apocalypse wasn’t going to find her looking as if she had given up.
“Just don’t go far,” Lock said. “Unless you need to.”
He didn’t mean unless you need to, though. He meant unless Liliana needs to. Liliana, like all Visionaries, became a living bomb during her visions. She also changed ages within her timeline during these visions. This latter fact was really more of a novelty item. No one died because Liliana the girl became Liliana the old woman, or vice versa. No, people died because while she was having visions, the insides of their bodies exploded. The other Visionaries had learned to turn this energy inward so they didn’t kill bystanders—albeit with the drawback that this method eventually killed the Visionaries instead.
Liliana had not yet learned.
Or it was possible she didn’t want to.
“All right, folks,” Lock said over the radio as they closed in. “Focus. We’ve done this before. No mistakes this time.”
Westerly Reed Hager. Farooq-Lane had seen the Zed’s photo, had read her file. It was all fives and tens. Fifty-five years old. Five foot ten. Ten addresses on file for the last five years. Five sisters, ten brothers, most of them off the record, off the grid, off the planet. An expanded view of a hippie pedigree. She lived in an Airstream trailer she’d owned for five years, pulled by a dark blue Chevy pickup truck she’d owned for ten. She had ten misdemeanors to her name, five for bad checks, five for criminal mischief.
Farooq-Lane didn’t think Westerly Reed Hager was likely to end the world.
“Carmen,” said Liliana. She sat in the passenger seat of the bullet-ridden rental car, currently an old woman. Everything about her was held with an easy control, her knobby old hands folded neatly as book pages in her lap. “I would hang back.”
The rental car’s radio switched on by itself. It began to play opera. This was a thing it did now, just like killing Zeds was a thing Farooq-Lane did now. If Farooq-Lane thought about it, the apocalypse had already happened, just inside her.
Farooq-Lane looked at Liliana. Then she looked at the empty road ahead.
She hung back.
The plan began to break.
One moment, the Moderators were alone in the nice day, the empty fields. And then it wasn’t just them. Somehow there was another car on the road ahead of them. It didn’t just pop into being, it just seemed to have always been there, and they’d not noticed it until then.
Bellos whispered, to no one in particular, “I’m already forgetting I’m seeing it.”
He was looking right at the strange car, but he wasn’t seeing it. He was looking, not seeing, looking, not seeing. He kept telling himself there’s a car, there’s a car, there’s a car, and nearly forgetting the truth of it every time. His mind was breaking.
The car slowed so the furniture truck was right on its ass.
A person appeared. A young woman. Dark skin, huge white smile. She was standing up through the strange car’s sunroof.
It was one of the three Zeds who’d gotten away on the banks of the Potomac. Jordan Hennessy.
“Oh, shit!” Bellos swiped for the radio before he realized that the arm he’d swiped with wasn’t there anymore.
Ramsay grabbed the radio instead, smashed the button on the side. “There’s a Zed. It’s—”
Hennessy gave them the finger before throwing something at their windshield.
The two men in the truck’s cab had just enough time to see that the projectile was a small, silvery orb before it exploded across the windshield. A metallic cloud burst around the truck.
The cloud was getting inside the cab. The radio was talking, Lock was talking. None of it seemed important. All that was important was looking at the cloud, watching the little glimmering motes hovering in the air, feeling each sparkly moment invade their nostrils, coat their sinuses, live in their minds. They were the cloud.
The truck hurtled off the highway, just missing the Airstream trailer. It churned several dozen yards into the dead wheat before coming to a lumpy halt.
“What’s going on?” shouted the radio.
No one answered.
Now the back of the truck was opening. The other Moderators were coming out, guns bristling.
To this point, guns had always won. Well, aside from the last time. And the time before that. And the one before that. And before that. But before that, it had been Moderators 200, Zeds 0, or whatever. The point was that, statistically, the guns would work.
“Stay sharp,” Lock said.
A few yards away, between the truck and the Airstream, a car