He was Russell Fucking Blackfield, striding naked toward his destiny, and he could still vary the pattern.

Chapter Twenty-One

Southern Chad

31.MAR.2285

“The breathing,” Ana said. “It’s stopped.”

She had it right. The rhythmic ebb and flow of warm air had vanished. At that instant, as if on a dimmer switch, the yellow glow emitted by the floor began to fade.

“Shit,” Skyler growled. “Run.”

Even as Ana turned, Skyler saw the barricade iris in around the tunnel through which they entered. Three plates, hidden in recesses around the passage, slipped silently into place. He glanced left and right, hoping against hope, and saw the same thing.

“No. No, no, no,” Ana was saying. “This is not good.”

The light continued to fall until it vanished completely. The room didn’t quite go pitch-black, though. Dull gray-blue light still spilled in from the hole in the ceiling above the dais.

A series of booming thuds shook the entire room. The sounds came from above.

“What is that?” Ana asked, breathless.

“I’ve no idea, and I don’t like it. Not at all.”

“Skyler,” she whispered. She was looking past him, toward the dais.

He turned and saw … nothing, at first. Then it registered. A yellow glow where there’d been none before, coming from the depths of the pit below the shell ship. The light grew brighter as he watched, then seemed to stabilize.

The deep, reverberating thuds from above continued. Explosions? No, they weren’t violent enough, he thought.

Skyler strode back to the precipice and looked down. Deep below, a half a kilometer or more, he guessed, a circle of blinding yellow light had appeared. It reminded him of looking directly at the sun, and of the silo below Nightcliff where he’d fallen through an iris floor into … something indescribable. Something that had saved him and not the creature that chased him there.

“Sky!” Ana shouted.

He whirled.

A shaft of light had appeared near the edge of the room, coming from a newly opened section of the ceiling. Shadows danced on the floor below and then something fell through. A body hit the floor with a grunt.

Skyler swallowed hard and aimed.

The lump on the ground moved. Hands stretched out, then it began to push up, revealing eyes that glowed with yellow laser light. It came to its full height, illuminated from the opening above like an actor on a stage. He could see it look from him to Ana, then back. At the same time the armored subhuman coiled and spread its arms out.

Without warning the light that shone down on it vanished as the portal in the ceiling closed, leaving just a pair of yellow eyes glowing near the edge of the room. The two glowing orbs hung there, unmoving.

His wits returning, Skyler slipped his finger over the trigger of his gun and began to squeeze.

Ana fired first.

He heard the vump from her launcher, saw the trail of smoke in the darkness between her gun and the creature’s chest. It staggered backward a step from the impact, slamming into the wall behind it. Skyler braced himself for an explosion, but none came. Instead a cloud of smoke began to hiss from the small canister that now lay on the floor. White smoke, so white it almost glowed in the shadows. Tear gas.

“To me!” Skyler shouted to her. The gas he guessed would have no effect on the creature. It might be human, but that coating over its body he figured had to be akin to an environment suit, not merely just armor.

Ana kept her body pointed toward the thing as she danced around the corpses on the floor. When the creature moved away from the wall again Skyler squeezed off a salvo aimed at its head. His aim was true; he saw the head jerk sideways. But the subhuman shrugged this off like a bothersome fly and turned to face him again, its glowing eyes like two stars in the growing cloud of tear gas.

Another shaft of light lit up the room off to his right, and another body fell through. Skyler spun and saw a third behind them, already up and surveying the room before it.

“Oh, hell,” he muttered. They were trapped, good as dead.

“What do we do?” Ana asked, her voice high with fear.

“Try the other canisters—just fucking shoot!” He fired as well, clicking the weapon into fully automatic and pouring bullets into the same creature he’d already shot.

Ana’s launcher took on a rhythmic pace as she emptied the remaining five rounds—two toward the right and three at the creature behind.

White gas began to fill the perimeter of the room. More shafts of light appeared. A fourth, a fifth. Soon there were seven of the armored creatures.

“What are they waiting for?” Ana shouted over Skyler’s gunfire.

Overwhelming odds, he wanted to say, but a new sound cut off his reply. The noise began as a low rumble but quickly grew to skull-shaking volume, like standing near an aircraft that had suddenly ramped its thrusters to full power. The floor beneath him vibrated. Indeed, the whole building shook.

“What’s happening?” Ana shouted, her hand suddenly gripping his forearm as she almost fell. She righted herself and, impressively, began to slip a new set of canisters into the chambers on her gun.

“Nothing good,” he said back. His gaze remained on the creatures at the edges of the room. Their posture implied they were just as awed by the noise as he and Ana were.

Then it ended. Gone in a heartbeat, absolute silence in its wake.

Skyler began to feel his eyes itch, a slight burning sensation building as the gas began to fill the room.

The creatures stepped forward in unison and Ana fired again.

This time, though, she did not aim at the enemies surrounding them. She aimed at one of the barricaded doors instead, and the cartridge she fired exploded in a brilliant flash of fire and smoke. Chunks of debris rattled against the walls, the floor, the ceiling. One of the black-clad subs toppled sideways, limp. Struck in the head by shrapnel maybe. A shock wave of air pushed against Skyler. He winced as the heat of the blast pulsed across his face, pushed him backward a step. Chunks of material skittered past his feet and into the deep pit.

Something grabbed his arm. No, someone. Ana. She yanked him toward the explosion, running hard. His legs lurched into motion as if by their own free will as Ana pulled him toward the cloud of smoke and fire. His eyes were burning. How she could see anything he had no idea, but he ran.

The floor beneath him changed, sloped upward, and he knew they’d made it out into the hallway through which they entered. At the top of the corridor Ana let go of him, turned, and fired. A ball of fire and heat erupted from below. Then another, and another. Ana pulled the trigger as fast as the bulky weapon would allow, turning the portal through which they’d run through into a morass of fire, smoke, and rubble.

Her launcher clicked empty. She started to reload, the expression on her face a mixture of anger and grief. The grief was an illusion, though; the way she squinted and the streams of tears rolling down her cheeks came from the teargas. Skyler grabbed her, turned her. “Save it, keep moving.”

He took the lead, his weapon more appropriate in the tight hallways. The sensation of having needles piercing his eyeballs faded to a mere burn. He followed the same path they’d taken on the way in, hoping he remembered it correctly, but given the symmetrical layout he hoped it wouldn’t matter. The tunnels, now mostly dark, all looked the same, though. It didn’t help that his vision kept blurring, that he had to keep squeezing his eyes shut against the chemical agent. It occurred to him suddenly that the occasional holes in the floor were no longer there. Either that or he’d been extraordinarily lucky not to have tumbled into one as they’d run. He’d completely forgotten to watch for them.

“Wrong way,” Ana blurted, halfway along a narrow corridor.

“It’s this way. Right up ahead.”

“No.” She pulled against him. “We missed a turn or something; we haven’t been here before.”

He started to argue, then swallowed it. She was right. A dim light came from ahead, showing a pristine floor. Behind, he could see the evidence of their footsteps on the slightly dusty surface leading to this spot.

Skyler turned and went back down. The room below he’d rushed through without much of a glance. He studied it now and realized it was the same room they’d originally entered through, only the wide entrance had vanished. A wall like any other had replaced it.

“Open it,” he said to Ana, glancing down at her gun.

She pushed back as far as possible, guiding Skyler to stand around the corner of the hallway. He let her push him, focusing on reloading his rifle. Last clip.

She took a place next to him, leaned out, fired, and ducked back. A flash of yellow lit the hall, followed by a rush of smoke and hot air. The sound buffeted his eardrums, already ringing brightly from the fight below.

He waited next to her, and while the smoke cleared Skyler took her hand in his. Ana turned and drew his mouth down to hers, pressing her warm mouth against his own with fierce urgency.

“I love you,” she said.

“I lo—”

A subhuman’s piercing howl interrupted his words. Skyler stepped past Ana and brought his gun to bear on the hole she’d created to the outside.

In the cloud of smoke that hung there he saw a half-dozen forms moving toward him. Some upright, some down on all fours. As he aimed the air in the room changed, almost pulling him toward the creatures. The smoke suddenly lurched in unison, rushing upward into hidden ventilation crevices in the ceiling.

The creatures took no notice of this. They saw him clearly now and began to move. Skyler fired at the two closest and dropped them easily. He adjusted his aim. The next pair showed no sign of fear.

More came in from the opening Ana’s grenade had created. Only … had the hole become smaller? Skyler fired but his focus had split.

Indeed, as he watched the outer wall changed. The ragged edges spawned by the explosion smoothed out as the hole shrank. A slow, almost imperceptible movement at first, in the span of seconds it became obvious, then astonishing. The last few meters closed in the space between two gunshots.

Just like that, the hole had vanished. Ana raised the grenade launcher again, but paused when Skyler rested a hand on the thick barrel.

“Save it,” he said. “We’re trapped.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

The Flatirons, Colorado

31.MAR.2285

The white-hot pain dug into Tania’s skull like a thousand nails.

“Kill me!” she shouted. Or, she tried to. Had the words formed? Reality and imagination seemed to smear together.

She could do nothing except rock back and forth on her knees and try, try, try to focus. Focus on something, on anything. The pebble by her hand. A nearby clump of grass. Each time her eyes found something that might draw her to reality, a lance of agony would crush the world under its spiked boot.

There were sounds. Close or, perhaps, very distant. Gunshots and snarls and … birds. That was a new addition. Songs of birds. No, cries. Alarm. Thousands of birds, far off. Tania tried to look and was rewarded with a hammer blow to the center of her mind. The subhuman in her trying to break free. Her sanity, shattering.

“Something’s happening!”

Who’d said that? Who had shouted? Natalie? No, Nat had died. Collateral damage in a failed assassination. Oh Nat—

The coherent thought was set upon by the virus, crushed, wiped away like a deleted file.

“Tania!”

A hand grabbed her arm. She pulled away, heard herself actually growl. But the voice, it was …

Vanessa. Yes, a friend. The woman’s arms enveloped Tania from behind and forced her to the ground. Sheltering her from something.

All the while the birds screamed. Louder and louder until—

The wave hit. A pulse of something. Not air or water but … energy. Tania felt the shock wave slam into her not physically but mentally. A concussive force that rammed headlong into the thorns that gripped her consciousness, fracturing them, turning them to so much mental dust in a single, all-powerful strike. And then …

Clarity.

Quiet.

The pebble by her knee. The clump of green grass sprouting through a crack in the packed dirt. Vanessa blanketing her, sobbing.

“I’m …,” Tania said. She had to swallow first for the word came out as a croak. “I’m okay. I’m okay. I’m okay.”

The woman who lay on top of her shifted, rolled to one side onto her knees. “I thought you were …” The words caught in her throat and trailed off. “I was about to shoot you.”

She had a pistol in her hand, dangling from tired fingers. It fell to the ground in a dull thump. Numbly Tania noted the lack of a knife in her own hand. She glanced around, saw no obvious sign of it, and decided to accept the fact that she was unarmed.

Tania tried to rise, but despite the apparently stalled disease her head still pounded. She rolled partially onto her back instead, her air pack prevented her from going all the way over. She stared at the blue sky above. Birds were everywhere, floating in lazy circles, searching for the nests they’d just fled. Singing, now, or just silent. “What happened?” Tania asked. “Is the thing making its own aura?”

The idea made some sense. The object certainly resembled the material the towers were made of, yet clearly it hadn’t been helping her when the towers left. Maybe their departure had switched it on. Maybe it was only a few meters in size.

“I’ve no idea,” Vanessa said, picking up the gun again, “and I don’t care. You’re alive and talking clearly, and we need to go. Now.”

Tania glanced up at the sudden urgency in her companion’s voice. “Why?”

In answer she pointed. Along the tree line where the aura towers had powered their way south, Tania saw movement. People racing toward her. Some ran, some loped, others stumbled and staggered.