back. He was now encrusted in a makeshift shell scrape that camouflaged him and layered over his heat signature, protecting him from the infrared sensors.
They couldn’t detect him.
As long as he didn’t move.
Or blink.
Or breathe.
He lay still, cold mud plastered on his face.
The swarm churned, agitated and frenzied.
Searching.
The able communicated with the disabled, the swarm reconstituting itself with ever greater grace and menace. It flurried out across the testing fields, darted across the parking lot, swooped over the lab building.
Evan lay still. Tried not to breathe. There was no backup plan, no next step. The drones would not tire. They would search until they found him.
The smoke shifted slowly, gauzy strips floating off like clouds. Embedded in the earth, lying stock-still, he felt as if he could sense the planet’s rotation moving him away, out of cover. He wondered if he’d already died; if this was what death felt like.
The mud on his arms, his neck, warmed and crusted. He felt it cracking, curling off his skin. With all the training he possessed, all the control he’d been taught over his anatomy and his mind, the one thing he could not suppress was his body temperature.
Soon enough the warmth of his flesh would become apparent.
There was almost a comfort in the inevitability. The whine of the drone heightened. They were across in the neighboring field, a flock of seagulls searching for prey. Now they dappled the edge of his peripheral vision.
The mask of mud across his face was thin enough that he felt sweat bead through it.
The swarm hesitated directly over him, trembling. He watched it re-form with a horrified awe. It pulled to a tip. Like a snout aiming down.
He’d been spotted.
Nothing left to do.
The swarm gathered itself around the point, readying for a plunge. This was it, then. It was time.
He vowed to face it on his feet.
He pulled himself up, a mud monster, the filth clinging to him, a ghillie suit made of earth. His OCD had shut down, drowned beneath the roar of incoming death, and all the disgust and judgment he carried with him like a shield to keep others at bay were inside him now. They were a part of him and not the world, and he accepted them as his own.
Up above, the dragonflies drew back like an enormous fist.
They tornadoed down at him.
He readied himself.
But all at once there was a ripple in the nosediving swarm, the front half torn away and then the back, sheeting down limply to the earth.
Behind him he heard the growl of a motor, and he swung his concrete-heavy head to see Candy commanding a joint light tactical vehicle.
She was atop the desert-tan JLTV, standing tall behind the gun turret. Bizarrely, her purse wagged from one shoulder, and she was holding something—silver, cylindrical—aloft to the sky like a wizard’s staff.
It took a moment for him to put it together: She’d recharged the portable EMP weapon and used it again to fry the electronics inside the microdrones.
The vehicle was barreling at him.
There was nobody at the wheel.
Candy reared up behind the turret, readying to drop back through the roof into the driver’s seat.
She was shouting at him.
His ears were blown out, and he heard the words as if through earplugs: “Move!”
He threw himself to the side, the massive tires ripping through the puddle where he’d stood an instant before. Peeling himself up, he stared after the JLTV as it blazed across the parking lot toward the circular building.
Just before it struck the box truck, Candy gained control, the vehicle swerving abruptly and swinging back around. Through the open window, she shouted at him from the parking lot. “Get your car and clear out!”
He gave a thumbs-up and strode back wincingly to the Civic as she powered off to her own getaway vehicle.
He fell behind the wheel, praying that the car’s electronic ignition had been sufficiently out of range of Candy’s EMP device. His fingers, slimy with mud, had trouble gripping the key, turning it.
Nothing.
He heard his teeth grind, felt a vein pop in the side of his neck. Tried again.
Still nothing.
He exhaled through clenched teeth and gave it one more try.
Miraculously, the engine coughed to life.
He accelerated out of the lot and up the long road to the perimeter, whipping through endless testing fields. He tried to take control of his breathing first. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. Slow, steady, keeping the heart rate low.
His earpiece was missing, and he thought to call Joey to