“We all need to.” Navy’s boot-camp hoorah seemed appropriate here, the sound of an individual submitting to the best interests of his team, but as the collective noun “we” left his mouth, he felt like a hypocrite and a liar. Byron knew it, too, and stepped so close he could smell his breath.
“Fuck everyone else. You don’t think of her as a commodity, as a cure, do you?” Byron said barely above a whisper, but it felt like a roar to Navy.
“No,” he said instantly. “I don’t.”
“I need to know you’ll—”
“I will protect her.”
Byron didn’t need to hear Navy’s words. The near violence in his eyes, the ferocity caged in his form, carried the note as clearly as air through Byron’s harmonica. Byron nodded, and Navy matched it in response.
“Daddy? Everything okay?” Rory’s voice came from behind them.
“How’s my missing twin daughter? Did you guys finally make the fish-blood oath?” Byron almost hid the crack in his voice.
Rory smiled, and AJ appeared at her side, arm in arm. “Yeah.” When she couldn’t handle the gleam in his eyes, Rory looked from her father to Navy, ready to blame him.
“It’s time to go,” Navy said abruptly.
She visibly paled. “You said eleven.”
“I changed my mind.”
“We can’t—”
“We can. Go pack. AJ can help you,” Byron intervened. Rory read his face and nodded assent. She disappeared upstairs, and Byron’s gaze met Navy’s again. “I’m going to say goodbye to friends. Without saying goodbye. When I come back, you two will be gone and my daughter will be safer.”
Navy nodded. “I swear to you, I’ll keep her safe. You’ll see her soon again.”
When AJ left the house again, she started for the party of neighbors and friends, but her emotions were running too high not to arouse suspicion. She decided a short walk would clear the threatening tears, so she headed to the chicken coop to remind herself how many they had and what to do to care for them. The light off the corner of the house kept the coop lit and mostly deterred would-be assailants.
A man’s tall form was crouched by the coop, a small set of tools on the ground beside his knee. Judging by his military-issue drab shirt and cargo pants, she wondered if this was the “military friend” of Navy’s. His hair was shaved clean, his arms and back were heavily muscled, and AJ reminded herself that strolling up to strangers wasn’t wise at any age. But she was intrigued, and she dealt with big men every day of her life.
“Hello.”
He didn’t flinch or turn, which led her to believe he had known she was walking up long before she saw him.
“Hello there,” was his reply, in a warm and friendly voice that indicated he wasn’t quite as tense as his darkly marked friend. She detected a Caribbean accent. “I’m Army. You must be AJ.”
“Army? You must be Navy’s pal?”
“Yup. Give me a second, I’m just installing something.”
AJ crossed her arms and watched him. It looked like a tiny metal box, with short wires hanging off it. After a few adjustments, he locked it into place just under the coop’s low-slung roof, pointed up and out, and then checked his wrist phone. Illuminated on his strong forearm appeared the video of them, revealing his face to her and vice versa. As if his arm were a mirror, their eyes met.
He grinned, and she thought her heart fluttered a little. She smiled a little, too, unable to resist the charm of his well-hewn face. Army stood and turned, and she smiled in amusement again.
“Sorry. I just don’t often meet men—people—taller than me.”
“I don’t usually meet women nearly as tall as me.” He extended a hand and AJ considered it, then shook it. She had a confident grip, he thought. Navy had told him what he knew about the only person who would stay tonight and know anything about their plans.
“I’m AJ. Or Birdy. Whatever.”
He seemed to be studying her, seeing her saddened mood. She broke the silence with a gesture to the coop.
“So, you’re installing cameras?”
“Yup. If you wear skirts when you come to check on the chickens, that won’t bother me at all.”
The joke caught her off guard and earned a peal of unexpected laughter that shot straight to Army’s heart. It was like a bird’s song.
“I usually prefer longer formal wear for cleaning up after chickens.” She sighed, adding, “I just wanted to come remind myself of what to do. With the chickens, I mean.”
Turning, he stood beside her and watched the birds peck lightly at the dirt.
“You know, it’s okay to be upset by this. I know it was a bit of an ambush. I’m still worried Rory might punch me.”
“She would.” She sighed. “Thank you. I’m just scared for her, and worried I won’t see her again.”
“And worried for yourself?”
AJ passed him a reluctant, guilty glance. “My father is a bit of a conspiracy nut. If I believe him, men in black may come for me soon.”
He turned to face her, then gently touched her arms and turned her to face him. “Listen, you don’t know me from Adam. But I’m a Navy SEAL. I’ve been doing this for a while. And I want you to remember something: if anyone asks you anything about Rory, the way to keep her safe, and you safe, is to tell them absolutely everything you know. You don’t have to write them a novel, but if they ask you a question, you give them the answer.”
AJ, confused, shook her head.
Army smiled, his warm brown eyes holding hers. “They don’t want what they already have. If you give them what they want, they will leave. And you don’t know where we’re headed, so you can’t put her at risk that way.”
PART TWO
* * *
Wild Nights
CHAPTER 9
* * *
Stevigson Farm, Woods Hole, Massachusetts
Rory climbed into the Jeep beside Navy, shutting the door quietly in the dark barn. With everyone distracted by the barbecue and her father’s starting up a music circle, if she and Navy disappeared, the only assumptions would be of the sniggering sort.
“You ready?” he asked. He turned the key, and the electric-powered Jeep barely whispered when its engine lit.
“No,” she said angrily. “But even if I had a year I wouldn’t be ready.”
He took her chin and turned her face to his. In the dark shadows of the barn, the colored swaths of his skin seemed to disappear. “You’ll see this place again.”
“I hope you mean that.”
“You’ll come to learn, Rory, that I mean everything I say.” Turning back to the wheel, he shifted into drive and wheeled quietly out, with no headlights and heading north.
Washington, DC, TEAR Headquarters
An alert flashed across the holo-screen of the analyst working the late shift. He clicked it—another glitch, another reset in the nanodrones at the farm. His two coworkers were asleep at their own desks, but he’d become accustomed to this shift. And, as with all government agencies, it was run by idiots who had no idea how often he hacked into classified files. If the world wasn’t so hopeless already, he would probably be able to sell some secrets for a life on a Greek isle—or more likely a Chinese one—but until someone found a new source of medicine, there wasn’t anything very valuable here to be sold.
Not that he didn’t have reason to hope. If this chick in Massachusetts was the gold mine they were suspecting, there might be an especially lucrative secret at his fingertips soon. Though her dead mother had been useless to help find the cure, everyone seemed to think she was the cure.
“She can be the cure for what ails me,” his coworkers loved to sneer. And they were right, she was a hot piece of ass. But he could afford many, many hot pieces if she ended up being the secret the world needed to prevent human extinction. How, he wasn’t sure. He knew they thought she was somehow knowledgeable of her mother’s research, but he had reason to doubt. Hell, she was homeschooled. All he could tell she was dece
nt at was computers and research. Boring.
Another alert flashed, and he tapped the touch pad. This one was an alert, not from a drone, but a vehicle tire plug. Transmitting movement from the farm, headed north. Seemed odd, but he didn’t have the drones working right, so he hadn’t been able to watch or listen for a few hours, resetting all their transmitters. That electrical storm had been vicious, but the analyst supposed it hadn’t been able to affect the transmitters embedded into tires.
“Somebody out for a beer run?” he mused. Shifting to a second holo-screen, he tapped a drone that was on the outskirts of the farm, expecting another transmitter fried by the storm. But this one lit up the screen in perfect detail, the road into the farm from the north. The vehicle hadn’t passed this drone yet, so he switched to another drone on the south perimeter.
Perfect transmission.
He tried others, sometimes with success, sometimes failure, till a pattern emerged. If he drew a map from the center of the house, signals were blocked in all directions at roughly equal distances. Surely the storm hadn’t created failures in such a symmetrical pattern. He went back to the exit road and waited. The family Jeep drove by, windows up, too dark to see driver or passenger. Just a hint of both.
“Odd.” But was it worth alerting higher command? He decided to track them for an hour or less. A run to get beer shouldn’t be a long one.
CHAPTER 10
* * *
Docks near Stevigson Farm, Woods Hole, Massachusetts
At eleven, as they had planned, Byron and Army boarded the small boat Byron had owned for years. After the engine had failed almost three years earlier, he hadn’t quite found the motivation to get it fixed. It was reassuring, as Byron quietly shoved off the dock guided solely by the light of a sliver moon in a cloudless sky, to know that Army had repaired it in a day. His mechanical skills seemed to come naturally, as he had already assured Byron that he’d checked both the Jeep and the boat for any bugs or tracking devices shortly after their plan to sneak away was hatched.
“How long, how closely, have we been watched?”
“Hard to say, but the drones I caught were carrying cameras with high resolution and low zoom function. Not low-tech by any standard, but not the best available to the military. Meaning unless they were in your face, they were probably not able to hear many conversations. And we turned all phones and communication tools off. That’s the only way to be sure no one’s listening.”
Byron nodded in the dark, eyes focused on the water and the coordinates Army had given him. He glanced at his copilot and was still unnerved and fascinated by the greenish underlight of his skin where the moon touched it.
“Do you think they’ll be followed?”
“I hope not.” Army could only shrug. Byron’s nervous breath in and out reminded him that, for possibly the first time, he’d entrusted his daughter’s whereabouts and safety to a man he hardly knew. Army had never known a friend as loyal, a soldier as fearless, or a person with as much integrity as Navy. But to Byron, he barely qualified as an acquaintance.
Reaching over, he clasped Byron’s tall shoulder.
“There is no one she’d be safer with.”
Byron returned his focus to the inky horizon, but his chest was tight with the knowledge that, for probably two weeks, he would have no idea if Army was right.
CHAPTER 11
* * *
Near the New Hampshire–Maine State Line
Navy glanced over at Rory, who had finally given in to sleep around four a.m. Curled on her side in the reclined seat, she looked peaceful and frighteningly delicate. He knew she was strong, and he believed she could handle whatever happened. But he wished badly that he could shelter her from anything more jarring than yesterday’s revelations. Now that the sun was creeping over the horizon, burning off fog, the sense of anonymity he had felt in the night was also evaporating.
If drones had been at the farm, their signal jamming theoretically would have prevented the drones from knowing to follow the Jeep. But he knew the jammer had its limits, and drones had none.
With that in mind, he adjusted the left-hand rearview mirror with its digital controls, tipping the mirror as horizontal as it could go to view the sky above them. It was almost light enough now to make out any drones close enough to follow. He cursed as his eyes discerned the form of a bird flying steadily behind and above them with an unwavering flight path. And an unnatural wingspan.
Just the sound of his whispered expletive woke her, and she straightened abruptly.
“What? What’s . . . what’s going on?”
He looked over at her, her eyes foggy with sleep. He longed to run a hand down her cheek in reassurance, but he knew it would be unwelcome.
“We’re being followed.”
She looked behind them at the flat expanse of empty highway and turned forward in time to see a sign indicating they were nearing Maine.
“Use the side mirror.”
Rory looked, bewildered, to the side mirror and saw it was tilted wildly forward. But then a form in the sky became clear, and eerie silence filled the car as the implications hit her. It never flapped its wings, never circled or even dipped. As steady as a jet plane, and terrifyingly close.
“So what now?” she whispered.
“It means one of two things. Either Army missed a tracking device, or this guy saw us leaving and was outside the range of the jammer.”
“Or both.” She touched her mouth. “But it’s not terribly crazy that we might drive the Jeep somewhere. Take a trip.”
“Yep. Until they realize that nobody’s at the farm. And that it’s just you and me, almost to Canada,” Navy reasoned. “And that the boat is gone.” She nodded, processing.
“Is there anywhere we can drive that he can’t foll—”
“No.”
“Can we shoot him, too?”
“Unwise.” Navy snorted. “Not that I don’t want to.”
Rory said aloud, more to explain to herself, “As soon as he goes offline, they’ll know why. And send more. And if there’s a tracking device, we need to ditch it or ditch the Jeep, too.”
Navy tapped his fingers on the wheel. “Know any big covered bridges or tunnels around here?”
“Why ask me? I thought you grew up in Maine. Or was that just a lie?”
Navy frowned. “I lived further north. This is closer to Boston, so I assumed you might have visited.” He sighed, then added, “I told you, I haven’t lied to you.”
Rory’s eyes lit. “Wait, I do know a covered bridge. Yes. I do.”
Washington, DC, TEAR Headquarters
The analyst and his coworkers were now all awake. Just when he had woken them for help, the drones at the farm had come back online, showing a few partiers still drunk around a dying bonfire that must have been set up for a celebration while the drones were down.
One drone was on the path of the Jeep, already nearly to Maine, but no one had a gut feeling for why they were anxious. Something was just . . . off.
“It’s probably just her going on a jaunt with that guy. That farmhand they hired.”
“Yeah, maybe. I’m alerting the team, though. Commander Jacobs should be informed,” said the lead.
They nodded in agreement and left him to the job. He dialed the commander on a secure line, connected after three buzzes. He gave him a quick briefing on the night’s events, explaining the electrical storm and its possible connection to the downed drones.
“So they’re near Maine? Could be a lovers’ getaway?”
“Yep.”
“Do you have a snapshot of the farmhand you think she’s with, face-on?”
“Enh. Maybe a bad one, yeah. He’s got some sort of . . . disfigurement or tattoo. No clue why she’s into him. She’s pretty hot.”
“Whatever,” Jacobs blew him off. “Just send me the damn photo.”
Orders acknowledged, the analyst hung up and slid back to his primary station to search up a face capture. As he did, he noted the
drone in Maine indicating a forty-five-degree turn in direction to the northwest, but he returned his focus to the old videos.
Windham, Maine
Rory pointed ahead to the bridge, an old wood-covered structure spanning a river and still, miraculously, open to smaller cars. Navy judged its total length at about thirty yards and slowed as they entered it, stopping about two-thirds into its length. The sound of the tires rumbling across the old boards echoed like a drumroll slowing to a nerve-wracking stop. He pulled his weapon from a side pocket of his pants and chambered a round.
He turned to her. “Whatever happens, act surprised.”
“Why?” Rory’s heart was beating faster, her breath short.
“Because if they think you don’t know anything, you’re safer.”
With that frightening suggestion of interrogation, he got out of the Jeep and eyed the entrance to the bridge. Within moments, the huge bird wafted into the front of the bridge, its eight-foot wingspan flapping twice and sending a concussion of air Rory could actually feel lift the strands of hair at her temples. Talons that were clearly metal tapped at the wood boards. It folded up its wings and stared at them, towering at least four or five feet tall.
“Holy shit! That thing is huge!” she said, looking from it to Navy. He was leaning over the rail, pretending to admire the river and not to have seen it. “Look at that!”
She heard the gunshot before she saw his weapon, as he had fired under his left arm. She looked back at the bird in genuine shock to see half of its head blown off, sparking and wires exposed.
He walked toward it, releasing bullets into it, as the bird’s chest opened like a nightmare cuckoo clock and a tube emerged, firing something toward Navy that struck the Jeep’s rear corner. Navy fell at the same second.
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