Washington was already working the clasps, pulling the armor away. Her chest was covered in sweat, and way too pale.

  “Flores. Mariana, stay with us,” he said, looking into the open hold for the medkit. But what the hell was he supposed to do with it? Flores didn’t answer him. “Flores, come on.” He looked at her face. Her eyes were closed. She was out cold. Damn it.

  Washington propped her up while Caleb pulled off her shirt. They both froze. The discoloration was gone. If he hadn’t seen it earlier, he would have never guessed she had anything wrong with her.

  Washington held out his hands. What do we do?

  Caleb grabbed his helmet, pulling it back over his head. “Hal, we have a situation.”

  “What do you require?”

  “You. Here. Now.”

  “Assurance.”

  He had no idea what Hal might be able to do, but it was supposed to be advanced, and it had been on the Deliverance. Maybe it knew something about the solution Riley had created.

  A knock came on the ADC’s top hatch. Washington moved to it and released the lock, pushing it open and allowing Hal to jump inside.

  “What is the problem?”

  “Flores. David gave her a topical solution on the Deliverance when she was injured. She was fine for a while, but now she isn’t. Is there anything you can do?”

  “I require entry to the capsule,” Hal said.

  “You want to go inside her like you did with Sho?”

  “Not the same but yes.”

  Caleb glanced at Washington. He didn’t think Flores would ever allow it. She would rather die.

  His jaw tensed. She was a Guardian serving under him. It was his call, not hers.

  “Do it,” he said.

  It was a surreal experience to watch a trife lean over Flores, reaching out and wrapping its large hand around her face. Caleb could only barely see the tendrils extend from the palm and out into her throat, and he had to resist the urge to grab the Axon AI and pull it away.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Give me a moment,” Hal replied.

  Caleb glanced at Washington, who looked equally tense. Hal could be doing anything to her insides and they would never know.

  “The solution was imperfect,” it announced. “Private Flores has advanced stomach cancer.”

  “What?” Caleb said, heart racing.

  “Alterations cause mutations unless properly controlled,” Hal said. “Mutations cause improper cell duplication. Ergo, cancer. She will die.”

  “Damn it. Is there anything you can do?”

  “Yes, but you will care not for it.”

  “What does it involve?”

  “I can activate a waveform that may convince her body to fight the mutation. The signal must be powerful to be effective. You will hallucinate. I will augment her natural response with targeted internal heat that will kill the diseased cells.”

  Caleb looked at Washington again. Washington nodded without hesitation. Then Caleb grabbed the open hatch of the ADC, pulling it closed and locking it.

  “Do it,” he said.

  Chapter 42

  Caleb noticed Hal stiffen. Then he heard a noise in his head, a sharp spinning whine like a violin on a yo-yo. It vanished within a couple of seconds, leaving him…

  Home?

  He blinked his eyes a few times. The ADC was gone. Hal was gone. Flores, Washington, everything. It had vanished from existence, leaving him standing on familiar ground. His parent’s house. The place where he had grown up. It was just like he remembered it.

  “This isn’t real,” he said. He was light years away from Earth. Hundreds of years away from this memory. His parents were long dead. His sister was long gone.

  “What isn’t real?”

  He turned at the sound of his father’s voice. His father was coming down the hallway from his bedroom, holding a pair of baseball gloves.

  “Dad?” Caleb said.

  “Yeah. Who else would I be?” His father laughed and tossed him one of the gloves. “Come on outside. We’ll have a catch. Just like old times.”

  “Dad, this isn’t real,” Caleb repeated. “You aren’t real.”

  His father ran his hands over his cardigan. “I feel real to me,” he replied, laughing. “Are you having another episode?”

  “Episode? What are you talking about?”

  “It’s okay, Cal. You’re here with your mom and me. Just stay calm. Everything’s going to be okay.”

  “What?”

  “Come on, and we’ll have a catch. The game’s on in two hours. Maybe we can head over to Danny’s and watch on the big screen.”

  “Dad, I don’t know what you’re talking about. The trife. Essex. Flores.” He reached up and clutched his head. Hadn’t he put his helmet back on?

  His father draped an arm over his shoulder. “Come on, Cal. Why don’t we sit for a minute instead? Do you want a glass of water?”

  “What? No. I’m fine. I’m just a little… confused.”

  “It’s okay. PTSD, remember? Let me help you, son. It’ll be okay.”

  Caleb took a step back. It felt so real. But it couldn’t be. He was on another planet. He was trying to save the colony. Washington was with him. And Flores. She was dying.

  “The Guardians,” he said.

  “You mean the Vultures?” his father replied. “You’ve been out for two years, remember? You got sick. Did you take your pills this morning?”

  “I’m not sick,” Caleb said. “I’m hallucinating. This isn’t real.”

  “It’s alright, Cal. This is real. Come on. We’ll sit and do the breathing exercises the doctor showed us. Then we can play catch.”

  Caleb pushed away from his father. “No. This isn’t real.” He turned and headed for the door, grabbing it and yanking it open. The air was warm and moist. He stared out into his street. It was all just like he remembered it.

  What if this was real? What if it was everything else that was the hallucination? What if there were no trife? What if he had never left Earth?

  “Cal, please,” his father said. “Just relax. You’re having another episode. You need to breathe.”

  Caleb tried to breathe. It felt so hard. “I can’t stay here,” he said. He pushed out of the doorway and into the street. He turned right. There was a deli at the end of the block. If the deli was there, it proved this was real.

  “Cal!” his father said, coming out behind him. “Cal, wait!”

  Caleb broke into a run, sprinting along the sidewalk. He nearly tripped over the Olson girl’s skateboard. Only it wasn’t really there, was it?

  He kept running. His father ran behind him, giving chase. It only took a minute to get to the end of the block. It only took a minute to swing around the corner and look into the open windows of the deli.

  Mr. Wilson was in there, cutting some meat for a customer. He noticed Caleb and waved.

  This was real, wasn’t it?

  Caleb slumped against the wall of the deli, resting on the sidewalk. There was no Essex. No colony. No trife. He had imagined the whole thing.

  His father caught up to him. “Cal, it’s okay.”

  “I think I’m going crazy, dad,” Caleb replied.

  “You aren’t. It’s from your job. You were a hero, Cal. You helped a lot of people. But the stress. It happens to a lot of Marines. You're not alone. You’ll never be alone.”

  Caleb looked up at his father. Had he made up the entire thing? Had he lost himself that badly? He didn’t remember being in the hospital.

  “Come on, son,” his father said. “Come back home.”

  Caleb nodded. “Can you get me a soda?”

  “Sure.”

  Caleb’s father went inside. Caleb reached behind his back, producing a gun he didn’t even know he had. He held it in his hand for a minute, staring down at it.

  No trife. No Deliverance. No Essex. No Marine. No war.

  No purpose.

  What was he? A Marine with nothing to fight for. A Marine who couldn’t even take care of himself. His father was treating him like a porcelain vase, afraid the next word he said would break him.

  What the hell kind of life was that?

  He glanced back into the deli. His dad was in the line, a soda bottle in hand. He looked back at the gun. Two seconds and it could all be over.

  He didn’t know what was real anymore. All he knew was that he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life trying to figure it out.

  He raised the weapon, putting the barrel in his mouth. It was cold and heavy. His finger slid over to the trigger.

  Sorry, Dad.

  He would have pulled it, but a large hand wrapped around his, yanking it and the gun away. He looked up into a distorted face with big brown worried eyes.

  “Wash?” he said.

  He looked around. He was outside the ADC, in the jungle against the trunk of one of the trees. His helmet was gone.

  Washington released his hand. It was empty, but his fingers were folded into the shape of a gun. He felt a cold wave rush down his spine. He didn’t need a real gun to kill himself, and he had come within a hair’s breadth of doing it.

  “Shit, Wash,” he said.

  Washington nodded.

  “You didn’t hallucinate?”

  Washington nodded again.

  “What did you see?”

  Washington shook his head. He didn’t want to talk about it.

  “We need to get back to Flores.”

  The big Marine helped him up.

  They both froze when they heard a scream. It split the jungle, reverberating off the trees.

  A trife. And it was close.

  “Now,” Caleb said.

  Washington pointed and held up two fingers. The ADC was only twenty meters away.

  A sudden chorus of hissing screams echoed the first.

  They were completely surrounded.

  Chapter 43

  “Shit,” Caleb said for the second time, his voice almost drowned by the demons’ calls. Not only was he and Washington outside the ADC, but they were also unarmed, and Caleb didn’t even have his helmet to alert Hal to the situation.

  As if there was any way the intelligence could miss the racket the trife were making.

  Caleb and Washington broke for the ADC. They both froze at the same time, picking up movement in their peripheral vision.

  A trio of trife flanked them on either side, coming out of the brush, crouching low and hissing, revealing their long teeth. Another pair emerged behind them, and Caleb was sure he heard them in the trees over their heads too.

  How long had he been out of his mind? Ten minutes? An hour? He had no idea. Time seemed to fade the same way reality did. Now that he was back in the jungles of Essex, he could hardly believe he had thought he was home.

  He could hardly believe he had been about to kill himself.

  He eyed the trife, keeping his head straight and slowly moving into a fighting posture. Washington did the same, more than ready to take on the creatures with his bare hands, if that’s what it came to.

  Only these weren’t the trife from Earth. These trife were bigger, stronger and probably smarter. Like the AI they had encountered, the demons had been upgraded and advanced. But for what purpose?

  “We’ve been in worse scrapes than this before,” Caleb said.

  Washington glanced at him and raised his eyebrows.

  “Maybe not,” Caleb corrected. “I’ll hold them back; you make a run for the ADC.”

  Washington shook his head and pointed to himself.

  “No. I’ve got the metal arm, I’ll hold them back. Grab a gun and shoot the buggers.”

  He could tell Washington didn’t like the idea, but the silent Marine didn’t continue arguing.

  “Make a break for it as soon as they move in,” Caleb said.

  It didn’t take very long. The trife shifted around them, hissing and scraping their clawed feet on the ground. Caleb had no idea what triggered them to attack, but a pack twelve strong suddenly shot forward at once.

  Washington waited for the group to close before he burst forward like a linebacker, rushing into the front line and using his mass to power through them. The trife grabbed for him, claws digging into his SOS but failing to find flesh or purchase. He squeezed into the middle and broke through the line. The trife closest to him stopped their forward assault and turned back, giving chase.

  That still left nine trife for Caleb to contend with. It was a ridiculous number and more than he could handle unarmed. He didn’t need to decide whether or not to fight them. He watched their approach, letting his training take over—timing his escape.

  Only two of them lunged at him, the rest staying nearby to catch him no matter what direction he chose. He ducked and rolled away from the demons, feeling their claws scrape his armor as he rolled beneath them and to his feet. He heard the soft movement of a trife behind him, and he spun without slowing, using the momentum to bring his replacement arm around and crack it right into the demon’s face. Bone shattered under the force of the blow, and the trife crumpled, creating a hole in the attack.

  Caleb used it, still maintaining the momentum of his roll, straightening out and vaulting the dead creature, sprinting away. The nearest demons reached for him, one grabbing his replacement arm and trying to sink its claws in. He yanked it off-balance, bringing it to the ground as he leaped away.

  The chase was on. He ducked into the foliage, pushing aside large green leaves and jumping over roots and smaller vegetation. He took a mental picture of his surroundings, sure of his direction and its relation to the ADC. He didn’t run often, not like this, but it wasn’t his first time. One time, he had gone solo on a mission to rescue a high-level molecular biologist. It had started clean and gone to hell in a hurry, leaving the biologist dead and him running from two hundred trife. That time, he had climbed the fire escape of an abandoned apartment building and barely made a pickup off the rooftop before the demons pushed him off it.

  This time, there was no air support. Then again, all Caleb needed to do was buy some time for Washington to load up and hopefully get Hal involved. He had no idea what condition the AI was in. He had no idea what condition Flores was in. Had the Axon been able to save her?

  He broke to the right when he heard the brush jostle ahead of him. He collided with a vine, which clung to his SOS and began curling around him, grabbing his torso as though it were a living thing.

  He looked up, into the wide, toothed mouth of a large flower. The vine was dangling out of the center, and now it started to retract as though it were a rubber band.

  “Ugh. Damn it,” Caleb cursed, pulling against it. A trife appeared out of the jungle, coming to a stop when it saw him. It hesitated a moment and then resumed the charge.

  Caleb struggled against the vine, trying to pull himself free. The trife held up its claws, and he turned his head and closed his eyes.

  He felt the vines about him loosen. He pulled away from them, stumbling a step and then making eye contact with the creature. “Hal, is that you?”

  The demon hissed and crouched low.

  Not Hal, but it had set him free. He almost laughed. There was no sport hunting something that couldn’t move.

  “Are you ready then?” he asked. It stared at him without a response. Two more joined it, coming to a stop. They wanted to chase him?

  He pivoted, pushing off and getting two steps ahead. The trife hissed and started moving, one down the center and the other two breaking off for the flanks. The hunt resumed, with Caleb breaking through another group of vegetation, more cautious around the vines hanging from the branches above.

  He stayed parallel to the ADC, not wanting to lead the trife back to it until Washington was ready. But how would he know when that was? No helmet. No comms. He tried to estimate it in his head.

  He nearly lost it.

  One of the trife leaped at him from the side. He barely spun and covered himself before it hit, claws scraping his replacement arm. They tumbled to the ground together, and Caleb punched it in the head with his human hand three times in quick succession before jumping to his feet.

  The other two trife caught up, and the first leaped at him. He brought his arm up to block only to have the creature cut its leap short. It spun, kicking out with its leg. Backing away from it, he cursed as the third trife slashed its claws all the way down his back. It managed to pierce his ATCS and the battery, and it hissed as acidic gel leaked onto its hand.

  Caleb threw himself forward into the first trife, driving it to the ground. He was in trouble. Where the hell was Wash?

  He grabbed the first demon’s head and slammed it hard into the ground, crushing its skull. He tried to run back the other direction, but the second trife grabbed his ankle and pulled him down. He rolled over, hands raised to defend himself.

  A black object swooped around one of the tree trunks, its forward-mounted cannon opening up and tearing the second trife to pieces. The third rounded on it, only to have its head quickly removed.

  Caleb waved to the drone in thanks, getting up and following it away. There were screams in the distance, followed by screams all around them. A group of trife emerged ahead, vanishing again as the drone started shooting. Caleb ran past the trees, only to have the trife come out behind him. The drone spun around and Caleb hit the deck, bullets whipping over his head. The trife hid again, two of them falling to the assault.

  Caleb ran, the ADC coming into view soon after. There were trife everywhere. At least a hundred of them all converging on the vehicle. Washington was on top of it, an MK-12 in each hand, showing off his impressive strength as he fired both weapons at once.

  If he was up there, who was flying the drone?

  A dozen trife died in rapid succession, but the drone didn’t stop them. They were coming in for the kill, no matter how many fell.

  Caleb reached the ADC, leaping up and scaling the side, rolling to a stop at Washington’s feet. He didn’t linger, sliding into the open hatch. Flores was in the drone pilot seat, her brow creased in concentration. She was alone in the carrier.

  Where was Hal?

  “Hey Sarge,” Flores said without looking at him. Caleb’s eyes locked on her. Could it be? There was no trife corpse on the floor. But Hal could have already disposed of it.