Game Over

Chapter 52





EVER GET STUNG by a bee or a yellow jacket or a fire ant? Try all three at once, and then multiply the feeling by a thousand if you want some sense of the intense pain I experienced when Number 7 and Number 8 first grazed my left arm. If a doctor had shown up and offered to amputate my afflicted limb, I would have said yes on the spot.

But almost worse than the pain was the frustration. I couldn’t figure out how to fight back. It was a textbook case: often the greatest challenge of my powers isn’t actually using them; it’s deciding how to use them. And while I believe there are elegant solutions to every problem under the sun, finding the right one usually takes more than a few seconds, or minutes, or hours, or…

I dodged another dark blow from my amorphous four-eyed enemy as I gave up on the latest of several half-baked ideas, including:



Sucking them up with a giant vacuum cleaner. Problem was, did I really expect they’d stay sealed in the bag and I could just toss them into a Dumpster?



Using a flamethrower might be effective, but I’d run the risk of burning Kildare’s cells too, assuming he was somehow still alive in there…



Preserving them cryogenically with a freeze ray and then spending the next few years figuring out how to extract Kildare’s billions of cells from the mix once they weren’t moving around. Problem was that although I’d heard of them, I hadn’t yet learned the physics of freeze rays and couldn’t very easily just invent one on the spot.



Using a giant can of alien bug spray was a great idea, if I had any understanding of Number 7 and Number 8’s physiology and what toxins might actually be effective. And, again, how could I simultaneously not kill the Kildare parts of the cloud?



Going back in time and hoping things would work out differently. But I’d been told that Number 1 had somehow put a block on time travel for me, and since I had no idea how he’d done it, I couldn’t possibly figure out how to work around it.



Summoning a billion carnivorous dragonflies and instructing them to eat only those bits that looked like Number 7 and Number 8’s cells. I had no idea, though, if there actually were a way to tell Kildare’s bits apart from his parents’ bits… or if a billion dragonflies would fit inside the lobby… or if dragonflies were even trainable.





In short, maybe if I’d had a month and access to the intergalactic equivalent of Wikipedia, I could have come up with something. But I didn’t have a month. And I didn’t have a computer. And I did have a big black cloud of malevolent alien cells trying to sting me to death.

Again and again, they came after me. At first I was dodging pretty well—biding some time, hoping against hope I’d find a weakness, a chink in their amorphous armor—but with every leap, spin, duck, and parry, I grew a little less confident, and a little slower, and a little more scared.

And then blackness exploded across my vision, and searing white light seemed to be pouring into my skull.

They’d hit me. They’d gotten me in the face.

How could I have been so stupid? How could I have let them do this to me? How could I have thought—after losing Kildare, after my friends’ and father’s warnings—that I’d ever stand a chance against them?

I leaped blindly, as high and as fast as I could, wanting only to get away, wanting only to make the pain stop.

I smashed into the wall on the far side of the room with a bone-jarring thud, but I was almost grateful for it. The stinging wasn’t as bad as before, and my vision had partially come back. Apparently, they’d only grazed me.

And then, finally—as if the impact had knocked some sense into me—I had a halfway decent idea.