“It means,” says a new voice, feminine and vaguely familiar. I spin around, reaching for my sidearm, and I see a face I haven’t seen in a year, not since Washington D.C.—Maggie Alessi. “That none of you are safe here.”
Alessi was Katsu Endo’s right-hand lady at Zoomb, the technology giant behind the rebirth of Nemesis, whose interference has had long and destructive consequences without much in the way of repercussions, mostly because of its massive ties to Washington and lucrative government contracts. While Hawkins’s thorn has been DARPA, ours has always been Zoomb. It shouldn’t surprise me that they are, once again, involved in shady dealings, but it does. Endo and Alessi were instrumental in stopping Gordon and a handful of Kaiju from turning the world into a human-life-free zone. While I still hold a grudge against Endo, it’s mostly for kicking my ass on a few occasions. He’s still a fugitive, and it’s still my job to bring him in, but I had no plans on tracking the man down. He’s earned that much.
I have a lot of questions for Alessi, specifically about Zoomb’s potential involvement with Nemesis’s disappearance, but the problem she’s just posed dwarfs them all.
“Who will come?” I ask, drawing my weapon, but not aiming it at her. She’s unarmed and dressed like a civilian. She’s not here to hurt us. If she’s telling the truth, her goal is quite the opposite.
“The BlackGuard,” she says.
“Who?” Hawkins asks.
“The men responsible for destroying the Tsuchi in Oregon.”
I don’t miss the fact that she used the same name for the BFSs as the BlackGuard she’s talking about.
“The DARPA special ops team,” Hawkins says. He’s fishing, but he doesn’t let on.
Alessi’s momentary surprise is confirmation enough, but she says, “How much do you know about them?”
“Enough to know they’re bad news,” I say, “which brings us back to the problem at hand. When are they coming?”
“I don’t know,” she says, “but if they’ve seen Lilly, they’ll come for her. Soon.”
Alessi and Endo both know about Lilly. They’ve seen her in action. They don’t know her origins, and they didn’t ask, but they’ve obviously kept quiet about her. But now, it seems, we’ve put the crosshairs that Hawkins has always feared right on Lilly.
“You need to leave here,” Alessi says. “All of you.”
“I suppose you have someplace for us to go?” I ask. “I’m sure Zoomb would like to get a peek at Lilly.”
“And at her,” Alessi says, pointing at Maigo, “but they don’t know about them. About either of them. And we’re going to keep it that way.”
“Why?” I ask, unable to restrain my skepticism. “Does Endo want to keep them for himself? Or is he simply waiting for the highest offer?”
“That’s not fair,” Alessi says. “He saved your life.”
“He also serves himself.”
Alessi is silent for a moment and finally says, “Endo’s allegiance remains where it has always been.”
After leaving the Japanese Defense Force, Endo served under General Gordon, and then in the private sector, working with Zoomb, but in each of those instances, he was involved in all things—
Maigo screams and falls to the floor, clutching her head.
The conversation with Alessi slips from my mind, all fears of exposure and impending BlackGuard doom forgotten. I hurry to her and fall to my knees. “Maigo what’s—”
My voice is cut short when I reach out and take her hands. The physical contact acts like a conduit, slamming me into Maigo’s mind for a moment. We stand across from each other, both ten years old again, on Christmas morning, dressed in footie pajamas and staring at each other. I reach out for her, opening my mouth, but then the world becomes a blur.
Heat surrounds me, pulsing in the darkness.
Maigo is here, too. I can feel her.
Where are we? I think.
Back. The mental voice belongs to Maigo.
Back where?
Stabbing pain fills my body, pulsing through me three times, growing in intensity like a migraine headache.
She’s alive, Maigo thinks to me.
Who... And then I know. Oh my God...
My eyes snap open, and I sit up from the floor, where I must have collapsed. Maigo sits up next to me, pulled from the strange mental connection.
I grip her shoulder. “Was that?”
Maigo nods, looking relieved and afraid.
Collins crouches next to me. “What happened? Jon, what’s—”
“It’s Nemesis,” I say, turning to Collins, feeling terrified, but unable to prevent a smile from forming. “She’s alive.”
11