Annalise was already on her feet. Both of her arms hung at her side, having been twisted counterclockwise until her elbows pointed forward. Her forearms were twisted another 180 degrees beyond that. “Get the fuck up,” she said. Her face was pale and shiny, as if she was about to faint or go into shock. It had been a long time since I’d seen her look so wrung out. “We got to get away from here.”
She glanced vaguely behind her, where the sirens were growing louder.
I kicked upward and rolled to my feet, and even though I didn’t brace myself with my arms again, that motion, and the impact of every step I took as I chased Annalise toward the street, shook my dislocated shoulder and elbow joints and the shattered bones in my arms. The pain made tears well up in my eyes, and that made me all the more furious at Milton Fucking Hardy.
Emily’s chain link fence was twisted up like modern art, and the concrete sidewalk had been burst into chunks, then flung into the street, shattering windshields and denting fenders. I picked my way through the rubble as best I could, well aware of the silhouettes in the upstairs windows all around us. No one was going to ignore all that gunfire.
Annalise rushed to the address Daria had given us. At the curb, she shouted, “Let’s go! Time to move out!”
The door flung open and Daria sprinted out, Emily close behind. Emily was carrying a plastic grocery bag with what looked like a bowling ball inside. Annalise hurried toward the van, saying, “Let’s go open this shit let’s go.”
But when Daria came close enough, she registered what we looked like—especially me, judging by her reaction—and recoiled in horror, her hand covering her mouth. Emily actually screamed.
“Stop fucking around,” Annalise snapped. “Daria, get Ray’s keys out of his pocket and get in the van.” She turned to Emily. “Not you.”
“Boss—”
“She doesn’t know and she’s not supposed to know.”
Daria came up next to me. “She’s my identical twin. They’ll kill her if they find her, so she’s coming. Emily, open the side door and help them inside.” Then she put her hand into my front hip pocket to fish out my keys. “Hello again, Ray. Normally, I’d make some sort of salacious comment, but you look like you just walked out of a horror movie and I am on the edge of vomiting right here in the street.”
“No idea what salacious means,” I said, as she took the keys and Emily helped me into the back. Oh, shit. As she settled me against the side of the van, I closed my eyes and reached for my ghost knife. There. I called it to me as the engine started. It cut a slot in the back panel, then landed on the floor at my feet.
Annalise glanced at the damaged van, then back to me. “Great. Yet another way this van will be easily identified by the cops.”
“Open that bag,” Daria said as she pulled away from the curb, “and start. We talked about what you would need to do.”
Emily did not look directly at either of us. “They need a hospital.”
“No, they don’t.”
“No, we don’t,” I said at the same time. “Your sister knows the score. Just follow her lead.”
Emily reluctantly set the bag on the floor, revealing a big, precooked spiral-cut ham.
“Fuck,” Annalise said. “Ham. This is going to take forever.”
From the front, Daria said, “This is what we could steal out of Emily’s friend’s fridge, so quit complaining.”
We did. Annalise and I sat with our backs to the wall of the van while Emily pulled off long, wide slices and held them out, first to the boss, then to me, for us to take a bite. At first, she treated us like rabid dogs, afraid we might take a finger. Soon, her fear gave way to distaste. She clearly didn’t like handling the meat with her fingers and didn’t like feeding us in the dirty van.
The first time one of Annalise’s bones cracked as they reset themselves back into place, Emily squealed and dropped the slice she was holding. It took some coaxing to get her to move closer and start feeding us again, but with her sister’s assurance, she did it.
“What are you?”
It was a question I kept hearing lately, and I didn’t like it. Every time someone treated me like I was not human, I felt less human.
Of course, that’s what I’d been doing to Annalise since almost the first moment I met her. No wonder she was so fucked-up.
Annalise gave her usual answer, Aliens, which Emily thought about for a few seconds, then shrugged and went back to feeding us. Then she started talking to us, asking if Milton Hardy was an alien too, and how that sort of made sense, and did we come here on a ship and if so where was it parked and…
Daria cut off that shit. We pulled into a grocery store so Daria could run in and buy meat that was not so processed. Once we switched to that, our injuries started healing much faster.
Annalise, not having been sliced to ribbons by plate glass, was fixed faster than I was, so she moved into the passenger seat, leaving me in the back with Emily and the burning questions she obviously wanted to ask.
It had taken days to grow back my foot. Knitting broken bones so they would twist my hands back into place, restoring my eye, and closing the raw, bloodless gashes on my legs, face, and everywhere took a little more than an hour.
When I waved off the last nuggets of ham—having finished off the beef Daria bought before returning to it—Emily finally worked up the courage to ask “Does all this hurt?”
I sighed and nodded. “But maybe not as much as it should. Boss, where are we going?”
Annalise turned in her seat. “It’s gotten so late that it’s almost early. We know where they keep the plane that Serrac is supposed to use, and we have nothing better to do than go to the airport and watch it. Shit, Hardy is probably pushing his timelines forward, so we should have already been there an hour ago.”
“Sorry,” Daria said. “I know better than to hide out in my sister’s house, of all places, but I still hadn’t shaken off what that asshole did to me. And I’m sorry, Emily, for putting you in danger.”
“So,” Emily said, brushing off all talk of danger, “we’re going to the airport?”
“We are not,” Daria said, with a special emphasis on the first word. “This part is not for us. We’re going to hide my way, which means we’ll be safe for a couple of weeks. Sorry, you guys, but I’m not going to be able to help you anymore.”
“Finally,” Annalise said, “we’re going to be rid of you.”
Daria laughed. “Yeah, right. You can’t fool me. You just dropped everything to race across the state to save my life. Now I’m breaking your heart by bugging out.”
“Pft. Ray was driving. I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Heart. Breaking.”
What do you know, Annalise was… I didn’t even know what to call it. Bantering? She wasn’t smiling, but Daria sure as hell was. Somehow, Daria had broken through the boss’s shell, just a little. Meanwhile, all Annalise did with me was complain about how she’d grown sick of me. Maybe having that knack for getting people to like you and open up was what made for a good investigator.
Emily was looking at me as though she knew exactly what I was feeling, then looked at her sister, then at me again. Maybe she wasn’t really ready to believe we were aliens after all.
Daria pulled into a little strip mall, then tossed me the keys. “Good luck!” Emily, to her credit, picked up the hambone and beef packages before she left.
“Go,” Annalise said, with no trace of goodwill.
I climbed behind the wheel. “We need to talk about Milton Hardy.”
“I knew this was coming. Now you’re going to ask how he got away from us, and how he twisted everything around him, including my hands and arms, when he did it.”
I also wanted to ask about the way he’d erased my anger. Had he eaten it, the way some predators feast on emotions? Or did he just step on it? But the truth was, it didn’t really matter. We’d faced similar magic in the past, and it was always fucked-up to have some spell or predator change who you were. I hated it, even though I was doing almost the same thing every time I cut someone with my ghost knife.
Annalise sighed. “Fucked-up things happen when predators are around, and we don’t always know why. But I’ve seen that vanishing, twisting thing before—just once—when I was a girl. Milton Hardy just stopped time.”
“Wait. What?”
“It was only for a little while, by his perspective, but enough for him to get away. That was how it worked the first time it happened, too. Back then, me and Eli caught up with the asshole within a couple of hours and he was practically comatose. It takes a lot out of them, I guess. Otherwise, Hardy could have taken our heads. That’s all I know.”
“So, Milton Hardy can change himself so that physical objects can’t affect him, and my ghost knife, too, so magic can’t affect him, and he can also change himself so that time can’t affect him. Huh. Maybe he can do the same thing with our emotions. Like our anger at him, and hatred for him, just isn’t directed at him anymore. It has nowhere to go. Suddenly, we’re fighting someone who seems sort of boring and neutral, which is why it felt like all the energy was running out of me.”
Annalise didn’t say anything. She just shrugged.
“How do we kill him? It, I mean?”
“When he can control time? There’s only one way. He’ll have to die so suddenly and unexpectedly that he never realizes it’s happened.”
“Like a sniper shot to the head.” Except ordinary bullets wouldn’t take out a predator as powerful as this one. They wouldn’t take out much weaker ones, either. You needed magic for that. I’d already come across bullets with spells engraved on them, but the guy who made them was dead. I wondered what it would take to acquire some new ones.
I focused on the road around me, letting those thoughts simmer in the back of my mind.
The sun was peeking over the horizon when we arrived at the Watsonville airport. I’d imagined that we would park in a lot somewhere and Annalise would use trickery or force to get through a security gate.
That didn’t happen. We drove on an access road until we saw a hangar with the logo for High Blue Aviation on it. Then she had me park at the chain link fence.
There was no one nearby, so she just walked up, grabbed the chain in both hands, and pulled, popping the metal mesh one link at a time. Then we stepped through and strolled calmly across the asphalt.
The sky was clear and the air was chilly. Planes were taking off and landing almost constantly, and the noise was startling. People in what looked like little luggage carts full of beautiful matching leather bags zipped by, but no one took notice of us.
From the far side of the fence, the hangar had looked shiny and white, but the closer we got, the more chips in the paint we saw and the more prominent the rust spots at the corners of the buildings became. On the back of the hangar was a single sheet-metal door painted the color of brick, probably to hide the rust. I figured it was the kind with a push bar on the other side, and I wondered if it would be locked. Based on what I saw from movies and TV, the front of a hangar always stood open, so why lock a little door when the big one is standing wide?
Christ, I was tired. We’d been running too long without sleep.
“Boss, next question. What’s the deal with Hardy’s Ark?”
“What’s the mystery? He created what he hoped would be a safe haven from predators, and he carved spells into the entrance, thinking that would protect people, and then he sold spots in his underground bunker for gigantic assloads of cash.”
“The guy already has assloads of cash.”
“It’s never enough.”
“Okay. That’s undeniable, but the real Hardy is gone, right? He’s a predator now. Whatever the original plan for the Ark, why is this predator still working on it?”
“Ray, the whole reason I keep you around—the whole reason I spent nearly seven years in a trailer in rural Oregon—is because you are supposed to be able to answer these questions. I’d seen Hardy’s escape move before and knew a little something about it, but this shit? Working out what people are doing and why? That’s what you’re good at and that’s why you’re here. So, how about you tell me why the predator wants to keep an anti-predator installation going.”
I remembered the way Milton Hardy had stood in the entrance way to the Ark. He’d seemed comfortable in the theater and during the other parts of the tour through the facility, but in that room, his hands had been pressed against his sides and his shoulders hunched. At the time, I thought he was nervous about showing off his project to a peer of the Twenty Palace Society, but maybe the glyphs in the room were messing with him somehow. Pressing against him. Forcing him back.
Of course, he could go around them by passing through the rock and soil into the lower sections, which was probably why he had Lauren Woo drive us there without him. Not even he could enter through the front way.
Plus, the human version of Hardy was proud of his little project. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned about the ways predators take over someone’s body and their life, it’s that an echo of the original person usually gets left behind.
“I can see it going two ways, boss. Either Hardy—this new one, the predator—wants some remnant of the human race to survive whatever he’s planning. Considering we just fought cousins again, I’m guessing these new plans involve lots of predators. So, he’s putting them away like seed corn, and because this thing took over Milton Hardy’s body, or replaced it or whatever, he has very Milton Hardy ideas about who would be the best people to restart civilization.”
“Meaning other rich people. What’s the other option?”
“That he’s about to summon a bunch of predators into the world, and he wants to set aside his own food supply.”
“Fuck.”
Then the conversation was cut off. We had almost reached that sheet-metal door when we heard the unmistakable click of a push bar latch. The door swung open.
Out stepped a tall, muscular Asian guy in lightly stained overalls. Pinstriped overalls, for fuck’s sake. He had a seventy-dollar haircut and a very tidy shave, even at this unbearably early hour of the day. He glanced at us in surprise, then said, “You don’t look like you’re supposed to be here.”
“Looks can be deceiving.”
Annalise was, as usual, dressed like she just climbed out the window of a halfway house. And she was wearing her oversized fireman’s jacket. Me, I was wearing ordinary clothes, but I had nothing new to wear, so my so-called ordinary clothes had a dozen slashes in it, most of which were faintly stained at the edges with blood.
And we were still walking toward him.
“Where are your badges?”
I sighed and glanced at the name tag sewn over his left pocket. “Look, Grant, my boss has some questions and we’re going to need you to answer them.”
He closed the door behind him and squared off with me, extending one hand with the palm outward. Stop. We didn’t. He started psyching himself up for a confrontation, saying Get back, keep back in a loud, angry voice.
Grant was taller than I was—maybe six five—and he had the build of a power forward, but he did exactly what we expected him to do. He noticed that our hands were empty, then he put all his attention on me. When I got too close, he lunged at me—a preliminary shove, the only acceptable move for a normal citizen in a fight that hadn’t even started yet. Annalise lunged at him.
She did something I’d never seen before and hope I never see again. She grabbed him by jabbing her fingers under his left pectoral muscle. Not the armpit, where it would have done permanent harm, but just that muscle. Then she yanked him down to his knees.
Grant was even more surprised than I was, and he cried out in pain, called her a crazy bitch, demanded that she let him go, tried to knock her arm away, and when all that failed, he finally threw a couple of punches at her. They were half-decent right crosses—a little slow, but he tried to put his hips behind it, at least—but they didn’t have any effect on Annalise.
“Weak,” she said after the third punch.
I leaned down toward him. “You can’t even break her grip? Look at her. She’s tiny. Maybe you should start going to the gym or something.”
He looked like he was about to argue that he did, in fact, go to the gym, but Annalise shook him slightly, and he turned almost wise. “What do you want?”
“Friend Three,” I said. “We want to be on it when it leaves.”
“Hah. Good luck with that.”
Annalise turned to me. “Cut him.”
I reached for my ghost knife, but Grant had made other assumptions.
“Wait wait! You can’t because you’re forty-five minutes late. Friend Three is, like, over Utah by now.”