She allowed the pause to lengthen, then said, “I believe we can . . . remove those obstacles for you. Your superiors.”

  He looked at her sharply. “How?”

  “Ironically, by being the weapons your people always thought we could be.”

  “Your people don’t kill without reason.”

  “Did I say anything about killing them?”

  “Nothing short of a bullet will stop Sebring. And possibly not even that. Or her closest lieutenants.”

  Murphy considered, then shrugged. “Well, if we can’t remove her and her boys any other way, you know I’m perfectly capable of killing them. Sebring is, after all, responsible for abducting psychics her faction likes to turn inside out. Literally. All in the name of science. That’s more than reason enough for me. For others on our side. And the same thing goes for the scientists and . . . healers . . . who murdered so many psychics, all in the name of their quest for knowledge.”

  “I can live with that,” he said finally.

  Murphy merely nodded. “I need the information I asked for, Duran. And, in the meantime, you don’t go anywhere near those labs or those high-rises. You don’t do anything to raise suspicion. You don’t do or say anything that might tip them off. Anything.”

  “Agreed.” He hesitated, then said neutrally, “There is one favor I would ask. A . . . personal . . . favor.”

  “Ask away,” Murphy said.

  * * *

  • • •

  Henry? Are you awake?

  I don’t really sleep now. Juno . . . I don’t think I can take much more.

  You have to hold on, Henry.

  I don’t think anyone’s coming to help us, Juno.

  They will. Bishop will.

  Are you sure?

  Just hold on, Henry . . .

  * * *

  • • •

  “You really believe your—roaming psychics—can find those labs?” Brodie asked Bishop after the fed told them the status of the search out west, which narrowed with remarkable speed to only one state.

  One vast state.

  “I believe they can. And Wyoming makes sense. It’s one of the ten largest states, and the least populous. I think you could hide more than a couple of labs there for a very long time.”

  “Assuming the labs of both factions are in the same general area.”

  “Yeah. And they may not be. But, so far, everything my people have sensed has been there.”

  “They sensed shadows.”

  “Which also makes sense. They’d want the labs as protected as possible by security, but even before that they’d want to make certain psychics on this side would be warned off by those shadows.”

  Brodie eyed him. “You’re a lot more tense than you let on, aren’t you?”

  Bishop didn’t deny it. “Matt and Jody Garrick believe they’re burying Emma today. And I don’t dare offer them hope that they aren’t, not until we know for sure.”

  “Would they expect you to attend the funeral?”

  “Probably, but I doubt either will notice at the time. I hate every minute that I can’t call and tell them what I know. What I feel is certain. That Emma’s still alive.”

  Brodie hesitated, then said, “If I’m getting all this, her chances are a lot better if one of Duran’s field teams abducted her.”

  “Yeah. Though, in the early hours and days after an abduction, it doesn’t make all that much difference to the victim why they were taken and by whom. The emotional and psychological damage begins immediately. Emma is a strong girl, but she’s a teenager, and teenagers feel things . . . very intensely.”

  Tasha, who had been listening silently, nodded to that. “Especially teenage girls. But it won’t be much longer, Bishop.”

  He looked at her. “How do you know?”

  She blinked. “I—just know.”

  “Another door open?” Brodie asked her.

  “I guess.” Tasha frowned a little. “It popped into my head when Bishop was talking. I hope I’m right,” she added a little uncertainly.

  “So do I,” Bishop told her.

  But the hours dragged past, and no word came from any of his “roaming psychics” searching the vast state of Wyoming. They all worked throughout the afternoon, looking over the research that came in continually and helping Tucker continue coordinating Sunday’s rescue missions.

  Murphy left twice during that time, each time for no more than about forty-five minutes, and no one asked her where she went.

  They sent out for supper, and when it was delivered they gathered at the big table in an equally large room filled with windows that could be used for dining or for a board meeting it was so huge.

  Annabel emerged from her room, Pendragon at her feet. Annabel was shy and sweet; Pendragon was . . . a cat.

  He wasn’t talking to anyone.

  The others forced themselves to be relaxed and casual when the still-fragile little girl was in the room. Bishop, always comfortable with children and with the knack of winning their trust instantly, talked to her while they ate. Her small, still-thin face seemed to glow from within as she responded to him with no trace of shyness.

  At the other end of the long table, Brodie kept his voice low when he said to Tucker, “Say Duran’s people headed back to their homeworld. Do you seriously believe thousands of years could have passed on that world?”

  “Jesus, I don’t know. Einstein thought so. Some of the best scientific minds we’ve ever produced agree. And I’m guessing the trip back would take a lot longer than the trip here did. From what Murphy said, the ships that landed here were relatively small craft, intended to meet up with a mother ship. That would have been the fast ship; the smaller ones were probably never intended to travel from one world to another.”

  Tucker looked around. “Where is Murphy?”

  “Slid out about fifteen minutes ago. You didn’t see her?”

  “No. Though, to be honest, it’s easy to lose track of Murphy when she wants you to. Probably went to check in with the boss. Plenty of new intel to share.”

  Tucker frowned. “Do you guys get the same feeling I do? That things are moving all around us, whether we see them or not? That we’re seriously closer to the end of this thing than we ever expected to be at this point?”

  “I’ve barely been in it,” Tasha said. “The fight, I mean. But knowing I was watched and monitored my whole life and that my life was never even what I thought it was, that part of it all makes me angry. All those women and their babies dying makes me . . .” She drew a breath and let it out slowly. “I’d like to be at the end of this. I’d like to be able to stop all the bad things happening because of this.”

  Brodie’s fingers tightened on hers.

  “I don’t mean I want to quit,” she added, mostly for Tucker’s benefit. “But it would be nice to feel that at some point our lives will be normal again.”

  Tucker smiled faintly. “We’re all bonded pairs of psychics,” he reminded her. “Our lives will probably never be what most people would consider normal.”

  “I’m not psychic,” Brodie objected. Then he met Tasha’s gaze, and added, “With you, but otherwise . . .”

  Tucker said to him, “Take it from me; you’re more psychic than you know, and it’s only going to get stronger.”

  Tasha, watching Brodie, was glad he wasn’t at all upset about that. She could feel his calm and his certainty.

  “Our new normal,” he told the other man dryly.

  “That is certainly true. For us more than most, normal is what we get used to.”

  Their attention was caught by a motion at the other end of the table, as Annabel closed the box her supper had come in, said something to Bishop that made him smile, then rose with the box and her silverware in one hand and her glass in the other and looked inquiringly at Sarah.

  “Just leave that stuff on the kitchen counter, sweetie.”

  “It was really good,” Annabel said earnestly. “Sarah, is it okay if I read for a while? Those books you got for me this morning.”

  “Of course it’s okay.” Sarah smiled at her.

  Pendragon, who had sat in a chair at the table like people and eaten his own supper delicately from a bowl, glanced around at the humans, then jumped down and followed Annabel from the room.

  Somewhat uncertainly, Sarah said, “I think I heard him thank me. Did anyone else hear that?”

  Everyone else shook their heads, but before Sarah could question, Bishop said, “I’m pretty sure he has the ability to focus well enough to reach only the mind he wants to communicate with.”

  “Is that a good thing?” she asked wryly.

  “No idea. I’ve never known a telepathic cat before,” Bishop told her in all seriousness.

  “He’s not a cat,” Tasha reminded the fed. “I mean, he looks like a cat and walks like a cat and sometimes even sounds like a cat. But . . . everything about him is unusual.”

  EIGHTEEN

  When they returned to the study/command center, Murphy was in the chair she had occupied earlier, her legs stretched out before her as she finished the last bite of a donut. After washing it down with what was undoubtedly a latte in a tall cardboard cup, she said, “That coffee shop on the corner will be the death of me. Donuts. Can’t resist them.”

  “You left during supper,” Tucker said, not quite accusingly.

  “Yeah. Needed to check in with the boss. She already knew most of it, because we’d talked about some of this stuff before and because I checked in this morning after I met with Duran. Knew I was going to give him that report. So I mostly filled her in on our speculating today. And on how Duran reacted to that report.”

  The others were taking seats around the room, pairing up as usual as if by instinct.

  “And?” Brodie demanded. “How did he react? Or is that a need-to-know thing too?”

  Murphy smiled. “Still sure you want to go on offense?” She looked at the others as well as Brodie. “Take the fight to the other side in a major way? Because once we make that choice, we’re committed. If we plan and execute this right, it should be a final decisive battle in every way that counts. If we fuck it up . . . Well, things could get worse.”

  There were decided nods all around, without hesitation. Clearly, everyone was ready to go on the offensive.

  “Good. Since we were reasonably sure you’d all feel that way, the boss has been contacting every other cell, and it seems everybody’s ready to do something proactive.” She was smiling.

  Brodie eyed her. “We’re scheduled to send cells—and some extra assets, thanks to Bishop and a lot of other people who’ve been standing by wanting to help—to fifty of Duran’s shadow breeding operations day after tomorrow, on Sunday. Most of us have been working on the final coordination of that. Rescue the women and any babies and get them to our safe houses. That’s easily the most proactive operation we’ve carried out to date.”

  “It gets better,” Murphy told him. “Not only will we get those women and their babies to people who really can take care of them, even fairly long-term while we figure out how best to help the Stepford mamas and raise those babies safely and happily, but the operation should serve two more purposes. It’ll be a dandy distraction for most of those on the other side, both factions, and it should draw all the high-level leaders of both factions into emergency meetings in their not-so-ivory towers.”

  “We know where those are?”

  “Yeah. New intel. We know where they’ll be right down to the right rooms on the right floors of the right buildings.”

  “Where we plan to blow them up?” Brodie asked, something in his tone telling them all that was a line he wasn’t at all sure about crossing.

  “No, something a lot less violent—and a lot more certain, at least for us. Look, this kind of monster is like a Hydra; if we chop one head off, another grows in its place, sooner or later. We can’t go after the leaders individually, allowing them time to fill a power vacuum. We have to render them useless to their . . . cause.”

  Slowly, Bishop said, “And how do we do that?”

  As if she were saying something utterly ordinary, Murphy said, “We use the abilities of some of our bonded pairs to turn those so-called business moguls into just that. We remove the indoctrination and the memories of their mission. We remove everything, in fact, that isn’t simply the knowledge needed to run those companies just like regular human robber barons do.”

  Before either Bishop or Brodie could say something, which both looked ready to do, she added, “Even more, because these monsters posing as greedy business suits in giant corporations will become just that, we have to make sure the money stops flowing for as long as possible—and that plenty of very suspicious people are peering over their shoulders. Any company or companies as huge as these, especially designed to make money for their ‘shareholders,’ are going to have a lot of . . . creative bookkeeping. We can tip off the IRS and SEC, the attorneys general in the states where their businesses are located. And anyone else we can think of to cause those giant companies a series of giant headaches that’ll drag on for years.”

  “That’s neat,” Tucker said approvingly.

  “The boss’s idea. All that confusion should also drive those from both factions in these businesses further down the food chains to get out of the companies and go get real jobs. Or at least be prepared for new jobs. Most of them, anyway. We may have to deal with the others one on one, if Duran can’t. And just to make very sure those a bit further down the ranks, the field soldiers running both Duran’s breeding operation and the other faction’s hellish biology experiments, get the point that all this stops, we do two more things.

  “First—and I’m counting on Bishop’s roving psychics coming through on this one—we hit their labs on the same day, at virtually the same hour, while all the bosses are coping with disappearing pregnant psychics and psychic babies from a big chunk of their operations—and also forgetting they were ever anything but Fortune 500 executives.

  “No matter what, putting those labs out of commission permanently is a major, major goal. They have to be utterly destroyed, no matter what it takes. We have to make it impossible for them to experiment on our people any longer. Not by selective breeding, and sure as hell not by dissection. Which means the buildings and all their equipment are totally trashed. In fact, obliterated. And we’ll metaphorically or literally salt the ground so nothing ever grows there again.”

  Intently, Tucker said, “I hope we’re planning to grab as much intel as we can going out the doors and before all that equipment is destroyed.”

  “We certainly are. Their data banks will be emptied into flash drives and other data storage devices our teams take with them. We will also, of course, search for any psychics still surviving, and rescue them if at all possible. There will be at least one EMS-trained medic on each of the teams going into the labs.” She knew Bishop gave her a steady look, but ignored it to add, “We have to destroy the only true aliens left in both factions, the healers.”

  “I wondered about that,” Tasha murmured.

  “Yeah, they’re all either first ones, somehow medically modified to have way longer life spans than us—or else they’re clones. A possibility that seemed to shake Duran when I suggested it. Either way, when the labs go, they go.”

  “We’re sure they’ll all be at the labs?” Miranda asked. “Don’t they usually help with field operations, or stand by in case Duran or other team leaders need them?”

  “Some do, yes, but we’ll make sure they’re all at the labs Sunday. And when those first ones go, so will the shadows, which means they lose that line of defense. I’m hoping there’s intel about how the first ones developed and projected those shadows, but if not, so be it. Our world’s better off without those illusions.”

  “And we’re certain they’re illusions?” Bishop asked. “I know one of my own people reported that was the sense he got, but as far as I know he’d never been exposed to them before, so he could have misinterpreted what he sensed.”

  “Not sure if they’re illusions or projections or something else, but they aren’t real. Not at all what our alien visitors look like, not even the first ones. Defenses. They’ve had a lot of time to build their various defenses. A lot of time. We’re still playing catch-up. And even after we take Sebring out, I don’t know that all of her field people will be willing to rethink their mission. Or to follow Duran. We’ll have to wait and see about that.”

  “You’re banking an awful lot on Duran,” Brodie observed in a carefully neutral voice. “On the information he offers being accurate.”

  She widened her eyes at him. “Yeah, I am, aren’t I?”

  Tasha was frowning. “I still don’t get how my ability to see the shadows—no matter whether they’re real—is going to help us destroy them. Whatever they are.”

  “You don’t know the power of your own abilities, Tasha.”

  “Is that supposed to be an answer?”

  Brodie spoke before Murphy could, saying, “You can’t be sure they’re only illusions, especially if you have only Duran’s word for that.”

  Murphy grinned at him. “Oh, come on, Brodie, you’ve been considering the possibility ever since we found out Tasha was able to see those shadows attached to people she’d thought were perfectly normal. All those people, all those assets tied up over so many years, we thought. What we didn’t realize was that those people were perfectly normal. Oh, they were definitely keeping an eye on Tasha. And as disgusting as that was, I find it even harder to excuse them knowing what I know now. That they were more of Duran’s tools. Human people doing a job they didn’t ask any questions about because they were being paid very, very well.”

  “They were like us?” Tasha demanded now. “Human?”