desk. He sits on the edge and looks down on me, much like a hip teacher from a bad sitcom about to dole out “serious life lessons.” Byron temples his fingers in front of his mouth and considers me with an intense gaze.

“Elvie, do you know how incredible your baby is?” he begins. “I mean, all babies are incredible. Life, I mean, wow, right? Whether it’s human or Almiri or, I dunno, whales . . . it’s just a miracle. But your baby . . . she’s even more special.”

“Because she’s a chick,” I say.

“Because she’s a chick,” he confirms. “Almiri do not have baby girls.” He reaches across his desk for a round red tin and pops open the top. “Biscuit?”

I seem to have lost my appetite. “So, my daughter’s, like, a miracle squared?”

Byron sets the tin on the desk and rests one hand on each of the heads of his two dogs. It’s a measured and self-conscious pose. I can totally picture him practicing in front of the mirror for dramatic situations just like this. Then he lapses into that annoying closed-eye reciting thing again. “What a whirlwind is her head, and what a whirlpool full of depth and danger is all the rest about her.” He opens his eyes again. “No,” he says, and the ice that’s suddenly in his voice startles me a bit. “Not a miracle. On the contrary, the child is a great danger.”

“A danger?” I ask, baffled. “To who?”

“All of us,” Byron says. And just as quickly he snaps back into levity. “Seriously, you should try one of these biscuits.” He plucks one from the tin. “They’re delish.”

I’m not even sure I manage to shake my head. Dangerous? How can one baby girl be a danger to anyone, let alone a guy who’s well over a hundred years old and has two Academy Award nominations on his résumé?

“What’s an ibrida?” I ask. Byron chokes on his biscuit, trying his best to hide a double take.

“Where’d you hear that word?” he asks pointedly.

“At the hospital, when your goons decided to go all batshit crazy on me.”

Byron tries to smile casually. “That’s not really important at the moment,” he says, and it’s the first time I don’t buy the acting job. His eyes shift to the biscuit tin for a split second, before he looks back up at me. “I know you are somewhat aware of the history of the Almiri, Elvie, but let me explain it to you a little more fully, so that you’ll understand.” He nudges Thunder’s nose away from the biscuit tin. “We came to the Earth nearly five thousand years ago. Humans were one of six viable host species in the entire galaxy, and they were remarkable creatures. We sought to make them more remarkable. You are familiar, to some extent, with Greek mythology?”

“Sure,” I say, bracing myself for yet another history lesson. The Almiri seem to love them. “Zeus, Athena, all that crap.”

“Exactly,” Byron says. “Those were us.”

“Excuse me?” I say, eyebrows up. “Sorry, but not for one second do I believe that you guys are gods.”

“No, of course not,” Byron replies. “You misunderstood my meaning.” Beside him, Boatswain manages to sneak a biscuit from the tin unnoticed, but I decide to let this go unmentioned. “When we first arrived on Earth, we couldn’t blend in as we do now, so of course our appearance was strange to humans. They had stories of deities already in their society, and whenever anyone happened to spy one of us, they simply slotted us into those appointed roles. Burning bushes, talking clouds, showers of gold, these were ways for them to describe what was beyond their understanding. Thunder, no. You just ate.” Thunder glares at Boatswain, who’s licking the crumbs stealthily off his doggy gums. “Soon,” Byron continues, oblivious, “we Almiri had our first children, and they appeared to be human. Their abilities, however, made them stand out.”

“Lemme guess,” I interject. I’m wondering when this is going to lead to a smidgen of information about my baby. About my dad and Ducky. About Cole. “Achilles, Hercules, Perseus . . .”

“They were the first Earthborn Almiri,” Byron confirms. “Thy Godlike crime was to be kind, to render with thy precepts less the sum of human wretchedness, and strengthen Man with his own mind.” He’s doing that closed-eye thing again. Boatswain sneaks another cookie. I clear my throat, and Byron’s eyes fly open. “Where was I? Oh yes. Over time, successive generations appeared as human, and it became easier and easier to simply disappear into human society.”

“This is all fascinating, really,” I lie. “But can we skip along? You were explaining how my baby was going to bring about the apocalypse.”

Byron smiles again and starts pacing around the room. The dogs follow obediently at his heels, with the husky staying as far from the bear as possible. On the wall next to the oil painting of the dude in the headscarf is one of Boatswain, though the picture appears to be very, very old, and the pooch couldn’t be more than six. Byron considers it for a moment in silence, then turns back to me.

“Elvie, we have always been a very small, discreet society. We took to heart the mistakes of our ancestors, and were careful to never endanger mankind with reckless propagation. Basically, we tried not to be dicks about it. And along the way, we’ve pushed the humans toward advances that would have taken eons for them to come up with on their own. I mean, take jazzercise.”

“My apocalypse baby,” I remind him.

“We need human females to breed, Elvie. We have no alternative. Without you there would be no Almiri. Human female, Almiri baby. That’s the way it’s always been. Then suddenly you come along, and young Mr. Archer . . . and somehow your child is not Almiri.”

“What do you mean she’s not an Almiri?” I say. “Sure, she’s an anomaly, I get that. But she’s Cole’s kid. I’m not some wanton slut-bag, if that’s what you’re imply—”

“The child is not Almiri,” Byron repeats. “The child—your child, Archer’s child—is somehow something else. An ‘anomaly,’ as you put it. But not a benign one. If left unchecked, this anomaly could be the end of the Almiri . . . and of humans, too.”

An icy ball is beginning to form in my stomach. “What are you going to do to my baby?” I ask slowly.

Byron examines me curiously, as if he’s honest-to-goodness confused, before realization breaks across his face. “Oh, poor child, what monsters we must seem right now! As I said, nothing that is happening is your fault, nor your child’s. We will not harm either of you, I promise.”

“So, then what? We’re free to go?”

He looks at me sadly. And maybe I’m just overreading his superdramatic facial expressions, but I swear I see something there. Something that tells me it pains him, deeply and personally, to say what he’s about to. “The situation is not your fault, but it is still the situation at hand. I’m afraid we’re going to have to . . . contain the threat.”

I shift uneasily in my chair. “And here I thought the only threat was the Jin’Kai.”

Byron reaches for the tin again, then thinks better of it. Suddenly he seems to be avoiding my gaze. “Keeping you out of their hands is paramount as well. You and your child will be sent to a secure facility. For the time being. Until we can straighten this whole mess out.”

“What about Dad? Ducky?” I ask, rising to my feet. Drusilla rises as well, but this time I don’t back down. Being bear food is suddenly the least freaky thing I’m facing.

“We wouldn’t want to risk your father and friend falling into Jin’Kai hands either. So they will accompany you.” He’s trying to make this sound like some sort of temporary vacation or something, but I’m getting the strong vibe that wherever he’s sending us, it’s not going to be pleasant.

“So where is this Almiri Alcatraz you’re shipping me off to?” I ask. “Outer space again?”

“I think you’ve had enough adventures out there for a while, don’t you?” he says, jovial once more. “No, you’ll be stationed at a secret facility near Cape Crozier.”

It’s not a place on the planet most people would probably know. But I happen to have a deceased mother with a passion for travel and a detailed book of maps.

“ANTARCTICA?” I screech. What. Da. Fuh.

“The camp is home to a number of Almiri. A sort of . . . ‘time-out’ zone for brothers who have broken the Code.”

I drop my head so that my chin is practically digging into my chest, but my glower shoots directly into Byron’s pretty eyes.

“And you really think the safest place you could put me is in the middle of the frozen tundra with a whole bunch of superbuff aliens who you already know can’t keep it in their pants?” I ask in disbelief.

“Come now, Elvie.” Byron scrunches up his face and gives me a quick headshake, as if I have a filthy mind for even thinking what I’m thinking. He walks back over to his desk and hits a button on his intercom. A voice crackles in response.

“Yes?”

“We’re just about finished in here,” Byron replies. He takes his hand off the intercom.

“Elvie, I realize that right now I must seem like a terrible villain—well, let’s be honest—an asshole. I’m sure I can’t blame you for thinking as much. Hopefully, someday sooner than later, you will understand that I have no choice. For the time being, Cape Crozier is our only option, however imperfect.”

The main door slides open, and my new buddy Alan is on the other side. Byron leans in to me and whispers so that Alan can’t hear. “Just remember that I won’t stop trying to help you, dearheart.” I flinch at the sound of the pet name that I’ve only ever heard my father call me.

Just how much does this guy actually know about us, anyway?

“Are the preparations made?” Byron asks Alan.

Alan, already at attention in the doorway, stiffens at his commander’s voice. “Nearly, sir, another hour at most,” he says.

“Please lead Miss Nara to the holding area, until then,” Byron says. “And for God’s sake, get the girl some clothes.”

•  •  •

I walk down the long, sterile corridor with Alan beside me, my slippers sliding across the slick linoleum floor. The rooms along the corridor do not have normal doors. Rather, the doors are thick, heavy, and mechanized, like the kind you might find in a factory, or a cargo ship.

Or a prison.

“How long are you going to ‘hold’ me here before I get started on that all-expenses-paid trip to the Earth’s rectum?” I ask Alan.

“Not long, Miss,” Alan says, and I can’t tell if he’s being polite or condescending.

Each door has a small, circular window about the size of a dinner plate. As we pass by one such window, I think I catch a shadow standing at the door, peering out at me, but in a flash the shadow disappears.

“Hey, what’s that?” I wonder, pausing. I try to look inside, but whatever was just there has disappeared. Alan takes my arm and gives it a slight tug, and my feet slide away from the door.

“This way, Miss,” Alan says.

I pull against Alan’s grip to crane my neck and look inside. I make out a tall, willowy figure and a very familiar-looking long blond ponytail.

“But—”

“This way, now.”

If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear that the Almiri were keeping my arch-nemesis, Britta McVicker, under lock and key.

But no, I think. That wouldn’t make any sense.

We come to the final door along the corridor, and Alan slides a card over the side sensor. Immediately the locking mechanism springs to life and the door slides open. The inside of the room is even more drab than the one I woke up in. It’s gray, with nothing but a couch built into two sides of the wall. Like a karaoke room without the karaoke.

I step inside, and without another word, Alan closes the door behind me. My options are pretty much stand or sit, so after a few moments of pacing, I decide to sit.

I’m not sure how long I’m sitting there—five minutes? ten?—when I hear the door sensor beep and the locking mechanism disengage. The door slides open, and in steps Byron, carrying something in his arms.

“I thought you might want a little company,” he says. I look down at the bundle he’s balancing so delicately in the crook of his elbow.

He is cradling my baby.

The Goober is tiny and pink and wrinkly, cooing softly as Byron bobs her gently up and down.

“We’ve made arrangements for your journey,” he tells me as he nears with my daughter. “You’ll leave on the Fountain. It will only take a few hours to get to the continent, although from there I’m afraid you’ll have to travel by dogsled. Technology is great, but it can’t trump Mother Nature. Still, it’s a relatively easy journey, at least to the base.”

But I’m hardly listening. In the instant he hands me the Goober, the whole world seems to drop away.

I am a mother.

This wrinkled pink raisin is my daughter.

She finally opens her eyes, and blinks up at me, and that’s when I start to cry. Huge, blubbering sobs. Worse than when Christian was killed off in season three of Martian Law.

Byron takes in the scene quietly. Almost as if he were ashamed. I can only hope.

“I never did ask,” he asks softly. “What are you going to name her?”

Basically what I’m trying to say is that evolution saved my ass. Well, evolution and the fact that when you’re orbiting the planet this high up, the artificial gravity is bound to be a little more forgiving. But that’s not nearly as poetic.

I guess I should be thanking my lucky stars, seeing as I’m still in one piece, but instead I’m furiously scrambling to yank my pregnant keister off the Treadtrack and away from Britta McVicker.

“Need some help?” she sneers in a tone that I’m sure is supposed to sound sincere. Britta is the aforementioned bitchy cheerleader. We go way back, Britta and me—too far, if you ask me. She doesn’t remember, but I’ve known the girl since she first mocked my Hercules lunch box in second grade. We are the only two students at the Hanover School who knew each other before the school year began. Because apparently the universe is not through punishing me just yet.

I scramble to my feet quickly so that I don’t roll with the Treadtrack all the way into the wall. Balance is not my strongest trait at this point in my pregnancy, but I still have the maturity and poise to flip Britta the bird without stumbling again.

Britta snorts. “Jeez, tubbo,” she says, beginning what I am already positive is going to be one of her classic McVicker slams, “how’d you ever trick anyone into pity screwing you?”

That’s when one of Britta’s innies comes over to take in the scene. She’s this girl who glommed on to Britta the second we launched into orbit and who spends so much time stroking Britta’s ego that in my head I only ever think to call her Other Cheerleader.

“Pity screw or not,” Other Cheerleader says, jerking her head in my direction, “the guy must’ve been blind and deaf.” And I have to admit, that one stings a little, until she decides to take it a step further. “And had, like, no sense of smell,” she adds. “And he also didn’t have—what’s the other one? Touch. Yeah, he was touchless.”

I bite the inside of my cheek as I yank my sweat shorts down at the hem. I avoid making eye contact with Britta. Would she be so smug if she knew that . . . ? No, I decide, staring at my shoes. I’m not going to go there. Britta McVicker is not nearly worth it.

But I guess I should’ve gone somewhere, because before I even notice what’s happening, Other Cheerleader has punched the Treadtrack control, jacking up the speed to max. I topple over again as the exercise track flies under my feet, and I crash into a girl running behind me. She falls on top of me, and together we slam into the wall, the track still running underneath us. The thing damn near burns a hole right through my ugly running shorts.

“Turn off the track!” comes a cry from the far side of the gym. It’s Dr. Marsden, Hanover’s school physician, rushing over to us past the station of Japanese fit-bots, with our PE teacher, Mr. Zaino. Other Cheerleader shuts the track down and tries to put a concerned look on her face. Although, if you ask me, it just looks like she’s eaten too many beans and is holding in a nasty moon rocket. When Dr. Marsden reaches us, he looks down at me with concern. “That was quite a spill, Elvie,” he says kindly, helping me to my feet. “You all right?”

Even though he’s my school doctor and all, I blush a little bit when he takes my hand. I am notinto the whole May–December-romance thing, but you’d have to be from another planet not to think Dr. Marsden is one damn fine specimen of a man, standing nearly two meters tall with broad shoulders and just enough stubble to let you know that he’s sophisticated but still a little dangerous. But I try to play it off cool. “It’s not the last time I’ll fall on my butt,” I say with a shrug.

Zaino is more accusatory than inquisitive. “What happened?” he asks. Zaino’s a pretty good-looking guy himself, although he’s a little too rah-rah about dodgeball to seriously crush on.

Britta gives me this look like, You better not rat me out, and while nothing would give me more satisfaction than watching her and her doppelganger lackey run laps for the next hour, I know I won’t say anything.

“I just misjudged the speed,” I lie, dusting myself off. I turn to the girl who toppled over behind me on the Treadtrack. It’s this chick from my trig class who is, like, always chewing on her hair. She’s currently looking at me like I’m the world’s biggest doof—although, hello, she’s the one with an entire braid crammed into her mouth. “Sorry,” I tell her.

She mumbles something in reply, although who can tell what through all that hair?

“Are you sure you’re not hurt?” Dr. Marsden asks again. I look at Britta and smirk a little.

“Well, I am kinda sore, but I’ll survive,” I say with as much earnest reluctance as I can fake. “I’m mostly just worried about the baby.” I place my hands under my swollen belly and put on my most concerned frown.

The doc nods. “Why don’t you go back to your quarters and lie down for a bit? I’ll give you a pass to skip yoga next period, and we’ll see how you’re feeling at your checkup this afternoon.”

Game and match. I’m pretty sure there’s not one girl on this ship who wouldn’t give her right arm to get out of a single day of underwater prenatal yoga.

Chewie spits the braid out of her mouth. “Uh, maybe I should lie down too,” she says.

“Just run it off, Sanderson,” Mr. Zaino replies.

On my way out of the gym, I offer Britta and her friend my smuggest grin. “Enjoy yoga, ladies,” I tell them.

“I can see your fat ass through the hole in your pants,” Britta shoots back.

I want to ask her if when her baby’s born she’s going to cut the horns off right away, or wait until the kid is older. But I’m a civil sort of gal, and civil sorts of gals don’t say things like that.

Did I not mention earlier that Britta McVicker—former cheerleading captain and most popular girl at Lower Merion—is now simply another knocked-up teenager at the Hanover School for Expecting Teen Mothers, just like me? Due to pop any day now too.

Okay, so it’s not like I actually wanted to end up preggers in outer space or anything. If you’d told me a year ago that I’d be here on this ship, and with Britta McFreakingVicker to boot, I’d’ve told you to check the dosage on your Phezalin prescription. But, you know, shit happens.

I guess, if you want to be specific about it, the first shitty thing that happened was that I got the hots for Cole Archer, which was the perfect example of what my dad would call “one’s loins speaking more loudly than one’s brain.” My dad finally stopped using that expression when I told him that saying the word “loins” was the most psychologically damaging thing a parent could do to a child. But maybe I should have let him stick with it, because when it came to Cole Archer, my brain didn’t stand much of a chance. His eyes were this unearthly blue-green-blue-again that could, like, make you melt or something. And that part wouldn’t have been so bad—the getting the hots and melting, I mean. But somehow that single, solitary time we got steamy, I—hello, biology class!—got knocked up. And then Cole totally bailed, leaving me with one bun and no baker. Which, you know, sucks and stuff.

The second shitty thing that happened was that I was forcibly enrolled at the Hanover School for Expecting Teen Mothers. Since I’m a member of Hanover’s inaugural class, they don’t have a motto yet, but if they ever decide to get one, my vote will be for “Catapulting Troubled Young Ladies into Outer Space Since 2074.” Well, technically we’re in low Earth orbit, but that’s not as catchy. I’ve been here for three full months now, and even though my baby is due to pop fairly soon—the week before Christmas, like someone’s idea of a gag gift—I’ll be spending the rest of my junior year here with all the other Hanover girls. I mean, it’s not like they can just land the whole ship for winter break or anything. I can’t decide if life on board the Echidna will be better or worse after the baby is born. As meticulously scheduled as my every second is now, I get the feeling that once the Goober arrives and I hand it off to the adoptive services coordinator, I’m going to have a redonk amount of free periods. Which, given the bafflingly terrible connection speeds and limited flat pic library up here, could actually be more of a curse than a blessing.

As I travel the ten levels on the lift from the Health and Wellness Center up to the living quarters, I decide that a bruised coccyx is a steep but acceptable price to pay for an hour’s respite from the inane chattering of my classmates. I’m only a few steps from the door to my stateroom when I feel a buzz in my back pocket. I yank out my phone and check it. A blink from Ducky. Smiling, I tap the screen while the phone’s still vibrating.

check it out found britta’s online dating profile.

I tap the link and shut the door, and then flop down onto my bed in my holey gym shorts while the new site is buffering. It’ll take, like, nine hundred years. Shit takes forever in space. Which totally blows, because my blinks with Ducky are the only thing keeping me from going completely bonkers at Hanover.

When I finally get to the site, it’s not a dating profile. It’s a vid of a baby elephant peeing. Like, this fire-hydrant torrent of pee.

I snort so loud, a little snot comes out my nose. I shift my phone around until I get a good angle against my belly, and I blink back to Ducky.

britta’s never been that hot in her life. flippn skank just tried to take me out in gym. :(

I told Ducky once that Britta McVicker was my arch-nemesis, and he told me she was more like my arch-nematode. Which really just goes to show that while I was busy getting knocked up, Ducky was actually paying attention in life science. But nerd king status notwithstanding, he was right. Britta McVicker is a genuine grade-A worm. The lowest form of life on the planet—and now, God help me, in space, too.

I mean, really, I know that I’m not exactly a saint, but I swear that in my former life I must have been a claims adjuster or something, because there is no other way to explain why fate decided that Britta McVicker should follow me into the cosmos. If only I’d gotten a screen cap of my face three months ago on launch day, when Britta showed up with two trunks, eight garment bags, three totes, and a big-ass baby bump of her own. Up until that point I thought the worst thing I’d have to deal with until my love child popped out was suffering through morning sickness in zero grav. I didn’t even know the girl had gotten herself storked. But she had, of course. She trumps my due date by two whole weeks. Which made sense, once I did the math. But I don’t care to think about that particular math very often.

I’m guessing the surprise wasn’t a pleasant one for Britta, either. As soon as she saw me, she got a look on her face like she’d just accidentally used the wrong hair smoother. I think maybe I deal better with shock than some other people.

I feel a rumble on top of my bump. Another blink from Ducky.

:( heres something to cheer u up, E-fab.

I tap the link, and twenty thousand years later it opens. Ducky’s gone and bought me another poster. I smile. Damn you, Ducky. Way to make me cheer up just when I’m getting a really good funk on. I aim the phone at the last square of remaining white space on my wall, tap IMPRINT, and snap! The image is pasted on my wall next to the last poster he sent me, of The Godfather. Ducky knows I have a thing for classic flat pics, so lately whenever I’ve been feeling particularly gruesome, he goes and buys me a poster of one of my faves. So far I have The Princess Bride, Transformers 5 (totally the best of the series, no matter how hard Ducky argues for number 7), Rebel Without a Cause (Mom was really into James Dean, Dad tells me), and now, the crown jewel, Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus: The Musical. Call me a sap, but I eat up that tortured unrequited love stuff with a spoon.

As I’m rummaging through my closet for a change of clothes, I set a hand on my belly and feel around for the Goober—that’s what I’ve decided to call the mini Cole who up and ruined my life. Sure enough, the little bugger’s lodged itself lengthwise in my uterus. It’s weird to be able to feel a tiny thing inside you. That’s something they never mention in health class, that you can actually feel it, especially when they get bigger. Head here, over there an elbow, foot poking into what used to be your gallbladder. It’s a little gross if you think about it too hard, being a human hotel room for some kid you’ve never even met before. So I try not to think about it very often. Instead I try the trick Dr. Marsden taught me, rubbing my belly in tight little circles, slow and steady. Dr. Marsden says this calms the kid down, lets it know you care about it. I told Dr. Marsden that all I cared about was the little bastard not kicking me in the bladder anymore, and he just handed me my vitamins and told me the rubbing would probably work for that, too.

After I’m changed into my “favorite” pair of maternity stretch pants, I check my clock. Almost an hour until my physical, and not a thing to do.

Thank you, Dr. Marsden.

The trauma of gym class has left me famished, so I decide to make a trip upstairs to see what grub I can rustle up. I grab my phone as I head for the door, just in case Ducky decides to send me any other choice Britta vids, and make my way down the corridor toward the elevator.

The Hanover School is actually an old recommissioned low-orbit luxury cruise liner. The kind that folks my dad’s age used to travel on for tacky ooh-look-we’re-playing-shuffleboard-in-space style vacations back in the fifties and sixties, when being in orbit was still sort of a novel experience. These days, of course, you can’t throw a rock out the viewport without hitting a vacant ship or orbital station that’s floating aimlessly through the void. Most of them have been empty for decades, or are home to some less than desirable characters, but in recent years there’s been a real push to refit them as residential, commercial, and educational estates. “Ozone re-gentrification” my dad derisively calls it. The L.O.C. Echidna is supposedly pretty small by space cruiser standards, but the first time I set my swollen feet on board, I have to admit I sucked in my breath at how freaking huge it is. It’s pretty kitsch, honestly, but it’s not all bad.

My cabin is on deck eighteen, same as the other girls. There are more than a thousand rooms on board, but the place is mostly empty. There’s just forty-six of us girls, and about half that many teachers and counselors. Apparently hundreds of applicants were turned down for matriculation. I guess I should feel honored that I have such a desirable set of ovaries, but mostly I just feel how deserted and lonely this place is. The faculty all sleep on the next floor up, deck nineteen. Kate Mueller once told me that the faculty’s rooms are much bigger, although how she came across that information is probably more interesting than the square footage. There are twenty-five decks total, ten for staterooms, one each for the mess hall, auditorium, and the athletic courts. There’s a big honking hangar for shuttles that runs nearly half the length of the deck, and it’s situated in the lower fore section of the ship. Leading off of that is the entry parlor, the game rooms, and the Health and Wellness Center. The HWC houses all the medical suites, in addition to the fitness center and the understandably (given the condition of most of the school’s residents) underutilized sauna. The lido deck has the big lap pool and “sunbathing area,” which reflects sunlight through a system of adjustable mirrors so that people can work on their melanoma even in space. I’m heading for the uppermost level of the ship, the observation deck, where the snack kiosks are.

I’m steps away from the elevator when I run into someone barreling around the corner. For the third time this morning, I find myself flat on my ass. Although to spice things up, this time I’m covered with dozens of tiny, hard, and stinky round objects.

Brussels sprouts. I’m covered in brussels sprouts.

“Good grief, Miss Nara. Would it really hurt to look where you’re going?”

I look up at my brussels sprout attacker. It’s none other than Fred, Hanover’s “chef.” I’m no gourmand or anything, but even I know that someone who serves up succotash more than three times a week needs to think about returning to culinary school.

“Sorry,” I mumble, flipping over to my hands and knees before grabbing a handful of the vile little veggies to toss back into Fred’s crate. I shouldn’t be apologizing. Fred was the one who wasn’t looking where he was going. And what the heck is he even doing walking around the girls’ living quarters carrying a crate of brussels sprouts, anyway? But I’m not going to argue with a dude who holds my gastrointestinal fate in his hands.

He just growls at me, ever the picture of friendliness. “Shouldn’t you be in class?”

“I have a pass from Dr. M,” I tell him.

Fred harrumphs like he doesn’t believe me, but I guess playing truant officer is low on his list of priorities at the moment, because all he says to me is, “Try to stay out of trouble, will you?”

“I’ll do that.” I plop the last sprout into the box and shuffle as quickly as I can to the elevator.

When the lift doors open on the observation deck, I find the floor totally deserted. This is my favorite deck—completely encircled by curved, six-meter-high windows, permanently bathed in Earth light. The first few weeks after launch, anytime we didn’t have class or yoga or some other mandatory project, you could always find all the girls up here, faces plastered against the windows, staring at Earth as it shifted down below us. It takes a little less than two hours to make a full orbit around the globe, and for those first few weeks, just watching that sucker sweep by was like tweaking out in geography class. “Look, there’s Japan!” “Holy crap, it’s the Nile!” “Guys, check it. I can cover up Greenland with my thumb.” But once they’d seen Earth go by a few times, they seemed to get over it. Now the observation deck stays pretty much empty around the clock.

The only reason most girls head to the observation deck these days is for the snack area. It’s basically just an alcove filled with vending machines. Junk food, juices, and some sort of dehydrated dessert called Astronaut’s Delight, which I think is someone’s idea of a joke. That corner of the spaceship is a pregnant lady’s neon-lit paradise. But there’s one machine that is calling to me more than any other—the one stuffed with pint-size cartons of Midnight Craving. Yes, the flavors and ad campaign that are specifically targeted at pregnant women border on the offensively stereotypical, but damn, sometimes you do just want to dive into a pint of Double Cheese’N’Chocolate Pretzel Swirl.

The vending machines on board the Echidna work on the HONOR System—Honest Operations Necessitating Objective Reward. You do something the faculty thinks is pro, they give you points for vended nachos. I slap the button for my ice cream and hold my HONOR bracelet up to the scanner. The scanner beeps and flashes red, and then the robotic voice I’m beginning to loathe informs me: “You currently have zero HONOR points. Request for Cherry Marsaladenied.”

It’s not like I’m shocked that I’m out of HONOR points, since for some reason the Hanover faculty doesn’t seem to condone my ditching Mandarin class, or napping during study hour. Still, I could really go for some craving cream right now. I take a step back and stare at the vending machine for a minute, the scanner blinking its infuriating red eye at me in this, like, Morse code, which I am positive means “No-ice-cream-for-you-no-ice-cream-for-you.” But I do my best to ignore it, and focus instead on what my dad likes to call the “thinking behind the machinery.”

I was six years old the first time my dad strapped a tool belt on me and took me out to the garage for what he liked to call lessons in self-sufficiency. “Elvie,” he told me seriously, “no matter how advanced a machine is, there’s a brain behind its creation. A human brain. Andyou”—he tapped my skull—“you have a human brain too. Right?” I shrugged. I was pissed because I wanted to be inside playing Jetman online with Ducky, not in the garage with my dad staring at a broken toaster. “You do,” he told me. “You have a brain. A good one. Which means that no machine is a match for you. Now”—he plopped the busted gizmo on the worktable in front of me and yanked a screwdriver out of my tool belt, wrapping my six-year-old fingers around it—“you can come back inside when you’ve fixed the toaster.”

“But I don’t even like toast!” I hollered at my dad as he shut the garage door behind him. It took me five hours to fix the damn thing. And to this day Ducky still totally kicks my ass at Jetman.

Looking back, it probably would’ve been better if my dad had taught me how to survive hunky boys and bitchy cheerleaders, but at least now I know I can defeat this vending machine in three minutes tops.

First I unhook my Swiss Army knife from my belt and use the mini screwdriver to pop the top panel off the vending machine’s scanner, exposing the vid card and laser reader. Then I take my dad’s lucky old five-dollar coin from my pocket and slip the sucker between the card and the magnetic strip at the bottom of the panel. After a few seconds I swipe my bracelet again, andBEEP!—“You have one million HONOR points. Request for Cherry Marsala accepted. Your remaining balance is one million HONOR points.”

Child’s play.

I peel off the top of the ice cream carton and pop out the tiny spoon underneath. Then I settle myself into one of the observation chairs, staring down at Earth while the ice cream melts into smaller and smaller ovals on my tongue.

I lean forward in my chair and study Earth below. Having passed over the western coast of Africa, we’re now directly above the Canary Islands, with the Atlantic Ocean stretching out in front of us. When I was a kid, I used to spend hours poring over my mom’s giant book of maps, running my fingers over the lines of rivers she’d planned to raft down, or cliffs she wanted to climb, or valleys she wanted to hike. I’d study the careful curve of her letters in all the spots where she’d written Can’t wait! or Won’t this be fun? All the places she would’ve gotten to if she hadn’t had me and then died, like, a nanosecond later. I must’ve memorized the whole world through that book. And even though I never really officially met the lady, every time I’m up on this deck, I feel like maybe I know my mom a little bit better—staring down at her book of maps blown up life-size.

Just as I notice the East Coast of North America coming into view, I get a pang in my belly that at first I think means I have to pee but that I soon recognize as homesickness. Honestly, I’d rather need to use the toilet. I sigh and flop back into my chair, doing my best not to squint at the continent to pinpoint which blobby part is Ardmore, Pennsylvania. I miss my dad. I miss Ducky. I even miss that goddamn high school.

You’d think that life two hundred and fifty kilometers above Earth’s surface would be totally different from life in the suburbs of Philadelphia. But it turns out it’s almost exactly the same. I still spend more time doodling in English than diagramming sentences. I still talk to Ducky more than anyone else. And I still have to deal with mega-skank Britta McVicker. I can’t even believe cheerleaders are allowed to breed.

From my ice cream container I hear a dull thunk. My spoon has hit the bottom of the pint without me realizing it. I’m just debating how much my hips will hate me if I go back for another pint, when from behind me comes a soft, quick rumble, and the ship rocks under my feet. It’s over almost as soon as it began, but if there’s one thing I know about orbiting the planet, it’s that bumps are bad. As I’m heading to the window to see if maybe we collided with some debris or something, there’s another thud, and my jacked-up center of gravity lands me ass-down on my ice cream carton, bringing the grand total to four pratfalls in one afternoon. The intercom from the far-up corner of the observation deck crackles to life, but all that I can make out is static.

I hoist myself up onto my feet, and I’m sure I have flecks of cherry, butterscotch, and mushroom smeared on the butt of my maternity stretch pants, but at the moment I’m slightly more concerned about the ship. The lights above me start flickering, dimming and sparking back to life. In and out, light and dark. The displays by the door are glitching too, and now I’m starting to freak just a little bit. I’m trying to remember the Survival Checklist for Emergencies in Space my dad made me memorize before launch, but all I can get through is “Oxygen? Check!” before my feet roll out from under me again.

Okay, this is starting to get old.

And now the Goober is at it too, kicking me in the bladder.

“Listen, bud!” I shout, flat on my back, my right elbow wedged under a chair. “Stop kicking me! I do not want to pee right now!”

I manage to right myself again, and I make it to the window as the intercom sputters back to life. Someone is saying something over the static, I can tell that much, but I can’t make out what it is. Whoever it is certainly isn’t speaking English. The sounds are deep, creaky, guttural. Like no language I’ve ever heard.

I press my body against the full-length window, so close to it that the Goober can probably see out too, and together we examine the length of the ship. We have a full 360-degree view from here, but I’m so busy looking for debris that it’s several seconds before I spot the obvious.

Protruding from the starboard side of the Echidna, like a giant tumor, is another ship.

Another ship?

I race to the door, ignoring the Goober kicking me the whole way, and I’m just about to fly down the main staircase when something passing by the foot of the stairwell makes me reconsider that course of action.

Dudes in helmets. With guns.

Da-fuh?

I duck behind the door and try to hide the best someone can with a fetus jutting out her front end. I don’t know who these dudes are, and I can’t see their faces, but I know for a fact that they weren’t on board ten minutes ago. The faculty doesn’t pack heat. They usually stick with demerits. Which means that the L.O.C. Echidna is under attack.

Lights flickering, intercom crackling, I suddenly realize: Everyone else is on the lido deck doing underwater prenatal yoga except me.

And that’s when I think something else. Probably the most real, true thought I’ve ever had.

Astin eases me into the black SUV. I gasp as pain rockets through my wounded leg. I think about the person who just tried to kill me, and I think about the secret that we both shared.

Once upon a time, I thought that the biggest secret in my life was that I’d killed a friend of mine.

Rearing up above the Tigris were the spectacular crags of the Hakkâri Dağları, all dark stone, white snow, and formidable black shadows. And above Jerry were the domes and antennae of the CIA listening station, perched here at eight thousand feet, with convenient electronic access to Syria, Iraq, and Iran, the Middle East’s perpetual stormy petrels.

Jerry had been delighted to learn that the Hakkâri Dağları were also known as the High Zap Mountains, because the High Zap was what he and his partner had done four days earlier—reached electronic fingers down into the plain below and performed long-distance surgery on crucial electronics controlled by a clutch of malign foreigners.

The operation had been a brilliant success, at least until the news had come that had left Jerry stranded on the mountain.

Sunlight dazzled Jerry as a frigid wind numbed his cheeks. Tears leaked from his eyes. He wished he had been allowed to bring a camera to take a picture of the scene, but things were so secret here that cameras and cell phones were forbidden, even to station personnel.

This was simply the most beautiful and spectacular place he’d ever seen in his life. He’d been born in the flat Iowa cornfields and now lived outside Annapolis. Giant rearing untamed glacier-capped mountains were a completely new experience to him. He just wished he could leave the station and visit some of the towns he could see on the plain of the Tigris, far below.

On his one and only drive, coming to the station, he had looked out the window as they passed through the square of a small village and he’d seen old Arab women with tribal henna tattoos on their faces. It was like a visitation from another universe.

Being stranded up here at the station sucked. Totally.

Jerry flapped his arms and shuffled his feet for warmth. When he and Denny had flown out to Turkey, they’d had no clear idea where they were headed, and they hadn’t brought clothing suitable for living on a mountaintop in the middle of February.

The deep mountain shadows expanded as the sun neared the horizon. Jerry scanned the horizon one last time, then turned and shuffled his way back toward the main building.

The listening station lacked any trace of glamor. Four acres of windswept limestone had been scraped flat by bulldozers and surrounded by chain fence draped with rusting signs reading “Danger” in English, Turkish, and Arabic. The main building was a prefabricated steel structure that sat on a concrete pad. Two more structures served as garage and generator room. Above the main building were the huge golf ball–shaped domes that concealed the station’s dishes and antennae, their bulging geodetic surfaces an echo of the domes of the mosques on the plain below.

The air was glacial and snowfalls were frequent. The only reason the station wasn’t absolutely buried in frozen H2O was that the wind blew most of it away—though still there were drifts here and there, and occasionally the station personnel had to get on a ladder and sweep snow off the roof before it collapsed.

The gate was padlocked shut, and an old Mercedes truck, with icicles dripping from its bumpers, was parked behind the gate as a security measure—another obstacle that a jihadist car bomber would have to push aside in order to blow up the installation. But the gesture seemed halfhearted—the regular station crew didn’t seem very interested in the possibility of attack, and in fact Jerry couldn’t see the station as a high-profile target. You wouldn’t get many headlines blowing up an anonymous, prefab site on a remote mountain in some place called High Zap. Much better to blast a café in Istanbul or an embassy somewhere else.

Jerry walked into the main building, stomped snow off his boots in the anteroom, and headed straight into the ops room with its coffee machine. He took his cup—a souvenir mug from Perge, where he’d never been—and filled it with hot coffee. The coffee was unbearably strong.

“You know,” said his partner, Denny. “You can watch the sunset perfectly well from the window.”

“Not the same,” Jerry said. He had a hard time keeping his teeth from chattering.

Around him data flashed across flat-screen displays, intercepted transmissions from Syria, Iraq, or Iran. The material wasn’t analyzed here; it was encrypted, sent to a relay satellite twenty-two thousand miles above the planet’s surface, then beamed down to a facility in northern Virginia where it was either inspected or, most likely, ignored and filed away—in any case, the data itself wasn’t any of Jerry’s business.

Neither Jerry nor his partner, Denny, were members of the station crew, nor were they CIA employees. They were special contractors who had flown to Turkey on a special assignment eight days ago.

What had surprised Jerry was the discovery that, despite working at a CIA facility, none of the station personnel were CIA employees. They were all contractors working for one corporation or another. But then he’d realized that, in fact, they all were CIA—the corporate identities were just ways of sanitizing the identities of Agency employees.

He’d realized that when absolutely none of them expressed curiosity concerning the task that Jerry and Denny had been sent to perform. The lack of interest in the Zap had been professional all right, but it wasn’t in any way corporate.

But now Jerry and his partner were stuck here on the mountaintop. While they were engaged in their special assignment, transmitting the High Zap to sites below, the Turkish government had changed suddenly and violently. The prime minister, on a state visit to Spain, found himself deprived of his office by the military. The president was under arrest in an undisclosed location. The entire country was under martial law—particularly the Kurdish areas, such as those on all sides of the listening station.

The attitude of the military government to the U.S. installations on Turkish soil seemed ambiguous. On the one hand, Turkey was a NATO ally of the U.S. and its military had enjoyed a long collaboration with the Americans on security matters. On the other hand, the Turkish generals were ultranationalists who might view with suspicion any foreigners using Turkish soil for their own purposes—a suspicion enhanced, no doubt, by the possibility that the listening stations might now be listening to them.

The orders that came down to Chas, the soft-spoken engineer who was in charge of the station, seemed to Jerry to be contradictory. Chas had sent half his people away—it wasn’t clear where, exactly—and was now running the station with a skeleton crew of eleven. Jerry and Denny, by contrast, were forbidden to leave the station at all.

Jerry had asked Chas why.

“Because,” Chas said, “the regular personnel won’t be able to tell the Turks anything they don’t already know.”

Jerry and Denny were confined to the mountaintop by their own importance. They knew about the High Zap, and the High Zap couldn’t be allowed to fall into foreign hands.

Another frustrating aspect of the situation was that even though they were bored and had nothing to do and the station was now shorthanded, Jerry and his partner weren’t allowed to use any of the station’s regular equipment. Denny and Jerry weren’t authorized to use the station’s gear, any more than the station’s personnel were allowed to use the laptop that Jerry and Denny had brought with them from the States.

It left Jerry with nothing to do but watch the sunset. Or the sunrise, if the desire took him.

“Wanna play Felony Maximum?” Denny asked.

Denny was a short man of twenty-eight years. He’d been a fat kid and had grown into an obese adult, but two years previously he’d put himself on a severe diet that consisted solely of vitamins and an assortment of Progresso canned soups. Denny had lost seventy-five pounds and his body was now of svelte proportions, for all that he still had no muscle tone—he had managed to lose all the weight without any exercise at all, and even climbing a stair left him out of breath.

The odd thing about the diet was what had happened to Denny’s face. Its moon-pie proportions had shrunk, but the skin hadn’t ebbed to the same degree as his flesh, and the results were deep creases that hadn’t been there before. Jerry thought his partner now looked like a very intelligent monkey.

Despite the peculiarities of his appearance, the weight loss had nevertheless achieved its objective: it had given Denny the social confidence to court and marry a young woman named Denise, who was now pregnant and installed in a minimansion off in the Blue Ridge.

Right now Denny was sitting in the cubicle he and Jerry had been assigned, which featured a desk, two chairs, and a flat-screen monitor that hadn’t been connected to anything, because they weren’t permitted to touch any of the equipment.

“Felony Maximum,” Jerry repeated. Felony Maximum V was one of the two games Jerry had brought along with his Xbox, and the other, which involved World War II fighter combat, had already been played to death.

“Fine,” Jerry said. “Let’s play. But this time, I get to use the MAC-10.”

Jerry and Denny had managed to get the game’s convict protagonist out of Ossining and into Manhattan when they were called to supper—hearty lamb stew in the local style, fresh bread, and strawberry Jell-O for dessert.

Meals at the listening station were taken mainly in silence. If you were the sort of person who was a spy and who furthermore lived in a small near-monastic community on a mountaintop, you were also likely to be the sort of person who didn’t talk much. Jerry and Denny sat at the same table and chatted to each other about the progress of the game and how best to get revenge on the mafiosi who had sent the game’s protagonist to Sing Sing.

A phone rang in the ops room, and Mauricio, the short Dominican guy, answered. He called Chas in, and twenty seconds later Chas returned, his face set in a look of cold resolution.

“The army’s coming,” he said in his soft voice. “We need to erase or shred every piece of data in this place.”

There was a clatter of plates as the station crew pushed back their chairs and stood. Jerry stood as well, though he didn’t quite know why.

Chas looked at him.

“We need to get the two of you out of here,” he said. “Get your stuff together.”

Jerry left the remains of his dinner on the table and hustled to the little cell-like room he’d been assigned. He unplugged the Xbox and put it in its case, then began stuffing clothes into his duffel.

The laptop, with the High Zap encrypted on its hard drive, had waited in its case in the corner for the last four days. Once he’d understood that the contents of the laptop were what was confining him to the mountain, Jerry had asked permission to erase the drive, which would guarantee that it wouldn’t be captured by rogue Turkish generals or indeed anyone else—but to his surprise, his employers in Virginia had balked. He was supposed to return the program in the same condition in which he’d received it and otherwise not use the laptop except when authorized to do so. It was there in black and white—Jerry had signed a contract to that effect, a contract that included a twelve-page nondisclosure agreement.

When permission was refused to erase the hard drive, Jerry had realized that the program almost certainly contained a log on it that would inform his employers when and in what circumstances the program had been accessed. The return of that log intact would be the only way the Company would know that the High Zap hadn’t been misused or copied.

His bosses, Jerry realized, were too paranoid, or bureaucratic, for their own good.

Jerry threw the duffel on a chair and headed for the bathroom for his toilet kit. Chas appeared in his door, a set of keys in his hand.

“Take the VW,” he said. “Go warm it up now; then we’ll load it.”

Jerry took the keys and threw on his thin nylon jacket and ran out to the garage, through the ops room where the document shredder was already in operation, and past the techs bent over their keyboards, intent on zeroing every file on the hard drives. The Volkwagen’s door handle was bitterly cold to the touch. The plastic seats sucked the heat out of Jerry’s bones.

The car didn’t start the first try, the cold battery reluctantly heaving the starter over. Jerry swore, switched off, and then ground again and the engine caught. He shoved the heater lever all the way over to the right and turned up the fan as far as it would go. He put the car in neutral, set the hand brake, and stepped out into the still air of the garage.

The garage door shot up with a great boom and the high mountain wind roared into the building in a stinging swirl of ice crystals. Jerry gave a convulsive shudder as the cold hit him. Chas, looking warm as toast in a huge blue fur-lined parka, came into the garage.

“Open the trunk,” he said.

Jerry bent into the driver’s compartment again and spent a few useless seconds looking for the trunk latch. Chas reached in past his shoulder and popped the trunk lid.

“Okay!” he said. “The army’s coming up from Hakkâri. You’ve got to get to the crossroads before they arrive.”

“Right,” Jerry said. The crossroads were a good ten klicks down the mountain, where the switchback road that led to the listening station met the two-lane road leading west from Hakkâri. If the army got to the crossroads before Jerry did, there was no way the car could escape.

“When you get to the crossroads, turn left to Şırnak.”

“Check.”

“Here’s your stuff.”

Denny rushed into the garage, burdened with his carry-on and his suitcase. Denny was followed by Mauricio with other bags, including Jerry’s duffel. The luggage was heaved into the trunk, and the trunk slammed shut.

“When you get to Şırnak—” Chas began.

Jerry turned to Mauricio. “Do you have the laptop?” he asked.

Mauricio flashed a bright smile. “I took care of it, man.”

“Okay!”

Denny opened the passenger door and dropped into the car. Chas leaned close to Jerry’s ear. “When you get to Şırnak,” he said again, “call your contact at Langley and ask him for instructions.”

Jerry stared at Chas.

“Call him with what?” he asked. “We weren’t allowed to bring phones.”

A savage grimace crossed Chas’s face. Jerry shuddered in the cold.

“Okay,” Chas said. “In that case, get on the E90 and head west till morning. Then buy a phone with prepaid minutes and make your call.”

“Fine.”

Jerry decided that he officially no longer gave a damn about his instructions. He just wanted to get out of the freaking cold.

“I’ll open the gate and get the truck out of the way,” Chas said.

“Fine.” Jerry’s teeth were chattering. “Bye.”

He dropped into the driver’s seat and slammed the door. The car wasn’t any warmer, but at least he was out of the wind.

Jerry experimented with the VW’s dashboard controls while Chas got in the Mercedes truck and backed it out of their way. He put the car in gear and inched forward, then when Chas swung the gate open put the accelerator down. The tires spun on ice, then caught bare rock and hurled the car forward. The VW sped through the gate and began the long trip down the mountain.

The road had been plowed after the last storm, but the wind was ever present and there were new drifts everywhere. The road surface was stone or gravel plated with ice. There were no guardrails, and a mistake would send them over a cliff, or into a stand of pine where they’d hang suspended until they starved or someone came and rescued them.

The idiocy and danger of their situation drove Jerry into a fury. He attacked the mountain as if the Volkswagen were a tank rather than a reasonably priced coupé. Twice he skidded off the road and bounced the car off banks of snow piled up in corners by the snowplow. He smashed through drifts as if the car had a blade on the front. He cursed continually as he worked the stick shift, and in his terror and anger he forgot all about being cold.

“Jesus, Jer!” Denny said. “Are you sure you know how to drive on ice?”

“Better than you do, Florida Boy,” Jerry said.

Denny’s weird shrunken monkey face contorted with fear. “I went to MIT!” he said. “It snows in Massachusetts! Maybe I better drive!”

“You didn’t have a car when we were at MIT. You had a Schwinn. I remember.”

“Fuck!” Denny shrieked as the wheels spun uselessly on ice and the car began a sideways drift toward yawning, empty space… and then one wheel hit some gravel, gained purchase on the road, and the car lurched back onto the correct trajectory.

“Will you please take it easy?” Denny cried.

“Shut the fuck up.” The drive was taking too much of Jerry’s concentration for him to deal with anyone’s fear but his own.

The VW lurched and skidded its way down the mountain. Short of the T-intersections Jerry turned off the lights so that if the army was in the area, they wouldn’t see the VW turning off the road to the listening station.

“What the—” Denny began.

“Shut up.”

Jerry pulled up to the intersection, the darkened car skidding the last few meters, and then turned left and pulled onto clean, dry, two-lane asphalt. Denny gave a cry of relief.

“Look behind,” Jerry said. “See if they’re coming.”

Denny turned to peer through the rear window. It took a moment for the banks of snow on the side of the road to open and give Denny a view of the mountain behind them.

“Holy crap,” he said. “There they are!”

“How many?”

“Looks like four or five vehicles. Like a convoy. I can see their lights like a mile away.”

Jerry backed off the accelerator and downshifted. He didn’t want to have to brake and give their position away with a flash of the brake lights.

“Tell me what’s happening,” he said. The VW bounced over frost heaves.

Denny rocked back and forth to keep the vehicles in sight. “I—I can’t see them,” he said. “Trees in the way.”

“Keep looking.”

The tires drummed through potholes as Jerry took the VW through an S curve, and then he ended up on a broad curve of mountain that provided a perfect view of the road behind them.

“I see them!” Denny said. “They’re coming up to the intersection!”

Jerry slowed again to let Denny keep the vehicles in sight.

“They’re stopping! They’re turning! They’re heading up to the station!”

Relief gushed out of Jerry’s throat in a long sigh. He accelerated and shifted into third and let a curve carry him out of sight of the vehicles behind. When Denny assured him that they were out of sight of the other vehicles, Jerry snapped on the lights and accelerated to eighty kilometers per hour, which was as fast as he was willing to go on a strange mountain at night.

“That was close!” Denny said.

“I don’t want you complaining about my driving again,” Jerry said.

Denny took several long breaths, like a runner at the end of a sprint.

“Can I turn down the heater? It’s really warm in here.”

It wasn’t just warm now; it was hot. Jerry hadn’t noticed.

“Sure,” he said.

Jerry drove on another ten klicks and then saw the sign for the Monastery of Didymus Thomas. The monks, ethnic Kurds, were Assyrian Christians, a sect of which Jerry had been completely ignorant until he’d been driven past the monastery on his way up the mountain. The monastery was literally perched on a cliff face, the monks living in caves hollowed out of the mountainside. The only way out of the monastery was to be lowered to the ground in a huge basket.

At the moment, presumably, the monks were all in their eyrie, shivering in their beds.

Jerry downshifted and swung the car into the monks’ parking lot.

“What’s the matter?” Denny said. “You want to change drivers?”

“Get the laptop out of the trunk. I want to zero the hard drive.”

Denny looked at him doubtfully.

“We’re not supposed to do that,” he said.

“Look,” Jerry said. “We’re going down into the Kurdish part of the country. There’s got to be a big Turkish military presence there, and I don’t even know if there’s a curfew or not. We’re very likely to get stopped, and I don’t want to get stopped with a software bomb in the trunk. We look suspicious enough as it is.”

Denny thought about this for a moment and then nodded.

“On your head be it,” he said, and opened his door.

Thanks a lot, Jerry thought, and sprang the trunk latch.

When Denny returned, Jerry saw the case and knew that they were totally fucked.

Totally, he thought. Totally totally totally. Totally.

Denny saw Jerry’s stricken expression. He looked at Jerry with his strange monkey face.

“What’s the matter?”

Jerry pointed at the case.

“Dude,” he said. “That’s my Xbox.”

ACT 1 CHAPTER ONE

FROM: LadyDayFan

Hey! I have received word of a Facebook site featuring this coded message.

Not to give it away or anything, but it looks like James Bond needs our help!

FROM: Corporal Carrot

The blond or one of the others?

FROM: ReVerb

George Lazenby could really use us!

FROM: Vikram

Why us? Is Q on vacation or something?

FROM: LadyDayFan

I have started the usual series of topics under the title From Isfahan, with Love.

Newcomers to this forum should check out Tips for Beginners. I also recommend my latest guide on Netiquette, which might just stop some flamewars before they begin.

FROM: HexenHase

Excuse me, but I must have missed something. Why Isfahan?

FROM: Corporal Carrot

For the Isfahan thing, check out this link.

FROM: HexenHase

Oh. Sorry. Got it now.

FROM: LadyDayFan

If you’ll look here you’ll find a crossword puzzle, which seems to have been left behind by an enemy agent. Does anyone know a six-letter word for “Meleagris covers mostly Anatolia”?

FROM: Corporal Carrot

He didn’t mean to. He was actually just trying to score a new computer and some other cool stuff, and in any case, the words “to its knees” were the New York Times’, not his—and were way over the top, in Sam’s view. Not as bad, though, as the Washington Post’s. Their headline writers must have been on a coffee binge, because they screamed

National Disaster

in size-40 type when their presses finally came back online.

Anyway, it was only for a few days, and it really wasn’t a disaster at all. At least not compared to what was still to come.

A juddering roar reverberated off the high-rise buildings, and Sam glanced up as the dark shadow of a police Black Hawk slid across the street. His breath caught in his chest for a moment, as if all the oxygen in the street had suddenly disappeared, but the chopper didn’t slow; it was just a rou- tine patrol. It weaved smoothly between the monoliths of uptown Manhattan, a cop with a long rifle spotlighted in the open doorway by a brilliant orange burst of early- morning sun.

He tried to remember a time when armed police in helicopters hadn’t patrolled the city, but he couldn’t. It seemed that it had always been that way. At least since Vegas.

Gray clouds were leaking a dreary, misty drizzle from high over the city, but low on the horizon, there was a long thin gap into which the sun had risen, teasing New York with a short-lived promise of a sunny day.

Sam cut down 44th Street and turned right at 7th Avenue to avoid beggars’ row along Broadway. He took 42nd to Times Square, where the tall video screens flickered intermittently or were silent and dark. The M&M’s screen still worked, although there were several blank spots that were said to be bullet holes.

Forty-second Street station was crowded—jostling, bustling, shortness-of-breath crowded—at this time of the morning, but he was used to that, and the subway was still the fastest and safest way to get around Manhattan.

He got out at Franklin Street station and took Varick Street down to West Broadway. He quickened his step as he passed Gamer Alley. His nose wrinkled involuntarily at some of the odors that hung around the entrance.

Two dogs were fighting on the corner of Thomas and West Broadway but stopped as he approached. He slowed, not comfortable with the narrowing of their eyes or the jelly-strings of drool dripping from their fangs.

One took a step toward him, a low growl in its throat. The other followed, its lips drawing back from its teeth.

Sam took a step backward. The dogs moved closer, haunches high, stalking him. He stumbled backward a few more steps. A police Humvee cruised past, and he half turned toward it, hoping the cops would stop and intervene, but they either didn’t see or didn’t care.

The entrance to Gamer Alley appeared to his right. As the dogs spread out to cut off his escape, he turned and strode into the smoky unease of the alleyway.

He glanced behind but the dogs had not followed.

The walls of the alley were high, and the street was narrow, a deep saw-cut across a city block. None of the dawn glow penetrated, just a tired dullness that washed through the clouds and was swallowed up by the steam and smoke from the food stalls. Gaudy fluorescent signs appeared indistinctly through the haze, promising the latest in video-gaming technology. The games they promoted outside were innocuous, but everyone, especially the cops, knew that inside, the full range of games, including all the illegal ones, was freely available.

People drifted past. Both men and women with the vacant stares and twitching hands of longtime game addicts.

Sam thrust his hands into his jacket pockets, hunched his shoulders, and moved deeper into Gamer Alley.

A woman in her twenties, fashion-model beautiful, sat on a blue office chair next to an overflowing Dumpster. Her hair was plastered to her scalp by the rain, and droplets of water formed on the end of her nose before breaking away in a rhythmical pattern. She did nothing. She said nothing. She just sat, watching Sam as he made his way down the alley toward her. A game addict for sure.

As he neared, the chair swiveled slightly, and although her head and neck did not move, her eyes remained fixed on him.

He passed her, the chair swiveling more, her whole body turning with it to stay focused on him, her face expressionless.

His shoulders crawled as he left her behind, as if her strange inactivity might suddenly explode into mindless violence.

Ten yards past, he glanced back. She stared at him, unmoving.

“Want to buy a dog?”

The man in a shabby gray overcoat was right in front of him, and he had to stop abruptly to avoid a collision.

“I, er . . .”

“Want to buy a dog?”

The dog in question was in the man’s arms. A mangy cross about the size of a small poodle but of no detectable breed.

“He’s a good boy,” the man said, thrusting the dog forward. The dog snarled and snapped at Sam, missing his arm by a fraction of an inch.

“No, I . . .”

“Hardly ever bites,” the man said.

“No.”

Sam took a wide step around the man as the dog’s teeth snapped together again in midair.

The end of the alley neared.

To his right, a door opened on a second-story fire escape. A man in his fifties burst out of the building dressed only in Mickey Mouse boxer shorts and a Hawaiian lei around his neck. He was carrying a coffee machine. He leaped down the metal steps three at a time and disappeared across the street and around the corner of a building just as two policemen in black tactical gear burst out of the same door, hard on his heels.

Sam escaped onto Church Street with a slight sigh of relief and a relaxing of his nostrils. His cell rang, right on cue, as he turned into Thomas Street, and he tapped his Bluetooth earpiece into his ear.

“Hi, Mom,” he said.

“What kept you?” Fargas asked on the other end of the line, his mouth full of something.

Sam looked up at the building opposite. He caught a glimpse of Fargas behind a window on the second floor, the two black circles of a pair of powerful binoculars jutting out from his long mop of unruly hair. Sam made a discreet waving motion with his left hand.

There was a flash of white from the window that he took as a sign Fargas had waved back.

“Cut through Gamer Alley,” Sam said.

There was a short pause while Fargas digested that. “Quick hit on the way?”

“Just sightseeing,” Sam said. “What are you eating?”

It would be caramel corn. Fargas was the only person he knew who could eat caramel-coated popcorn for breakfast.

“Caramel corn,” Fargas said. “Want some? I’ll toss a couple pieces out the window.”

“Suddenly not hungry,” Sam said. “Can’t think why.”

He walked casually past the Telecomerica building as if he had no interest in it whatsoever. He didn’t even glance at it.

“You sure this is possible?” Fargas sounded a little nervous.

“I’m sure it’s not,” Sam said. “Be no fun otherwise. They’ve got industrial-strength firewalls with a DMZ and a secondary defensive ring with ASA and IPSec. Impenetrable.”

“Then give it away, dude,” Fargas said. “I’m not going to jail for the sake of a hack.”

“Fargas,” Sam said, “you’re my brother and I love you, but you gotta get your head out of your butt before you fart and suffocate yourself.”

“I’m not your brother and you don’t love me,” Fargas pointed out.

“You know you’re the one I’d turn gay for.” Sam grinned up at the window.

“I thought you liked Keisha,” Fargas said.

“I’d definitely turn gay for her,” Sam said. “If I was a chick. How is she?”

“Still not interested.”

“Her words or yours?”

“She’s a sophomore. You’re a senior. That’s just wrong. Should be illegal.”

“Have you asked her for me?” Sam asked.

“You can’t ask her yourself?”

“She’s a sophomore. I’m seventeen. That’s just wrong. She’s got to ask me.”

“Loser,” Fargas said.