Chapter 14

Personally, I Like the Javelin

Gretchen was not the type who took chances with even the smallest details. She kept her fingernails trimmed to a precise shape and length, long enough to inflict damage in a cat fight but not so long that they got in the way of using her Tablet. This was a more exact calculation than those around her would have guessed. She wore her hair cropped short, not because it was easier to manage or brought out her gloriously high cheekbones. She kept it short purely for reasons of strategy. The only use long hair had in a fight to the death was getting in the way. It could be pulled, shut in a door, tangled in the gears of a machine. This was the way her mind worked: observe the risks, minimize them, complete the task at hand, repeat.

It was this kind of disciplined system of thought that made her even more invincible than the other second pulses wandering the face of the earth. It was also why she carried the darts, because one never knew for sure about the last second pulse.

Gretchen, like Meredith and Andre, had what she liked to call “special information.” Only the three of them, no one else, knew certain things. And Gretchen, for reasons she liked to turn over in her mind on a regular rotation, knew the most. She knew two things no one else in the world knew, because Hotspur had told her before the end. Her and her alone.

There will be five. Five second pulses, he had told her. No more, no less. It is ordained. Two will be twins, so really, in a sense, there will be four. One of these two is a doppelgänger, a black mirror, a balance.

Gretchen had never liked the sound of that. She’d also seen it as a miscalculation. Wade and Clara were both evil brats without vision or control. As far as she was concerned, they only reflected each other’s incompetence.

Hotspur also told her something else: There may come a time when these humans I have engineered must go. Even you, Gretchen. One day you must go. Water, the living things of earth, stone, and titanium. These are the way in, the way through, the darts of death. Do you understand?

She had understood perfectly. These were the elements that could kill a second pulse. And she knew the owner of all but one. Stone for Dylan, the living things of earth for Wade and Clara, water for herself. She could drink it, wash with it, touch it—but water was extremely dangerous for Gretchen. It had to be consumed in small doses. She never submerged herself in water, only showered, and even that burned after a few minutes. It was another reason, possibly the main reason, she kept her hair short. Long, wet hair burned her scalp and took too long to dry.

That left titanium, and the one who had never appeared. Somewhere, alone and hiding or unaware entirely, an unknown second pulse lurked. The last, the fifth, the most dangerous of them all. Dangerous because titanium wasn’t just lying around everywhere. Rocks, trees, water—these things could be found and used as weapons with relative ease. But titanium, well, that was another matter. It wasn’t the kind of thing one had quick and easy access to in the event of a real confrontation.

He’d chosen it for obvious reasons. For Hotspur Chance, titanium was the perfect element. He had torn it asunder, reorganized it, manipulated it into the clay of God. Titanium was the seed of it all: the Tablets, the States, the first and second pulses. But for one second pulse, the one Gretchen could never find, it was the poison that killed.

This was why she carried the darts in sleeves along her belt: six of them, made entirely of titanium, with tips as sharp as needles and feathers of coated steel.

She hated the fact that Meredith had been given the ability to sense the second pulse.

A balance of power is required, Hotspur had said. I know what I’m doing.

It had turned out to be his greatest mistake, for not long after that Meredith was gone; one of the second pulses was alive and kicking in her belly. Hotspur had let that happen and more. If the fifth second pulse was going to be found, it was Meredith who would make the discovery.

All these things—the number of the second pulses, the killing elements, Meredith’s sixth sense—all this information had been given to Gretchen and Gretchen alone. She thought of these many shards of knowledge and how they added up to a complete picture only she could see.

As she stared across the sky at Faith Daniels, Gretchen ran a perfectly manicured finger across the slick titanium of six darts. She drifted up, higher in the sky, much higher than the top of the tallest spire in the Western State, just below the ceiling of clouds. Of course Faith followed her ascent, but she held back, biding her time.

Poor little single pulse, Gretchen thought, staring across the open sky. Your days have been numbered. We arrive at zero.

She heard the sound of Clooger’s sawed-off shotgun before she felt the metal buckshot pellets bouncing off her back. The impact pushed her softly forward, as if she’d been struck by a blast of Nerf balls. She turned on Clooger and found he was surprisingly close, only ten feet off, reloading.

“Shooting someone in the back,” Gretchen said. “I didn’t take you for a coward.”

“Whatever gets the job done,” Clooger said, and then he shot her dead-on in the face at point-blank range, peppering her with metal.

Gretchen’s lungs filled with a great breath of air as her chest widened, and she floated slightly higher, her chin resting on her chest. When the breath released and her head came up, she was smiling. The shotgun flew out of Clooger’s hand along with all the shells he had in his pockets. Gretchen loaded the barrel with two rounds, but when she looked up to fire, Clooger was gone. He’d flown up into the clouds above, hidden from view. Gretchen felt a presence behind her but didn’t turn. Faith was at her back, close enough to kill with one shot.

“I’m the one you want,” Faith said, slow and steady.

Faith couldn’t see Gretchen’s face until she turned, only a few feet away, and fired the shotgun. At the same moment, Clooger descended from above, knocking Gretchen into a tailspin as he spun her around and around and let go, flinging her toward the Western State below. The timing was such that Gretchen hadn’t seen the way Faith moved right into the shotgun fire as if it were nothing more than a steady rain. Her second pulse was still, for the moment, a secret.

Gretchen turned on Clooger, her anger fully engaged now, and fired the second round in the chamber. As Clooger dodged to one side, a half-dozen pellets stung his left forearm. It hurt but didn’t break skin through his layer of clothes, and as Gretchen reloaded, he dived headlong, down toward her.

“Clooger, don’t!” Faith screamed, diving alongside in the same direction.

All Gretchen could think was how perfect this was going to be. Two rounds in the chambers, the barrel slapped shut. I’ll take them both, bang bang. This was almost too easy.

Gretchen took aim as both of her targets came in fast. The blast zone would be at least ten feet wide; two shots in a row would finish them if they stayed the course. She fired both barrels empty in rapid succession at thirty-foot range. Using the power of her mind, Faith pushed Clooger wide, tumbling him end over end into the vastness of the sky above the Western State. The full force of both shots, hundreds of lead pellets, slammed into Faith at close range.

And she kept on coming without the slightest hesitation. Gretchen’s expression changed from a gleeful rage to confused surprise. The idea that Faith Daniels could be the one, the last of the second pulses, was somehow beyond her ability to grasp in those first few seconds. It was a fact of the universe that couldn’t be true.

Faith’s fist, the hand that wore the tattoo of the hammer, struck Gretchen square in the face hard enough to rattle Gretchen’s brain. Her second-pulse weakness wasn’t a fist, but the punch was so full of power and vengeance that Gretchen felt it all the way down her spine.

Gretchen tumbled toward the tallest spires of the Western State, setting off the first of many alarms in the security center of the city. They were close enough now to attract attention, and bigger than the biggest birds that might fly through the airspace above the state. This set a standard drone protocol in motion, of which Clooger was the first to take notice. He pressed the sound ring.

“Hawk! Incoming!” he yelled. “This is going to get complicated fast.”

“I’m on it,” Hawk said. There were six attack drones heading into the sky, all designed first to provide high-definition visual, then strike if necessary. Hawk had prepared for this and knew he had only twenty, maybe thirty seconds. He’d already hacked into the military system and set up a daisy chain of commands that led from the security center to the drone video feeds. The States relied on visual to determine threats coming in from overhead and had never gone so far as to fire on a target. The drones, each of them shaped like a four-foot fighter jet, were extremely accurate at determining enemy fire. Inside the security center, Western State officials were unconcerned. They’d never seen anything but low-flying condors or the occasional mass of space junk falling to Earth. They were on strict orders not to shoot birds out of the sky, but space junk was like target practice, something they always hoped for. Western State security officials had an expectation, and it was Hawk’s job to meet it.

“Hawk?” Clooger said. “You seeing this? We got six fliers, coming in hot.”

Hawk didn’t answer; he was too busy programming, his fingers flying across his Tablet. Just a few more keystrokes, Hawk thought.

Got it!

“Okay, you’re clear,” Hawk said. “At least for these six.”

Inside the Western State all six drones were returning images of three huge condors, birds with wingspans of four feet that seemed to be participating in some kind of high-flying mating ritual.

Gretchen looked down into the mass of towering spires and calculated her options. There were very few weapons so high in the air, many more down below. And it had been her primary job to get down there anyway, to create some havoc, a diversion that would hold the attention of both States.

She dived, headfirst, like a bullet into the core of the Western State. Faith pressed her sound ring.

“Don’t you dare follow me in, Clooger,” she said. “I can handle this alone.”

Clooger was having none of that, taking chase right behind Faith as all three of them plummeted to Earth. But in his desire to help Faith any way he could, he’d set off a second set of alarms in the security center. There were now three, not two, objects in the sky, and one was unidentified.

“Cover blown!” Hawk yelled. “Cover blown! Get ready for incoming fire!”

Six additional drones launched off the tops of Western State buildings, making a total of twelve. Gretchen took control of the nearest one with her mind, guiding it in Faith’s direction. They were both below the line of the tallest buildings now, darting back and forth between them. Faith lost Gretchen around a corner and, clearing the edge, found a drone staring her in the face. It slammed into Faith’s midsection, buckling her over like a rag doll, pushing her backward. She slammed into the edge of a building, the metal and glass flying, and punched out on the other side. The drone was a rocket-fueled beast that wouldn’t let her go, so she turned it toward the ground and waited for the impact. Hundreds of stories down she went, faster and faster, slamming through encircled walking bridges that spanned buildings, knocking wide holes through frosted glass and steel. She turned toward the ground, straining against the power of the drone, and guided it through a maze of elevated walkways. When the drone hit the pavement, the impact was felt for a hundred yards in every direction, like a small earthquake rattling the Western State. The hole was deep, ten feet or more.

Gretchen flew in close, hovering overhead, a titanium dart at the ready.

Drones weren’t programmed to fly this low; it was far too dangerous. There was an enemy at ground level, and the protocol was to change to ground forces, which were dispatched from the nearest military station. Armored vehicles, loaded with personnel and weaponry, were on the move.

Clooger had landed on a building, where he assumed the position of a gargoyle, low and still. Clad in a black T-shirt and green camo pants, he held a knife with a six-inch blade in one hand as drones flew back and forth overhead, searching for him.

“Clooger, stay low,” Hawk said. “Airspace is crawling with drones. Must be thirty of them now. They’re on to us.”

“Is there anything you can do? Any kind of diversion?”

“Working on it. Hold tight. If you go airborne, they’ve got you.”

Clooger looked down over the edge of the building and saw the crisscross of white bridges clogging the space, the shadows of people moving inside behind frosted glass. The space between himself and the ground below looked like a thousand white arteries pumping shadowy blood.

He couldn’t help himself. Staying put just wasn’t an option. He dived for the ground, knife extended.

“Where is she?” Clooger asked Hawk, pressing the sound ring with his free hand as he dodged bridge after bridge.

Below, Gretchen waited. She could already hear the convoy of military heading her way from three different directions. Maybe she’d only imagined Faith was a second pulse, or maybe their little Intel friend, Hawk, had developed some sort of shield against a certain level of violence. Faith was probably nothing but a mangled corpse, ten feet underground, never to be seen or heard from again. She’d done her job—the military was on high alert, and the Eastern State was distracted with the mayhem she was causing. Everyone would be pleased with her effort, and she wasn’t finished yet. She planned to have quite a lot of fun wreaking havoc in the Western State before she was done. Why not enjoy herself a little? She’d earned it.

Clooger saw three things on his way down, darting between bridges and buildings: the military convoys, coming in from three directions; the impact hole from Faith’s crash into the ground; and his target, Gretchen. All three convoys converged into action at once.

The front end of all three convoys was made up of large assault vehicles, with doors that opened from the side, pouring armed soldiers out into the open like ants out of a hill. Within seconds there were a hundred of them in position, pointing everything from rifles to rocket launchers directly at Gretchen. Faith was nothing if not theatrical. She waited until the whole world seemed to be watching before bursting out of the hole, tripling its size as she came. Gretchen backed up in the air, momentarily stunned, then raised her arm and fired a titanium dart as if it were blown from a cannon. Faith turned sideways in the air, but the dart grazed her left arm, tearing into flesh. She screamed and lurched backward, stunned by the searing heat of pain. Blood began to flow as Gretchen took a second dart in hand. Someone was speaking through a bullhorn.

“Prepare to fire!” the voice said. There was a distinct feeling that whoever was in charge didn’t know what else to say. There were people flying in the air. This was not in the playbook.

Gretchen was about to fire the second titanium dart when Clooger slammed into her from behind. He smashed the knife into her back, but it was like hitting a slab of marble with the tip of a sword. Gretchen turned on him, thrust the titanium dart into his arm, and pushed him away. She pulled the dart back—it was far too valuable a weapon to waste on a single pulse—and veered in the direction of Faith.

That was when the bullets started flying.

“Fire! Fire! Fire!” the commander shouted. The whole quad between the buildings erupted with sparks and reverberating sounds as Clooger, stabbed and bleeding, flew back up through the walkways toward the top of the building he’d come from.

“Things are getting pretty hairy down here,” he said into his sound ring. “How’s that escape plan coming?”

“Just about got it, really close,” Hawk said. He’d never worked so feverishly in his entire life. His brain was fizzing with data as he went around every firewall the Western State had and dug right into the brains of the drones themselves. The dreadful voice reared up in his head like a warhorse: Plans proceeding as expected; it won’t be long now. Fire! Fire! Fire!

Hawk shook the voice free and kept programming as Clooger landed on top of the highest bridge, just below the line of buildings. He looked up and saw the blue sky above, looked down and saw the red blood pouring out onto his upper arm, dripping onto the white bridge. The shadows moved beneath him: people, running for their lives, trying to make sense of the brutality outside.

Down below, Faith was realizing something she hadn’t expected.

She knows. She knows I’m a second, and she’s got a weapon that can get through.

It was this thought that sent Faith flying out of the melee, around the first of many buildings. Gretchen took chase, the two of them leaving three military convoys scratching their heads and wondering what had just happened.

Faith hadn’t expected the maze of bridges and buildings to be so difficult to navigate, and she bounced from turn to turn like a badly thrown bowling ball skidding across multiple lanes. Along the way she saw people walking outside along the pristine streets, staring up at her as if she were some sort of aberration, a ghost or a phantom from another dimension.

“Hawk!” she yelled, pressing her sound ring. She turned a corner around a building and felt as though she was going in a big circle. “Where’s the field? Guide me in!”

This was the kind of distraction Hawk didn’t need, and it was only made worse by the other voices that were pressing in all of a sudden.

Dylan: “Faith, get the hell out of there! Whatever you’re doing, it’s not worth it. Get to safety!”

Clooger: “Patching up a wound here, just about back in business.”

Meredith: “Everyone stay calm and let Hawk focus. No more chatter! I mean it.”

The line went dead, and Hawk switched to a split-screen view on his Tablet. On one side, the coded brain of a drone lay before him; on the other, Faith’s position in the Western State, the location she needed to get to, and the route she had to take.

“Left around the next building, straight for seven buildings, right for three, you’re there. Got it?”

“Got it!” Faith yelled, and she was moving faster, thirty feet up, darting between the endless web of bridges spanning the towers.

Gretchen gamely followed, doing her best to destroy as much as she could as she went. Faith was attempting to leave no trace; Gretchen had a stated goal of wrecking as much as she could. She flipped armored vehicles as she passed over them, threw white Western State vans into bridges, killed innocent bystanders with complete and utter disregard for human life.

“I’m doing you a favor,” she said to herself as she watched a military truck slam into a plateglass window, crushing bystanders as it tumbled end over end.

Faith felt the wrenching regret for her decision to take Gretchen head-on and wished her plan had never included the Western State. Why couldn’t she have lured her out into the abandoned world and done this? Out there they could have gone head to head for hours and no one would have been hurt. But she knew this was Gretchen’s plan, too. She knew it would end up here, that it would be violent. She knew Gretchen was sent to do some terrible deed here, in the Western State. The collateral damage wasn’t Faith’s fault, but she felt the weight of guilt all the same.

I have to get her out in the open, she thought. And fast.

It was as she thought this very thing that Faith Daniels finally arrived in the place where her best friend had been murdered: the outdoor coliseum, the location of the Field Games. The grass was a bright green beneath her as she flew into the middle of the field. White stone columns, tall and thin, encircled the field, and behind them, the vast seating in row after rising row. It looked like something out of the Roman Empire, a beautiful expanse of white and green, the red ribbon of a track separating the two.

Faith glanced at her arm, crimson with blood from the slight wound, and felt a sudden burst of energy. She liked the pain and was glad to have it. It was she and Gretchen now, standing on the otherwise empty field, staring each other down.

“This is for you,” Faith said, looking up into the cobalt sky and thinking only of Liz. She looked at her arm and saw the tattoo of the chain and the ivy, then looked at the palm of her hand and saw the hammer. All she wanted was to feel no more pain, and the only weapon against the deep chasm of sadness that held her was the hammer of justice served.

Faith saw the titanium dart heading her way as Gretchen moved in closer. A column of stone stood to Faith’s right, and moving with sudden speed she avoided the weapon. But Gretchen was all business now. Killing Faith had become her complete and total focus. She moved with stunning speed, around the side of the column with another dart in hand. She rounded the corner and pulled to a stop as Faith backed up in midair, staring at Gretchen.

“I have you now,” Gretchen said. “You can run, but there’s no place to hide.”

Faith nodded curtly, as if she understood but didn’t really care one way or the other. Gretchen held the dart at the ready. One clean throw would do it. She was trying to decide whether to go for the head or the heart, savoring the moment. She was also enjoying the idea that she was taking this opportunity away from Clara. God, how she hated Clara’s arrogance. She had a radio receiver of her own, though she’d been careful not to use it for security reasons. Now that she’d unleashed the Western State army and cornered Faith, she felt it didn’t matter who knew where she was. And besides, she was invincible. Nothing could touch her.

“Connect CQ,” she said, which automatically sent a signal to Clara’s receiver, where Clara was soaring above the clouds in the prison.

“Everything going as planned?” Clara asked, her voice projecting out in the air as it sent waves of rage pumping through Faith’s veins.

“Oh, I think it’s going better than that,” Gretchen said. “I wanted you to hear this. It’s going to be something special.”

“Whatever you say, Mother.”

Faith could practically see Clara rolling her eyes with boredom.

“I didn’t know my own weakness,” Faith said. “I should thank you for pointing that out to me.”

“Sorry I couldn’t return the favor,” Gretchen said.

Gretchen had put all the pieces in place. Her spoiled brat was on the line, listening in. She’d gotten Faith out in the open where there was no place to hide. She had the weapon that would finish her in hand. It was perfect.

Which was why, when she should have been more aware of everything happening around her, Gretchen was caught unaware. A mass of water was beginning to rise from directly below her, where Faith had carefully planned its arrival in a fifty-gallon drum. The barrel itself wasn’t moving, only its contents. Fifty gallons of water, rising slowly and quietly up through the air, dripping like the tentacles of a poisonous jellyfish. Only now it was moving much faster on the power of Faith’s thoughts, so fast that Gretchen had time only to glance down before it surrounded her body, rising to the level of her neck.

“I don’t know if you’re hearing this or not, Clara,” Faith said. “But your mother is having a little bit of a moment here.”

Gretchen was choking. It sounded like she’d swallowed a small potato that was now stuck in her windpipe.

“Cat got your tongue?” Clara asked, and Faith couldn’t be sure if Clara was kidding, not at all aware of how much trouble her mother was really in. Either way, Faith’s work wasn’t finished yet. She had enlisted the help of Liz’s special somebody, the guy with the softest hands on Earth. Noah, the one who had been sitting next to Liz when the hammer came down, the one who had placed the barrel of water right under the column where Faith could find it. Faith looked across the long length of the green field and saw him standing alone.

“Time to go,” Faith said and, raising her hands out in front of her, swept away Gretchen, encased in a prison of water. Faith followed closely behind as Gretchen descended toward the far end of the field, where Noah waited. In his soft hands, the hands that had caressed the one he loved, he held a javelin. One end of the javelin was stuck in the ground, the other end angled up in the air at forty-five degrees.

“Better say good-bye,” Faith said.

Gretchen took a massive, gulping breath and found the strength to form words.

“Titanium. Her weakness is titanium!”

And with that she somehow managed to remove her hand from the watery prison that surrounded her and release the dart. It was, Faith would later recall, poetic in a way. She felt the piercing sting of the dart enter her side at the same moment Gretchen landed, back first, on the javelin. Coated with water as it slid into Gretchen’s spine, it passed through her heart and out the other side. The water surrounding Gretchen like a clear cocoon turned a divine shade of pink in the morning sunlight, then clouded into an ugly swirl of red.

Faith let the water fall to the ground, but Gretchen stayed where she was, pinned to the field like a bug in an experiment. Faith would always remember this as a moment of sweet release, a letting go. If her vengeance was a cancer the size of a melon in the pit of her stomach, she’d just chopped it in half with a clean, violent slice. She felt lighter, less weighted down. She would also later discover that the biggest reason for this new lightness in her head was the blood quickly staining the side of her shirt. The dart had gone all the way through, burning like a hot knife as it passed. “Personally, I like the javelin. It’s a good weapon, don’t you think?” Faith said, a little weakly.

Noah didn’t know what to think. He’d gone along with the plan because he owed it to Faith and Liz and Hawk, but now that he was standing there staring at the dead body of someone he didn’t even know, he wasn’t anything but scared shitless. He started backpedaling.

“You better get out of here, Faith,” he said. “They’re coming. You don’t want to be here when they show up.”

Noah started running at about the same moment the signal on Gretchen’s end popped and fizzled and faded away, the water finally having worked its way into the sealed casing of the device strapped to her belt.

Clara wasn’t entirely sure what her mother had said, garbled as it was through a wall of water, but she was smart enough to record the conversation. The first four or five replays revealed the whole message, which was as clear as a bell but far, far away, as if being heard from behind many doors.

Her weakness is titanium.

“Thank you, Mom. That information is going to be helpful. And thank you, Faith. I couldn’t stand the old bag any longer. You did me a solid. I won’t forget.”

 

“Clooger!” Hawk yelled. “You’re clear! Go now! Go!”

“Any chance he could swing by and pick me up?” Faith asked. She was lying on the field, a red stain growing slowly wider at her side. Blood was pumping not through her but out of her as she stared up at Gretchen’s terror-filled eyes. Faith half expected the body to reanimate, for Gretchen to pull the javelin from her own chest and begin laughing hideously.

Clooger didn’t think twice. He was in real trouble and he knew it, but it sounded to him as if Faith wasn’t doing much better. He was expendable; she was anything but. How she could have gotten herself really hurt he didn’t know, but it didn’t matter. He had to get her the hell out of the Western State, and fast. He looked up, saw nothing but blue sky, and went for it.

“Five buildings down, then a right,” Hawk said. “Make it snappy; this diversion I’ve set in motion isn’t going to last all day.”

“Roger that,” Clooger said, flying at breakneck speed between bridge spans, any one of which could have killed him on impact. He was giving it all he had, taking every risk he possibly could that wasn’t completely out of control.

He was one, maybe two minutes from his destination when Faith and Dylan started talking on the sound ring.

“One down,” Faith said, and then she got confused. Was it one down, one to go? Or one down, two to go? Two sounded weird, but she thought there were two: Clara and Wade. Or was it one?

“Are you okay?” Dylan asked. He was done worrying about who might hear him. The world outside was coming apart at the seams. “Tell me the truth.”

“She throws a damn good uppercut,” Faith said, the world of reality swirling like an eddy of water around her. “But I knocked her out. I took care of it.”

Dylan could tell she was fading. Faith was in real trouble. He wanted to break out of his cell, fly to her side, take her out of the mess he’d gotten her into. How had he allowed himself to end up in such a helpless situation? Trapped in a prison, no way out, flying away from the one he loved when she needed him most.

“Don’t leave me, Faith. I mean it. I’m not going to make it without you.”

“Such a romantic,” Faith said. “I always liked that about you.”

“I’m sorry,” Dylan said, trying to hold it together. “I’m really sorry.”

She thought of the secret places that were theirs alone: the top of the old Nordstrom building, the Looney Bin. She started to cry, tears clouding her vision as the sky turned into milky sapphire liquid.

“I love you, Dylan,” she said. “I only ever loved you. Come home.”

Dylan got up and went to the bars of his cell. He took one in each hand and pulled, harder than he’d ever pulled before. He screamed with effort and frustration, and the bars gave way, inching apart. But it wasn’t enough. He was in a maximum-security prison. The place was designed to hold the Hulk, and he wasn’t getting out until someone let him out.

“I love you, too,” he said, and felt his heart ripping in two at the thought of losing her. “I’m coming for you. Wait for me!”

Faith saw the frozen look of desperation on Gretchen’s lifeless face and summoned the will for one more thought before passing out.

“I might have been wrong about this revenge business. It’s not as great as I thought it would be.”

Meredith had remained quiet throughout, listening as she crossed into Arkansas territory with the rest of the single pulses, but now she spoke.

“It never is.”

Clooger couldn’t believe his eyes when he arrived at the coliseum. Gretchen, one of only five second pulses, pinned like a bug with a javelin to the ground. It was at once horrifying and beautiful, the kind of vision he knew all too well from one too many days as a soldier. The joy of a good victory was always overshadowed by the overwhelming bleakness of death.

He saw the stain of blood surrounding Faith.

Clooger had played doc plenty of times in the field and knew he needed to get her medical attention, and fast.

“Hawk, find me a hospital,” he said. He looked skyward and saw the crisscrossing trails of drones and the first of many explosions.

“Copy that,” Hawk said, thinking for an instant how he, too, was beginning to sound like a stowaway on the Starship Enterprise. “Just get airborne. I’ve set the drones to attack each other, but that’s not going to last much longer. They’re going to override my hack. Matter of time.”

Another explosion in the sky above as one drone blew up another and Clooger had Faith in his arms. She stirred momentarily, looked into his eyes.

“I’m scared.”

“Don’t be,” Clooger said, the tone of his voice full of strength. “I have you.”

Anyone who had come up against Clooger when he was in this kind of mood knew what it meant: proceed at your own risk. It didn’t matter if you were a warrior or an army or a second pulse; you knew there would be hell to pay. You might kill him in the end, but there would be consequences for messing with this guy, and those consequences would be harsh.

A few seconds later Clooger was airborne, where he dodged and parried his way through a maelstrom of explosions and drone fire, flying away into the blue, carrying the most important cargo the free world had in its arsenal.