by Stan Lee
A shaft of late-afternoon light has fallen across Cameron’s desk, and he cranes his neck to give the solar cell in his eye a little bit of juice. Just a quick charge, he thinks, so I don’t have to listen to this bullshit—but even as he tries to tune out the hateful rant, he can’t help reaching out in search of its source. A moment later, he’s snooping through the phone of a kid named Mike Wilson, an underachiever with a serious acne problem and an even more serious hard-on for the hatemongering Smith. A peek at Mike’s social media confirms that he’s a card-carrying member of “Daggett’s Maggots”—and a quick cyber-jaunt through the school’s student database reveals that this probably isn’t the first time the kid has tuned in to one of Smith’s rants instead of paying attention in class. D-plus average, Cameron thinks, scanning Mike’s academic record. What a shock.
The power display on Cameron’s lenses shifts from yellow to a pale green, and the sound of the podcast fades away as he breathes a sigh of relief.
But for all the insight Cameron’s abilities give him, he is still not psychic—and peeking at someone’s phone isn’t the same as getting inside his head. When the bell rings, he doesn’t notice the expression on Mike Wilson’s face, or the way he rushes out of the room with his jaw clenched and his hands balled up into fists. And he’s not the only one. Nobody sees Mike coming. Not the teacher, not the kids mingling in the halls, and most especially not Brahms, short for Brahmpreet, who doesn’t even have a chance to throw his hands up before Mike Wilson grabs him by the back of the neck and slams him face-first into an open locker.
Cameron feels the signal surge as thirty-seven kids whip out their phones to film the action. The next thing he feels is a wave of nausea as he steps into the hall and sees Brahms staggering to his feet, blood running like a river down the lower half of his face. His turban is askew, a loose strip of fabric flapping over his forehead, and he reaches for it, his face a mask of pain and confusion. There’s movement in the crowd: Cameron’s heart sinks as he realizes that kids are jostling not to help, but to film the best angle of Brahms’s broken nose. He looks around, bewildered. “Why?” he says.
Mike Wilson steps out of the crowd.
“Because, you diseased piece of shit,” he growls, and sweeps Brahms’s legs from under him.
In the crowd, someone screams: “FIGHT!”
What happens next is horrific, and this time Cameron is glad that so many people caught it all on camera: the way Mike knocks down the bleeding Brahms, ripping his turban loose and pitching it down the hall, where it lands on top of the foot of a girl who screams and kicks it away. The way Brahms stops asking “Why?” and starts screaming “Stop!” and then stops saying anything at all as Mike kicks him in the belly, the ribs, the chin. The maniacal look of satisfaction on Mike’s face as two big guys break through the mass of gawkers and haul him back from Brahms’s limp body, handing him off to the school security guard, who drags him away down the hall.
Twenty kids kept on filming the violence instead of stepping in to stop it. Ordinarily, Cameron would find that disgusting. But as he discreetly wipes the footage from their phones and cuts it all together into a single video, he’s glad. Within five minutes, he’s got exactly what he needs—and if there’s one thing he learned from his YouTube days, it’s that you don’t want to sit on hot content.
Mike Wilson is about to go viral.
Cameron drifts away down the hall, leaving the chattering crowd behind. It’s important that he gets this next part right, and that he does it quickly. He sidles as close as he can to the door of the security office; inside, he can hear the clamor of adult voices demanding answers and Mike’s stammering response. That’s good. If they’re still trying to figure out what happened, they probably haven’t thought to confiscate Mike’s phone—and Cameron needs Mike to have his phone, because Mike is about to make some very ill-advised posts on social media.
Within seconds, the clip has been uploaded to all of Mike Wilson’s accounts. Even though he cobbled it together on the fly, Cameron has to admit he’s pretty pleased with his own work: Brahms’s face isn’t visible (the poor kid has suffered enough, after all), but there’s no mistaking Mike’s identity—although Cameron has gone ahead and hedged his bets by running a scroll with Mike’s full name and home phone number along the bottom of the video, cable news–style. It ends with a cheerful call to action: “Make sure to tell my mom what you think of me!”
The reactions start to roll in right away, but he’ll have to enjoy them later. Right now, he’s got a finishing touch to put on his revenge—not the most elegant move, but the best he can think of on short notice. His forehead wrinkling in concentration, Cameron sends a series of commands to Mike’s phone, which responds in the affirmative and immediately gets to work. Cameron wonders where the device is. If nobody has confiscated it yet, it’s probably in a backpack . . . but if he’s really lucky, it’ll be in Mike’s pocket.
Mission accomplished, Cameron turns to go—and freezes. His breath catches in his throat, the self-satisfied grin vanishing from his face as his mouth gapes open. Across the hall, leaning against the bank of lockers, is a girl. She’s dressed all in black, which makes the fiery red of her hair stand out even more fiercely, and she’s staring at him with unblinking intensity. When she sees him see her, she smiles, winks, and puts a finger to her lips.
Cameron swallows hard, takes a halting step forward. There is no mistaking her face—or the nervous excitement unwinding in his stomach as he looks at her. He clears his throat.
“Nia?”
The next moment, the silence is broken by a scream.
Cameron’s final command has been obeyed. He leaps clumsily to the side, his foot rolling under him and sending him to one knee as the door to the office slams open and Mike Wilson runs through it, howling, trailing a cloud of smoke behind him. He falls to the ground, trying to kick his way out of his pants, which have burst into flame. The gaggle of kids still lingering in the hall come running, and this time, nobody steps forward to help. Their phones come out in a wave, every one aimed at the now pantsless Mike, who looks back and howls louder than ever.
Yep, definitely in the pants, Cameron thinks, and struggles to his feet. He’d disabled the phone’s auto-shutdown safeguards and then sent it into a command cycle that would cause it to become dangerously overheated within sixty seconds. Maybe the next time Mike wanted to beat up some helpless kid in a xenophobic rage, he would look at the scorch marks on his ass and think better of it. But Cameron could relish his revenge later. Where was Nia? He cranes his neck to see over the jostling crowd, looking toward the place where she’d been. Was that a glimpse of red hair? Is she waiting for him? He pushes his way across the hall and stops just short of stumbling into the locker bay. Beside him, a short, plump girl with thick black bangs touches his arm tentatively. Cameron’s lens helpfully informs him that her name is Puja and her phone contains virtually no content except for about a thousand pictures of baby goats.
“Um, hey. Are you okay?”
“Fine,” says Cameron. “See you later, Puja.”
He looks around wildly, but there’s no sign of Nia. Puja has turned away; he’s dimly aware that she’s sending a text: “CAMERON ACKERSON JUST NEARLY RAN RIGHT INTO ME! AND HE KNOWS MY NAME!!!”
The surreality is overwhelming. He’s on the verge of wondering if he hallucinated the whole thing when a buzzing comes from his pocket. He can sense the message already, but he scrambles for his phone all the same, wanting to see it with his own eyes.
You’re just like I imagined. I’ll see you soon.
It’s her.
It’s really her.
8
Arrival
Xal grunts with discomfort as her ship shifts out of the ether and is immediately claimed by gravity, landing with a soft scrape beside the concrete pylon of an overpass. The journey to Earth, a series of violent jumps through the system of ancient portals that her people once used to explore the cosmos, has taken its toll on
both her and her vessel—but this last moment is gentle, barely a jolt. Apart from a brief shimmer as the air warps around it, the sound of the ship touching down is the only evidence of its arrival; it will stay here, hidden in plain sight, until her work is done. Her body feels stiff and strange as she moves to the door on ten spiderlike legs, her tentacles opening at the end like hungry mouths, sucking in the atmosphere from her vessel and then weaving it into a protective cloud around her. It won’t last long, and she’s not looking forward to the distasteful task that comes next. If it were possible to loathe the old man more than she already did for his deceit, his savagery, for the genocide he inflicted upon her people, she would hate him for forcing her to follow him here. To touch the surface of this filthy place, to contaminate herself with its repulsive matter.
Of course, she also understands why the Inventor would come here. It probably reminds him of home; the pathetic life-forms that dominate this planet aren’t so different from the Inventor’s own species, give or take a few additional strands of DNA. In her old life, as the keeper of the enslaved beings collected by her people, she might have experimented on them both to see if a crossbreed was possible. But the time for that kind of intellectual curiosity was over. Xal is here for revenge.
The humming in her body becomes stronger the moment she steps outside, the electromagnetic signature of her enemy’s work hanging thick in the air. She senses that she has just missed something; the signal is strong, but cycling down. She’ll have to hurry—which means there’s no delaying the revolting thing that comes next. Her prey is near, and if she’s going to hunt him, she’ll need to borrow a few things. Eyes. Lungs. A means of locomotion. Worst of all, she can’t afford to be picky. The protective cloud surrounding her is starting to thin, and she won’t survive much longer on this planet unless she can sync with one of its native creatures. Originally, she chose this spot because her scans showed no humans lurking in the vicinity; it wouldn’t do to plop herself into a crowd in her original form. Now, though, she’ll have to take what she can get. She scans the area again, this time opening up her parameters. The options are limited: flight would be an asset, but the only winged creatures nearby are sitting in a noisy cluster high above her head, out of reach . . . and among other undesirable traits, they seem to have no control over their excretory systems. The swarm of small gray scavengers crawling over a heap of rotting refuse a dozen yards away might be all right, she thinks—but not better than the quiet predator watching them from under the rubble, waiting to strike. Xal pulls up data on the animal and is immediately pleased: it’s a hunter, like her. Fast, graceful, efficient with its energy. And there’s no bad blood between this creature and humans. Dressed in its skin, she should be able to move more or less as she pleases.
The cat recoils and hisses as Xal draws near, its dirty fur rising in angry spikes. A low growl escapes its throat as it pauses to take the measure of Xal, poised to fight or to flee. The moment of hesitation is more than Xal needs. She makes quick work of it.
The creature that emerges from beneath the overpass is more like a crude facsimile of a cat. Xal’s damaged flesh can no longer fully integrate; the scarred, dead flaps of skin hang like wattles from her neck and belly. And in her rush to finish the skin sync she consumed only the essentials; the rest of it, including digestive and reproductive systems, which added too much bulk, sits in a wet red pile under the overpass, flecked with bits of fur. Xal notes with amusement that the vermin it was watching are beginning to nibble at its offal—a little role reversal, prey eating predator.
That’s fine for the rats. The Inventor won’t be so lucky.
* * *
She remembers the first time she felt the energy of his weapon, the surge of sudden connection as her people moved in perfect rhythm to unleash their minds on the Inventor’s network. It was hard to believe that they had trusted him once—that all of them, in their immense shared power, could make such a foolish mistake. But they had. At the time, the tool of her people’s destruction had seemed like their greatest dream made real. Nature had given them a shared consciousness, but Xal’s race was nearing the limits of its potential, and the old man knew it. He knew they craved more, he knew they meant to conquer not just the galaxy but the entire cosmos—and he used their desperation against them. Even the Elders were seduced by his promises of nearly limitless power, of a tool that could augment their reach a thousandfold. And it did, at first. Each mind hummed in sync with its kin, all sustained by his so-called gift: a great, grand web that allowed them a reach beyond their wildest imaginings. It was thanks to him that they became even more unstoppable, all-powerful; they sprawled across the galaxy, seizing hundreds and thousands of civilizations for their cause. They created a shared utopia inside millions upon millions of interconnected minds, fueled by the life force of the colonized and built by the Elders’ elders, those ancient architects. A virtual world so beautiful that nobody cared if it was truly real; it was real to her. To them. It was the home they returned to after each successful campaign to amass new resources, to conquer the cosmos: that glorious, golden, hallucinogenic city made of pure shimmering connection. It had been so beautiful.
And then it was gone. In their eagerness, Xal’s people had stumbled headlong into a trap. The network that interlinked their minds became their undoing. The Inventor had promised them power, but what he brought them was destruction. How foolish they had been, not to see his weapon for what it was. How foolish she had been, to underestimate him. The old man had been in her charge; she was the one to whom he first brought the proposal, to whom he first spun the clever lie: he was so in awe of her people’s superior civilization, he said, that he wished to lend his talents to their cause, to give them a gift that would make them unstoppable. She was the one who told the Elders of his offer—more than that, she convinced them to take it, assuring them of his sincerity. They had kept him alive, after all. Xal herself had been the one to recognize his unique talents, his useful brain, and given him a home and a purpose and a place in their world while the rest of his planet was exterminated. Of course he was grateful. Why wouldn’t he be?
He had taken them utterly by surprise. The weapon burned through their synapses in seconds when the old man turned it against them, cutting them down. An entire race, obliterated. Xal was one of the few who remained alive—but at such a cost. As her people, her friends, died all around her, she reached out to them and took what remained from their writhing bodies. She took what she needed. She couldn’t save them, but she could survive, pulling together their parts like a patchwork to make herself whole . . . or nearly so. Enough to redeem her mistakes, and see justice done for her people. Enough to come to this place and meet her destiny.
* * *
Now she’s ready. Slinking low and close along the sides of buildings and under parked cars, deliberately, keeping out of sight, she follows the signal to its origin—and then wonders if she’s somehow made a mistake. There’s nothing special about this place, or about the structure in front of her. The architects on this planet only seem to know how to build boxes, and this box is like all the rest of them. But the signal is unmistakable, so close it’s practically painful. It seems impossible that she could have found him so quickly, so easily. The building is utterly unguarded; is this really where the Inventor is hiding? It makes no sense, yet she can feel the signature hum of his weapon burning inside her original skin. It’s close. It’s so, so close.
Something is happening. Xal’s pupils dilate, her new skin alive with unfamiliar senses; the cat’s own instincts rise up in a chemical boil, overriding her alien curiosity. She bolts under a car as the doors of the building fly open and a stream of chattering, ungainly human beings spills out. The energy signature surges through her as she scans the crowd, confused. These creatures are adolescents. She can smell them. The Inventor can’t be hiding among them, yet she feels him. She feels . . .
* * *
HIM.
* * *
Not
the old man, but a young one, with wild dark hair and loose fabrics draping his lanky frame. Not quite a man, and not quite . . . whole. Xal’s eyes narrow; the human is giving off not just the signature energy of the Inventor’s weapon, but other signals too. He breaks off from the crowd at a loose trot, his gait just a little uneven. Xal tenses—he is moving toward her with enough purpose that her animal instincts rise up again, sensing a threat—but his attention is absorbed by something in his hand, and he passes without looking at her.
She looks at him, though. She watches him go, her skin crawling with the nearness of the energy that comes off him in waves. This boy is not the prey she seeks. But he has been touched, the same way she was.
And if she follows him, perhaps he will lead her to the old man. Is it too much to hope that she might have his blood on her skin before the sun sets?
An odd vibration begins in Xal’s throat as she creeps forward. Something else from this new form: the pleasant anticipation of killing the Inventor is expressing itself inside the animal’s body as a satisfied purr. She takes another step, eyes on her prize. A hunter, tensed and ready.
Then the world spins, her feet scrabbling for purchase as a pair of rough hands grabs ahold of her. The purr becomes a screech, a noise no cat on earth would ever make—but the man doesn’t seem to notice.
“Lookit this poor mangy thing,” a voice mutters. “Here, kitty. Nice kitty.”
Xal stops struggling and surveys her captor. A human male, and mature—or maybe past mature, she thinks. Overripe. This creature is unwell; she senses disease pulsing through the hands that clutch her by the scruff of her neck, and smaller creatures, parasites, writhing and skittering across the landscape of his body. He has a thick graying beard and smells even worse than most of his kind, which is saying something.