And then she started to shake and couldn’t catch her breath. Like some kind of panic attack had set in, like the past ten hours had been poured into a bottle that had burst apart inside her, all the death and fear spilling out at once. The tears were coming before she could even try to stop them, all the unanswered questions hammering at her mind. She tried to breathe again but managed only to gasp. She’d never hyperventilated before but was pretty sure this was what it felt like.
Then Sam felt Alex wrapping his arms around her, hugging her so close she could feel his heartbeat against her chest and wondered if he could feel hers skittering. The rapid beating slackened as he held her. She could feel her breathing steadying as well, wanted to wipe her nose and eyes but realized she was squeezing Alex too tightly to let go. She felt like a little girl again, weak and helpless. Not the high school girl with the perfect GPA and through-the-roof SAT scores, which were her ticket to the Ivy League and a career with NASA in space.
All that seemed so distant now, so behind her. Tonight had changed everything; no more looking any farther ahead than the next hour, if not minute. Sam started to feel it all overwhelming her again, the same tightness returning to her chest and stomach, and clung to Alex.
The boy of her dreams for as long as she could remember.
Then he was kissing her and Sam felt her glasses push up against the bridge of his nose. In that moment it seemed like everything would be all right, as if nothing bad had ever happened at all. Her glasses shifted again and Sam found movement flash in the mirror placed high by a corner ceiling. Three men wearing matching suits just entering the store.
Three men who looked a lot like the drone things that had killed Alex’s parents.
*
Raiff saw them too, from the street. His mind conjured the corrosive, burned-wire smell that hung in the air of the Chins’ home. He wondered why they smelled that way, guessed the internal cooling mechanisms designed to keep them from overheating still hadn’t been perfected. To him, this had long before indicated that they were being manufactured here on Earth. So the raw materials had come from here, and the manufacturing process was unable to account for all the variances and variables at once.
Hence the drones smelled like car engines with their temperature gauges flirting with the red. Raiff wondered if they might even spontaneously combust after too much activity. That would be something.
But it wasn’t going to happen in time to help Dancer, so Raiff jumped the curb and tore, tires screeching, toward the FedEx Office entrance.
*
“Alex!” Sam screamed, tearing herself from his grasp.
Alex twisted from the counter, facing the suited figures as they reached the door.
Sam looked at them again, wondered if they were no more than businessmen needing materials for an early morning meeting.
Then where were their briefcases?
They seemed not to see her, focusing on Alex with laser-like eyes as they stormed through the door. Sam swinging around when something rattled behind them.
*
Rathman caught up with his advance team just after the breach. They fanned out to provide support, while he moved into the lead, the shocked targets out of their chairs now and clearly in view, the team covering his rear flank as he burst in from the door at the store’s back that led into a break room.
All exactly according to plan.
Rathman leveled his submachine gun, finger pawing the trigger. Locked and loaded. Ready for whatever came next.
Then he froze.
*
“You need to pay for those?” the store’s shift manager called to Sam, emerging from the part of the store sectioned off by a counter where staff printed jobs that were completed. “Hey, is something wrong?”
An old SUV’s headlights flashed through the store an instant before the rest of it followed through the glass, the suited figures swinging toward it.
*
“Stand down! Stand down!” Rathman had the sense to order, over the staccato bursts of automatic fire driven up into the ceiling.
Also as planned.
Targets surrounded. Targets controlled. Targets captured without incident.
“Cease fire! Cease fire!” Rathman called out next, signal hand flapping in the air.
Because these weren’t his targets.
EIGHT
BATTLEGROUND
You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.
—MARGARET THATCHER
62
DRONE THINGS
ALEX GRABBED SAM AND pulled her backward, up and over the counter, crashing past the shift manager, who’d covered up in a crouch. He’d popped back up again just as a figure surged out of the ancient SUV with pockmarked paint, now bleeding steam from its radiator, which rose toward the drop ceiling like a curtain.
The drone things, near-twins of the figures wearing cop uniforms back at Alex’s house, seemed suspended between intentions, their focus divided.
“Alex,” one of them had said just before the SUV crashed through the storefront. Same voice as the fake cops too.
Your family, so to speak. Your real family.
No, they weren’t and neither were these, no matter what planet or world Alex came from. An and Li Chin were his family.
Alex felt his blood heating up, his skin seeming to bake. But then the figure from the car was in motion, moving as much with the air as through it. He was holding something in his hand, some kind of weapon, lashing it out toward the drone things even before his feet touched down.