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body. She was unconscious by the time she slumped, half over the body of Dabir. "Pull them all out!" someone ordered behind him. "Anyone moves or resists, shoot."

"No!" Michael yelled. "No!" He grabbed at one of the soldiers who tried to move past him toward the house and shoved him away. "Damn it, back the fuck off!" He glared at them all, waving all six hands. "We're going back. You hear me? We're done here. We're done."

The old woman moaned on the floor. He could see other people inside the house, watching and too afraid to come forward. "I'm sorry," he told them. "I'm sorry . . ."

They didn't understand. They only stared at him with hatred diluted by fear. At him.

The Abomination.

Just Cause: Part III

Carrie Vaughn

ARABIA

HOT, EXHAUSTED, SWEATING RIVERS inside her Kevlar vest - this, she had decided, was a Kevlar situation - Kate looked out the helicopter window at the desert sliding past below her. In a few minutes, they'd reach the pumping station in Kuwait, twenty miles from the coast of the Persian Gulf.

This was their second stop of the day. At the first, they'd spent six hours keeping a crowd of sullen locals at bay while technicians started the wells pumping.

Not a single person on either side had been happy to be there. This wasn't like Ecuador, where the lives they saved stood right in front of them. Hard to see the lives they were saving here.

Her phone beeped - incoming text message.

One word: FUBAR. From Michael.

"What's wrong?" Lohengrin said. Somehow, even in the heat and sand, with everyone around him boiling, he managed to maintain his cool, almost arrogant demeanor.

She showed him the screen. The German ace raised an eyebrow.

"From DB? He wanted to come here," he said. "He shouldn't complain now."

This wasn't complaining. Complaining was bitching about the heat and the food, pouring sand out of your shoe and yelling at your teammates for nothing at all. This was different.

It wouldn't do any good to argue with Lohengrin. He'd just look down his nose at her with the sort of condescending pity people used on children with skinned knees.

The helicopter landed on a concrete pad outside the station in a whirlwind of grit. Like Simoon. Ana had called from New Orleans to tell her about the weird ace who showed up channeling the girl's ghost. Kate was happy enough to not be there dealing with that particular mess. She shook the thought of the fallen ace away. She and Lohengrin piled outside first. Despite his confidence, he wasn't taking any chances - he already wore his armor.

They were in a dusty valley, a bowl of sand ringed by rocky outcrops. Some grasses clung to the wasteland, tossing in a constant breeze. The station itself was an industrial complex covering acres. Dozens of wells were marked by steel trees thrusting up from the ground, attached to angled collections of pipes and valves. More pipes, a twisting maze of them, connected various stations of hunched machinery of arcane purpose. It was a sci-fi landscape from some depressing post-apocalyptic future. The air smelled thickly of oil, sulfur, and waste. Kate sneezed.

Sun glared off everything. Even with sunglasses, Kate's face felt like it had frozen in a squint.

A control building and a collection of prefab barracks lay off to one side. But nobody was here. No workers had gathered to block the gate in the chain-link fence surrounding the site. No crowd milled around the barracks. She should have been relieved. The whole place was quiet, still.

Throwing a pebble, she blew the padlock and chain securing the gate. Still nothing. Maybe the place had been abandoned. She waved back at the helicopter, and the team of technicians, with their bright blue UN vests and helmets, ran to meet them.

"Keep your eyes open," she said to Lohengrin.

"You think I would let down my guard?" He sounded offended.

You're sleeping with Lilith, aren't you? "Of course not," she said.

They followed the team to the main building. Their attention was out, looking for trouble. The helicopter's motor was still running, just in case. A trio of UN soldiers stood near it, also keeping watch.

"Curveball!" one of the techs called from the door. He was middle-aged, British, and had a weathered look to him. "It's locked. Care to do the honors?"

She kept looking at the barracks, waiting for someone to lob a grenade from there. "Yeah. Sure." She pulled a pebble from the pouch over her shoulder.

"I could cut the lock off," Lohengrin