I stand up, cup my hands to my mouth and shout, “Run, Mark! She’s coming!”
Lilly hisses at me and then she’s off and running, a black blur between the trees, and then in them, leaping from trunk to trunk, branch to branch.
Collins stands up and brushes herself off. “You know he’s screwed, right?”
“Nah,” I say, feeling less hopeful than I sound. “Hawkins is like a jackrabbit, and he’s got a head start.” I catch a glimpse of Lilly soaring between two-hundred-foot pine trees in the distance. “Yeah, he’s screwed. Let’s go watch.”
We run down the wooded hill toward the field at the bottom. Mark is making the same run, maybe a quarter mile to the west. If we hurry, we might reach the field in time to see him get tackled. Moving in a straight line, we reach the field and stop, watching the tree line to our right for any sign of Hawkins or Lilly. Did she catch him already?
A line of flags running through the middle of the field delineates the two sides. If Mark crosses the line, we win, and we seriously need to, otherwise all the sage wisdom and experience we have to offer Lilly will fall on deaf ears. She needs to know she’s not invincible. So far, all we’ve managed to accomplish is the opposite.
I walk out into the field, watching the line of tall pines for any sign of movement. All I see are puffs of yellow pollen being swept into the air on the breeze. Normally, in an open space like this, I’d be worried about someone spotting Lilly. In public, she wears a pretty badass looking suit—think Snake Eyes but with a woman’s figure, and no swords—she doesn’t need them. But the federal government, at the President’s insistence, was inclined to give the FC-P one hundred acres of land in Willowdale, Maine, where Collins served as Sheriff for a time, and where Nemesis was created in a secret lab disguised as an abandoned Nike missile site. The lab, leveled after Nemesis’s escape, is now hidden at the core of a massive, fenced-in preserve. We have fresh No Trespassing signs threatening prosecution, and the latest in high tech monitoring, which Watson can watch from the Crow’s Nest (the FC-P’s headquarters) back in Beverly, Massachusetts.
“See anything?” I ask.
Collins starts to reply in the negative, but she stops short and points. “There.”
Hawkins is distant. Small. His head barely visible above the tall, yellow grass, despite his height. He’s wearing just a T-shirt and shorts, which is supposed to be my uniform, and he’s running in a sprint, like Tom Cruise in...well, in every Tom Cruise movie ever made. His arms, rising and falling, are a blur.
As Collins and I jog toward the action, I let myself think, he’s going to make it, but I quickly follow that thought with, “Holy fuuuu.” I never finish the expletive. I’m too stunned.
Lilly explodes from a tree in a cloud of yellow pollen. She’s at least seventy-five feet up, and arcing downward toward Hawkins, who is oblivious to her aerial approach. I nearly shout a warning, but I realize Lilly would disqualify the win, if we won.
“Just a little closer,” Collins says, and I smile. She hated this at first, but once Lilly started getting cocky, she’s been on board.
For a moment, I think Lilly is going to land on top of him, but she lands right in front of him in a crouch, her back turned. Hawkins doesn’t miss a beat, diving over Lilly and rolling back to his feet. He doesn’t bother running now. It would be a wasted effort. He’ll be tagged in less than a second.
Lilly strikes, reaching out for Mark’s back.
But he manages one last move before Lilly tags him. He throws the flag, which is wrapped around its metal post. It tumbles through the air, landing just short of the dividing line.
Lilly thrusts her hands in the air. “Yes!”
Collins and I stop nearby, close enough to watch what happens next.
After a few seconds of victory dance, Lilly notices her three silent observers, stops and misreads the situation. Again. “Sorry,” she says. “That was over the top.”
“Bonus points for apologizing, but...” I point to the flag.
Lilly’s head snaps around, just as a blond head of hair, perfectly hidden in the yellow grass, rises up to reveal the lithe Dr. Avril Joliet. As a biologist and oceanographer, she lends her scientific prowess to the team. But to Lilly, she’s ‘Mom.’ Like Lilly, she’s prone to impulsivity and is widely considered the reason we lost the first five capture-the-flag matches, but over time, Joliet learned how to operate on a team. And as she casually bends over from her position behind the dividing line to pick up the flag, she delivers us our first win.