“Maya, I’m going to drop in here and disable the cell phone jammer. Once I do that, I’ll be trapped inside—”

I interrupted, trying not to yell, “What?!”

The only thing worse than doing this with Carl, I realized, was doing it alone. “You’ll need to go get Miranda, in the high-security wing. It’s back toward the airport, you remember how to get there?”

We had gone through the plan, but Carl hadn’t told me we wouldn’t be there together.

“How the hell am I supposed to get past an armed guard?”

“I’ll take care of that for you. Once I do, just wave your phone over the keypad and then enter the code. You remember the code?”

“839-201,” I said. “How do we get you out of there?”

“I’ll make my own way out eventually. It will just”—they hesitated—“take some time. This body wasn’t going to be useful to you anyway. Do not think of me as being in one place. I will be with you.

“OK, I should have it disabled within the next five minutes or so,” they said, and then the monkey disappeared over the other side of the wall and I was on my own.

And so I went back into the woods and dragged myself through the leafy, dense undergrowth, trying not to trip and fall every six feet. I was not trained for this. I felt like my pants were full of bugs, and in my defense, the number of bugs in my pants wasn’t zero. Before that day, I had spent as much time in jungles as I had in outer space.

But I made it through. I had the giant cinder block building in sight after less than ten minutes of walking. Something in me hoped that the guard by the door would be sleeping, or maybe just gone. But no, a man in military fatigues stood next to the door. In his arms, he held the kind of rifle people take to wars.

Now was the time to just trust. I walked out of the woods and toward the building. What must it have looked like to that guy—this figure in a black hoodie and pants just stepping out of the forest?

“Hello!” I said, if only to be polite, when I was still thirty or so feet away.

“Hello,” he said, in a thick accent I didn’t recognize.

“I need to go into this building.”

“Do not come any closer.” He reached for his belt, which held a walkie-talkie.

I hadn’t thought about walkie-talkies! I was much more worried about the big ol’ gun. I stopped in my tracks, unsure what to do. He held the walkie-talkie to his mouth and then, all at once, he crumpled.

CARL

I left a surprise at Altus. I am technically a benign infection. But if my parts do not communicate with each other, they stop being me. They do not have consciousness, but that does not mean that they disappear, or even that they stop infecting new cells. When I severed my connection to the parts of myself that were at Altus, that did not destroy them. They just stopped being me. And in the moment before I snipped that thread, I sent a signal for those bits of me to hide, to change shape, to go stealth, and then to infect everything they could.

And I believed that they would go undetected by my sibling. I believed they would spread. I believed it because that was the only way we could succeed. If my sleeping network had been detected, it was all doomed anyway. But when that guard collapsed in front of Maya, I knew it had worked. That was a true test of signal strength, to interrupt the consciousness of a man that my sibling had so completely infiltrated.

Of course, it was like a beacon to him. I had hung a sign on Altus that said “Under Attack,” and I could already feel his response rising.

APRIL

I heard a man yelling as I walked to the front of the plane. “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU THINKING! YOU CAN’T JUST LAND A PLANE WITHOUT TOWER CONFIRMATION OR FILING A FLIGHT PLAN! GOOD LUCK HOLDING ON TO YOUR LICENSE AFTER THIS!”

But then, as my face was lit by the lights coming from the building, his frustration faded.

“Jesus,” he said in a mix of awe and exasperation. “Umm … come with me, I guess.”

And so I left the plane, alone.

Once inside the tiny terminal, I sat for about fifteen minutes before a group of five dudes came into the waiting area. One of them was Peter Petrawicki.

“April, this is a surprise honor.” He stuck out his hand.

I knew that this would happen, but that didn’t mean that I was ready for it. I hadn’t spent much time with anyone except my best friends since I got my new face, and now here was my archnemesis, in a crisp blue button-down and khaki pants flanked by hired muscle acting like nothing at all odd was going down.

“Peter,” I said, and I reached out and grabbed his hand, smiling. Normal, normal, normal!

“Do you want to go have a chat? I’m sorry if you caught us a little off guard. It is the middle of the night.”

“Yeah, that’s my bad,” I said, sounding cool, but feeling very small, very alone, and completely terrified. “It just seemed suddenly urgent that I come visit you,” I said.

“Well, let’s get to a conference room and we can talk about it. But first, I hope you don’t mind, we’re all about secrecy here, can you hand Davis your phone?” He gestured to the biggest of his companions. They had clearly all hastily dressed, but nonetheless each had a jacket on that could very easily be concealing a gun. I handed my phone to Davis, thinking that this plan was terrible and that I hated everything about it.

As he led me out of the hangar and through a courtyard toward a large building, Peter Petrawicki did what he did best.

“April, when I heard you had come back, I was …” He paused for dramatic effect. “I was just so relieved. The part I played in your story was not a kind one, and you owe me nothing. But I hope that you know I never wanted anything like that”—and then he turned to me, gesturing vaguely at my body, small and overshadowed by the bulk of him and his companions—“like this to happen to you.”

We walked past a huge cinder block building with no windows. That, I knew, was where Miranda was being kept, and the thought of her made me stronger. It made it clear that this guy’s talk was nothing more than the most distilled bullshit on the planet. That didn’t stop him from spewing it, though.

“I felt deeply responsible for what happened to you. I still do. What a foolish campaign I was on. I was chasing the high, that was all. Now, what we’re doing here”—he gestured around at the giant, curving building we were approaching—“is real change. You can’t change the world on cable news. You actually have to do something. And we’re doing something amazing.”

I was starting to realize that he was just giving me a modified version of a speech he’d given dozens of times before, possibly to every new high-level recruit that landed on the island. He opened the door for me, and as I walked through it, I felt the fear biting at the back of my throat as I said, “Yeah, and all you needed to do it was sell yourself to the space aliens that you got famous by despising.”

I saw a flash of anger in his eyes, but it was gone just as fast.

He didn’t say anything more until we were alone in the conference room.

“What do you know?”

All of the bullshit had suddenly been washed away. I realized that the flash I’d seen in his eyes wasn’t anger; it was fear. He was afraid I knew something, but what? And it came to me. When I’d said that he sold out to the aliens, I meant that he’d been using the changes in our brains Carl created to make Altus work. But it was more than that.