“Motherfucker,” he cries.
I hear the weapon recharging and I grab him by the arm, hauling him upright, and this time I don’t let go. “Run,” I shout. “We can take cover in the alley up ahead—”
Shots hit the ground at our feet, then whizz past ourheads. I realize, with a shock of dread, that the assailant must be sensing our heat signatures. It’s possible their weaponry is advanced enough to offer this technology.
“What do you think they’re trying to do?” says Kenji. “We don’t even know what their objective is—”
“Enslave the world,” I answer, breathing hard. “The ultimate objective of The Reestablishment has always been global colonization. By any means necessary.”
“Right, I get that,” Kenji says. “But what about right now?”
There’s a sonicboom—
We both lose our footing.
The entire world seems to shudder, shock waves reverberating painfully. My ears ring as clouds of ominous smoke rise in the sky, flashes of a firestorm raging in the distance.
“What the hell was that?” cries Kenji, panicked.
“I don’t know,” I shout above the din, helping him up, “but we have to move. The scope of this attack is bigger than anything we’ve dealt with so far—”
More shots narrowly miss us both, searing the ground beneath us, pulverizing the landscape around us, and we just manage to dive into a back alley, out of range. I realize, on a delay, that my left leg caught the edge of a laser shot, the skin raw and bleeding through the scorched material of my pants.
We take a second to breathe, but I know we can’t stay here long. “Their weapons have heat trackers,” I say to Kenji. “We can’t just keep running. We need to split up.”
“How did they even smuggle these weapons onto thecontinent?” he says, fighting for air. “Wouldn’t our teams have noticed crates of terrifying, alien weaponry coming in from hostile territory?”
I shake my head. “We’re more deeply infiltrated than we realized.”
“Infiltrated? You mean you think our own soldiers are working against us?”
“There’s no other way they would’ve been able to orchestrate and execute a complex operation like this from within our borders. It makes me wonder how deep the corrupted veins run through our systems.”
“Holy shit.”
“Kenji,” I say, glancing over my shoulder. “I’m going to tell you something right now that I want you to take to your grave. Are you listening?”
“Yeah, man,” he says. “I’m listening.”
“The stolen vial is another decoy. I’ve planted several; each one was meant to be a trap; each one has a tracker. Only I know where the original is stored.”
Kenji lets out a low whistle. “This is why they paint your face all over the city, bro. Already a fucking hero.”
Shots ring out in the near distance.
Not long before we’re discovered.
“I want you to track down the stolen vial,” I say to Kenji. “I’ll tell you where to find the coordinates.”
Kenji is quiet a moment, just breathing. “What about you?” he says. “What are you going to do?”
I risk a quick look through the unreliable notificationscoming through on my pager, my jaw tensing, and then I glance up at the firestorm still raging in the distance.
A sinister feeling moves along my skin. “I need to find out how much of this is real.”
39
James
