I thought back to how Kara had handled herself at the farm. She’d killed three men in three seconds. While I was definitely stronger and faster than I’d ever been in my life, I doubted I could match her speed, control, and physical prescience. She was a fighting virtuoso before the upgrade. I was not. I suspected the gap between my physical abilities and hers was still just as wide. Plus, I was unarmed, and she was walking behind me with a trench knife and a Glock and her innate, finely tuned, genetically enhanced lethality.
I saw Mom’s truck in the distance, eighty-five yards away.
Kara had left her shotgun leaning against the tree near the truck. I saw a route toward it, where the pines grew close together. They might provide me a modicum of cover. But first I’d have to break Kara’s defenses, blunt her cognitive processing and reaction times. Make her think like she used to, and give my outmatched self a fighting chance.
I said out of the blue, “Do you remember what you told me that night in the hospital after Max died?”
Kara’s footsteps stopped.
“Logan.”
I kept walking.
“Logan.”
I stopped, took one last look at my route through the pines, and turned slowly around.
She was standing twelve feet away, slightly uphill, staring at me. There were tears in her eyes, her hands were at her sides, and the magnetic clasp that locked her Glock into its holster was open. I knew with absolute certainty—it had been closed when we left the grid. She’d quietly flicked it open as she followed me downhill.
This was all the confirmation I needed, and I was sure she read the heartbreak in my face, because now my eyes were welling too.
I said, “You told me—”
“Stop.”
“？‘—I’m your big sister, and I always will be—’？”
“What are you—”
“？‘—and we’ll get through this loss together.’ You told me you would always be there for me.”
Her mask of control slipped, and for a fleeting moment she looked like the Kara of old, the agonizing struggle bleeding through her eyes, and on its heels, a grim resignation.
I released my grip on the hardcase. It fell over into the pine needles.
“What do you want me to say, Logan?”
“I want you to say that I’m your brother and that it matters more to you than—”
“But it doesn’t. I wish it did. I wish that more than anything. But it’s only a beautiful sentiment, and—”
I ran midsentence.
No warning.
Just turned and shot down the mountain on the winding route I’d mentally mapped for myself through the pines.
Heard Kara shout my name some distance behind me, and I almost stopped. Something in her voice—an element of surprise or hurt—made me wonder if I had completely misread— And then came the gunshot.
A chunk of tree exploded two feet to the left of me.
Mom’s truck was straight on, fifty yards away.
I glanced back, caught a flash of movement in the trees.
Another gunshot.
Veered left, then right, trying to make myself a difficult target.
Now flat-out sprinting.
Two more shots echoed through the forest in rapid succession, and I felt something tug at my left shoulder.
Kept running. The truck getting closer.
I could see the shotgun Kara had leaned against the tree.
My left shoulder was vibrating now, and there was pain in the vibration, which was spreading through the rest of my back and into my neck.
Another gunshot.
A bullet pierced the windshield of the truck.
A bull’s-eye of pain in my shoulder now, a radiant, wet heat. I reached back and touched it and my hand came away bloody. Kara had shot me.
I felt the front of my chest and shoulder—no exit wound.
Decelerating as I reached the truck and grabbed the shotgun and swung around the tree for cover.
The pain was a dull throbbing, masked by adrenaline. My heart drummed along at 203 bpm. I heard the snap of a twig somewhere up the hill.
Trying to steady my breathing.
The gun was a semiauto Benelli. I’d used one before. They were solid weapons with a standard 5+1 capacity, although Kara had modded this one with a much longer magazine.
I pumped the shotgun.
Peered around the tree.
The woods had gone silent.
No wind. No birdsong. Nothing moved.
My shoulder was aching like someone had struck it with a baseball bat and blood was running down the inside of my left leg, dripping off the hem of my pants, carving a dark trail through the crushed, brown pine needles.
I glanced behind me.
Nothing.
What was she doing? Coming around to flank me? What would I do if I were her?
She had a scoped rifle in her duffel bag—a disassembled CheyTac, the long-range sniper rifle of the U.S. military. It could hit targets at two kilometers, and it was in the trunk of the Google. If she didn’t want to risk taking me on with the pistol, that would certainly do the trick. I’d never see her. Never even hear the gunshot.
The Benelli was a close-range weapon, loaded with 00 buckshot that was only lethal to about fifty yards. She had probably gone back for the phase memory drives. Then she could race to the Google on a wide loop that would keep her out of my range of fire.
I painfully shouldered the shotgun and scanned the forest through the ghost sights.
All was quiet.
I scrambled to my feet. Unsteady. Vision blurring. My left shoe squishing with blood as I moved toward the truck.
The driver’s-side door to the Chevy was still open. I crawled into the cab, trying to stay low, hoping the key was somewhere inside.
The smell was eye-watering.
I climbed over my mother and took her by the shoulders, pulling her out of the cab as carefully as I could. But it quickly became apparent that there was no room for elegance or grace in this task. It was like trying to move a giant sack of soup and sticks.
I tugged hard and she slid out of the cab and dropped unceremoniously onto the forest floor.
“Sorry, Mom,” I said.
I got back into the cab and closed the passenger’s-and driver’s-side doors, their metallic shrieking filling the forest.
If Kara was close, if she hadn’t made a break for the Google, she’d have an easy shot at me.
Now I just needed the damn truck to start.
By my estimation, it had been sitting here since October. Eight to twelve weeks. When parked in low-consumption mode, on a full charge, it was supposed to take six months to drain the battery. If she’d stopped at the same charge station we had in Ojo Caliente, 28.4 miles back, there should’ve been an ample charge, even on an old model like this. If she hadn’t, well, I was probably going to die in the next thirty minutes.
I pressed the motor start.
Nothing.
Tried again.
The motors slowly whirred.
Then seized.
“Come on.”
I glanced through the windshield, the rearview mirror, the side mirrors.
No Kara.
I tried once more.
It whirred again, faster this time.
“Come on!”
On the fourth attempt, the motor whirred to life and stayed whirring. I eased onto the accelerator, the bald tires spinning for several interminable seconds, then finding traction.
The truck lurched forward, and I cranked the steering wheel, guiding the Chevy back in the direction of the road, flooring the accelerator now because every second delayed gave Kara a chance at— Bullets raked the passenger’s side of the truck, the window exploding, what I hoped were only glass shards embedding in the side of my face, and it wasn’t the single, piercing strike of a sniper bullet but the staccato chinking of full-auto rounds.