Game Over

Chapter 40





HOW MUCH TIME was I losing just resting there and debating everything I saw through my thousand-lensed butterfly eyes?

There was no way Kildare could be the enemy, I thought. I mean, what kind of evil space alien practically bawls his eyes out saying good-bye to a creature of an entirely different species, one that his parents want to kill and eat?

I could only imagine what my father would say if he knew I was forty miles outside Tokyo developing sympathies for the son of Number 7 and Number 8 on The List of Alien Outlaws on Terra Firma: I was just too darn gullible. When you think about it, wasn’t that precisely why I’d failed to notice that the little girl in the test had really been an alien? I saw her, and, like some just-landed-on-Earth simpleton, I assumed she was a poor, sweet little innocent whose life it was my mission to save from demon motorcyclists. Now, here I was out in the real world stalking my real enemies, and yet this time I didn’t think it could be a trap?

Still, the way the creature had simply replied, “Faith,” to Kildare, kept echoing in my head. Why shouldn’t I have faith in my own instincts? Hadn’t I gotten this far relying on them?

The second I made up my mind to begin to turn back into my regular self, the creature raced up, belched a cloud of donut-scented gas in my face, and, with a distinct note of mischief, said, “Catch me if you can, Alien Hunter!”

Startled, I tumbled to the ground, the stalk of bamboo crushed by my sudden human weight.

“Wha—Daniel?” Kildare said, as shocked as I was. “How did you find us?”

I ignored him and kept my eyes on the Pleionid. “You said you wanted to find me!” I blurted as I struggled to my feet.

“If you are who I think you are, you won’t have too much trouble,” the Pleionid replied, winking a puppy eye at me and breaking into bubbly giggles again. “Can’t be too cautious!”

And, with that, it was gone. Or, rather, it would have seemed gone if I hadn’t been aware of some of its abilities and known what to look for. A nearly-impossible-to-detect flicker of motion, like the faintest breath of wind in the grass, was racing across the field.

“Where’s it going?” I yelled back at Kildare, already sprinting after the Pleionid.

“You’ll have to catch him to find out!” Kildare shouted, fading away behind me as I hit—thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty miles per hour—trying desperately to catch up.

It was racing right for the train tracks, which, I quickly realized, were about to be occupied by a Tokyo-bound shinkansen, hurtling our way at more than a hundred miles per hour.

I put on an additional burst of speed, sending up a rooster-tail of mud and rice plants behind me. I felt a little bad—some farmer was going to be upset at the furrow I was making through his paddy—but there wasn’t time to apologize or to fix things right then.

I was just a dozen or so yards behind the Pleionid when I realized it was aiming to cross the tracks a split second ahead of the approaching bullet train, thereby trapping me on the other side of it or, perhaps, leaving me smeared across its pointed nose.

Fortunately, I happen to be able to leap higher than a speeding locomotive. Unfortunately, as I cleared the hurtling train, I didn’t see any sign of the Pleionid.

What I did see was an alien I recognized from the GC Tower boardroom.

A hunter.