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  “Keihin,” I said, spotting a sprawling, industrial-looking area on the map down along Tokyo Harbor. It seemed like the kind of place that would have plenty of good spots to hide, and not too many people—or aliens.

  “Get on,” I said, quickly materializing Pasmo fare cards and handing them out as a bus pulled up. “We’ve got a bit of a ride ahead of us.”

  “If I lose my mind from hunger,” said Joe, “I’m blaming you.”

  “You lost your mind a long time ago,” Dana quipped.

  “I hope it’s a scenic route,” said Emma. “Apart from Number 7 and Number 8 being here, I’m loving what I’ve seen of this country so far. It’s so… foreign.”

  I knew just what she meant, I thought, settling down by a window near the back of the mostly empty bus. Although, technically speaking, everything is foreign to me. I am, after all, quite possibly the universe’s most displaced orphan. I clutched my arm to my chest as a wave of homesickness washed over me. I call it homesickness; yet I barely have any memory of what my home was like.

  I turned and looked behind us out the bus window, hoping to hide my stupid emotions from my friends. The sinister GC Tower still loomed above us, and I again wondered if Number 7 and Number 8 were in there. Probably, I figured. The only things that have been constants in my life are the monsters I’m fated to kill—or die trying.

  That and feeling sorry for myself, apparently. I needed to get a grip. What was that lesson I had I learned in my last martial arts training session? Something about how if your emotions are getting in the way, you need to tie them to what’s going on around you. You need to link them to something practical and immediate.

  Like the problem of six aliens masquerading as tattooed young thugs who got on the bus at the next stop.

  Chapter 6

  IT MUST HAVE been Bad Human Disguise Day here in Tokyo, because those dirtbags wouldn’t even have passed for human in a Halloween parade for blind space rangers.

  Never mind forked tongues. These guys apparently didn’t know that human knees bend forward, not backward—and that most folks don’t have long, hairy tails. Most of them had tucked their tails up their shirts, but the biggest one left his hanging out the top of his leather pants. They clambered aboard like so many overgrown insect-Labrador hybrids and gathered around a tired-looking family of four seated at the front of the bus.

  I turned up my hearing (it’s a shame you earthlings can’t do that), so I could listen in on what they were saying. They were joking among themselves in a horrible attempt at Japanese.

  “Nice haul tonight,” said one of the shorter ones.

  “Not bad,” said the tallest and strongest looking of the thugs, the one with the tail hanging out. He also seemed to be the one with the most tattoos—dragons and shogun swords were all up and down his arms and neck. I suddenly realized what they were going for with their gangster exercise clothes and slicked-back hair: they were pretending to be Yakuza, the ruthless Japanese version of America’s mafia.

  “But remember, we’re not just supposed to be collecting revenue; we’re supposed to be acquiring targets for the next hunt.”

  “You mean like these guys?” said the one wearing the gold-brimmed New York Yankees cap, elbowing the father of the unfortunate family next to him.

  The big one leaned over and snuffled at the side of the father’s head as the rest of the family sank into their seats in terror.

  “Ah, what luck!” he shouted, suddenly wide-eyed and excited. “These are the ones that got away!”

  The five of us watched in shock as one of the aliens proceeded to knock out the bus driver with a blow to the back of the head, while another removed what looked like a high-tech staple gun and fired it into the father’s shoulder. The poor man screamed in pain and fell to the floor.

  I didn’t need to say a word to Dana, Emma, Willy, and Joe—we all stormed to the front of the rapidly decelerating bus.

  The man wasn’t dead—he wasn’t even bleeding—but whatever they had just done to him sure didn’t tickle.

  “All right, tough guys,” said Willy, standing up to his full five foot two inches and throwing out his not-exactly-intimidating chest. “Get off this bus, or I’m going to pour a fifty-five-gallon drum of hurt all over your heads.”

  The big goon turned and for a moment looked at Willy like he’d lost his mind. Then he joined his friends in raucous laughter.

  “Maybe we can paralyze them with humor?” suggested Joe as the thugs jumped up on the seats around us and simultaneously drew out the biggest Ginsu knives I’d ever seen.

  I leaped ahead of my friends.

  “Drop. The. Knives,” I said in a voice that, for a second or two, actually made them stop grinning like jackals.

  “Kill them,” the leader commanded.

  “But the boss said no taking humans yet.”

  “These aren’t humans,” he replied. “They’re gnats.”

  “They’re what?” asked his thickheaded henchman, apparently not knowing what a gnat was and taking him at his word.

  “Just get them!” ordered the boss.

  They sprang toward us, knives flashing. But they didn’t realize who they were dealing with. While they were arguing about bugs, I had already decided exactly how I wanted to handle these guys. Having recently played one of the GC’s rated-M-for-mature games, Extreme Cage Fighter VI, I morphed myself into one of the most legendary thugs in all video-game lore—Vito the Home Wrecker. Have I mentioned my ability to transform myself into any person or creature that my mind can adequately visualize?

  My arms and legs grew long, muscles I didn’t normally have rippled all over my body, my neck became massive, my jaw as square as a cinder block, and the next thing I knew I was nearly seven feet tall and over two hundred pounds. The alien thugs instantly recognized me—and my weapon of choice, an oversized baseball bat wrapped in razor wire.

  “Vito?!” asked one of them, standing stock-still with the rest of his friends.

  “Get off this bus,” I growled, smashing my club against the floor and causing the bus to rock like we’d just driven over a land mine. “And go tell your superiors that the Alien Hunter is here.”

  “Only if I got your severed head in my hands to prove it!” one of the more dimwitted henchmen yelled. He sprang for me, but I was too quick. The bat smashed into him in midair, and he dropped like a stone.

  “Who’s next?” I roared. “I’ve been dying for some batting practice.”

  The jaws of their pathetic human-costume faces all fell open as I flexed my biceps, covered—as was most of my body—in tattoo portraits of Roman Catholic saints.

  “GET OFF!!!” I yelled, and, even before I could cock my club for a second swing, they were clambering over each other to exit the narrow bus door, tails tucked firmly between their legs.

  Chapter 7

  “CHECK THE DRIVER, Em,” I said, assuming my regular form. Emma’s got the best medical training of any of us. A few days ago I’d downloaded the entire medical school curricula from Johns Hopkins and Vanderbilt Universities into her consciousness.

  Meantime, the rest of us checked on the family. I helped the weary-looking father to his feet and instantly recognized something about him, something about his touch, his energy.

  “Wait a second,” I said. “You’re—”

  “Alpar Nokian,” he said back to me. “All four of us are. Just like you.” In an interesting twist of fate, Alpar Nokians like me are physically identical to you human folks.

  “What on earth?”

  “Precisely. We were abducted by Number 7 and Number 8’s minions two months ago and brought here.”

  “But why?”

  “Best I can figure is we were supposed to be target practice. A training exercise before they went after you.”

  “You know who I am?”

  “Didn’t you just tell us? You’re the Alien Hunter,” he said, bowing respectfully.

  I had just announced that to the entire bus, hadn’t
I? My friends had been nagging me to get more rest—it felt like it had been a month since I’d had a full night’s sleep—and maybe it was time I started listening to them. I was losing track of what I’d said only minutes ago.

  “But if you were captured by Number 7 and Number 8, then why are you on this bus, and why did those fake Yakuza just refind you?”

  “We were held in isolation for weeks, but then one day our cell door was just, well, it was open. Somebody must have let us out for some reason.”

  He shrugged and helped his wife and then his kids to their feet. “As to how they found us again just now, I have no idea. Maybe bad luck?”

  I nodded. I was getting pretty familiar with what bad luck looked like.

  “Thank you for saving us, but we should get going,” he said.

  “Where will you go?” asked Dana.

  “We don’t know, but we’ll rely on alien ingenuity, yes? We just need to keep moving.”

  “That’s fine, except for one thing,” I said, and turned and yelled to Emma. “How’s the driver?”

  “He’ll be fine. Going to have a nice goose egg on the back of his head, but he’ll be okay.”

  “Good. Come here and take a look at this man’s shoulder. Those thugs were talking about ‘acquiring targets,’ right? And something about a hunt? Something makes me think they may have put a transponder in this man, and that we should take it out so they can be on their way without getting tracked down in, like, the next ten minutes.”

  Emma came back to us, asked the man to remove his button-down shirt, and examined his shoulder.

  “I see where it must have gone in, but it’s a tiny wound. Maybe a microfiber transmitter?”

  “Can we get it out of him?”

  “Sure. Why don’t you just dematerialize it, Daniel?”

  “Well, because I need to know what it is in order to do that. It’s not like wishing it away, you know.” That was true. I have to know exactly what it is I’m dealing with—and where it is—or it could be, um, a little dangerous. I mean, I didn’t want to put an unnecessary hole in the man, or sever an artery.

  “I trust you,” said the man.

  “I’m an alien hunter, not a surgeon, sir.”

  “You’re the Alien Hunter—you can do anything.”

  “Don’t believe the hype,” I replied. “My so-called powers only work when I have enough time to think something through, and when I truly understand what it is I’m trying to do.”

  Seriously—it’s not as easy as you might think.

  Chapter 8

  “WE’RE GOING TO need a portable ultrasound scanning unit,” Emma said. “Try the Yokohiro Medical Institute servers.”

  “On it,” I replied, whipping The List laptop out of my backpack and conducting a quick search. Y-O-K-O-H-I—there it was. And there was the ISP of their internal server stacks. And then it was just a few more steps before, voilà; there were the manufacturer’s design specs. And now that I knew what it was and could see exactly how it worked—

  “Perfect,” said Emma, looking over the newly materialized device in her hands. It basically resembled a police radar gun. She aimed it at the man’s shoulder and had me look into the viewfinder. A glowing mass, about two inches long, spiraled through the flesh of his shoulder, perilously close to the axillary nerve. I let my brain absorb the image—the dimensions, the orientation—and was overcome with a new appreciation for what it is surgeons do.

  And then, just like that, because I could see it, I teleported the transmitter out of the man’s shoulder and into the palm of my hand.

  It looked like a curly silver wire. I zoomed in my eyes and did a quick study of its circuitry and transmission patterns. If this was a device Number 7 and Number 8 were routinely using, it would be useful to know something about it. Then I materialized a glass beaker of nitric acid and dropped it in—a pretty quick way to destroy the thing for good.

  “Can you please give me the names you’ve been using here?” I asked.

  “We are the Murkamis,” replied the father. “I am Eigi. This is my wife, Etsuyo; my daughter, Miyu; and my son, Kenshin.”

  I introduced myself and my friends, but the real reason I needed their names was for a set of documents I produced right on the spot: Japanese passports, credit cards, and airline tickets to London—a place I knew to be recently free of alien infestations (read Book Three if you’re curious) and where they should be safe for a while.

  “Take these and get your family out of the country,” I said. “Things are about to get pretty hot here in Tokyo.”

  “I couldn’t possibly take—”

  “He made them out of thin air,” Willy said. “It’s not like you’re taking anything from him. Trust me.”

  The man thought a moment, then nodded. Then we all hugged. What can I say? We Alpar Nokians are big into public displays of affection.

  “Hurry,” said Dana. “You may have destroyed it, but that transmitter was working for a few minutes there. Other killers may be on the way, even as we speak.”

  Chapter 9

  NUMBER 7 AND NUMBER 8, Colin and Ellie Gygax to the rest of the world, were having a romantic candlelit dinner in the penthouse apartment of the Game Consortium Tower. They were sitting at a priceless room-length table milled from the dense, richly veined wood of an extinct species of alien tree. And set in the middle of the table in front of them was a lacquered bowl made from the shell of an extinct tortoise-like alien.

  “Ah,” said Number 7, slurping away at the soup it contained. “Endangered species jambalaya always takes my mind off my troubles.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “You’ve outdone yourself, my dear. Say, is that the Nicolarian I detect? The fruity, almost cherry-like overtones?”

  “Very good, honey,” said Number 8. “It certainly is.”

  One of several meats in the soup came from a Nicolarian, a species that resembled a gray-haired boa constrictor. Employees of Number 7 and Number 8 had just hunted the only one left last week, and now the two of them were eating it.

  “Oh, Colin,” Number 8 went on, giggling. It was so very droll to call each other by their fake human names. “Ah,” said Number 7, chuckling along. “Perhaps there is some part of this unbearable charade I’ll miss.”

  “I don’t think so; we won’t have time to miss anything.” Number 8 laughed.

  “Once we launch the 5G editions and the gamers start tearing this world apart—”

  “And once we have personally wiped out the last Alpar Nokian—”

  “Ah, yes. Play the video feed. Let’s see him one more time!”

  Suddenly, the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Tokyo went opaque and lit up with a high-resolution picture of a teenage boy climbing down off a bus with a homeless family.

  “Will you just look at him?” Number 7 said. “So young, so firm, so vital, so—”

  “Absolutely delectable,”

  said Number 8, drooling into their shared bowl of soup.

  “And soon to be the very last of his kind,” said Number 7.

  “As these annoying humans would have to admit about their caviar and truffles: scarcity is the very best seasoning.”

  “Well said, Colin,” Number 8 replied. “Let’s savor this one together, shall we?”

  “Absolutely, Ellie,” said Number 7. And then, somehow, the two of them morphed into a shimmering cloud of gray specks that hovered over the bowl and consumed every last particle of soup.

  And then they—or it—descended on the kitchen to eat the scraps.

  Chapter 10

  IF I HAD realized that the Gygaxes had been watching me on a giant video screen as they ate the last of some poor endangered (now extinct) species, I might have been a little more thorough about checking my surroundings for the equipment they must have been using to track me. But I was a little busy at the moment, squaring off with a rather unlikely opponent.

  “You can’t lose touch with your key like that,” said the little girl, M
iyu, Eigi Murkami’s daughter.

  The little she-devil had just delivered a sharp blow to my solar plexus, knocking all the air out of me and making my vision go gray.

  “Actually,” I said, wincing as I got back up off the dojo’s bamboo floor, “I don’t have a key or even a wallet, for that matter.”

  “Not k-e-y; ki!” she barked at me.

  “Ah,” I said. “You mean it’s another word. Can you please give me the language of origin? And use it in a sentence?”

  I guess she hadn’t seen any National Spelling Bees lately because she gave me a look like I’d lost my mind. I had been hoping to distract her with a laugh, but this would have to do. As she grimaced, I lunged forward and locked her in a jujutsu embrace, setting her up for a devastating fulcrum throw.

  But she was having none of it. She countered with a piece of kansetsu waza—joint-locking technique—a leg swipe that made my left knee buckle, and the next thing I knew I was looking up at her from the floor.

  “In English, you would spell it k-i. Ki,” she said. “It sort of means energy. Now, do you submit?” she asked, driving her heel into my windpipe even harder than before.

  “Restraint, Miyu,” urged her mother, turning to us as she waited for Dana to get back to her feet. Dana seemed to have had about as much luck sparring with Eigi’s wife, Estuyo, as I had been having with their daughter. And Joe, Willy, and Emma also seemed to be spending an inordinate amount of time on the bamboo floor—sparring, as they had been, with Eigi and his son, Kenshin.

  Both for company and because generally there is safety in numbers, we had invited my fellow Alpar Nokians to spend the night with us before they headed off to Narita Airport in the morning.

  The smart thing to do would have been to get some sleep—I had some aliens to hunt, and the Murkamis had a long flight ahead of them—but I guess I was just excited about having people from my home planet around. And what with us happening upon an abandoned martial arts studio, it seemed only natural that we would start talking about the martial arts. I’ve had quite a bit of training over the years, and the Murkamis professed to be slightly expert themselves—black belts, in fact, just like me. So, from there, it was only natural that all nine of us would end up on the dojo floor in a friendly little tournament. Right?