by Gini Koch
He nodded. “Lorraine, we’re at Code Red, man down from Alpha Team. Yeah. Yeah, she’s a mess. I want you and Claudia to get Paul and get him back to human medical. Keep him calm, don’t let him know how bad it is.” Martini eyed Reader. “It looks really bad from where I stand. Like brain gone bad.”
I started to shake. Tito reached out and grabbed my arm. “He’s not a doctor. I’m not either, but I’m closer. It’s bad, but he’s not brain-dead. There’s optical activity.”
“Is he paralyzed?”
Tito tightened his hold on my arm. “I don’t know.”
The ambulance arrived. Martini was suddenly standing there with the gurney. He bent down and lifted Reader easily. He put him carefully onto the gurney and strapped him in.
Tito stood up and looked at Martini suspiciously. “How’d you do that?”
Martini reached out, grabbed Tito’s hand, and put it onto his chest. “She told you. You want to listen?”
“Holy Mary, mother of God!” Tito yanked his hand away. “You have two hearts!”
“Yeah, I’m an alien.” Martini nodded his head toward a shimmering in the air. “I’m going through. Bring him.” He shoved the gurney through the gate and disappeared.
Tito’s jaw dropped. “Um . . .”
I grabbed his hand and pulled. “Come on.” I didn’t think about the ambulance drivers or trash guys. I didn’t care about them or what they would or wouldn’t tell anyone. I only cared about seeing if Reader was going to be okay.
It was the worst gate transfer of my life, though it felt like they all did. But it seemed like it took forever. My foot finally hit the ground, and Tito came through with me. We were in the med lab at Dulce, and Reader was already hooked up to a lot of scary-looking machines.
Dazzlers I didn’t know were working on him, and they all were moving fast and to a woman looked grim. Martini put his arm around me. “It’ll be okay, baby.” He didn’t sound like he believed it.
Tito looked around. “Wow.”
“Yeah.” I was crying again.
Gower arrived, flanked by Lorraine and Claudia. “What happened?” he asked me softly.
“She must have thought he was Jeff. Or something.” There was more to it, I knew that, but I was too upset to think about it. “Paul, I’m so sorry.”
He pulled me away from Martini and hugged me tightly. “It’s not your fault.” He let go and got closer. One of the Dazzlers gently shoved him back. “Sorry, we can’t have you close. Actually, you all need to get out.”
Tito stepped closer. “Why are you doing that procedure? He’s had double head trauma.”
“Pardon me?” The woman spun on him. “Who are you?”
“Tito Hernandez. It looks like all the trauma’s in the front, but I think he got slammed into a wall. The back of his head’s a mess.”
“Tito didn’t tell me that,” I said softly to Martini.
“Because he’s good.” Martini was watching Tito closely. “Clean him up, let him stay in here.” It was an order.
“Jeff, that’s not a good idea,” the Dazzler who appeared to be in charge said.
“James is a human, he’s a human doctor. Do it.” Martini pulled the rest of us out.
We all stood in the hall, no one looking at anyone else. Martini’s phone rang. He walked away from me to take the call. Gower reached out and pulled me to him. I buried my face in his chest and just let the tears come.
“Leave us alone . . . please,” Gower said quietly. I heard footsteps fade away and could tell the others had given us some space. Gower’s body twitched. “Kitty, ACE is afraid.”
“Me too, ACE.”
“James is going to die.”
CHAPTER 20
I COULDN’T CRY MORE THAN I WAS. I couldn’t stop, either. “It’s not fair.”
“No, it is not.”
“Why doesn’t God ever come help us?” I didn’t mean to say it out loud. ACE and I had had this conversation before, after all. I knew why—God wanted us to do it on our own. “Why can’t he come and save James? Just this once, actually save the good person who doesn’t deserve to die?”
“Why does Tito feel responsible?”
“What?” This seemed out of left field.
“Tito is in there with James. Tito feels if James dies it will be Tito’s fault. Why? Tito did not harm James, Tito is not the one who caused the injuries.”
“Oh. Tito’s learning to be a doctor. He helped me find James. He tried to take care of him.”
“Why would that make Tito responsible?”
“Doctors and nurses, paramedics, all the people who are trained to save lives—they sort of have to act like God, in that sense. They have to be good enough to save someone’s life, to steal a life back from death, from God, if you will. That’s a lot of pressure and responsibility. I think Tito feels responsible because, well, that’s how most people who try to save someone feel—if they could have done one thing differently or better or faster, then they would have saved the person.” Like me. If I hadn’t wanted to go shopping, if I hadn’t asked Reader to go with me, then he’d be okay.
“It is not Kitty’s fault, either. Kitty is blaming Kitty. Paul is blaming Paul. The same with Jeff. Everyone feels responsible. Everyone but the one who hurt James. She feels happy.” ACE sounded madder than I’d ever heard him.
“I’m going to kill her, ACE. In cold blood. I just want you to know that, so it won’t be a shock to you when I do it.”
“No, Kitty. Kitty must not become what she is.”
“He’s my best friend. I love him. He’s the only person I can talk to sometimes who understands—me, this, everything we do. There’s no justice on Earth that can make her suffer like Paul will suffer, like I’ll suffer, if we lose James. And I’ll be happily damned if that means she can’t hurt someone else I love.”
“Why didn’t Kitty ask God to save Kitty before?”
“You mean when Reid was about to run me down in the desert with an Escalade and I was sure I was going to die?”
“Yes.”
“Because I knew God wouldn’t help me.”
“Kitty did not ask ACE for help. Kitty asked ACE to join Kitty with ACE, but not to save Kitty. Why?”
“I didn’t want to put you into a position where you’d have to say no.”
“James asked ACE to save Kitty then.”
I could cry harder. What a nice way to find out. “But you didn’t.” My brain kicked. He had—ACE had told Martini what to do in order to save me. “ACE, please, please, do something to save James, to bring him back the way he was.”
“ACE cannot do that, Kitty.” But the way he said it, I had a little bit of hope. Gower twitched and tightened his hold on me. “We’re going to lose Jamie, aren’t we?”
“I . . . don’t know.”
I heard a ruckus from the medical bay. Gower and I detached and took a look. There was a lot of running around, and someone was trying to hold Tito away from Reader. “Jeff! Help!”
Martini was right there. “What’s wrong?”
“Tell them to let Tito do whatever he wants.” I ran into the room. “Leave him alone, let him get to James!”
The woman in charge turned to me. “He wants to do something that’s likely to kill the patient.”
“The patient’s dead if I don’t,” Tito said urgently. He looked at me. “I know what I’m supposed to do.”
“Jeff . . . please.”
Martini took my hand. “Let him do what he wants.” It was an order.
The women backed away, unwillingly, but they did it. Tito started doing something that I couldn’t watch. I turned my face into Martini’s chest and I prayed. A lot. I heard Tito asking for things, giving orders, just generally sounding like a brain surgeon, at least from what I could figure out. I couldn’t pay attention—I could only think about Reader being okay.
It took forever; at least that was how it felt. But finally, I could feel the tension in the room go down. I risked a look over my
shoulder—everyone was just standing there. Gower was by the bed, and he was crying. “Oh, no. Please, no.”
The Dazzler in charge looked at me. “I call it a miracle.” Martini and I went over to the bed. Reader’s breathing was normal. “Full brain function, all internal organs functioning properly, we’ve tested, no paralysis. He’s going to have a hell of a headache when he comes to, but he should be back in action within a week or so.” She turned to Tito. “I don’t know how you did it, Doctor, but thank you.”
Tito looked at me. “I’ll take the job.”
“Welcome to Alpha Team,” Martini said. “I think I speak for all of us when I say we’re really glad to have you on board.”
I tried to talk in my head, in the way I had with ACE before. Thank you, so much. More than I can really express.
ACE just showed Tito what Tito already knew how to do, ACE said in my head. Tito is a good person. Kitty has chosen well again.
Never better than choosing you, ACE.
ACE is here to protect. She is not. I knew who he meant. They are coming, and they are evil. ACE will have to help Kitty to fight.
Thank you.
This is ACE’s world, too. I felt warm and loved, which was ACE’s way of hugging my mind, then he slipped away.
Gower started to laugh. “Oh, hell.”
“Paul, are you okay?”
“He’s going to be pissed when he wakes up.” Gower was laughing as if there was really something funny going on.
Martini let go of me and put his arm around Gower. “It’ll be fine. Come on, Paul, let’s get you resting.”
“Nah, I’m fine. Now.” Gower looked up at us. “Jamie’s really going to be pissed, though.”
“Um, why? I think being alive is going to make up for a lot.”
Gower grinned, still laughing. “He’s bald.”
I looked. Sure enough, they’d shaved his head. I’d been too upset to notice. “He’s got a great head, I think, anyway. He’ll look fine.” It was Reader. There was pretty much no way he couldn’t look awesome.
“He’ll look hot,” Gower said. “But he thinks two baldies in a relationship is . . .” he started to laugh again, “. . . really gay.”
Tito and I looked at each other, and we both started to laugh, too. “I’m straight, for the record,” Tito gasped out. “But my older brother’s gay, and, you know, he’s got the same opinion.”
“What’s your brother do?”
Tito grinned. “He’s a cop.”
“Protection runs in the family,” Martini said. “Good to know.”
“How long will James be out?” I asked when I finally stopped laughing.
“Less time than if he was in a human hospital,” Martini replied. “We have things we can do that speed up human recovery. Not as fast as an A-C, but faster than normal.”
“Good. We need to brief Tito and bring him up to speed on what’s going on. And I need to go kick some serious ass.”
“Already done.” Chuckie’s voice came from behind us. He looked deadly. “We have the information we need.”
“How?”
Christopher came in. “The C.I.A. has different methods than we do.” He didn’t look upset about it.
Chuckie looked over at Reader. “Is he going to be okay?”
“Yeah. Luckily. Oh, Tito Hernandez, Charles Reynolds. He’s the head of the C.I.A.’s ET Division. Tito helped me and saved James’ life.”
“He on the team now?” Chuckie managed a small smile.
“Yeah, he is.”
“Good. We have a lot of pain heading toward us, and you’ll be particularly gratified to know, Kitty, that, true to form, there’s more than one plan active.”
“Oh, good. Routine.”
CHAPTER 21
GOWER AND I ACTUALLY DIDN’T WANT to leave Reader’s room. The medical staff didn’t want all of us in it. We compromised and stood in the hall.
“The assassin, and that’s what she is, isn’t with the Alpha Centaurion government,” Chuckie said without preamble. “She thought she was killing Jeff, by the way, so she’s not very bright.”
“No, it’s not that.” I thought about it. “James and I looked like a couple.”
“You want to explain that?” Martini asked.
I rolled my eyes. “Sure. He had his arm around my shoulders; I had mine around his waist. He held me, kissed my head, that sort of thing. We were talking about my wedding dress; he was picking out sexy clothes for me. I can see how she’d confuse it.”
“You have something you two were going to tell me and Paul later?” Martini sounded jealous. He looked jealous, too.
“Oh, Jeff, for God’s sake.”
Lorraine cleared her throat. “Jeff, it’s called pre-wedding jitters, okay?”
“What is?” He sounded confused.
“She’s scared, you idiot,” Claudia snapped. “And who can blame her? Your mother hates her, she’s the poster girl for interspecies marriage, we have your distant relatives descending on us to give her some horrible test we know nothing about. And instead of getting to do normal wedding things, she’s working on Alpha Team trying to save the world again. Of course James was holding her. He was probably keeping her from running screaming into the street.”
Martini looked at me. “Oh. Right. Sorry.” He looked embarrassed but no longer jealous, so I took that as a win.
“So,” Chuckie said, “the assassin was able to mistake Reader for Martini.”
“Which means bad briefing. James is a head shorter than Jeff. And human, though she might not have bothered to check his heartbeats.” Another fact rose to the surface. “Hang on. She pretended to be Paul to lure James out of the shop, so she had to know he wasn’t Jeff.”
“How do you know?” Chuckie asked.
I related what the shop girl had said. “And why the hell did she kiss me?”
“She thinks you’re hot would be my guess,” Tito offered. Everyone looked at him. “What? I’m new, but Kitty didn’t say I couldn’t talk, and it seems really obvious.”
“What assassin stops to have a tumble?”
“The overconfident kind,” Chuckie replied.
“She’s an imageer, and that’s rare in A-C women,” Gower said. “Maybe it’s made her unstable.”
My mind kicked. “Chuckie, how do you know she’s from Alpha Centauri?”
“Double hearts, strong, fast, imageer. Seems like a match.”
“Paul? Jeff? The other races in your home world system . . . what were they again?”
“Humanoid, reptilian, mammalian,” Gower answered.
“The warlike planet, what were they?”
“Humanoid, close to us, close to Earth, too. Probably why they were warlike.” Gower sighed. “They can’t get off the planet, Kitty. The PPB net there would keep them in.”
I looked at him. “Maybe their ACE got lonely, Paul. Or angry.”
Gower twitched. “Yes, Kitty, ACE agrees. Angry. Planet was angry, so entity would be angry.”
I thought about it. Earth was considered pretty warlike, but we were out in the middle of nowhere, spacewise, and we all knew it. So ACE took on our planetary loneliness as its own. The warlike planet over in the A-C system, on the other hand, would know there was a lot of company nearby. Company that had taken great pains to keep them from ever leaving said planet.
“ACE, did the Ancients visit all the planets in the A-C system?”
“ACE does not know, Kitty. Paul might.” Gower twitched again, and I restated the question. “We don’t know. Might have.”
I closed my eyes and relived my brief fight with the assassin in the dressing room. “Christopher, I hate to ask you to do this, but I need to test something.”
“Sure, Kitty, what?”
“I want you to pretend to be a female, full-on body image. Then I want you to attack me.”
“Uh, why?”
“Do it,” Martini snapped. It was an order—he was in full Commander Mode.
Christopher shru
gged and turned into Martini’s mother. Then he lunged for me. I punched him as hard as possible in the solar plexus and desperately tried not to enjoy it. Failed. The image disappeared instantly as Chuckie caught Christopher. Felt bad now. Wondered if it counted. Figured it didn’t.
“Nice punch.” Chuckie looked at Martini. “You’d really better fix that relationship before the big day.”
“Are you okay?” I asked Christopher.
“Yeah,” he gasped out. “Why?”
“I hit that bitch a lot and a lot harder before she lost the image. So if the most powerful imageer on the planet can’t hold the image when he’s being attacked, that means she’s not an imageer.”
“What is she then?” Martini asked.
“She’s a shapeshifter. And I’m going to go talk to her now and find out what’s really going on.”
“Not alone,” Chuckie said.
“No problem. You, Christopher, Jeff, and Tito. Paul, you stay here.”
“No. She tried to kill Jamie and I’m sure she’ll try to kill you. I’m coming with you. He won’t wake up for a while.” Gower sounded as though he wasn’t going to back down.
“We’ll watch over James,” Lorraine said. “Go ahead.”
“Okay. Call Serene in while you’re waiting for us.”
“Why?” Lorraine was speaking for everyone, I could tell.
“Because we need someone who can see the real people, not what they appear to be. Serene might be the only one who can do that reliably. Get her here under guard.”
“Okay. Brian will probably want to come along.”
“Fine, we can use someone else we can trust who’ll be in life-threatening danger.”
Lorraine managed a laugh and pulled out her phone. She and Claudia went into the room with Reader.
The rest of us headed off. “Where is she?”
“Fifteenth floor,” Christopher said. “Sorry, it’s the only place we have for this kind of lockdown.”
“Not a problem.” I wasn’t going to let her get out, let alone into the Lair.
“She thought she was killing your mate,” Christopher said as we got into the elevator. “Believe me, Reynolds is C.I.A.”
Chuckie smile a very wolfish smile. “She tried to kill someone on my team. We have protocols.”
