First published in Great Britain in 2019

by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited

The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN

Published by arrangement with HarperCollins Children’s Books, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, New York, New York, USA

Text copyright © 2019 Michael Grant

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

First e-book edition 2019

ISBN 978 1 4052 94669

Ebook ISBN 978 1 7803 17687

www.egmont.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Stay safe online. Any website addresses listed in this book are correct at the time of going to print. However, Egmont is not responsible for content hosted by third parties. Please be aware that online content can be subject to change and websites can contain content that is unsuitable for children. We advise that all children are supervised when using the internet.

To my two Katherines

I lose sleep at night wondering whether we are intelligent enough to figure out the universe.

I don’t know.

—Neil DeGrasse Tyson

“The justifications of men who kill should always be heard with skepticism,” said the monster.

—Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

ASO-7

1 SEX, PASTRIES, AND THE LAWS OF PHYSICS

2 MANHATTAN MAYHEM

3 BOLDLY GOING WHERE NO 3-D PERSON HAS GONE BEFORE

4 PSYCHOPATH ROLL CALL

5 HOW DO YOU GET TO CARNEGIE HALL?

6 INSIDE THE KALEIDOSCOPE

7 MALMEDY IN THE PINE BARRENS

8 UNCLE SAM WANTS YOU

9 DOWN AND DIRTY

10 NEW YORK, NEW YORK

11 KILL US

12 RARE MOMENTS OF PEACE

13 PARENTING FAILS

14 ASTRID DOES AMAZON

15 OVER THERE

16 SUPERHERO CHORES, PART 1

17 SUPERHERO CHORES, PART 2

18 BUG FIGHTERS

19 LOSING BATTLES

20 THE BROWNSTONE DECLARATION

21 THE DESK CLERK

22 NORMAL IS NO LONGER WITH US

23 PROBLEMS AT HOME

24 COUP

25 OF COURSE IT’S A TRAP

26 HELLO THERE, DRAKE

27 LESBOKITTY REPRESENTS

28 NO BATTLE PLAN . . .

29 . . . EVER SURVIVES CONTACT WITH . . .

30 . . . THE ENEMY

31 RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY!

32 DOMES

33 PLANS AND PLOTS AND STOLEN KISSES

34 SPEED, NOTHING BUT SPEED

35 STOP THAT TRAIN! I WANT TO GET ON

36 TOO LATE FOR FLYING LESSONS

37 JUSTIFIABLE HOMICIDE(S)

38 MOMENTUM

39 GAS WILL EXPAND TO FILL AVAILABLE SPACE

40 A LAIR OF THEIR OWN

41 MEET YOUR MAKER

42 TO BE OR NOT TO BE

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

Back series promotional page

ASO-7

ANOMALOUS SPACE OBJECT Seven was being carefully tracked by Professor Martin Darby of Northwestern University, father of the famous and/or infamous Shade Darby. Shade’s father had had his security clearance reinstated, despite the fact that his daughter had used his data to locate and steal one of the earlier ASOs and had then used the rock—its universal shorthand name—to become Rockborn, a mutant with a power—the power, in Shade’s case, to move at speeds just over Mach 1.

ASO-7 had passed the orbit of the moon and was now spinning around the Earth in a decaying elliptical, an orbit that Professor Darby and counterparts at universities all over the world had calculated and recalculated with growing alarm.

ASO-7 was a large piece, roughly eighteen meters (fifty-nine feet) long and sixteen meters (fifty-two feet) wide. Estimated mass, assuming the composition matched earlier ASOs, was 1600 tons, about the weight of 550 Toyota Land Cruisers.

The size of the rock and the fact that it seemed to be moving erratically had left Professor Darby able to calculate only probabilities. He’d turned those probabilities into a simplified map, which he’d forwarded along with his calculations, to Homeland Security, NASA, and the Department of Defense.

The map showed the likely strike zone as a pink crosshatched area. That pink cross-hatching extended from just north of Elizabeth, New Jersey, to the Long Island Sound around Bayville.

But it was what occupied the middle of that strike zone that had sent alarm bells ringing throughout the US government. Because in the middle of that zone stood New York City.

The odds of a relatively safe splashdown in the water of Long Island Sound were 40 percent, which left smaller likelihoods of strikes near Elizabeth, or in Manhattan proper, which had only a 20 percent likelihood of being the bull’s-eye.

But that was a one-in-five chance of utterly annihilating the greatest of American cities, because this much was certain: if ASO-7 hit land, it would release energy equivalent to thirty-five kilotons. The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was fifteen kilotons. If ASO-7 was intact and hit, say, Rockefeller Center, it would obliterate sixty square blocks, and severely damage buildings and toss cars and buses around from Thirty-Ninth Street to Fifty-Seventh Street, and from Ninth Avenue almost to Lexington Avenue. If it landed on a weekday, the estimates were that it would kill as many as a million people instantly and another quarter million from fires and related injuries.

ASO-7 had the potential to be the greatest disaster ever to strike the United States.

Department of Homeland Security

Memo: 19-00475

Top Secret (HSTF-66)

Re: ASO-7

DoD, NASA, and university assessments suggest a likelihood that ASO-7 will impact in or near New York City. Likelihood 20 percent low estimate (Northwestern University), 40 percent highest estimate (Oxford University).

Potential Countermeasures:

THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense). THAAD uses KKV technology (Kinetic Kill Vehicle) and would be ineffective.

GMD (Ground-Based Midcourse Defense). No units are within range.

Aegis-capable ships. Aegis RIM-161 Standard Missile 3 (SM-3) uses KKV technology and would be ineffective.

DoD assesses likelihood of any of these systems being effective at zero percent.

The only option we have to present at this time is to launch one or more ICBMs armed with nuclear warheads to intercept and either divert or break up the ASO. Such an application is theoretical and untested.

Preliminary estimates of effective destruction of ASO-7 by a single warhead are 5 percent. Preliminary estimates show a 30 percent likelihood of altering the ASO’s course, with that new course being almost entirely unpredictable. The most likely result appears to be fracturing of ASO-7 resulting in multiple smaller meteorites with impact zones and damage impossible to predict.

Embassy of the People’s Republic of China—Washington

ALERT

Top Secret

Ambassador Gao has been informed by US State Department that two ICBMs (Type: LGM-30) enhanced by additional solid-fuel boosters and carrying single warheads (Type: W87) with yields estimated at 475 kilotons will be launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on an intercept course with ASO-7.

US Defense Department liaisons have offered reassurance as to angle and flight time. Recommend People’s Army track but otherwise treat as nonhostile.

The Rachel Maddow Show—Interview Transcript.

RACHEL MADDOW: I want to thank you for joining us by Skype from Las Vegas. It has been a very intense few weeks, and an especially intense forty-eight hours for all of you. So thank you for agreeing to this interview.

SHADE DARBY: You’re welcome.

MADDOW: Would you mind . . . using Skype can be awkward . . . would you mind if we go around to each member of the group?

SHADE: No problem. Dekka?

DEKKA TALENT: I’m Dekka Talent.

MADDOW: You are a survivor of the Perdido Beach Anomaly—what you, I assume, call the FAYZ?

DEKKA: Yep.

MADDOW: How is this situation different from life in the PBA dome, in the FAYZ?

DEKKA: No dome. And the rock mutation is more physical. We change. Physically. Also we have food now, so that’s different.

MADDOW: Is that transformation, that morphing, is that painful?

DEKKA: No. More creepy and disturbing than painful.

MADDOW: Can you give us a sense of how that feels? It must be just . . . well, let me just ask: What is it like? How does it feel?

DEKKA: (Shrugs.) You should probably ask Cruz or Shade or . . . (pushes Cruz forward)

CRUZ: Hi.

MADDOW: Cruz, you have become the face of the Rockborn Gang. In fact, we’re going to put up the iconic photo of you carrying a baby away from the flames that engulfed hundreds of people in that just unspeakably awful moment in Las Vegas. I wonder if you see your new status as, well, like I said, the face of the Rockborn Gang, I wonder if you see this perhaps as an ironic twist, given that you are transgender and your ability, your superpower, is to alter your appearance at will.

CRUZ: I guess. I mean, yeah, it’s like, I don’t know. Like the rock has a weird sense of humor. Or else the media does. But I’m not the hero here. It wasn’t me that stopped Dillon Po

MADDOW: The so-called Charmer. Dillon Poe, who had the power to compel absolute obedience with just the sound of his voice.

CRUZ: Yeah, him. It wasn’t me that stopped him. It was Malik and Francs. I just happened to be in that picture.

MADDOW: The story is that you were recruited, in a way, by Shade Darby, who was your friend from school. Is that correct?

CRUZ: More or less. You should talk to Shade. Shade and Dekka are sort of the . . . I don’t know. I mean, I’m just this chameleon person. Or talk to Malik, he’s the one who . . .

MADDOW: Did you want to say something more about Malik?

CRUZ: Malik, come here, your turn.

MALIK: Good evening, Ms. Maddow.

MADDOW: Welcome to the show, and thanks for coming on. Your story is perhaps the most tragic. You were very badly burned in the battle that took place at the Port of Los Angeles.

MALIK: Yes.

MADDOW: Doctors did not expect you to survive. Is it true, as some reports have it, that the Malik you are now, the person we are seeing, is actually a morph?

MALIK: Yes, that’s true. I am in morph now. If I de-morph, I revert back to the condition I was in the hospital. Which, as you said, is . . . intolerable.

MADDOW: And the power you have is the ability to essentially project that pain onto others. That’s how you prepared the ground for the raid on the so-called Ranch, the Homeland Security facility people are comparing to Dr. Mengele’s Auschwitz.

MALIK: Yes. That is my power. The ability to project excruciating pain. It’s not . . . It’s not something I wanted.

MADDOW: Survivors from the Ranch, survivors—and there were very few—say the pain you projected was so awful that in some cases they attempted suicide rather than endure it.

MALIK: (Nods)

MADDOW: And Dillon Poe did in fact kill himself rather than endure it.

MALIK: Yes.

MADDOW: Does it concern you at all that this power is in the hands of . . . well, in your hands and in the hands of the others in the group? And then I wonder if you would talk about how you see all of this playing out.

MALIK: Does it concern me? (Laughs) Of course it concerns me. We have six people here who have extreme power. No one elected us. No one said, ‘Let’s give all this power to these kids.’ The problem is that the rock gives power to the good and the bad alike, people like Justin DeVeere—

MADDOW: Knightmare.

MALIK: Yeah, him. And Tom Peaks—

MADDOW: Napalm or Dragon, as people are calling him.

MALIK: And Dillon Poe, yeah. The only thing the people in charge could do to stop Poe was send a tank brigade into the city, and, I’m sorry, but that wasn’t going to stop him, either. Look, I don’t want to be doing this; none of us wants to be doing this. But Dillon Poe had to die; there’s no question about that. He had to die. He was a mass murderer. He killed—

MADDOW: The official death toll is currently 3,102 people. And may rise as more bodies are found.

MALIK: Yeah, he had to be stopped, and the only way to do it was by killing him. But that doesn’t mean I wanted to be the one who . . . None of us likes doing this, Ms. Maddow. You know?

MADDOW: Shade Darby? Is that true for all of you? I ask because—and please correct me if any of this is wrong—but you actually chose this path. You actually obtained a piece of the rock and became a mutant deliberately.

SHADE: Yes. And I have to live with that. Not just what I did to myself, that’s on me, but I dragged Cruz into it, and Malik. You could say I chose this for myself, although . . . Did I know this was how it would turn out? No, of course not.

MADDOW: I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I sense, and again, correct me, but I sense that you feel some guilt.

SHADE: Some guilt? (Laughs) I saw my father thrown to the ground and arrested for something I did. I convinced Cruz to help me, and now she’s in the middle of all this, living this life. And Malik . . . Do I feel guilty that someone I care about is haunted night and day by voices in his head? That he’s defined by pain? People are calling him M-Pain and Screamer and, you know, Malik is the smartest, kindest . . . Yeah. Yes, Rachel, I feel guilt.

MADDOW: Is Aristotle Adamo there with you?

ARMO: Call me Armo.

MADDOW: I want to run a piece of tape we have obtained. I’ll warn the audience that it is shaky and poor quality and . . . well, I was going to say it may disturb some viewers, but given what everyone has seen in recent days and weeks . . . Let’s roll the tape. That is you, in morph, attacking an Apache helicopter, a military helicopter, as it hovers over the ground.

ARMO: Huh. Cool, I actually haven’t seen that before.

MADDOW: You were a prisoner at the Ranch where—

ARMO: Can you run that tape again? That was way cool.

MADDOW: Actually, if you could answer my question and—

ARMO: Nah, first run the tape.

MADDOW: (Pause.) All right, ummmmm, control room?

1
SEX, PASTRIES, AND THE LAWS OF PHYSICS

“GOTTA ADMIT: THIS is nice. I guess.” Dekka Talent sounded unhappy about it as she rubbed a bedsheet between thumb and forefinger. “It’s all so smooth and soft.”

“Beats my old sleeping bag,” Francis Specter said, yawning, ruffling her red hair, and throwing back the covers of her own bed. “Do you mind if I . . .” She gestured toward the bathroom.

“It’s your bathroom as much as mine, kid.”

They’d shared the bedroom, each with her own queen-sized bed, night-light, side table, bottle of spring water, TV remote, and pillow mints. Dekka was the elder of the two, of voting if not yet drinking age, and had about her a seriousness and physical presence that made her seem older.

Francis Specter was a new person in Dekka’s life, and in the life of the rest of their group as well, an underfed white girl of fourteen, with wary, suspicious eyes.

Both girls had pasts full of pain and trauma. Dekka had survived the FAYZ, usually called the Perdido Beach Anomaly or PBA, the bizarre twenty-mile-in-diameter, impenetrable, opaque dome that had imprisoned 332 kids under the age of fifteen. 332 kids at the start . . . far fewer by the end.

Following the collapse of the FAYZ dome, Dekka had had four years of relative normalcy, doing her best to sink back into obscurity as a cashier at a Bay Area Safeway. That obscurity had ended when it was learned that more of the rock—the same alien mutagenic virus-infected celestial debris that had caused the FAYZ—was heading for Earth.

A secret government group, Homeland Security Task Force 66, had brought Dekka to the Ranch and there had tried to use the rock to give her some of the powers she’d had in the FAYZ. HSTF-66’s plan had worked, partially. Dekka had gained powers, but not the powers she’d once held in the FAYZ. Things had changed. Outside the confines of the dome, rock mutations yielded more terrifying powers that were accompanied by physical changes, often quite extreme. In Dekka’s case, the rock had grabbed a bit of cat DNA and some imagery from Dekka’s own mind, played its inscrutable game, and yielded a morph with poisonous snakes where her dreads were, and a body covered in fur.

And Dekka’s old power of canceling gravity had been replaced by an ability to shred anything—or anyone—in her path. Like she was a human blender, a human chain saw. She’d learned to focus this power, but it was still horrifically destructive. In the course of too many battles, Dekka had turned walls and floors and ceilings to mulch. And human beings—bad guys, to be sure, but still human beings—had been reduced to bloody gobbets. By Dekka. By her will.

Dekka was not happy about the soft sheets because Dekka had zero reason to believe that life would continue to allow her to survive, let alone survive in luxury. She was also not happy about the four and a half bathrooms, each a wonder of marble and mirrors and glass, with deep tubs and showers that could have been used to hose off a whole rugby team, outfitted with towels so thick and soft Dekka could have slept comfortably on one of them, let alone the bed.

Luxury, in Dekka’s opinion, made you soft. And the future did not feel soft.

But the sheets sure do.

Also, she admitted privately, it was a bit intimidating. She was not a rich kid like her sidekick, Armo, who took it all in his stride. Armo’s path to the Rockborn Gang had started when he wrecked his 600-horsepower, $90,000 Viper in Malibu. Dekka could not have afforded to pay a month’s insurance on such a vehicle.

As for Francis Specter, Dekka knew that she had endured a very different sort of hardship, living with her mother as her mother descended into drug addiction and a depraved life with a racist biker gang at a bare-bones compound in the Mojave desert.

Francis was also Rockborn, but while Dekka had a straight-forwardly destructive power, Francis had a stranger, deeper, harder-to-understand ability. Francis could pass through solid objects. Or at least that’s how it looked to people. In reality, Francis moved into a fourth spatial dimension, and rather than go through, she went . . . around.

If Francis was “the kid” of the Rockborn Gang, then Dekka was what passed for a responsible adult, not a role Dekka relished. In addition to Dekka and Francis, the Rockborn Gang consisted of Shade Darby, Malik Tenerife, Cruz (neé Hugo Cruz Rojas), and Armo, who no longer used his birth name of Aristotle Adamo because it was too long and too open to mockery. Armo was not, perhaps, the guy to go through life wearing a great philosopher’s name.

Armo was a white boy—a very large, strong, very handsome, rather sweet, not overly bright boy with Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD), which made it very, very hard for him to ever do as he was told.

Armo also had a morph, a creature not unlike a polar bear with various disturbing human features. In that morph, Armo—as long as you asked him politely and did not attempt to order him around—would happily charge a tank.

The Rockborn Gang currently occupied a three-bedroom, four-and-a-half bath suite in Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. The suite would have cost $10,000 a day had it not been offered to them by the grateful management of Caesars Palace with the enthusiastic support of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. The powers that be in Las Vegas knew how to show gratitude, and the Rockborn Gang had been given the lion’s share of the credit for saving Las Vegas from the mindcontrolling Rockborn psycho named Dillon Poe, the self-styled Charmer, and then from the army’s brutal overreaction. Had the Rockborn Gang not stopped Poe, it was very likely that Las Vegas would have been utterly destroyed.

Of course Las Vegas also knew the advantage for tourism in having the most Facebooked, Instagrammed, tweeted, YouTubed, reported, loved, hated, praised, reviled group of people on Planet Earth in residence. Just two days after what was being called the #CasinoWar, #MadMaxVegas, and #Vegapocalypse, among many other names, flights and room reservations were already coming back strong after having been shut down entirely.

The Rockborn Gang had saved Las Vegas billions of dollars, and now their presence was bringing the gamblers back. There was already serious talk of erecting a statue, which was fine, Dekka supposed, and certainly better than being hated and hunted, but it all made her nervous. A black, lesbian FAYZ survivor would never be able to relax as completely as Armo who, upon exiting the bedroom, Dekka found sprawled across a couch and a coffee table wearing pajama bottoms, with a bagel resting on his bare left pectoral and a little tub of cream cheese balanced on the right side.

“Unh,” Dekka said to Armo, the limits of her pre-coffee small talk.

“There’s coffee in that carafe,” Armo said, pointing with his cream cheese–smeared knife.

Cruz sat off to one side of the fabulously luxurious room with her battered purple Moleskine open on her lap, a pen in her hand, making notes and casting subtle glances at the ever-oblivious Armo.

Dekka poured. Dekka drank.

“Holy Communion in the Church of Caffeine?” Cruz teased.

Dekka nodded. “Damn right.” There was an expectant air that made Dekka frown. “What? What are you two waiting for?”

“We’re kind of . . .” Cruz tilted her head, hearing something, and held up a hand. “Never mind, you’ll see.”

Shade Darby, a white girl with blunt-cut dark hair—she’d hacked away at it herself—and the kind of eyes that drilled holes into you, opened the door to her bedroom, stepped through wearing a Caesars bathrobe, closed the door casually behind her, and said, “Any coffee left?”

“See, Dekka, what we’re doing,” Cruz said as though continuing a conversation, “is waiting to see how much time Shade and Malik have decided to allow before he comes out.”

“Out?” Dekka looked at Armo, who shrugged, causing his cream cheese to tumble down his chest.

Cruz answered with a significant nod toward the door Shade had just closed.

“Huh? Oh. Ahhh,” Dekka said. “I assumed you and Shade would share a room.”

“She got a better offer,” Cruz said.

“No, no, no. Just stop, right now,” Shade warned.

Dekka was not a jovial person, not much given to banter or teasing, but this was too easy to pass up. In a mock-severe voice she said, “You know, Cruz, just because Shade and Malik shared a room, that doesn’t mean anything, you know . . . happened. You shouldn’t jump to conclusions.”

“Well, something happened,” Armo said. “I know Malik’s power is causing people pain, but the noises I heard last night didn’t sound like pain.”

“Oh it’s going to be like this, is it?” Shade said, shaking her head. “You realize if I morph I’m fast enough to smack the shit out of all four of you, right?”

At which point Malik came out of the bedroom and Cruz said, “Hah! Three minutes on the dot.”

“Good morning,” Malik said. Malik was African American, a college freshman with adorable ringleted hair, sleepy eyes, and a scary IQ. He and Shade had dated long ago, and broken up because . . . well, because by Shade’s own account she had been obsessive and driven and not above manipulating friends.

Or as Dekka put it: a ruthless bitch.

The person Dekka and the others now spoke to was in some ways not Malik. It was Malik’s morph of himself. The real Malik, the Malik who would emerge if he ever left morph, was a boy who’d been burned so badly doctors had been about to put him in a medically induced coma and allow him to die. The rock had saved him, but at a terrible price. Each of them—with the fascinating exception of Francis—felt the intrusive, overbearing presence of the unseen Dark Watchers whenever they were in morph. Malik lived with that twenty-four/seven so long as he was in morph—and leaving morph would mean an excruciating death.

But at the moment, Malik looked unusually cheerful. So uncharacteristically, stupidly happy that Cruz giggled out loud and the others could not help but grin. It wasn’t prurient leering, Dekka told herself . . . well, okay, in part maybe it was . . . but each of them liked Malik, admired him, and each of them knew that of them all, he was the one who had suffered the most terrible harm. Seeing Malik smile was . . .

Like watching the sun rise.

Malik made a point of saying, “Good morning,” to Shade in an overly formal way, as though they hadn’t seen each other since yesterday.

“Plausible,” Cruz commented, dryly. “Totally plausible. I know I believed it.”

Dekka drank her coffee and went to the floor-to-ceiling window to look out, and to hide the sadness that had welled up inside her. She was nothing but pleased to see Malik happy, and frankly she enjoyed seeing the eternally cool and self-possessed Shade looking abashed and embarrassed. Served her right. But it inevitably brought personal memories to the surface, memories of her own doomed, lost, one-way love for a girl named Brianna. The Breeze, she’d called herself. Crazy fearless, reckless, Breeze.

Crazy, fearless, and reckless one too many times, my love. One too many times.

Cruz, the girl whose rescue of a baby had become the iconic photo of #ArmageddonVegas, had spent the night alone because the alternative would have been sharing with Armo, and that was not on the agenda, though Dekka had spotted more than one longing look from Cruz directed at the boy who could pass as the fourth Hemsworth brother.

It made Dekka sad seeing Cruz crushing on Armo. Dekka had detected no nastiness or hate in Armo, but that did not mean he would fall for a six foot-tall transgender Latina. Dekka’s own life had been shadowed by lost love, and she didn’t wish that ache on anyone.

Francis came in, hair wet and face alight with wonder. “There’s like . . . like . . . in the shower,” she began.

“Yeah, yeah, it’s nice,” Dekka muttered.

But Francis was not put off by Dekka’s puritanical gloom in the face of luxury. “There’s, like, six shower heads! Six! There’s this big wide one in the ceiling and then there are . . .”

Dekka tuned her out as the description of the wonders of the shower went on. Truth was, it actually was an amazing shower. It was the shower Dekka might have expected when she got to heaven. She was momentarily distracted by the notion of Saint Peter, like some real-estate guy on HGTV, saying, And wait till you see the shower!

Armo stood up, adjusted his pajama bottoms and announced, “It’s already ten thirty and unlike you people I’ve been up since eight. I’m going down to the pool. Who’s with me?”

No one was interested aside from Cruz. Dekka saw her dark eyes zeroing in on a dab of cream cheese clinging to Armo’s chest and thought, You poor kid.

Finding no takers, Armo disappeared into a bathroom and re-emerged in a bathing suit. “Call me if something happens.”

“Cruz, I thought you liked sunbathing,” Shade said once Armo was gone.

Cruz shrugged. “I don’t know what to wear. It’s a problem.”

“Oh, right.” Shade winced.

“You could always do what I do,” Dekka suggested. “T-shirt and shorts. That’s kind of gender non-specific.”

Cruz looked uncomfortable, and Dekka hoped she hadn’t said anything stupid. She’d had years of people assuming various things just because she was gay, or because she was black, and even the innocently curious inquiries got to be tedious after a while. Or in Dekka’s case, instantly.

“I don’t want to look like . . . ,” Cruz began, then veered away into a low, abashed mutter concluding with, “I don’t want him to think I’m stalking him, geez.”

Dekka sat down opposite her in the place Armo had vacated and leaned forward to keep her conversation with Cruz private. “Sweetheart, Armo is a good guy. Just whatever you do, don’t ever try to order him around. Other than that, though? The boy is pure Malibu beach bum, mellow to the bone. Just, again, and I cannot stress this too much: don’t tell him what to do.”

Cruz grinned. “Yeah, I got that. He mentioned he was ODD. It took me a while to figure out he meant Oppositional Defiant Disorder.”

Dekka smiled affectionately. “Oh, Armo’s regular old odd, too, but he’s good people. When things get hairy, you want Armo nearby.”

Armo. Crazy, fearless, and reckless. I have a type, Dekka thought dryly, even if it isn’t always a romantic type.

She moved to the far end of the vast living room, where Shade was now in earnest conversation with Malik.

“Hey, Dekka,” Shade said, waving her to a seat. “Malik is theorizing.”

Of all the internal relationships within the Rockborn Gang, none was more emotionally loaded than Shade and Malik’s. Shade had been present four years earlier when the FAYZ had at last come down, releasing its traumatized young inhabitants, Dekka among them. Shade had lost her mother that day, killed by Gaia, the monstrous alien in human form who had terrorized the last days of the FAYZ. That death had spawned an obsession in Shade, an obsession that had dragged Cruz and Malik into this new nightmare world with her.

Malik was what he now was because of Shade. He lived with the constant presence of the Dark Watchers because of Shade. They had been with him as he had spent the night with her, seeing what he saw, feeling his emotions.

What must that have been like for Malik? Dekka wondered. And the same phrase she’d applied to Cruz came to mind again: you poor kid.

“Once upon a time the most sophisticated computer game on earth was just a virtual tennis ball and two virtual rackets,” Malik said, talking between bites of blueberry muffin. “We moved up to Pac-Man and Galaga. Then Mario and Donkey Kong. Then the Sims, where human players could create and control avatars meant to represent humans. That was the turning point, right there. That was the point when the gamer became a god. The gamer wasn’t just a happy face gobbling up power dots and chasing ghosts; the gamer was creating virtual people and manipulating their world.”

“Talking Dark Watchers?” Dekka asked in a low voice. Shade nodded.

“If you created a perfect sim, so perfect, so sophisticated that it encompassed millions, even billions of individual people,” Malik went on, animated as he often was when prosing on about either science or great guitarists, “a simulation so advanced that each of those simulated people acted independently, so real that the game pieces, the avatars, experienced what felt like reality—”

Dekka held up a hand. “Is this going to involve math?”

Malik winked at her, and Dekka was caught off guard by the almost maternal feelings she had for him. Shade might be a manipulative brainiac, but the girl had excellent taste in men.

“I’ll stick to English,” Malik said.

“Proceed,” Dekka said. Her gaze shifted to Shade and she thought, If you break this boy’s heart, I will personally administer a beat-down.

“The point is that simulations can be reproduced like any other computer program. So if we suspect that there is a single simulation, we have to suspect that there could be millions. One reality and a potentially unlimited number of sims. Simulations might outnumber reality by billions to one. Which would mean statistically it’s likely that we are not in an original, evolved reality, but in a sim.”

Cruz returned from the bathroom and flopped down, spilling a bit of her coffee. “Oh, God, are we doing this again?”

“He promised no math,” Dekka stage-whispered.

“Basically there would be no way to ever know if you are living in a sim or not. Unless something goes wrong. A glitch. Or maybe a hack.”

“You think the Dark Watchers are the hackers?” Shade asked for the benefit of Dekka and Cruz, since she knew almost as much about it as Malik did, give or take a college-level physics course.

Malik shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe we’re a TV show. Maybe we’re a game. Maybe we’re something our three-dimensional brains can’t even describe.” He winced, closed his eyes as if in pain. Sometimes the attention of the Dark Watchers was so intrusive it felt like a kind of pain. After a moment Malik continued. “The question is: Francis.”

“I can hear you,” Francis said, coming back in, reaching for the overflowing platter of pastries, and pausing to ask, “Can anyone have these?”

“Francis, eat,” Cruz said.

“You’re an anomaly,” Malik said, turning to address Francis. “Everyone else who has taken the rock has three things in common.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “One: they’ve been changed physically, given a morph, sometimes vaguely animal, other times . . .” He shrugged. “Second: a power, an ability that defies conventional physics. And third, the Dark Watchers in your head any time you’re in morph.”

“All except Francis,” Shade said. “Morph? Yes, that whole prismatic, rainbowy thing she does. Power? Definitely. But no Watchers. Why?”

Malik sighed. “Well, babe . . .” He froze for a moment and shot a guilty look at Shade. “I mean, Shade, that just, um . . . slipped out.”

Shade smiled, a rare occurrence, especially recently. “You know, bunny, I kind of don’t think our secret is much of a secret.”

“What?” Cruz erupted in mock surprise. “Shade and Malik?”

“I’m shocked,” Dekka said in a perfectly flat voice.

“Anyway,” Malik said, too loudly.

“Don’t ever try to stop Malik once he’s got his lecture on,” Shade said.

“As I was saying—”

“So? How was it?” Cruz interrupted, batting her eyelashes.

Malik gaped at her in shock, his mouth open.

But Shade, in a low, marveling voice said, “Like you’ve fallen off a cliff and you’re going to die and then, suddenly, a hand grabs you and hauls you back up.” She made a face meant, belatedly, to make it seem like a joke.

Well, well, she’s human.

“So,” Malik persisted, his voice a bit desperate, “The point is if we are living in a sim, then what we always saw as the immutable laws of physics are just so much software, the OS of this universe. And software can be rewritten. The fact is, none of this superpower stuff is possible, not under the laws of reality we’ve always accepted. Someone, some thing, has rewritten the program that defined those laws of physics.”

Francis had kept well clear of the gentle teasing. Dekka knew she did not yet feel like she was really part of the group, and probably felt young besides.

“If we’re just some program, then . . . well, what?” Francis asked.

Malik shrugged. “Nothing changes, really. We cannot help but feel real because we are real, subjectively. I think, therefore I am, as Descartes said.”

“Who’s day cart?” Francis wondered aloud.

“No, no,” Shade said, shaking her head. “Whatever you do, don’t get him off on a tangent.”

“We experience real emotions, real pain, at least it’s real to us,” Malik went on, trying to float above the constant interruptions. “At one level it all doesn’t change anything, real or sim. But . . .”

“But?” Dekka prompted, trying to resist a croissant and wondering if she could use the Caesars gym without being interrupted by people wanting to get a selfie with a Rockborn mutant freak.

“But, Francis doesn’t even conform to the ‘new’ rules. She doesn’t feel the Dark Watchers. And more to the point, her power is not limited to our three dimensions. She can move into extra dimensions. Maybe,” he said, with slow emphasis, “into their dimension.”

They heard the door of the suite being unlocked, and Armo came back wearing a bathing suit, flip-flops, and a towel draped over his shoulders. “What are you guys talking about?”

“Extra-dimensional space and multiple universes,” Malik said.

“So, I’m not missing anything. Anyway I just came back to get my shades. It’s sunny and hot as hell, and they serve nachos at the pool. You guys should check it out. How about you, Cruz? Come on,” he pleaded in a wheedling voice, “I need someone to hang out with and I’ve heard all of Dekka’s stories at least twice.”

Cruz’s eyes went wide and a blush rose up her neck. “I don’t have a bathing suit.”

Armo waved that off. “Shorts and a T-shirt. Come on. They gave me one of those tent things, a cabana or whatever—I didn’t even ask. It’s got room for like, six people. And they already brought me a massive fruit-and-cheese platter.”

Cruz said, “Give me a minute and I’ll find a picture I can morph into.” She laughed, and it sounded just a bit hysterical. “You could be hanging out with Olivia Wilde or someone.”

Armo made a face. “Yeah, see, I don’t know who that is. Come on, Cruz, don’t make me carry you.”

“You wouldn’t want that, Cruz,” Shade said with a careful neutrality that Dekka recognized as knowing mockery, earning Shade a discreetly hidden upraised middle finger from Cruz.

“Okay, I’ll change into shorts.”

Armo flopped onto the sofa, nearly bouncing Shade off, and said, “That’ll take a minute. So in sixty seconds or less, explain this whole space-alien-extra-universe thing.”

Dekka looked around at them, seeing happy faces. Good. It was good to be happy. You never knew when it might be for the last time.

2
MANHATTAN MAYHEM

“FOOLS AND THEIR money are soon parted,” Bob Markovic said to his daughter, Simone. “It’s not illegal to profit from people’s stupidity.”

“No, just immoral,” Simone snapped.

It was an argument they’d had more than once. A tired argument, but one still fed by powerful emotions on both sides. In some ways it was a proxy argument, Simone knew, a stand-in for a series of grudges between them, most especially Simone’s decision to live with her mother and not her father following their divorce.

“Yes, well, morality and profit don’t always walk hand in hand,” Markovic muttered. “I live in the real world, not some college seminar.” He stood leaning against the stone balustrade of his fourteenth-floor balcony and waved his hand to encompass New York City in late afternoon. Slanting light turned the buildings far across Central Park into dark silhouettes and dabbed the trees with yellow and orange. “Different worlds, different realities.”

Bob Markovic was in an expansive mood, which Simone knew meant that he’d had a good and profitable day. The payday loan company he owned, Markovic’s Money Machine (offices all across the Northeast and upper Midwest), was doing gangbusters business. The whole country was on a mad panic-buying spree, grabbing up all the things they could never really afford, booking travel to places where people expected to be safe from the rolling apocalypse of the rock—New Zealand was very popular—and stocking cellars with emergency supplies and guns.

Guns, guns, guns, like that will keep them safe.

Simone Markovic had not had a productive day. She’d attended two classes at NYU—accounting and art appreciation. The accounting class had been a compromise to keep her father happy enough to continue paying tuition. The art class was her own choice. She didn’t really enjoy either class, but she would be damned if she’d admit to her father that art per se was not going to be her thing. What she wanted to study was filmmaking, but that seemed so unlikely to be useful that she had a hard time fighting for it in the face of his (and even her mother’s) skepticism. But for some time now, ever since she’d made the decision that film would be her thing, she’d seen the world around her in a frame, a series of shots.

Fade in: The arrogant tycoon is framed against a setting sun.

Simone had also put in a shift at an Italian restaurant, working as a hostess, a personal choice meant to give her some appreciation of what life was like for working people. The answer was: hard. The waitstaff messed with her because they knew she was a little rich girl, slumming. They cut her out of pooled tips, snapped at her every mistake, and never invited her for after-work drinks. Her manager would not stop hitting on her, despite a thirty-year age difference and her explanation that she liked girls, and even if she switched teams it would still not involve dating a married man in his late forties.

And then there was the matter of the general restaurant-going public. Simone tried to love humanity, but from the vantage point of the restaurant business, it wasn’t easy.

So, all in all, Simone was in a bad mood and inclined to pick a fight. “You give them loans you know they can’t pay back.”

“That’s the most profitable kind of loan,” Markovic said with a laugh. “You don’t want to loan a man a dollar and get a dollar and ten cents back the next day. You want to loan a man a dollar and have him pay you just the ten cents interest, but day after day, month after month after month. At the end of a few months you’ve made a dollar profit, and they still owe you the first dollar.”

Cut to: A mother of three counts the money she’s borrowed to buy Christmas presents, knowing she can never repay it.

Simone clenched her jaw. She was eighteen, white, a college freshman with blond hair she wore in a haystack bob, a cut meant to look casual, even indifferent, but which had cost three hundred dollars at her mother’s favorite salon. From the ground up, she wore a pair of red Doc Martens, torn blue jeans, a green-and-black Hillbilly Moon Explosion T-shirt, and a black leather jacket. She wore silver rings in two lip piercings and three more in one ear. Simone’s intention was not to look like a little rich girl, but she was self-aware enough to recognize that she just looked like a rich girl trying not to look like one.

Simone Markovic lived with her mother over on the West Side, and despite arguing with her, too, on a regular basis, they actually got along well enough. This was her weekend with Dad—who approved of very little about Simone except her last name. They had a contentious relationship, had since Simone had transitioned from girlhood to young womanhood. They were two strong-willed people with very different world views. But had Simone been given truth serum, she’d have admitted that she loved her morally blind father and knew that he loved her in return.

Bob Markovic lived on the fourteenth floor of a prestigious building on Fifth Avenue, facing Central Park. The condo had four bedrooms, a separate office, and maid’s quarters. It was decorated in what was almost a parody of masculinity of the aggressive, Hemingway variety. Markovic liked to hunt, and he liked to claim trophies, and he didn’t much care whether a beast was endangered or not. The main room of the apartment was painted the green of a pool table’s felt, with dark walnut molding. The walls were festooned with mounted animal heads: a water buffalo spread its gracefully curved horns nearly five feet; a polar bear looked startled; an entire eight-foot-long tiger had been stuffed and now stood menacingly in the corner by a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf.

Simone hated that room.

Slow pan of room reeking of sociopathy and masculine insecurity.

The apartment also had a long, narrow balcony opening onto a view of Central Park. It was on that balcony that Markovic and Simone sat nibbling on a plate of crudités and drinking a bottle of Tuscan red wine. Simone’s father might be a rapacious businessman and a skirt-chasing hound who had cheated on Simone’s mother repeatedly, but he was mellow where underage consumption of alcohol was concerned.

There were times Simone wondered how she would ever get through a weekend with him without being able to drink. Probably, she thought, he understood that and took the easy way out by keeping her glass filled.

Markovic made an effort to shift the conversation to less fraught grounds. “How are classes working out?”

“Fine.” The all-purpose conversation-killer: fine.

Markovic frowned. He was a good-looking man. Back in the days when Simone still had friends over, they’d often made sotto voce comments on her “hot dad.” But a full head of dark hair, broad shoulders, and fine features went only so far in distracting from dismissive brown eyes and what might be called “resting prick face.”

“Hey, look!” Markovic pointed up to where dark blue seemed ready to smother the setting sun. He leaned forward against the carved, waist-high balustrade.

Simone joined him and saw a bright pinpoint of light, far to the southwest. At first she thought it might be a star, but the light . . . actually, now that she squinted it was two lights . . . while tiny, were piercing. The lights had appeared suddenly, grown, and blinked out. But now, from that same direction came trails, sparks of fast-moving brightness.

“Shooting stars?” Simone suggested.

Markovic shook his head. “Damned if I know.”

Simone was just about to plead homework as an excuse to get away when it became suddenly, terrifyingly clear that the fast-moving sparks were not dimming or going away. In fact—

BOOOM!

A window-rattling concussion as the sound barrier was broken, and a heartbeat behind that, a shattering crash that literally shook the ground beneath Simone’s feet.

“What the hell?” Markovic cried.

BOOOM! BOOOM!

Across the park, the Majestic, a luxury apartment building that rose in twin twenty-nine story towers, exploded outward as a massive boulder blew through it like a baseball thrown through a Lego structure. The meteorite boulder tumbled across the park, annihilating anything in its path. Behind the boulder came tons of brick and steel and eviscerated bodies that fell on the street and into the park like a landslide, completely blocking Central Park West, crushing trees and burying the bridle path.

Neither Simone nor Markovic had time to move, time even to react, when something like hail but infinitely faster hit them and knocked them flat. Simone had a flash of herself flying backward through the glass balcony door that had been blown out by the same hurtling shrapnel a millisecond before her head would have crashed into plate glass.

When she opened her eyes, the view was inexplicable. She was staring sideways at a dark fireplace at the far end of a stretch of carpet. There was a ringing in her ears and a pounding in her head so intense she half believed someone was beating her with a stick. Tiny pebbles, some barely larger than dust or sand, littered the floor.

Simone sat up and was overwhelmed by a feeling of nausea that nearly made her vomit. Then came the pain. Pain everywhere in her body, arms, chest, face, all hurt like she’d been battered. It felt as if every part of her was bruised.

Only then did she notice the blood.

Close-up on blood-smeared hands.

Simone stared in horror and realized that it was her blood, her own blood seeping from half a dozen punctures in the side of her left hand, more on the back of her right hand, more still up both arms, holes, most so tiny they could almost be insect bites that she’d scratched bloody. But other holes were bigger, like the hole an ice pick might make.

Blood seeped through her clothing, dots of red growing like poppies, and she felt a scream rising inside her. She scrabbled to her feet, nausea and pain making the world tilt and spin, and lurched on wobbly legs to the big, framed mirror over the mantel.

It was like a scene from Carrie. Her face was red with blood dribbling from half a dozen tiny holes, one within an inch of blowing out her right eye. It was like she’d been attacked by a porcupine. But this was Manhattan, for God’s sake; there were no porcupines.

She tore off her T-shirt and gaped at similar puncture wounds across her shoulders and chest, down to her belly. Only her legs had been left untouched, protected by the stone balustrade.

“Dad? Daddy?” she cried in a wavering voice. “Daddy?”

She found him, unconscious, pierced as she was, bloody, and with his left hand hanging by veins and viscera. She screamed and fell to her knees beside him, looking for signs of life. His chest rose and fell; he was breathing, but the blood, the blood was gushing from his wrist. Simone pulled out her phone—it was pierced and dead. She ran for the landline and dialed 911 with trembling fingers and blurted out her fears to a harried operator. Then she ran back to her father, pulled off his belt, and used it as a tourniquet for his wrist.

She succeeded in slowing if not stopping the arterial flow, dragged an ottoman over and elevated his feet as she’d learned in some half-forgotten first-aid course. Then she ran back to the balcony, thinking of shouting down to the street for help.

But one glance told her that help would be slow in coming.

The Majestic had only been the first building to be annihilated. The apartment building half a block south had been hit, and its wreckage now spilled across Fifth Avenue. Flames rose in huge columns, south near Rockefeller Center. Only then did she begin to realize the extent of the horror.

Mom! I have to call Mom!

But now the phone circuits were jammed. Manhattan had suffered the equivalent of a bombing attack.

Exterior. Upper East Side Manhattan. Evening. Like something out of a World War II movie, shattered buildings, fire and smoke.

If she was going to save her father’s life, it would be up to her, alone. Step One: getting a man nearly twice her weight to the elevator, something she accomplished by hauling at the edge of the carpet he lay on.

Bob Markovic had two cars in the garage below street level, a black Mercedes S-Class roughly the size and weight of a small yacht, and a classic Triumph TR3 with a standard transmission. Simone found both keys in her father’s pocket and chose the Mercedes. Markovic was not a small man, and cramming him, unconscious, into a tiny sports car was not going to work.

Simone dragged her father out of the elevator and out onto the concrete, leaving a slimy trail of blood. The car was a hundred feet away, and she sensibly decided to bring the car to him.

He was moaning and making slight movements, but was nowhere near being able to walk, and it took enormous effort to heft him into the back seat, made no easier by the pain rocketing around her own body, not to mention that her hands were slick with blood.

It had been a while since Simone’s one and only driving lesson, and she moved at creeping speed up the ramp and out onto Fifth Avenue.

The emergency-room entrance to the hospital was jammed with cars, taxis, and ambulances, so Simone had to abandon the car a block away, but she found a helpful passerby who took one of her father’s shoulders while she took the other. Inside the emergency room was chaos, orderlies, nurses, security guards all trying to cope with dozens of people marked by the same pinpricks, as well as some far more seriously hurt. One woman, hauled along unconscious by her two teen-aged children, was missing the left side of her face. A woman cried and begged for attention as she cradled a blood-soaked mass of blankets swaddling a blessedly unseen baby.

Simone had no choice but to leave her father lying on the floor, where he risked being trampled, as she competed for the attention of besieged nurses.

After an interminable wait, during which time the numbers of patients doubled every few minutes, orderlies came to whisk Bob Markovic away on a gurney. Then Simone, too, was led to a line of curtained bays, all full to overflowing, and told to sit on the floor and wait. All around her a controlled panic of doctors and nurses dealt with burns, crushing injuries from falling walls and roofs, terrible cuts from flying glass, panic-induced heart attacks, and quite a few with injuries like Simone’s.

Simone waited and sat and oozed blood for hours, listening to cries of pain and screams of grief, forgotten in the mayhem. At one point she noticed that she was sitting in a pool of her own blood, that it had saturated the seat of her trousers. But her body was fighting back, deploying clotting factor, doing all that a billion years of evolved survival mechanisms could to keep the blood on the inside.

She managed to use a nurse’s station line to call her mother, who was, thankfully, alive but unable to go anywhere since a piece of rock had blown right through the elevator in her building. Simone also called her current girlfriend, Mary, and snagged a few ibuprofen, which did almost nothing to dull the bruising pain in her body or the migraine building steam in her head.

After hours of waiting, after multiple unanswered questions about her father’s condition, they put Simone through a full-body CT scan. A doctor had ordered an MRI, but that was before another victim had been placed in the machine. MRIs use super powerful magnets, and no one had realized the shrapnel was magnetic. The first patient in the MRI had been ripped to hamburger by dozens of bits of the rock being drawn through the meat of her body.

Two hours after the CT scan, and far into the night, they were telling her nothing. But the staff—justifiably exhausted and haggard—looked more than just tired, they looked scared.

Explanation of what had happened came not from any of the doctors but from Mary, who’d had to walk twenty-three blocks through a city lit by police-vehicle light bars and accompanied by a soundtrack of sirens, car horns, and burglar alarms. The subway was shut down. Cabbies had all headed for cover. Buses were being used as emergency treatment facilities.

Mary’s first words were not helpful. “Oh, my God, Simone! Oh, my God!”

Simone tried to smile, but her face was stiff from impact bruises and a dozen bandages dotting her body. “Yeah, I know, sweetheart, it’s gruesome. And I think my dad is worse off; they won’t even tell me what’s happening with him.” Simone was not prone to hysteria, but she heard the edge of it in her own voice.

“Don’t worry. It will be okay.” Mary’s tone carried no conviction, and her face was a mask of disgust. She kept moving her hands as if about to reach out to Simone, but then kept pulling away, as if she was frightened.

“I don’t even know what happened,” Simone said.

“Haven’t you seen the news?”

“What do you mean?”

“It was one of those rocks. You know, like the ones that turn people into mutants or whatever?”

“Mary, what are you talking about?”

Mary shrugged. “I’m just saying what the news says. They said a big rock, a meteorite or asteroid or whatever, was heading toward Manhattan, so they nuked it.”

The bright pinpoints of light: nuclear explosions going off at the edge of space.

“The nukes broke it up, I guess, but it still hit. There’s buildings burning and all. I had to cross the park, and it’s full of people all scared to death. People are saying it’s worse than 9/11.” Mary had started to cry, which angered Simone: Mary wasn’t the one bleeding.

Still sitting on a floor no doubt crawling with exotic hospital germs, Simone looked past Mary and saw looming over her three people: one in NYPD uniform, two in jeans and blue windbreakers with large yellow letters across the back reading ICE, one male, one female.

A nurse was with them. She said, “This is one of them.”

“All right,” the female ICE agent said. She fixed Simone with a no-nonsense look, like a disappointed assistant principal who’d caught her ditching class, and pointed to a gold shield on her belt. “I’m with ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, operating under emergency presidential decree.”

“Wait, what?” Simone frowned and shook her head not so much to say no, but to try and clear her head. “ICE? But I’m a US citizen.”

“Understood, miss. We’ve been deputized to act in this emergency. It’s for your own safety.”

Simone was confused, but not so confused that she didn’t know bullshit when she heard it. And as a child of privilege, she knew what words to say. She climbed to her feet, wincing at pains that had become deep aches, fighting the resistance of bruised and stiffening muscles. She said, “I want a lawyer.”

“We aren’t arresting you, miss. This is for your own protection.” The other ICE agent, a balding man with permanent worry lines around his eyes, tried out the same lie but was even less convincing.

“I want to see my father. And I want a lawyer. I’m not going anywhere until I—”

“Miss, you have to come with us.”

Simone turned to the NYPD officer. “Are you standing there allowing these people to drag an American citizen, a New Yorker, out of a hospital?” The policeman winced, then looked away, clearly not happy with his role.

“We are the federal government,” the plainclotheswoman said as if that would shut the conversation down. But this was tough New York, not nice Minnesota: New Yorkers were not by nature easy to shut up, and Simone was very much a New Yorker.

“Hey, Feds are the people who were doing that crazy stuff out in California. I’m not going anywhere with you people.”

“Under the Special Emergency Decree, we can take you to a secure facility for—”

“Hey, you!” Simone snapped, pointing at the uniformed policeman again. “You’re NYPD and I’m a New Yorker. Protect and freaking serve, man. Are you going to stand there and let these guys bully me? Where’s the warrant?”

The policeman seemed to agree, but he shook his head ruefully and said, “I’m sorry, miss, but we have orders to cooperate with the Feds.”

“I’m an American citizen in a goddamn hospital, I’m bleeding like a stuck pig, and I have done nothing wrong. You want me, you’ll have to drag me. Mary! Are you taping?”

“On it,” Mary said, holding her phone up.

“You need to put that phone down and wipe that recording,” the male ICE agent demanded.

But Mary was also a New Yorker and answered, “It’s live-streaming, and basically, screw you. I know my rights.”

At which point the agent stepped in quickly and snatched the iPhone away as Mary and Simone both unleashed verbal tirades liberally punctuated with F-bombs.

In the end it took the NYPD officers plus both ICE agents to carry/drag Simone, while fending off Mary, and the five of them went kicking and yelling out through the emergency room and down a corridor to the parking garage, where a black SUV with darkened windows waited.

From the Purple Moleskine:

FINDING IT HARDER and harder to think about writing fiction. Reality is too weird. I’m part of a group of superheroes, for God’s sake. Best friend can run 800 mph. Malik can make people wish they were dead. Francis moves through walls. There are silent, unseen aliens in our heads when we morph. Just the fact that I can write words like “alien” and “morph” and have them be a real thing, WTF ?

Times I think the watchers have a sense of humor or irony. Gentle, thoughtful Malik can cause agony. Driven, obsessive Shade can outrun a 787—how perfect for someone always in a hurry.

Then there’s me. How brilliantly cruel to give me the power I have. Let’s take the trans girl just starting to figure out how to be who and what she is, and give her the ability to appear as anyone of any gender, age, race . . . Not complaining—it’s so much better than what Malik got. Still.

Now I’m this famous person from an iconic photo. Millions of people who don’t know me have definite opinions about me. Expectations. I’m a hero to strangers and a mystery to myself. The personal is being obliterated. I’m in a war, and the war isn’t about me or what I feel or what I need. I get that. I know I’m just one tiny part of something huge and terrifying. I get that people are scared to death and looking for a hero.

But I am still just this one person. Just me. Cruz.

Also I’m thinking way too much about Armo.

Warning to self: heartbreak ahead.

If I live that long.

3
BOLDLY GOING WHERE NO 3-D PERSON HAS GONE BEFORE

“HOLD MY HAND,” Francis Specter said.

Malik held her hand.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Francis asked. “I’m worried you might get hurt or whatever and it would be my fault.”

“You took me into the Triunfo to take down Dillon Poe,” Malik said. “I was fine. Weirded out, but fine.”

They were talking quietly in the separate dining room of the suite because a sunburned Armo and Cruz were watching a movie in the living room, and Shade was reading something on a laptop provided by the casino hotel’s management. Dekka had gone down to replace a broken tail light on her precious motorcycle, involuntarily assisted by two starstruck guys from building maintenance.

Malik had not exactly cleared this experiment with the others. He worried that if they knew what he was up to, they’d come up with an endless list of objections, and he didn’t want more delay. The others did not have the Dark Watchers constantly, constantly in their heads. They could watch a movie. They could read. Malik was straining just to avoid screaming half the time, not from physical pain but from the crushing humiliation and impotent anger that came from having alien consciousnesses poking through your mind, seeing the world through your eyes.

Using me. Violating me.

There were times when anger would almost suffocate him, and that was not a feeling Malik liked. Malik was about doing things, fixing things, and above all, understanding things. Passively raging at invisible creatures in his head was not good for him; it was toxic and foul. It made him feel weak.

It had been wonderful going to bed the night before with Shade. It had been her move. The assumption had been that the two guys, Malik and Armo, would share a room, but Shade had said, “I want you close so I can keep an eye on you.”

Awkward had not begun to cover Malik’s feelings. He’d thought of objecting but had not been able to come up with a good rationale. So he’d just nodded and excused himself to take a shower.

I was not hard to persuade.

Then Shade had joined Malik in the shower where they helped each other get very, very clean.

It was the closest Malik had come to being able to ignore the ongoing horror that was his true body now, and the loss of privacy and sanctity that twisted his mind. But even as they were making love, the Dark Watchers had been there, making Malik feel that in some way he was betraying Shade by exposing their intimacy to the voyeurs in the shadows.

Enough. Enough feeling bad. Time to do something.

“Okay, so something simple to start with,” Malik suggested to Francis. “The hallway is on the other side of this wall. Shall we?”

Malik squeezed her hand and smiled encouragingly at Francis, whose eyes became swirling rainbows of color, a rainbow that spread over her face.

There was a sudden feeling of the whole world tilting sideways, like Malik was looking at it through a prism. Colors shifted toward ultraviolet, and then the world seemed to unfold as if every object, the chairs, the bed, the walls, were origami. They unfolded and refolded into impossible shapes, nothing still, nothing permanent. He looked at Francis and saw not a girl but a silhouette of light containing rainbows.

Then he chanced to look down and saw his own feet and legs and nearly screamed, because the view was of the burned-down-to-the-bone legs that were his de-morphed reality.

He quickly looked away and ordered himself to stay calm, but by that point they were standing, still holding hands, in the hallway outside, and reality was reassuringly 3-D again.

“Wow.”

“Are you all right?” Francis asked anxiously.

“That is one serious roller coaster,” Malik said.

“Yeah. Totally freaked me out the first time.”

“I would imagine so,” Malik said dryly. “Are you up for another?”

Francis shrugged assent.

“Do you have any control over how fast we move?”

“I don’t know. You want me to go slow?”

“Try, yes,” Malik said. “How about we go from here down to the casino?”

They were still holding hands, and again the world tilted, shifted toward ultraviolet and came apart as if all of reality was no more substantial than tissue paper. This time Malik carefully avoided looking at his own body, and instead found himself in a slow-moving tornado of things almost impossible to recognize. Was that the floor unfolded? Was that what a bed looked like from extradimensional space? He saw water pipes with water running not through them but beside them. He saw what were surely fiber-optic data lines, but they were writhing blue serpents surrounded by a hurricane of colorful dots.

He passed humans, men, women, a child, the inhabitants of the rooms between the suite and the casino floor far below, though up, down, above, and below had a very different meaning here. He saw people as paper-thin faces glued onto an explosion of gray matter; he saw their intestines sluggishly pumping food; he saw them as arms and legs spread out into a kind of diagram, with bone exposed and muscles twitching unattached, and arteries with blood both inside . . . and somehow not.

With his free hand, Malik reached toward a shimmering light seemingly made up of discrete, sparkling bits like so many fireflies, but there was nothing to touch. He tried again, reaching his hand to touch a deconstructed wall, and saw his fingers trace lines in dust but unable to go deeper into what he could see so clearly.

When he looked up and held his gaze steady, he found he could look through every floor above and see blue sky through a shifting forest of objects that obeyed none of the rules of three-dimensional euclidean geometry.

It was disorienting in the extreme, making his stomach churn and his balance fail. He stumbled, tried to stop himself, but fell through a wall and a floor and almost lost his grip on Francis’s hand before he stopped falling for reasons he could not even guess at.

And then, all at once, they were on the casino floor in reassuring 3-D space being stared at, openmouthed, by a blackjack dealer who had just dropped a stack of chips on the floor upon seeing them materialize out of nothing.

“Sorry, we didn’t mean to scare you,” Francis said to the dealer.

“That was amazing,” Malik said. “Incredible! I don’t even . . .” He was breathless with excitement. He’d always liked his physics classes, and this was a wild master class in n-dimensional space, except that this wasn’t a dry discussion of theory. He’d done in reality what in theory was impossible. He had passed through a dimension beyond normal 3-D space. He was a 3-D creature, with 3-D eyes and a 3-D brain, trying to make sense of his world as seen from a very different perspective.

“Amazing,” Malik whispered again. “I . . . I mean . . . wow. Wow.” He felt as if he’d just glimpsed the world like God—if such a creature existed—might see it. No other human being in the history of the world, aside from Francis, had seen what he’d just experienced.

“Yeah. Weird.” Francis did not share Malik’s pleasure, it was all just disorienting and unpleasant to her.

“Let’s go back up. But even slower if you can.”

Once more, with Francis’s small hand held firmly in his, the world unfolded, opened up. Straight lines became curves, curves became curlicues, inside was out, and it was all madness, complete, swirling, colorful, impossible madness. Malik laughed in pure joy, his laughter a paisley fog in the air around him. He reminded himself sternly that he wasn’t an extradimensional tourist: he was searching for answers. Searching for a way out.

Searching . . . for them.

He closed his eyes, trying to regain some sense of perspective, but it was no good: eyelids were just so 3-D. He focused his mind and “listened” for the Dark Watchers. They’d been there with him night and day since he’d been burned beyond saving. But now?

Where are you, my dark, invisible friends?

He could not feel them, which was a wonderful relief, but not the point. If he could not sense them, how could he find them?

The world around him was made entirely of bits and pieces: gypsum board walls, lumber, structural steel, the fabric of carpets, wires buzzing with electricity, which he saw as a pulsing green glow. Mixed in like croutons in a salad were humans, bulging water balloons of guts and muscle and blood that, when looked at from a certain angle, exploded outward in a disturbing vivisection, like something out of a Guillermo del Toro movie, strange and unsettling—and the more strange and unsettling for being recognizable.

But none of this was what he was looking for. He needed to look past all the debris. He needed, he told himself, to look in a different direction. But how was he to find that different direction, the direction where the Dark Watchers lurked?

He turned his head this way and that, and caught a glimpse of something. Not light—light was everywhere, seeming to shine right through everything in every direction but one, and in that one direction he saw a hole no bigger than a grapefruit. Inside that hole was not the black of total darkness, but something he could not describe, because inside that hole was nothingness, a pale gray, flat, nothingness without surface or depth or feature.

“I want to go there,” Malik said, and watched his technicolor words wrap themselves around the splayed gray mass that was Francis’s brain. He saw the intricate muscles of her eyes contract and turn her gaze in the direction he’d indicated.

Francis moved toward the hole. If she was using her feet, Malik never saw them move. She just seemed to glide, smooth and slow, drawing him along, like he was Wendy to her Peter Pan.

Suddenly Malik felt an electric jolt, not painful, but alarming. And there! There he felt the presence of the Dark Watchers!

From the nothing hole something emerged, something like an amoeba, but too big, and when he stared at it he did not see inside, did not see organs or viscera, just more of the same bland, featureless gray that shaped the rhythmically pulsating mass.

It’s digital, not physical. Or whatever passes for digital in this universe.

The amoeba went straight for him, and all at once it had wrapped itself around his head, fast as a bullwhip. He cried out and tried to take hold of the thing, but his hands . . .

He had let go of Francis’ hand!

He clawed frantically at the amoeba, but his hands would not touch it and just passed through with no resistance. He might as well have been batting at the air.

He twisted frantically, fear swelling inside him. He turned away from the nothing hole, and instantly the amoeba was gone.

Some kind of defense mechanism.

He tested his theory by looking back at the hole, and sure enough, the featureless amoeba went for him again.

He reversed direction, lost the amoeba, and called out in paisley swirls, “Francis! Francis!”

But his words did not reveal her. No answer came.

And now Malik was getting good and scared. Because the power to move between dimensions was Francis’s, not his.

He was stuck.

4
PSYCHOPATH ROLL CALL

DRAKE MERWIN HAD reassembled himself several times during his relatively short life. It was a process he neither understood nor controlled; he only knew that whatever was done to . . . disassemble him, he came back together.

The latest such disassembly had been the result of a Hellfire missile launched from a Predator drone. The explosion had annihilated much of him, leaving bits and pieces, many burning, smeared all over a pile of rocks in the Mojave desert. The largest bit of his head—left eye, a bit of nose cartilage, and his mouth—had landed on a cactus.

A few days had passed since then, and he now had a body capable of limited movement. His head was mostly complete, with the right side lacking only skin to cover exposed muscle and tendon. He had most of his left arm and all of his right arm, that being the ten-foot-long tentacle that was a legacy of the FAYZ. His right leg was minus a foot, and the left leg was scarcely better.

It was not an ideal body for crossing hundreds of miles of desert. Before he could do anything he would need to be more complete: hard to walk without two feet.

Drake experienced a moment of sadness and loss for the excellent cave that had been collapsed by the explosion. He’d spent years in that cave, torturing victims, savoring their agony, laughing at their increasingly desperate pleas.

Often during the months and years of his desert exile, Drake had passed the time by teasing Brittany Pig, the homunculus that always reappeared, like a living bas relief on his chest, complete with the protruding wire of her broken braces. Brittany had not yet re-emerged—that part of his chest was still open to the ribs—but she would be back. Aside from his victims, Brittany was the closest Drake ever came to human contact. “Friends” would not be the right word, but Drake had become accustomed to her.

Drake had foolishly allied himself with Tom Peaks, called Dragon by some, Napalm by others, and damned near been disassembled by various mutants at the Port of Los Angeles, including an old enemy, Dekka Talent. Dekka had been Sam Temple’s muscle, his enforcer, her and that brat Brianna. Dekka had been dangerous enough then, and she was more so now. But he could take her. Could and would.

In time. But not yet.

Peaks’s cell-phone signal had led to the missile strike that had wiped out Drake’s excellent cave. They’d been trying to kill Peaks, but he was gone by then, and Drake had borne the brunt.

It was unfair, but Drake was not one to stew over life’s unfairness. Anyway, now he had a mission. The world was coming apart, civilization was slowly crumbling, and the “new normal” was just abnormal enough that Drake thought he might have a chance at something he had wanted desperately for five years, from all the way back in the FAYZ: Astrid Ellison.

He didn’t have an address, but he thought he knew how to find it. In the meantime he only had to wait for another foot to return, and then: Los Angeles.

He had come so close in the FAYZ. So close to making Astrid suffer. This time he would not fail.

Drake had learned patience down through the years, and he waited for hours more until he had two almost-complete legs. And then Drake marched . . . well, staggered . . . toward murder.

“I’m an artist, damn it!”

Justin DeVeere muttered those words to a cup of coffee at a Starbucks in McCarran International airport.

Justin DeVeere, aka Knightmare and a few other less-flattering names, had escaped the massacre at the Ranch, the HSTF-66 facility, by running into the woods until he could run no more. He’d then managed to hitch a ride to Las Vegas, which turned out to be a very poor choice of destination. Only sheer, dumb luck had kept Justin from dying from a missile en route to Vegas.

After the explosion, he’d walked on toward Las Vegas until he saw flames rising and explosions booming. Then he had sensibly turned around and walked in the other direction. He’d ended up spending the night shivering in the freezing desert and watching the flames of the distant battle.

It had sent his mind back onto half-forgotten tracks, back to when he was just a promising young artist. As he watched from a safe distance, he’d begun thinking about a multimedia art installation that would evoke the horror. And that led him to painful memories of his wealthy patron and girlfriend, Erin O’Day, who had been killed in an earlier battle.

The thing was, Justin admitted, he did not actually want to be Knightmare anymore. It had been exciting for a while, but had quickly become a bloody, violent, and very precarious existence. He’d been imprisoned at the Ranch before Shade Darby and her mutant friends had attacked and destroyed the place, freeing a freak show of mutants and cyborgs, things that were half-human, drones flown by the disembodied heads of infants, things . . . Bad things. Very bad things. And had any of the Rockborn Gang spotted him there, he’d almost certainly be dead now. He had experienced the blast of pain from Malik, and one thing was absolutely clear to Justin: he never, ever wanted to feel that again. It had been unendurable, and it had shaken him down to his bones.

I’m an artist, dammit!

That phrase had become his rallying cry. He wasn’t Knightmare; he wasn’t the creature who had destroyed a plane and burned its passengers alive. He wasn’t the creature who had destroyed the Golden Gate Bridge. He was an artist.

Dammit!

It was this mantra that convinced him that he needed to get back to New York. Back to where people knew him for his art. Surely some art lover would grant him shelter until . . . until the madness descending on humanity was past.

The morning after the battle, he’d once again walked back toward Las Vegas, passed by an endless stream of National Guard troop transports and FEMA trucks carrying emergency relief.

Once there, unrecognized in his normal, human body, he’d overheard people talking about the Rockborn Gang, the heroes who had saved the city. And to his horror, he’d realized they were still there, still in Vegas.

One thing Justin was quite clear about: wherever the Rockborn Gang was, he wanted to be far away.

He had no wallet, no credit cards or phone. But a young man walking past a vast construction site in North Las Vegas, and who arguably looked a bit like Justin, had all that and more. Justin had not wanted to kill the young man, but necessity made its own rules. One more body for collection by the crews that were scouring the city for the dead. Justin took his victim’s wallet and phone and caught a taxi to the airport. He’d bought the first available ticket to New York and now merely waited for the gate to be called.

Back to New York.

He would be safe in New York.

Tom Peaks had run from Las Vegas after the horror at the Triunfo, the hotel where Dillon Poe had made his unspeakably brutal last stand.

Peaks had arrived in Vegas as Napalm, the ten-story-tall reptile with the belly full of liquid fire, believing he was there to take down Dekka, who he hated for what he still thought of as betrayal.

But when he’d arrived . . .

He had not known about Dillon Poe. He’d had no idea what Dillon was doing. He had not known that the hundreds of people gathered by the entrance of the Triunfo were slaves to Dillon’s will, unable to flee.

He had definitely not known that the Charmer had sprayed that crowd with gasoline.

Now Peaks sat trembling in a booth at a diner in one of the multitude of identical shopping centers that ringed the city. His coffee was undrunk. The pancakes he’d ordered were untouched and now cold.

There had been so many horrors. So much destruction. The Ranch, his great creation, was exposed to the world and destroyed. What had once been his staff of carefully recruited scientists and techs and guards had been hunted down and murdered by vengeful mutants and cyborgs.

His family . . . He closed his eyes and tried to picture them, but each time he did he saw disgust and contempt on their faces. He could never go home to them, not now.

No job. No home. No family. No purpose in life. And for the rest of his life he would see the Triunfo fire over and over and over again. A fire he had unwittingly lit.

“Can I get you anything else, honey?’ the waitress asked.

Peaks shook his head. He fished out a twenty-dollar bill and laid it on the table, got up, went to the men’s room, and vomited coffee and bile.

Peaks splashed water on his face and looked at himself in the dirty mirror. Looked at a face now known to every law-enforcement agency on earth.

There was no safety.

There was no escape.

There were only the screams of people burning.

Peaks stumbled out of the diner into brilliant sunlight. Across the vast parking lot was a Big 5 Sporting Goods store. He headed for it, spotted a liquor store, and bought himself a bottle of excellent scotch on the way.

“Damn good scotch,” Peaks muttered, draining a quarter of the bottle as he maneuvered through parked cars.

The clerk at the liquor store had given him a strange look, a shrewd look of recognition. Would he call the police? More likely than not.

Time was running short. If they came for him, he could morph and fight them off. He had only to belch the dreadful napalm and they would burn. . . .

Innocent police officers just doing their duty. My God.

He set the scotch bottle, now half-empty, on the curb and went into the Big 5. He easily found the gun-sales area. He pointed to a 12-gauge shotgun in a rack.

“How much?”

“That model will set you back $899.99.”

Peaks stuck a credit card into the reader. Denied. Tried another card. Denied.

“I know who you are,” the clerk said suddenly. He looked at Peaks as if seeing the devil himself.

“I need a gun,” Peaks rasped.

“You get nothing from me, you piece of shit,” the man said. “Give you a gun? Why, so you can kill some more children? Get out of here! Security! Security!”

Peaks bowed his head, then walked around behind the counter. The clerk, terrified, tried to back away but Peaks grabbed him by the shirt front and said, “I need a shotgun. Short barrel. And one shell. Just one.”

A minute later store security came hustling up just in time to see Peaks jack the 12-gauge shell into the chamber, place the barrel of the shotgun under his chin, and blow the top of his head all over the display case.

5
HOW DO YOU GET TO CARNEGIE HALL?

IN SURGERY THEY had reattached Bob Markovic’s nearly severed hand. He was given painkillers. He was also given a sedative. And by the time he woke he was in a very surprising yet oddly familiar place. Consciousness returned to Markovic in the form of too-bright lights and a sea of red velour. He blinked, and then squinted against the light, and then, with rapidly mounting panic, recognized where he was.

Carnegie Hall?

Markovic’s Money Machine had season tickets to Carnegie Hall, using them to reward especially productive senior employees and the occasional politician who needed some TLC. But, he realized, he was not in the corporate seats which were up in the first balcony, stage left. He was in a seat toward the rear of the orchestra section.

And the people around him were definitely not regular patrons. Not even close. Carnegie Hall’s Isaac Stern Auditorium held 2804 people; less than a tenth of that number were in the hall now, but they were not there to watch a show. Many were in pajamas or robes. Many others—like Markovic himself—were in hospital robes. Some were in street clothes. But all were bloody to one degree or another. Some showed just a few blood-soaked bandages slowly drying from crimson to rust color, but others looked as if they’d been dipped in red paint.

Markovic’s pain seemed to come out of nowhere, a series of pains, really, starting with the total-body bruising he quickly traced to what looked like dozens of pinpricks, or ice-pick stabs on his arms, his hands, his face. Then there was a deeper wound, a thick bandage on his chest that seeped blood and felt terrible. That wound suggested danger to life and limb. But it was the hand, wrapped in gauze and surgical webbing, that was the most troubling because he had no idea what had happened to it, or why he could not feel his fingers.

He opened his robe with his good hand and peeled back the thick bandage on his upper pectoral. This was no pinprick; this was a gash, maybe three centimeters long with a dozen black stitches holding it closed.

Have I been shot? Stabbed?

Some kind of terrorist attack?

And, given the pain and the wounds and the blood and the incessant pounding in his head, why in holy hell was he at Carnegie Hall?

He tried to stand and sat right back down, head swimming, thighs quivering, knees as firm as overcooked spaghetti. Markovic began tracing back through his memories. He’d been arguing with Simone, which was not unusual. She was an amazing kid, of course—after all, she was his daughter—but she was headstrong. Then there had been a strange light . . . no, two lights, each far more steady and intense than any star. Then . . .

Beyond that point, memory became disconnected flashes. A flash of an impact of some sort. A flash of his living room. A flash of Simone, face bloody, bending over him. Then . . . doctors? Nurses? He furrowed his brow, thinking. Cops?

The back seat of his Mercedes?

A linoleum floor?

And a gurney rolling fast down long corridors, he remembered that. And the next memory was coming fully conscious in the last place on earth he’d ever . . .

It must have been a mass casualty event. His brain was working now despite the pain everywhere. Mass casualties, and the first responders had decided to use Carnegie Hall as a temporary . . .

Temporary what? Hospital?

He squinted to focus and turned his stiff neck. Beside every door—and there were a dozen or so—beside each one was a national guardsman in green uniform, helmeted, and carrying an assault rifle.

Some hospital.

He fumbled for his phone, but he was in a hospital robe, underpants and socks, which meant his street clothes and phone were back at whatever hospital had done whatever they’d done . . .

“What is going on?” he muttered, getting no response. So he looked left and right and decided the best target for conversation would be the woman seated in the row behind and left.

“Excuse me,” he said through a parched mouth. “Do you know what’s going on?”

The woman had gray hair cut short, was small, compact, and full of nervous energy, like a clever sparrow. “The explosion,” the woman said.

“What explosion?”

The woman glanced over her shoulder like they were in fifth grade and she was worried the teacher might hear her gossiping. “One of those meteors. The alien ones. I heard the major—I think he’s in charge here—talking about it. One of those alien rocks was heading for the city, so they nuked it. I guess they saved the city by breaking it up, maybe, but we still got hit by a lot of stuff. Smaller pieces. I live on West Forty-Ninth and it’s burning.”

Markovic nodded. “Thanks.”

“They said we’re here for our own safety,” the woman said, reluctant to relapse into silence.

But Markovic was already on to considering the possibilities. He could just get up and walk out. He was in pain, but the serious wound in his chest had been sutured and, well, whatever had been done with his hand. Presumably he was not in imminent danger of death. And he’d be a lot more comfortable at home than here.

But could he leave? That was the question. He took a moment to observe, twisting painfully this way and that. He saw two different people attempt to exit, and both times be sent back to their seat by a guardsman.

So, not a hospital: a holding cell, a temporary jail. They were prisoners. More importantly, he was a prisoner.

“Why hold us prisoner?” he wondered aloud.

The answer was not long in coming to him. They had all been struck by shrapnel from the meteorite. And by now everyone knew the possible consequences of exposure to the rock.

“They’re isolating us,” he muttered under his breath.

“Dad?”

“Simone?” There she was, standing right before him. “Oh God, baby, I’m so glad you’re okay.” The word “okay” died on his lips as he realized that she had been peppered with shrapnel as well, that her body was a series of leaking bandages. Her face looked like she’d tried to shave during an earthquake.

Simone made a half-hearted effort to hug him, but stopped when she realized the pain it would cause them both. She lowered herself gingerly into the seat beside him.

“What are they going to do with us?” Simone demanded.

Markovic shrugged and winced at the movement, which sent pain stabbing up his neck. “I don’t know, but I’m calling Cowan.” Cowan was Markovic’s lawyer.

“They took everyone’s phones. I don’t think they’ll let you call,” Simone said.

“The hell they won’t,” Markovic snapped. He stood up, fighting crashing waves of headache and nausea, and steadied himself with a hand on Simone’s shoulder. He looked around imperiously, decided he should go straight to the top, and weaved his tottering way up the aisle to the main doors where a National Guard major stood, surrounded by junior officers.

Simone followed him. She didn’t approve of her father, but he was still her father, and the truth was he generally got his way: no one was better at bullying underlings than Bob Markovic.

“Major, a word,” Markovic said.

The major was a middle-aged man with blond hair cut so short he appeared bald from a distance, a fleshy nose, and a body as fit as a fifty-year-old man whose real full-time job was managing a branch office for a mortgage broker was likely to be.

“Sir, you need to take a seat,” the major said.

“Actually, major, I don’t take orders from you. See, you’re a National Guard toy soldier, and I’m Bob Markovic. If that name doesn’t mean anything to you, I assure you it means a great deal to the mayor, the governor, and all the congresspeople and senators you could name. So—”

“Sir. I’m very busy. We have an emergency situation here. So please take your seat.”

“I will not take my seat, you jumped-up doorman.” Markovic stabbed a finger at the major’s chest.

The major turned away, a look of distaste on his face. “Lieutenant, have this gentleman escorted back to his seat.”

The lieutenant reached for Markovic’s intact arm.

“Don’t you lay hands on me!” Markovic yelled, and slapped the lieutenant’s hand away, and that was when a military police sergeant stepped in and jabbed a black rectangular object into Markovic’s side.

Markovic heard the sparking of the stun gun. He jerked wildly, staggered back, and was saved from falling by the lieutenant and a sergeant.

“This man with you?” the lieutenant demanded of Simone.

“He’s my father.”

“Then you need to get him to calm down.”

Simone said nothing but stepped in to wrap her stunned and quivering father’s arm over her shoulder. He had been barely ambulatory. Now he was not just weak but confused, unable to control what direction he was going, and Simone led him back and deposited him in his seat.

“Fascist bastards!” Markovic said when the effects of the stun gun’s charge had diminished.

“You got the rich-white-guy treatment,” Simone said pitilessly. “I saw a black guy try it and he got handcuffs.”

“Spare me your libtard crap, Simone!” Markovic raged. “This is illegal. It’s unconstitutional! I have rights!”

There was a flurry of activity around the major. Civilians in suits had come in from outside and were arguing with the major. Evidently the major lost the argument, because one of the men in suits walked down the aisle and climbed nimbly onto the stage.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I am Carlos Malina from the Department of Homeland Security. An emergency has been declared, and an emergency decree has been issued.”

All in passive voice, Markovic noted. Like he was just the messenger.

The audience erupted in shouted questions and demands.

Malina ignored the questions until the volume died down. “I know you all have questions. And they will all be answered. But first we have to transport you to a secure location. Buses are pulling up outside.”

It was then that the worm of doubt woke within Markovic. A secure location? Buses?

“It’s all about the rock. They think we’re going to become mutants,” Simone said. Then, slowly, dreamily, as if marveling at the craziness of the words she was uttering, Simone said, “They’re going to kill us. Dad? I think they’re going to kill us.”

6
INSIDE THE KALEIDOSCOPE

MALIK WAS SCARED. Good and scared. He was in a place impossible for his mind to understand or explain. It was in some sense like being buried inside a fantastic junkyard. All around him were things that should have been connected, should have been part of some recognizable structure, but all rationality was subverted. He could make out lengths of structural steel, big I-beams, but they hung in midair, attached to nothing . . . unless he changed the angle of view, in which case, like glass beads in a kaleidoscope, objects moved, touched, intersected, or alternately separated, even disappeared entirely.

Who needs hallucinogens when you can travel in n-dimensional space?

Malik was fairly sure that everything around him was part of the casino or the people in the casino and hotel—at least he hoped so. But he caught glimpses of things that he could not rationalize as being any part of 3-D space: at certain angles he thought he saw a sort of faint web, like one of those orange plastic fences they put up around construction sites, but more pink than orange. He thought more than once that he saw a solid object become fluid. He saw tendrils, like a squid’s legs, dangling and withdrawn, curled up like a measuring tape only to disappear, so that he wasn’t at all sure they were real and not figments.

Malik knew that the apparent randomness of everything around him was a problem inside his own head. He was a man of three spatial dimensions, up and down, left and right, forward and back. He was now in four—well, who knew how many—dimensional space, a place where there was at least one more “direction” that was none of the usual three. His eyes were eyes evolved for three dimensions; his brain was a brain that could not really even picture extra dimensions. What he was seeing around him was his brain’s futile effort to make sense of what it could never hope to understand.

I’m an ant walking across a computer motherboard.

The worst came when he saw parts of himself seeming to stand apart. He saw inside his body, saw the burns, the exposed bone, saw through the superficial normality of the morph he was doomed to remain in. He saw his organs, his liver seething with blood. He saw his intestines slowly pulsating with chewed food, but at the same time saw startling glimpses of that very food in its original, intact form. A bagel. Fried eggs which were simultaneously in and out of their shells. He saw the inside of his own brain, a pink cauliflower in a bone cage. Tendrils of light seemed to reach out from his brain, twisting and poking, turning objects this way and that.

I’m seeing my own consciousness!

He cried out in shock when his own eyes floated before him, staring at him, meeting his own gaze before erupting like a stop-motion video of a flower blossoming. He peered closer and he saw his own iris contract, saw the thousands of muscle fibers straining and releasing.

It was literally sickening, and he might or might not have vomited; it was impossible to be sure.

I have no way out of here.

Panic swelled, and he could see it as a wave of swirling blue crystals that followed his arteries—arteries which, if he looked at them from the wrong angle, would separate, become sections of tubing, with blood seeming to cross from piece to piece.

Sensory overload.

He tried shutting his eyes again and even put his hands over his eyes, but even his hands were no more an impediment than a dirty windshield.

“Am I going to die here?” He spoke the words aloud, but the sound was distorted, alien, not human.

Why had he not snapped back to reality? Francis had moved him into this dimension, and he had assumed that only her power was keeping him there. But that wasn’t the way it was working. Her power was the ability to cross the line between there and here, and once he was across that dimensional line, he had no power to escape.

The amoeba he’d seen earlier, the amoeba that had panicked him, had not returned. But then again, he had not tried finding that . . . what to call it? Direction? If it was a direction, it was one that was neither up, down, left, or right.

Try again.

He focused his thoughts and actually saw a swirl of yellow paisley rise from a brain that had been exploded into separate gobbets of flesh awash in a pool of cerebral fluid.

There!

The instant he focused on the hole, an amoeba came rushing at him, and just like before wrapped itself around his head. But this time he did not panic, but tried to will himself toward that hole.

The amoeba evaporated, and Malik reassured himself that he had passed the defensive system. He felt himself moving toward the hole, which seemed to recede as he approached, growing ever so slightly larger, far too slowly, as if it was moving away almost as quickly as he advanced.

Suddenly there was another organism, a mass of organs and bits of bone, and things he did not even want to guess at. He stopped moving and began to pull back, but then, a slight shift of perspective, and he saw a face.

“Francis?”

Her answer was not a sound but a color. A color never represented in even the biggest Crayola box. He knew nevertheless that it was an affirmative.

She reached with a bony claw wreathed in pulsing veins. He held out his own hand, a hand as deconstructed as hers.

And all at once the two of them were back in the bedroom. In three-dimensional space.

For what felt like a very long time Malik just stood there trembling, breathing hard, looking at Francis. The rainbow effect in her eyes faded and disappeared. Solid objects were solid again, their insides hidden from view.

“Are you okay?” Francis asked, and Malik realized it was for the third time.

“I think so,” Malik said in a harsh whisper. Then, “Wow.”

“I’m really sorry I let go of you,” Francis said. “You must have been scared.”

“Scared? I was terrified,” Malik admitted. “It’s . . . I don’t even know how to make sense of it.”

“Yeah, it’s weird, huh?” Francis said.

“You have a gift for understatement. There are people who spend a lot of money on drugs and never see anything one tenth as weird.”

“Did you find what you were after?”

Malik considered. “Maybe,” he allowed. “You know what didn’t happen? I did not feel the Dark Watchers. Just like you don’t. Whatever they are, the effect—the Watcher effect—is something in three dimensions that is gone or transformed in n-space.”

Francis nodded politely, but Malik was pretty sure that she was not interested in the physics of it all, let alone the metaphysics. To Francis, it was a trick she could do. It was a power. But she didn’t grasp just how great a power it was.

“They have defenses, those things, those amoeba-looking things,” Malik said. “But I think that’s sort of an automated system, and not very effective. I would guess they are system cleaners, subroutines designed to redirect any random bit of data that takes the wrong turn. But I’m not some random databit, I’m a whole system.”

“So, no more of that, huh?” Francis said, already losing interest and edging toward the door.

“Well, not today, anyway. It’s very . . . unsettling.”

But did he intend to go back to find out what was through that blank hole of nothingness? To seek out whoever was behind this deconstruction of reality? To confront whoever or whatever was screwing with the software of the universe to allow the growth of monsters and destroy human civilization?

Hell yes, I’m going back.

But he wisely said none of that, and instead said, “Shall we go find the others, see what they’re up to?”

7
MALMEDY IN THE PINE BARRENS

“DAD. THEY’RE GOING to kill us.”

“Now you’re being paranoid,” Markovic said. “They’re probably going to put us in a hotel for the night.”

Simone hoped he was right. She tried to push away a growing panic as they were moved by rows to a side door and marched down a hallway. A National Guard private stood there handing out bottles of water and granola bars, smiling, looking normal and sympathetic. It should have calmed Simone’s nerves, but she kept hearing echoes of books she’d read, books about the Holocaust. The Nazis had lulled Jews into a false sense of security as they were sent to die in showers spewing nerve gas.

In the crush of bodies, she was separated from her father. As they reached cold night air, she was stopped from catching up to him and saw her father loaded onto a bus by armed men in black tactical gear bearing no identification patches or badges.

Simone looked desperately for an escape, but there was none. They were in an alleyway loading bay, soldiers to both sides. She in her turn was herded aboard a bus, a borrowed yellow bus with the words “New York School Bus Service” in blue script down the side.

Simone was seated with a woman who, like everyone on the bus, bore the telltale bloody bandages.

“I heard we’re going to a Motel 6.”

“Yeah? My dad seems to think they’ll take us to a suite at the Four Seasons.”

Peering ahead, Simone could see her father’s bus ahead of them, led through panic traffic by black SUVs with lights and sirens going.

They dipped down into the luridly lit Lincoln Tunnel, heading toward New Jersey, and Simone felt the anxiety on the bus grow. As the ride went on and on, complaints grew louder, and demands for a bathroom stop intensified.

They were far from the city now, far from any city. They had left the interstate, and pine trees crowded the road on both sides, interrupted by stretches of marsh.

“The Pine Barrens,” a voice whispered.

Then Simone saw the lead bus slow and turn onto a narrow, pockmarked and unpaved road that dived straight into the woods.

“They’re going to kill us,” Simone whispered. It might have been paranoia earlier, but now she could see it about to play out. It made sense to kill them all; that’s what she’d seen back at Carnegie Hall, that the cold logic of the situation would lead the government to snuff them out fast, before any of them could become a serious problem. Now it was no longer theoretical. There was no other explanation.

“They’re going to kill us!” Simone yelled, standing up. Her seat partner gaped at her in disbelief.

The armed guards—one at the front, one at the back, both bristled and brought their weapons to bear on her. For a moment Simone was too appalled to react: they were pointing guns at her. At her!

“Sit down, please,” the guard at the front said. “We’re just taking a bathroom stop at a park restroom facility.”

That calmed most, and Simone heard nervous relief laughter, but she felt in her bones that it was a lie. What was she going to do? What could she do?

She sat back down, hands twisting on her lap, and tried to hold her head still so as not to restart the headache that was receding at last, replaced on her list of physical woes by the fiery, insistent itching of her many puncture wounds.

Ahead the bus pulled into a clearing, silvery and vague in the faint starlight, eerily bright where the headlights illuminated grass and mud. There were some picnic tables that looked as if they’d never been used, and, sure enough, there was a wooden building marked with bathroom signs. Simone felt the collective sigh of those around her, saw their scornful looks at her, the girl who had panicked and started yelling about being killed, ha, ha, ha.

“Okay, we are taking a break,” the guard announced. “Everyone off, and line up. We’ll bring you up in groups of six to use the restroom.”

Simone, abashed but not reassured, filed off the bus with the others and headed toward the restrooms. But a man in black tactical gear with a balaclava covering his face held up a hand and pointed them to a space yards away. “Line up there. Three rows.”

Then Simone saw the camouflage-painted military truck parked beside the clearing, a dark green canvas cover over the back.

Simone tried to make her way to her father, but here there were still more men and women in black tactical gear holding assault rifles, insisting that everyone line up.

“Line up! Line up!” an authoritative voice shouted. They did. They lined up. Three rows of about thirty people per row.

And that’s when the canvas cover of the army truck was raised.

Simone stared at the perforated black tube of a machine gun’s barrel.

“No!” she screamed. “No! No!”

The machine gun opened fire, spitting tracer rounds that flew like rocket-powered fireflies in the darkness.

Bap-bap-bap-bap-bap-bap!

Screams. Screams from everywhere, including from Simone’s own throat.

Simone turned and ran in blind panic—no reasoning, no plan, just run from the machine gun! Run! Something punched her hard in the back and she fell on her face, hands sinking into soft, wet soil. She heard her own voice whimpering. She tasted mud.

The machine gun roared on, relentless, the well-oiled steel parts pushing rounds out of the belt, striking the percussion caps, exploding the gunpowder, propelling the thumbtip-sized slugs down the rifle barrel, then kicking out the used brass casing and pushing the next round into place, many times each second. Tracer rounds flitted inches above her back, so close she could feel the breeze.

Screams of terror came from all sides, screams and cries and pitiful demands to know, “Why? Why?” and the grunts of those who were beyond words and would soon be beyond all pain.

The machine gun stopped, and the still-living who could move ran or crawled. But now the black-clad guards, faces behind balaclavas, began shooting, a higher-pitched sound of assault rifles. Simone raised her head and saw a child shot in the back. His mother screamed and crawled to him and was shot in the neck.

A man fell on Simone, a big man, his weight so still, so inert she knew he must be dead. She felt his blood trickling down on the back of her neck. She smelled the stink of his voided bowels.

The machine gun, reloaded, started up again, sweeping the field, punching holes into the still-living and the already-dead. Simone felt the impact as bullets struck the dead man over her. Bullets that would have struck her, would have torn holes through her, but for the shelter the dead man provided.

Her terrified, panicky brain told her she was wounded, too, that the sudden blow to her back, the blow that had knocked her down, had come from the machine gun. But she felt no pain and suspected she’d simply been knocked down by another victim. Some person whose name she would never know had taken the bullet with her name on it.

The machine gun stopped again. Sudden silence. Then the sound of a woman weeping and seconds later a cry for mercy and two rounds of assault rifle fire and the cry stopped abruptly. Simone opened one eye narrowly, a sideways view that revealed men in black walking like wraiths through the steam rising from bloody corpses, shooting everyone, living or dead, two rounds in the head.

Bang! Bang!

If she waited, she would die.

She tried to move, but the dead man’s weight was too great to free herself from. She had a sudden flash of the last Lord of the Rings movie, of King Théoden lying broken on the battlefield, trapped beneath his dead horse, saying, My body is broken.

Bang! Bang!

Helpless. She was helpless, and for a moment despair offered her an easy way out. Simply wait for death. Just lie there beneath a dead man and wait for the bang . . . bang. She would only hear the first shot. Maybe not even that. And all the fear and fury would be gone.

But despair had not won out yet; rather, the temptation of surrender poured fuel on the fire of her anger. How dare they do this? How dare they simply murder people this way? Her father might already be dead. Why? It wasn’t her fault or her father’s or the fault of any of these people, these poor, massacred people.

She struggled again to free herself and this time drew the attention of a man in black, who looked at her from a hundred feet away and said, “Don’t worry, honey, I’ll get to you.”

Nonchalant. Like mass murder was a daily affair for him. Like her life was nothing.

She felt a sick, acid bile in her throat, felt her whole body tingling, still wracked by pain, but this was something else, something different. Rage filled her, rage and impotence, a burning sense of injustice and of her own weakness.

Then the dead man rolled aside.

He had rolled aside because suddenly Simone was on her hands and knees and had shrugged him off. Impossible just seconds earlier; the man weighed twice what she did. Impossible!

The man in black who’d noticed her yelled over his shoulder, “Live one here!” He came striding toward her, fast, weapon at his shoulder, leveled on her.

At nearly point-blank range, he fired!

Simone saw him fire. Saw the muzzle flash. Heard the loud popping noises.

Saw it and heard it . . . from about fifty feet in the air.

“Shit!” the killer yelled, and raised his weapon to aim up at her. He fired and missed again, because now Simone was higher still, and moving through the air with no more difficulty than a trout in a mountain stream.

Tracer bullets from a half dozen guns chased her through the sky, like something from an old World War II movie where she was the brave fighter pilot. She was not fast enough to outrun bullets, but she was too fast for them to be able to keep sight of her in the deepening darkness.

The army truck switched on a small spotlight. Its beam swept around the sky, searching, but too slowly, like someone trying to spear a cockroach with a chopstick—it followed her but had no chance of catching up and keeping her illuminated.

Simone found she had only to think of moving, and she did. No time yet to ask what had happened to her, and no need to ask how: even in her frazzled, freaked-out state, she knew it was the rock. Dozens of particles no bigger than a grain of sand had pierced her. Had they been larger they might still have been moving at twenty-eight thousand miles an hour and blown right through her, like gamma rays, but small particles traveling through air are slowed by friction. So the rock had not simply blown through her; it had stayed within her. Like buckshot.

Simone’s overriding thought was that she needed to find her father. He might not be her favorite human being, but however he treated the poor fools who took his loans, he’d always been good to her. And whatever else might happen, he was her father.

Below she saw a bizarre scene, a sort of drone camera pan over a battlefield, except that this was not a battle but cold-blooded massacre. A hundred or more bodies lay in twisted poses, holes dripping urine and stomach contents and blood. The black-clad killers were still finishing off the wounded.

Bang! Bang!

But now a more mundane fear shivered through her, the fear of falling. She was in the air.

In the air!

Visions of Road Runner cartoons flashed, and she imagined being Wile E. Coyote as he looks down to see he’s run past the edge of the cliff. But Simone did not fall. She had no idea how she was doing this . . . And then Simone looked down at her legs. The jeans were gone, and her legs . . . She stifled a scream. Her legs were covered with what looked like iridescent scales, like a trout—but no, that wasn’t right, either. Because these scales did not lie flat; they moved. They beat like tiny hummingbird wings. And it wasn’t just her legs. Her entire body was covered, every square inch of it, with hundreds, no, thousands of tiny, iridescent bee wings. She raised a hand and looked in fascination at the furiously buzzing things all down the back of her hand, though not on her palms. She touched her face—no wings there, or on her throat, but her head, her shoulders, her sides were all winged, like some weird insectoid bedazzling.

And she was no longer the color of a white girl who lived in the shadow of tall buildings: beneath the iridescent wings was flesh the color of faded Smurf toy left too long in the sun.

I can fly!

The rock. There was no doubt about that. Nor was there any doubt that the government had feared just this sort of thing and had tried to solve the problem with bullets.

Simone veered away as the searchlight’s shaft swept nearby. She didn’t have to do anything to fly, just think, go there, or go that way, or, faster!

Her duty was to find her father, but the killing field below was dark, and all she saw were twisted bodies and armed men. She spotted a column of vehicles approaching, headlights moving slowly, led by an earth mover, along with two heavy dump trucks and three black SUVs.

Coming to bury the dead!

If she reduced altitude far enough to search faces, she would be shot, and while she could fly and had become significantly stronger, she had no reason to imagine that she could survive being shot.

Simone knew she would feel sadness, terrible sadness, and soon, but right now was all about staying alive. In the distance she heard the air-punching sound of military helicopters and suspected that she would be their main target.

Her mother. That’s what she needed to do: get to her mother. Then she could cry for her dead father.

8
UNCLE SAM WANTS YOU

THE PHONE IN the suite rang at 1:20 in the morning. Shade was the only one awake, and picked up the receiver from the set in the dining room where she’d been sitting in the dark, looking out at the flash and sparkle of the Las Vegas Strip at night, and thinking.

“Hello?”

“This is Jody Wilkes. I’m terribly sorry to bother you; we are blocking all calls to you . . .”

Wilkes was the head of casino security at Caesars and their main contact person. Shade knew from Wilkes’s tone that there was a “but” coming, and knew it would be bad news.

“. . . but this call came from Washington.”

“This is Shade, Ms. Wilkes. Given what we’ve seen from those clowns, I don’t think we want to talk to them.”

“It isn’t from the White House or anyone political. It’s from a General Eliopoulos. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs.”

Shade held the phone out and stared at it as if reassuring herself she was actually awake. The country’s highest-ranking soldier wanted to talk to them? Urgently? At one in the morning? Of course it would be nearly dawn on the East Coast.

“Is he holding or what?”

“He asked me to put him through.”

Shade said, “Okay. Give me ten minutes. And have him FaceTime my cell phone.” She recited the number.

She went to the sideboard and began brewing coffee. She needed to wake the others, starting with Dekka and Malik, and she didn’t intend to wake either without some ready caffeine.

Five minutes later, a scowling Dekka, a distracted Malik, and an oddly perky Cruz were assembled in the living room. Shade had made the executive decision to let Armo and Francis sleep.

“The chairman of the Joint Chiefs?” Malik said, frowned and then winced as he felt renewed interest from the Dark Watchers.

“I figured you should all hear the call,” Shade said.

“You assume we should take the call?” Cruz asked. The days of Cruz passively taking her lead from Shade were over. They were friends, even close friends, but Cruz no longer blindly believed her brilliant friend was always better able to make decisions. Shade was relieved by the change: the fewer people looking to her for solutions, the better.

“I think we should,” Shade said.

“They want something.” Dekka searched for the remote and clicked on MSNBC, the first any of them had heard of the shrapnelized landing of ASO-7. They’d all been avoiding news broadcasts, which still tended to rerun video of horrible events they’d been part of, events none of them wanted to be reminded of. “Aaaaannd that would be it.”

“Jesus,” Cruz whispered. “New York.”

The phone rang.

“I’ll prop the phone here,” Shade said, balancing it against a bowl of fruit. She tapped the button, and a picture formed. The man was in full uniform but looked as if he was wearing a size too large. He was a fiftyish white man with a receding buzzcut and glasses that exaggerated his brown eyes. It was a capable face, a confident face, but one marked with lines of exhaustion that made him seem less impressive than he must have looked on a parade ground.

“Hello. This is Shade Darby.”

The voice was higher than she’d expected, but carried heavy worry in its tone. “This is General Andy Eliopoulos. Thank you for taking my call.”

“I’m here with Dekka Talent, Malik Tenerife, and Cruz.”

The general got right to it. “Have you seen the news out of New York?”

“Just turned it on.” Then, belatedly, added, “General.”

“Ms. Darby, and the rest of you, you have no reason to trust me or the US military.”

“No. We don’t,” Dekka said in a low rumble. “I was at the Ranch.”

“That was not a military operation,” Eliopoulos said.

“The tank column that shot up the Vegas Strip sure as hell was,” Dekka snapped.

“Yes.” Eliopoulos made no effort to offer excuses, nor did he argue about responsibility. “The relevant commanders have been relieved of duty. And may I say on behalf the US military, and myself personally, how grateful we are that you were able to take down Dillon Poe and save so many lives. Not least my soldiers, many of whom might have been killed, and many more who would have had to live a lifetime of regret.”

That caught Shade by surprise. “We wish we could have done more.”

“Well, more is exactly what I’m going to ask of you, Ms. Darby.”

“I knew this was too good to last,” Dekka said, looking bereft as she gazed around the room whose luxury had made her feel out of place but which she now looked on with great fondness.

“The situation in New York is critical. Some actions have already been taken that . . .” The general looked uncomfortable. “People are scared shitless, I don’t mind telling you, and they’re doing stupid things. Bad, stupid things.” He leaned into the screen. “And there are insistent demands that we take certain actions that . . . that I do not countenance at this time.”

The four of them exchanged looks. The general was leaving it to their imaginations, but in a world where the US government had already used drone attacks to take out suspected mutants, a world where military helicopters had been deployed to attack civilian vehicles, where a nuclear device aboard a submarine had somehow blown up in the waters off Georgia, where a full tank column had been sent into Las Vegas, they could imagine all too well.

“ASO-7 was potentially on a course to annihilate New York City, so a decision was made to try to destroy it as it entered the atmosphere. Unfortunately, while the nukes broke up the ASO, tons of the rock still impacted the city. And worse, a number of people have been, for lack of a better word, shot: penetrated by granules of the ASO.”

The four of them all understood what that meant: New York City was about to become ground zero for Rockborn mutants. None of them was naive enough to welcome that—the rock transformed the decent and the bad alike. Some who developed powers used them for good, or at least didn’t cause problems. Others, however . . .

“We have no way of predicting,” the general continued, “how many people will develop powers. Nor how many will choose the path that psychopath in Las Vegas did.”

“It doesn’t take many super-villains to mess up your day,” Malik said. “If Poe had been a little smarter and more mature he could have destroyed civilization as we know it.”

The general nodded. “The thing is, you saw our response. The US military is the most powerful instrument of destruction in the history of the world. But tank battalions and F-35s are not much use in Manhattan. If any of the people from this event turn into . . . well, monsters, no offense intended to you . . . The police and first responders have all they can do to cope with the straight-up destruction in Manhattan right now. They’ve got dozens of burning buildings, people buried under rubble, looting, panic. . . . They are not in a position to cope with the likes of a Tom Peaks, let alone a Dillon Poe.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Shade said, “but why are you calling us?” She had guessed the answer—they all had—but she wanted the general to say it.

Eliopoulos let out a long sigh. “I have no power to deputize you or convey any official status on you. I can’t even pay you. And frankly, if you screw up, the Pentagon will disavow you.”

“Cool. Just like Mission: Impossible,” Malik said under his breath.

But Eliopoulos heard him and nodded. “Exactly. I’m asking for your help, knowing I don’t have the right, and knowing you have no reason to do any more than you’ve already done. And I won’t lie: there are half a dozen local law enforcement agencies and twice that many federal agencies involved, and it’s all a massive clusterfuck, so I cannot guarantee you won’t get shot at by NYPD or FBI or ICE or even my own people.”

“Gosh,” Cruz said dryly, “it sounds just great when you put it like that.”

The general managed a weary smile. “You’re a bunch of kids who’ve been through hell. Neither I nor anyone else has a right to ask you for more. But I’ve been asking young men and young women in uniform, men and women who mostly earn about what they could make flipping burgers, to do more than any human should be asked to do for my whole career. It’s what these stars on my shoulders are about—sending good young people into harm’s way. So, I’m asking you. Will the Rockborn Gang come to New York? I have a jet waiting at the airport.”

Shade was on the verge of saying yes when Dekka held up a cautioning hand.

“No offense, general, but all of us together on an Air Force jet? That’d make a tempting target. I hate to seem suspicious, but like I said, I was at the Ranch. And I’ve already gone one-on-one with Apache gunships.”

The general bridled and glared thunder at them but then dipped his head and said, “I understand your caution.”

“Here’s what we’ll do,” Shade said, with a grateful glance at Dekka. “We’ll discuss it. We’ll make a decision. If we decide to go, we’ll arrange our own transportation. And we won’t let you know we’re going until we’re there. If we go at all.”

Eliopoulos nodded. “Fair enough. But quickly, please.”

They broke contact with Eliopoulos and woke Armo and Francis. Once those two were fully conscious, Malik laid out the proposition.

“Oh, I’ve always wanted to see New York,” Francis said.

Armo’s reaction was more practical. He looked at Dekka. “We’re bringing our bikes, right?”

“Let’s not be too glib,” Dekka said. “We’d be going into a situation where there could be a whole army of dangerous mutants. We haven’t had time to work out how we act as a team. There’s no front line, there’s no safe space, there’s no knowing in advance what we’re up against. I think we need to take a vote—a secret vote—and it has to be unanimous.”

Dekka expected Shade to argue, but she nodded.

Malik said, “We need to ask ourselves what we are. We need to decide whether we’re a group, or just six fools thrown together temporarily by fate. Not to sound too Stan Lee here, but are we some kind of comic book superheroes or not? Is that our future? Is that what we’re committing to? We have great power; do we also have great responsibility?”

They tore up scraps of hotel stationery, wrote their votes, folded the ballots, and dropped them into an empty ice bucket. Cruz read the votes out, one by one.

“Go. Go. Hell yeah.” Cruz shot a look at Armo, who winked in acknowledgment. “Go. Go. And . . . go.”

Dekka called down to Wilkes, who had to be roused from sleep. “Ms. Wilkes, it looks like we’re checking out. And we need transportation to the East Coast.”

Two hours later, they took off from McCarran International aboard one of the casino company’s private jets, an Embraer Lineage 1000, which came complete with lie-flat seats, a bar, two flight attendants, an onboard chef offering to whip up omelets or stir-fry, and a resourceful loadmaster who’d managed to get Dekka and Armo’s big motorcycles aboard. Francis, too, had arrived by motorcycle, but hers had belonged to the leader of the racist meth-dealing biker gang she’d escaped from, and she was not sentimental about it.

Anyway, Francis had other means to get around.

As they crossed the Rockies, Dekka motioned Shade to join her on one of the plush couches, away from Armo, who, to the surprise of no one, had managed to fall asleep within seconds of wheels-up, and the others, who were testing the chef’s skills.

“We have a problem,” Dekka said with no preamble, but keeping her voice low.

Shade sensed the purpose of this conversation, but let Dekka lay it out.

“We’re six people with two different people in charge,” Dekka said. “So far it hasn’t mattered, and maybe it never will. But . . .”

Shade nodded. “But it may matter if we’re in a fight. And we’re not just six random people anymore, we’re the Rockborn Gang; that’s what the vote was about. We’ve chosen the superhero path, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs just lit up the bat signal. Jesus,” she added in an aside, “the superhero path? Sometimes I can’t believe the words coming out of my mouth.”

Dekka nodded in agreement. “I know! I’m arguing with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs! Me. A Safeway cash-register jockey with a decent memory for the produce codes. Red onions: 4082. Honeycrisp apples: 3283. But it is what it is, Shade, so here’s how I see it. Cruz and Malik are loyal to you. You’re smarter than me, and aside from Francis, you’re the one with the most useful power. So, if we’re being logical, you ought to be in charge.”

“But?”

Dekka shook her head. “No ‘but.’ Tag: you’re it.”

“Mmmm . . . No,” Shade said flatly. She shook her head and rolled her eyes, amazed at what she was about to say. “You know I’ve read like, everything about the FAYZ, right? So the thing is, Dekka, in a way I’ve known you for a long time. Maybe Astrid Ellison’s book was wrong in some details, and maybe the other books and movies are wrong, so maybe I have it wrong, too, but Astrid was always smarter than Sam Temple, right? Yet Sam was the leader. Why? Because he never wanted to be, but he was one of those people that other people will follow. And trust. And believe in.”

“And you don’t think that’s you?”

Shade made a wry, self-deprecating grin. “Well, Dekka, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m not short on ego.”

Dekka lowered her head to conceal a smile.

“But I’ve had humility shoved right down my throat since this all started. I’ve had a master class in my own limitations. Malik and Cruz are only in this because I dragged them into it, and not for any grand purpose, just my own obsession. My own arrogance.” She glanced at Malik and had to wait a moment for a wave of emotion that threatened to choke her speech to pass. “But not you, Dekka. You volunteered; you stepped up. That’s what a leader does. It’s what you do. So, I would be honored if I could be for you what you were for Sam. I’ve learned some humility, but even so, I think I’d be a hell of a strong right arm.”

“No question,” Dekka said, her voice roughened by emotion. “But am I ready to be Sam?”

They sat in silence for a while, each contemplating their own weaknesses and strengths with a realism and focus that only comes to people who’ve really been in what the Vietnam vets dubbed “the shit.” It was a specificity and realism not possible for spectators and armchair heroes.

“We don’t say anything to the others,” Dekka said after a while. “We don’t make a thing of it. But okay, Shade Darby, I will do my best to be Sam.”

“And I am whatever you need me to be.”

Four hours later they ate fresh-baked biscuits and drank excellent coffee as the late morning sun outlined the spires of Manhattan in gold.

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