Katie and Lily stood in the weird shadows of the armory, listening.
“What do you think happened to Jasper?” whispered Katie.
Lily’s eyes were wide. She had no idea what to do.
Katie walked a few steps back toward the door they’d just come through.
Then they heard the slapping of many feet, running together like a Roman legion in an old gladiator movie.
“A whole crowd,” whispered Katie. “Of one.”
It was the Dirrillill thundering toward them.
They darted toward a ramp. They remembered the way up to the roof.
They ran through the strange architecture of the Final Fortress of the Dirrillillim. Lily looked back.
She saw the reflection of the many-faced creature pursuing them across surfaces of glass. It doubled the hands, the mouths, the eyes, the arms that grasped.
“Girls!” called out one of the Dirrillill’s mouths, while others said, “Ladies!” “My dears!”—“We won’t hurt you!”—“We simply want to hold you hostage until we need to kill you!”
Katie and Lily scampered out onto the roof. They were far above the surface of the planet. Heaving the droopy force field over their heads, they made their way between old flying cars resting on cinder blocks.
The Dirrillill called out to them. “Let’s go! Back inside, girls!”
Stooped over, they crept toward one of the cars that looked like it might still work. They hid. They flattened themselves against the side. They hunkered down.
Above them, the old force field twitched and yanked as the Dirrillill raced around the roof, looking for them.
Lily could tell she was starting to breathe too much and too quickly. She was gasping with terror. Sometimes Lily wished her friends wanted to spend a normal weekend sitting around the house, watching stuff on the computer. She closed her eyes and wished herself magically to be sitting on the wall-to-wall carpeting in her living room, with the three of them making Rice Krispies treats and drawing interlocking lizards on their math book covers. As she heard the alien’s footsteps approaching, her panicked brain could picture perfectly every detail of every single piece of furniture in that living room: the scrapes on the coffee table, the pattern of the sofa, the cushions on the chairs, the bricks of the fireplace, the little black freckles where the rug had melted when sparks flew past the fire screen. . . . It was all in front of her eyes.
But it was fifteen hundred light-years away.
The footsteps were coming up right beside the flying car.
The monster was right near her, but Lily couldn’t even think about it—no!—so she just squinched her eyes closed, hysterically calculating that if the Horsehead Nebula is fifteen hundred light-years from Earth and one light-year is about six trillion miles, then . . .
Lily shivered. She was NINE AND FIFTEEN ZEROS MILES from her mother and her—
She opened her eyes and saw about twelve knees.
“Aha!” said the Dirrillill. “Dooby dooby dooby doo.”
The girls pushed away from him as fast as they could.
But there was nowhere else to go. They were on the edge of the roof. Lily looked down. It was about a hundred stories to the ground. Instant death if they fell.
The Dirrillill stalked toward them. Several arms held the canopy of force field up so he could get a clear shot at them. He had a gun.
“I froze your friend because I need him. I’m not sure I need you.” He clicked a knob on the gun. “So let’s try disintegration, shall we?”
He did not make the mistake some bad guys make: talking a lot before firing. Though he had many mouths, he just didn’t have that much to say anymore.
So he just shot the girls there and then.