“Mom?”
An Chin’s expression had frozen in mid-thought, mid-sentence, fooling Alex into thinking she was just pausing. But her eyes didn’t blink, just continued to gaze up at him blankly, Alex afraid to let go of their grasp for fear he’d lose his mother forever if he did.
But she was already lost, her final breath crackling from her lips before fading off to nothing.
“We need to go, Alex,” Sam was saying, suddenly hovering over him, having recovered her senses. “You heard what she said.”
Alex glanced up at her, still holding fast to his mother.
“Alex, please,” Sam begged.
She stooped low by An Chin’s body, having noticed the strange bracelet wrapped around An’s wrist. Then she glanced toward Li Chin’s wrist and saw an identical one fastened to his wrist as well. Sam leaned closer to him and started to peel it back.
“What are you doing?” Alex asked her, his own senses sharpening again.
“This looks like an old-fashioned slap bracelet. Not the kind of thing your father would be wearing, and your mother’s wearing one too.”
Alex followed Sam’s gaze to the black piece of fabric jewelry, which looked shiny as steel. She had straightened out the one she’d unfurled from his father’s wrist.
“See?” she whispered.
But then it snapped back into place with a whapping sound.
Alex took it from her grasp and slid the thing that looked like a slap bracelet into his pocket. He lingered over his mother for what seemed like a very long time, before pressing her eyes closed, sobbing and sniffling loudly.
“Alex,” Sam said from above him.
“I know,” he managed, rising stiffly but still unable to take his eyes off his murdered parents, who lay adjacent to each other.
“I’m sorry, Alex, I’m so sorry,” she said, easing a hand to his shoulder, which felt hot and as hard as banded steel.
Alex realized he was still clutching Meng Po. “You’ve got to get out of here.”
“We’ve got to get out of here,” she corrected. “You heard your mother.”
“She wasn’t making sense.”
Sam looked back toward the pulverized remains of the drones littering the floor like children’s toys or the parts of some massive, unassembled model. “None of this makes sense.”
Alex smelled the noxious stench of burned wires and scorched metal searing the air now.
“I can’t leave them,” he said, looking back down at his parents. “You go.”
“I’m not going anywhere without you. And you heard your mother—more will be coming. This is just the beginning.”
“Beginning of what, Sam, beginning of what?”
Sam saw the shock and sadness in his wet eyes, wished there was something she could say to make him feel better.
“We have to do what your mother said,” she reminded him instead, thinking of the severed arm spewing wires instead of veins, and skulls that dented like car fenders. “Now, Alex,” she continued. “Please, we need to go.”
“Where, Sam, where are we supposed to go?”
She swallowed hard. “I have no idea.”
FIVE
TRACKERS
The merit of all things lies in their difficulty.
—ALEXANDRE DUMAS
33
THE BUNKER
LANGSTON MARSH STUDIED THE scroll on his computer as he did every morning and whenever time allowed. Hours spent in darkness broken only by the light of the screen, absorbing incident report after incident report into his psyche until he found what he was looking for. In a few minutes, the new man would be ushered into his office, located in the sprawling bunker he almost never left.
There was a war coming, and he needed to be ready for it at all costs. The new man, who came highly recommended, was extremely well versed in military matters, a worthy addition to the army, and the cadre at its top, Marsh was building.
The beautifully furnished office in which he was working offered a magnificent view of the Pacific Ocean through its expansive window-wall of glass. The scene was even more beautiful to him at night, the way the moonlight reflected over the currents lopping over the shoreline and filling the room with the steady crash of cascading waves. Other than the spill of moonlight and a single standing floor lamp, the room’s only illumination sprang from the glow off the computer screen through which he continued to scroll.