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  “Sounds hilarious,” said Kildare, deadpan.

  “It is,” said Number 7. “Although, if you start to feel overstimulated, we can try some off-line games too. Things like this—”

  And, with that, steel shutters dropped across the store windows, and the two security guards pulled out their sidearms and began blasting away. At me.

  Chapter 50

  “MOM, DAD! DON’T!” screamed Kildare. “He’s not going to hurt you!”

  If this was all part of Kildare’s plan, he sure was a good actor. I leaped over a console of driving simulators and tried to find some cover, which wasn’t easy since their weapons were making short work of the video-game consoles. If they kept this up, their entire store would soon be reduced to a circuit-board scrap heap.

  I know I’d told Kildare I’d give him a day before I went after his parents; but I didn’t recall making a similar pledge about their security goons. I grabbed the turret-mounted gun off the first-person-shooter console next to me and quickly transformed the thing’s guts into those of an Embulsorator 2300—a weapon my father favored and whose popular nickname was the Fly Daddy, so called because it turned your opponent into a harmless species of insect.

  I leaped back over a bank of consoles with my seemingly plastic gun. No doubt assuming it was a harmless video-game accessory, the security goons promptly burst into laughter.

  “Anybody know how to turn this thing on?” I asked, taking advantage of their overconfident amusement and gradually leveling the gun at them. They laughed even harder until I depressed the trigger, and, voilà, their suddenly not-smiling selves turned into tiny little flies that—unlike when I turned myself into an insect—didn’t include their brains. They were, for all intents and purposes, plain-old flies forevermore.

  “He’s harmless, is he, Kildare?” asked Number 7. A sharp smell was wafting through the room. I immediately realized it was the same odor I’d detected in the crawl spaces upstairs in the Tower when I’d found Kildare’s secret room.

  “He won’t hurt you,” repeated Kildare, with little spirit. My friend had become very pale and was shaking. He looked like he was getting sick, but not with the common cold.

  “I promised him I wouldn’t harm you,” I told his parents. “Now let us out of here.”

  “Won’t hurt us, huh?” asked Number 7. “The great Alien Hunter is taking an early retirement?”

  “Or,” suggested Number 8, “perhaps the reason you’re not going to harm us is that you’ve discovered you couldn’t if you tried?”

  “At any rate,” said Number 7, “the relevant fact here is that we haven’t made any such promises about not harming you.”

  And, with that, he shot out his arms and sprayed a stream of white liquid at me, which I’m glad I didn’t assume to be nondairy creamer. I did a backward flip and landed ten yards away as the liquid hit the tile floor and melted through to the level below us.

  Next time I had a chance, I guess I’d have to add that to their entry on the List computer: can shoot ultraconcentrated acid.

  Now Number 8 had joined the action, easily mimicking my flip—despite the fact that she was wearing a woman’s business suit and heels—and landing right next to me. I smiled sheepishly as she looked down at my surprised expression.

  “My home world has stronger gravity than yours,” she explained. And then her arms turned gray and became wicked-sharp-looking swords that she swung together toward my neck like a giant pair of scissors.

  I ducked and sprang to Kildare’s side in the middle of the showroom floor.

  “You okay?” I asked. Number 7 was looking at Kildare intently, and for some weird reason his cheeks were puffed out and he was blowing.

  “He’s… making… pheromo—”

  “Pheromones!” I blurted. Of course! That was the sharp odor I’d been smelling. And that must be why Kildare looked so sick. If the “cells” of his body and his parents’ bodies worked the same way those of the ants in his terrarium did, Number 7 was disrupting the very function of Kildare’s bodily systems.

  “Here you go,” I said, materializing a gas mask and quickly putting it over Kildare’s face.

  He nodded and put his hand on my shoulder as he breathed deeply through the mask. Already he was straightening back up, and color was returning to his skin. But we couldn’t exactly savor the moment because Ellie Scissor-Arms was sprinting toward us, her razor arms whistling through the air as she came. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Number 7 had produced a shoulder-firing microwave cannon from someplace and was in the process of drawing a bead on us. Before I could grab Kildare and drag him to safety, he pulled off his mask and did one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen.

  He pulled in his feet and hands and for a moment hovered there off the floor in a curled-up ball. Then Kildare flickered gray and—BLAM!—exploded into a dim gray cloud that entirely filled the room.

  A new sharp smell assaulted my nostrils and stung my eyes, then both his parents flickered gray and dispersed into indistinct gray clouds.

  The demolished store was now filled with an angry buzzing sound, and Kildare rematerialized.

  “It won’t last too long,” he said. “And I won’t be able to surprise them that easily again,” he said.

  “Another pheromone?”

  “Yeah, panic signal,” he said. “I’d never tried it before, but I just set off an alarm that sends all their cells scrambling. Kind of like when you stir up a hornet’s nest or an ant hill.”

  We bolted out into the lobby. The steel security shutters had now dropped around the perimeter of the building, and there was no obvious way out. I sized up one of the shutters and got ready to magnify my strength and peel it from its frame.

  “So that panic signal you used on them is kind of a self-preservation thing?” I asked, stooping down to grab the shutter.

  “Exactly,” said a voice behind me. But it wasn’t Kildare’s.

  Chapter 51

  THE VOICE DIDN’T belong to Number 7 or Number 8, either; it belonged to both of them. Kildare’s trick had scattered them into their billions of parts, but they had now regathered. Well, sort of. Together they’d formed a dense, swirling gray cloud, with four black eyes and a single cavernous mouth the corners of which rose in a bone-chilling smile as I turned around.

  “Yesss,” they hissed to me. “We have many talents that single-body creatures like you can’t begin to guess.”

  Kildare was standing frozen next to me. He’d gone completely white except for his widened eyes, which were now completely black like those of his parents.

  “Kildare?!” I yelled at him, but he didn’t react. It was like his mind had slipped away, and then, to my horror, his body started to disappear too.

  He was being swallowed. Number 7 and Number 8’s mouth had grown to the size of a whale’s, and their body was expanding like a bellows, drawing in air—and drawing in their son. He came apart like a pillar of sand in a tornado. They were devouring him!

  It was so terrifying an image that my emotions were getting in the way of my powers. My head was reeling, and I couldn’t figure out a thing to do about it. How was I supposed to hurt a cloud? And how was I supposed to defeat the enemy and not hurt Kildare?

  “That’s right, Alien Hunter. Another of our unique defense mechanisms involves eating our young. At least the ones that are weak or unfit.”

  “Give him back,” I commanded. “He’s not like you.”

  “You’re right—he’s not like us. He’s part of us.”

  “Give him back,” I repeated, this time with as much authority and ire as I could muster. But they sensed my weakness here. Had it all been a trap? Did they somehow lead me to Kildare, to lure me back to them? Had he intentionally fooled me?

  “Here’s the deal, Alien Hunter,” they announced vaingloriously. “You have thirty seconds, and it’s your choice how you spend them. If it’s any comfort, we can assure you that you’ll soon get to see Kildare—or, at least, parts of him.” />
  Rage boiled up inside me, but I couldn’t just blindly attack them. I didn’t want to hurt my friend. I had to play along. “What do you mean by that?”

  “You can either stay here and chat with us, as you’re doing now,” they continued, “or you can have a head start.”

  “A head start? What are we playing, tag?”

  “You can call it whatever you like, but we tend to refer to it as ‘hunting.’ And then once we’ve caught you, we’ll devour you, just as we did Kildare. Only in your case, it will be a lot more painful and permanent.”

  “Oh, look at that,” taunted the black-eyed cloud, morphing part of itself into a wrist with a watch wrapped around it, at which it glanced dramatically. “Time’s up!”

  My ears filled with an awful buzzing sound as the cloud began to envelop me.

  Chapter 52

  EVER GET STUNG by a bee or a yellow jacket or a fire ant? Try all three at once, and then multiply the feeling by a thousand if you want some sense of the intense pain I experienced when Number 7 and Number 8 first grazed my left arm. If a doctor had shown up and offered to amputate my afflicted limb, I would have said yes on the spot.

  But almost worse than the pain was the frustration. I couldn’t figure out how to fight back. It was a textbook case: often the greatest challenge of my powers isn’t actually using them; it’s deciding how to use them. And while I believe there are elegant solutions to every problem under the sun, finding the right one usually takes more than a few seconds, or minutes, or hours, or…

  I dodged another dark blow from my amorphous four-eyed enemy as I gave up on the latest of several half-baked ideas, including:

  Sucking them up with a giant vacuum cleaner. Problem was, did I really expect they’d stay sealed in the bag and I could just toss them into a Dumpster?

  Using a flamethrower might be effective, but I’d run the risk of burning Kildare’s cells too, assuming he was somehow still alive in there…

  Preserving them cryogenically with a freeze ray and then spending the next few years figuring out how to extract Kildare’s billions of cells from the mix once they weren’t moving around. Problem was that although I’d heard of them, I hadn’t yet learned the physics of freeze rays and couldn’t very easily just invent one on the spot.

  Using a giant can of alien bug spray was a great idea, if I had any understanding of Number 7 and Number 8’s physiology and what toxins might actually be effective. And, again, how could I simultaneously not kill the Kildare parts of the cloud?

  Going back in time and hoping things would work out differently. But I’d been told that Number 1 had somehow put a block on time travel for me, and since I had no idea how he’d done it, I couldn’t possibly figure out how to work around it.

  Summoning a billion carnivorous dragonflies and instructing them to eat only those bits that looked like Number 7 and Number 8’s cells. I had no idea, though, if there actually were a way to tell Kildare’s bits apart from his parents’ bits… or if a billion dragonflies would fit inside the lobby… or if dragonflies were even trainable.

  In short, maybe if I’d had a month and access to the intergalactic equivalent of Wikipedia, I could have come up with something. But I didn’t have a month. And I didn’t have a computer. And I did have a big black cloud of malevolent alien cells trying to sting me to death.

  Again and again, they came after me. At first I was dodging pretty well—biding some time, hoping against hope I’d find a weakness, a chink in their amorphous armor—but with every leap, spin, duck, and parry, I grew a little less confident, and a little slower, and a little more scared.

  And then blackness exploded across my vision, and searing white light seemed to be pouring into my skull.

  They’d hit me. They’d gotten me in the face.

  How could I have been so stupid? How could I have let them do this to me? How could I have thought—after losing Kildare, after my friends’ and father’s warnings—that I’d ever stand a chance against them?

  I leaped blindly, as high and as fast as I could, wanting only to get away, wanting only to make the pain stop.

  I smashed into the wall on the far side of the room with a bone-jarring thud, but I was almost grateful for it. The stinging wasn’t as bad as before, and my vision had partially come back. Apparently, they’d only grazed me.

  And then, finally—as if the impact had knocked some sense into me—I had a halfway decent idea.

  Chapter 53

  I’D NOTICED THAT every time Number 7 and Number 8’s cloud attacked me, it first had oriented its four eyes at me. Its eyes! In other words, it was finding me by sight. If the cloud couldn’t find me by sight, I might just gain some sort of advantage or, at least, a chance to live.

  The next step was effortless. I filled the entire GC Tower lobby with something relatively easy to understand and create: mirrored glass. With a quick sweep of my arms, I converted the sleek obsidian ground floor of the building into a giant carnival fun house.

  The fun part was that Number 7 and Number 8 didn’t see just me; they saw thousands of me.

  The not-so-fun part was that, judging from the angry, droning roar that went up, they weren’t very happy about it.

  “You think you’re clever?!” the cloud’s polyphonic voice challenged me, spinning its gray mass around and around as it—or they?—tried to figure which image was the real Daniel X.

  This was no time for chitchat. I had to take advantage of their momentary confusion to strike back or get away.

  The cloud’s eyes were up against one of the mirrors now, examining the surface closely, very closely. Then it lifted a glossy black appendage—an arm? a leg? a tentacle? a pseudopod?—and carefully tapped the glass.

  There was a small ping and then the pane shattered into gravel-sized bits and collapsed on the hard floor.

  “Not so clever,” the droning voices yelled triumphantly. The cloud flickered and launched a swarm of tiny, glossy black spheres. In a moment, they had all fanned out and had shattered every single mirror in the room, resulting in a sound like, well, a Niagara-sized waterfall of breaking glass.

  All of them, that is, except for the one that was obstinately flying into my forehead, over and over again, wondering why on earth I wouldn’t shatter.

  I grabbed it in my fist, and it made a disgusting popping sound as I crushed the life out of it.

  “Ouch,” pouted the cloud’s voices as it turned its four baleful black eyes toward me.

  “You started it,” I reminded them, as a wall of darkness roared near. I almost got out of the way, but it hit me in the leg—hard.

  And then I began to fall, and my entire being exploded in pain, and, well, I don’t remember much after that…

  Chapter 54

  I DIDN’T WANT to open my eyes. They hurt enough as it was with the lids closed, without having to focus or move or do anything. I just wanted to go back to sleep. I just wanted to fade back into darkness. I just wanted get myself away from the sickening, searing pain that racked my head and entire body.

  “Daniel, sit up. You need to drink.”

  The noise hurt my head, but there was something reassuring about the voice, something that was the closest thing to comfort I could remember.

  And then I realized why. It was Dana’s voice.

  “Am I dead?” I managed to croak, no pun intended.

  “Almost—but you somehow teleported yourself away before they could actually kill you.”

  “I don’t remember trying to teleport,” I said with a wince. “I was in too much pain.”

  “Maybe it was the pain that forced you to do it,” Dana said. “You couldn’t stand it any longer and channeled all your energy into getting away. There’s no shame in backing down when you know you need to. It’s what we’ve all been trying to tell you from the beginning.”

  I decided I would have to think about that some more later. “Where are we? Are we safe?”

  “You’re back at the Amitabha Buddha in Ushiku.�
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  “The giant one?”

  “Yes, the one that could kick King Kong’s butt.”

  “You mean if the statue were alive and King Kong were real?”

  “Yes, Daniel, that’s exactly what I mean.”

  I cautiously let one of my swollen eyes open. It was dark.

  “Is it nighttime?”

  “Yes, you’ve been unconscious awhile.”

  “Wow, it’s really dark,” I said, allowing my other eye to open. “Even for nighttime.”

  “Well, that’s because we’re inside the statue’s head. There aren’t a lot of light sources in here.”

  “So… why are we inside a Buddha statue’s head?”

  “Because that’s where you teleported yourself, genius.”

  “I teleported myself? Away from Number 7 and Number 8?”

  “That’s what I was just telling you. Don’t you remember anything?”

  “Would I be asking—” I couldn’t finish the sentence. I had to stop talking. My brain was wobbling like bowl of jelly on a dirt bike’s fender. Dana forced a Japanese lemon soda to my lips. It was really sour, but it felt good in my sore, dry mouth. I drained the entire bottle in less than five seconds, a new personal best.

  “That’s it. Drink up. Clearly, you aren’t ready to heal yourself yet,” said Dana, taking the soda and resting my head gently in her lap. “So, get some sleep. Let your body do some of the work on its own. I’ll be right here.”

  It’s true—between the pain and the exhaustion, there was no way I could possibly think about doing something as complicated as diagnosing and fixing my wounds. You know why doctors have to go to school for like ten years before they get licensed? It’s because healing is a complicated business. Way too complicated for somebody as beaten down as I was then. But I wasn’t going to stress about it. After all, Dana was right there next to me. Seemed like nothing bad ever happened when Dana was around. I turned my head and started to thank her, but she pressed her finger to my lips.