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  The only problem was that even though I had thought I’d be the one giving pointers, the clinic was clearly shaping up to be for, not by, me.

  “Tell me,” I said, rubbing my neck and getting back up as Miyu resumed a defensive crouch. “Exactly what part of Alpar Nok are you guys from?”

  “We learned these martial arts here on Earth,” said Eigi, helping Joe and Willy back to their unsteady feet. “Just as you did.”

  Well, that much I believed. If people on Alpar Nok had known how to fight like this, there’d be a lot more of us alive right now. Seriously, these guys knew every move in the book, and a bunch I’d never heard of. I guessed maybe that was the advantage of getting your training in Japan instead of from your imaginary father in America, as I had.

  I untied the black belt from my waist and offered it to Miyu. Some may say I’m stubborn to a fault, but, believe me, I know when I’m outclassed.

  “Honorable Alien Hunter,” said Eigi, coming over to me. “There is no need to turn in your belt. You are a worthy opponent for any black belt of the second or third degree.”

  “So, you guys are like seventh degree or something?”

  “Miyu is forty-seventh, but she is still young. The rest of us, as you might expect, are higher degrees than that. Would you like some training?”

  I shrugged and looked over at my exhausted, demoralized friends. They were nodding their heads as vigorously as they could through the pain. I guessed it wouldn’t hurt us any to pick up some tips.

  Chapter 11

  WE CONTINUED THE training until my friends and I were so sore we couldn’t move. I made Emma, Willy, and Joe disappear, with the excuse that they needed to recover, but Dana seemed to want to stick around for a while. Which was just fine with me.

  “You were so good, Daniel,” Dana said.

  “What do you mean? At sparring?” Dana’s one of the sincerest people I know, but I briefly wondered if she was making fun of me.

  “For not beating them,” she said.

  “But they kicked my butt,” I said. “Even little Miyu.”

  “But that was just because you played by the rules. You could have easily used your powers to beat them.”

  “Assuming I’d had even a second to think straight, maybe you’re right. But that wasn’t the point. They’re friends, they’re from Alpar Nok—they’re good guys.”

  “I’m just saying… you were very disciplined and mature. I’m impressed is all.”

  “Aren’t I always disciplined and mature?”

  “You mean like taking us halfway around the world to go after Number 7 and Number 8 with no plan and next to no preparation? Um… no.”

  “Dana, you know as well as I do that they’re about to make a move. I had no choice but to step in.”

  “It doesn’t have to be all or nothing, Daniel. You don’t need to put yourself in harm’s way every single time. You’ve been very lucky but—”

  I was about to tell her she sounded like my mother, but it occurred to me that she might take it the wrong way. And, anyhow, I was feeling homesick enough without bringing my mother into the picture.

  Dana and I looked over at the Murkamis. They were getting ready for bed, and Etsuyo was reading a bedtime story to the two kids—a chapter of the Japanese translation of The Great Gilly Hopkins.

  “You know,” said Dana, “sometimes I forget that if we were on Alpar Nok, we’d still be living at home with our parents.”

  “On Alpar Nok—” I stopped, deciding not to remind her where she’d really be if she were still there… dead. Victim of one of the worst extraterrestrial invaders in the universe. “If we were back home, we might have been packed up in a crate like this family,” I said. “That’s why I’m here on Earth. That’s why we’re in Tokyo right now.”

  Dana looked at me, and I saw something in her eyes, an emotion I’m not sure I know what to call, but I knew whatever was going on behind her brilliant blues was intense. Maybe even as intense as the feeling in my chest right then. Why was my heart beating the way it was beating? Why did I feel apprehensive and excited and like I just wanted to keep talking with her all night and maybe we could even go for a walk and—

  Dana smiled inscrutably and said good night, pulling her sleeping bag up over her head.

  “Good night, Dana,” I said and rolled over and sighed. I might be responsible for her existence, but clearly I had little or no control over what she did.

  I refluffed my pillow for the eightieth time and wondered if I would ever fall asleep. Confusion about girls isn’t exactly the most relaxing thing in the world, is it?

  Chapter 12

  ON THE GROUNDS of a shrine in a residential area of Ota, a district on the south side of Tokyo, a sleek black cat rested atop a high garden wall and cried softy, its blue-white eyes shining up into the starry night.

  There was a certain peacefulness about the spot, a tranquility that almost gave the cat a sense of hope after the past several hours of panicked chaos. Somebody or—more accurately, several somebodies—had been hunting it all night long.

  And it wasn’t over yet. A gunshot ripped through the darkness, and the cat sprang from its perch.

  It was a tremendous leap. From the force of its legs alone, the cat had landed a good twenty feet from the wall. And then, as it cleared the bushes that ran parallel, it sprouted wings that glinted and gleamed like peacock feathers in the moonlight.

  The cat banked steeply, clearing the garden gate and hurtling down the alleyway, a look of steely resolution—a resolution to live—in its now glowing, slit-pupiled eyes.

  It would not be an easy resolution to keep. As the bullet ricocheted above the just-blossoming cherry trees, the hunter bounded over the wall, its grasshopper-style rear legs disloding enormous divots of soil from the ground.

  And now the hunter, too, opened its wings—leathery and ridged with a network of scarlet veins—and banked out over the alley. It howled like a banshee as it flew through the night air, a gale of dust blowing up off the ground.

  The cat’s pursuer was not just bigger, stronger, and faster; it was also high-tech. A pair of wraparound goggles tracked the quarry’s flitting figure and illumined it like a torch in a dark field. It also had a gun in each of its three forehands.

  The cat’s reflexes were already dull from exhaustion. Every time it had shaken its pursuer, another one somehow found it again. Still, it hadn’t been transported halfway across the galaxy—the last of its kind—because it was prone to giving up.

  The hunter was gaining—maybe just ten yards behind now. The cat’s eyes suddenly shone like high beams, and, right then, from glands in each of its hind legs, it sprayed two clouds of nitric acid into the air.

  In an instant, the attacker’s lungs convulsed in mortal pain, its organs spilling into one another as the powerful acid destroyed the membranes between them, causing the great insect-like beast to slam into the cobblestones and explode as if it were a water balloon filled with black yogurt.

  The bird-cat trilled with satisfaction and shot straight up into the night, clearing the artfully stacked roofs of a pagoda, and then arcing south toward a massive oil refinery on the banks of Tokyo Harbor.

  Chapter 13

  THE BIRD-CAT DOVE amid the hulking reef of refinery towers, pipes, valves, hoses, tanks, and heat exchangers, searching for a place to hide, a spot to get its light-filled heart back under control.

  Mahlerian bird-cats are unique in all of nature for having, deep inside their chests, an organ that basically functions on the principle of nuclear fusion. In other words, with the same intense energy that fires the sun.

  It takes place on a more modest scale, of course, and with a few mere atoms at work, rather than the billions of tons of matter that make up a star. And the power source never fails, except when the animal—through illness, stress, injury, or other trauma—loses control of the self-sustaining life force.

  You see, when a fusion reaction escalates past containment, there’s an explos
ion—an explosion that, though on a smaller scale, is still of the sort that occurs when you set off a hydrogen bomb. What could happen next was a big reason Mahlerian bird-cats had the intergalactic renown they did.

  The bird-cat dove down, deep into the bowels of the refinery, into a dense forest of carbon-cracking tubes safely hidden from any sky-or ground-traveling passersby who might still be searching for it.

  Could it have finally given the slip to its pursuers?

  Unfortunately, not one, but seven other alien safari hunters—card-carrying, paying members of Number 7 and Number 8’s exclusive Hunt Club—were tracking the microfiber transponder that had been implanted in the bird-cat’s rear leg, and were even now converging on the refinery. And the safari hunters weren’t merely concerned with hunting down the bird-cat; they also wanted to beat each other to the kill.

  The first two hunters on the scene saw a third streaking ahead of them in an unauthorized skycar. It was a flagrant violation of Hunt Club rules to use nonnative transportation, so they didn’t hesitate to atomize both skycar and cheating hunter.

  The explosion attracted the attention of the four other hunters, who aimed and fired at the two who had first used their weapons. In a matter of seconds, an all-out alien war was taking place on the grounds of the refinery.

  The bird-cat heard the explosion too—and then more weapon fire and shouting—and quickly fled east toward the Pacific Ocean. Perhaps its relentless pursuers would have trouble tracking it to the depths of the Mariana Trench.

  But even as it readied itself to bound over the barbed-wire top of the chain-link fence and into the inky harbor beyond, two humanoid figures leaning against the hood of a limousine simultaneously fired high-intensity microwave ray guns.

  Because microwaves travel at the speed of light, there was no escape this time. The rays converged, instantly incinerating the bird-cat, and thereby releasing all the raw galvanic energy the creature contained. A blue-white blast about thirty yards in diameter seared the eyes of anybody foolish enough to have been looking that way. A split second later, the entire refinery exploded in a mushroom cloud of superheated petrochemicals.

  “That was unfortunate,” said Number 7 to Number 8, referring more to the loss of the priceless quarry than to the incineration of a handful of their high-paying club members. There were always more clients.

  “But it had to be done,” replied Number 8 as they stashed their microwave ray guns in the trunk of the limo. “We can’t leave evidence around for the humans—or our Alien Hunter friend—just now.”

  “So true, my dear,” said Number 7, getting behind the wheel and driving the limousine back toward Tokyo. “Surprise, after all, is the most crucial element in our plan.”

  “Still, Colin,” said Number 8, “one can’t help but be saddened at being denied the chance to sample Mahlerian bird-cat kebabs.”

  “I hear they don’t need much hot sauce, Ellie,” he replied, and they both broke out laughing.

  Chapter 14

  THE SHOCK WAVE from the exploding refinery rattled windows across Tokyo, and all of us in the dojo sat bolt upright in our sleeping bags.

  “What was that!?” asked Emma, voicing the question in all of our sleep-addled heads.

  “I believe,” said Eigi, his mind spinning with the quick and precise analysis that only an alien could have, “that the Game Consortium’s Hunt Club just managed to kill a Mahlerian bird-cat.”

  “A Mahlerian bird-cat?” I yelled in surprise. “I thought they were extinct!”

  “Now they are,” replied Etsuyo.

  “The last specimen was being held in an intergalactic preserve for cloning purposes, but Number 7 and Number 8 stole it and brought it here. We saw it while we were being held captive.”

  “He was my friend,” said Kenshin, choked up.

  “Why would they bring it all the way to Earth just to kill it?” I asked.

  “It’s all part of one of their video games—only, of course, they’re more than video games,” explained Eigi. “Number 7 and Number 8 didn’t just get into this line of work here on Earth. They’ve been at it for millennia, on many other planets, with many other races. And the final stage of their efforts is always extinction. They take great pride in being the ones to destroy the last vestiges of a species. This Hunt Club of theirs is actually a safari game they run for the best—that is, winning—players of past conquests. It’s something they do to test out their systems when they arrive at a new planet. And it also helps them tie up any loose ends from the planets they’ve left.”

  “Their virtual hunting games have become real hunting games?” I asked.

  Eigi nodded.

  “But how?”

  “Essentially, they’ve gotten their players so addicted that their habits force them to cross over into the real world,” continued Eigi.

  “Like what we saw in that creepy theater,” Dana said quietly.

  “In fact, these ‘winners’ are actually still willingly paying them for the experience,” Eigi went on. “They’re here to track quarry through the streets of Tokyo and all over Japan. That is, in fact, why we were brought here. We’re among the last of the Alpar Nokians—we’re close to extinction, too—so we qualify as prey. And so, of course, do you.”

  “That’s sick!” bawled Emma, our official Animal Planet addict. “Why would they do that!?”

  “Who can know the heart of the beast?” asked Eigi.

  “A veterinary heart surgeon?” asked Joe, eliciting not a single laugh. This was not a funny situation.

  Clearly, I needed to put a stop to this and take out Number 7 and Number 8. Both of them at once. Both of them, even though I hadn’t even managed to lay eyes on them yet, except in their human forms on television and on the Internet.

  As if reading my mind—which maybe she can because, after all, she came out of it—Dana said, “Maybe we should back off and find some other way, Daniel.”

  I ignored her. “Eigi, do you know where Number 7 and Number 8 live? Are they in the GC Tower?”

  “Yes, I think they’re up on the top floor most of the time. We sometimes heard our guards saying things about going up to the penthouse, so I assume that’s where they stay.”

  “You’re not going up there, Daniel,” said Dana.

  “Well, not there, precisely,” I said to her with a wink.

  Chapter 15

  THE SQUEEGEE IN my hand was shaking so much that every window I tried to clean ended up looking like a chalk-covered snake had slithered across it. The reason for my nerves was that I was standing in a window-washing gondola six hundred and sixty-three feet above the street. I was attempting to pose as a window washer, but I don’t think I was exuding the necessary degree of confidence or indifference to heights. The street below me—at least the one time I stupidly looked down—was spinning like I was in one of those tilt-a-hurl rides at the state fair. And the way the wind was buffeting and rocking the narrow, low-railed platform… let’s just say I was seriously regretting that third helping of tempura Joe had convinced me to eat.

  Coming up here had seemed like a good idea when I’d been safely down on the ground. The Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower—among the coolest skyscrapers on earth—is a fifty-story teardrop-shaped structure encased in a latticework of curving dark glass and white aluminum. And it happens to be located just across the street from the GC Tower, where Number 7 and Number 8 keep both their official business and their residence.

  Unfortunately, the Mode Gakuen’s unconventional shape means it doesn’t have much in the way of a flat roof on which to sit. When you’re trying to spy on two evil penthouse-dwelling aliens across the street, that can be a bit of a problem. Especially when you’re not so keen on heights to begin with.

  Of course, two hours into my reconnaissance mission, it was all seeming like a big, fat, needlessly-high-up-in-the-air waste of time. Boy, can aliens be boring. The only thing I’d discovered about Number 7 and Number 8 so far was that they were Internet junkies. They hadn
’t done anything but surf the Web on their laptops. And their surfings weren’t exactly the stuff of legend. Other than reading some news stories about the big refinery explosion last night, they mostly seemed to be interested in landmark Tokyo buildings and—get this—parenting websites. Weird. Boring, but weird.

  I was just about to call it a night when I suffered the worst bout of vertigo ever. And it had nothing to do with the height or the unsteadiness of the horrible window-cleaning gondola.

  Someone had just emerged from the private penthouse elevator and entered their suite. Someone with a striking resemblance to an overgrown mantis with wild dreadlocks and the most evil-looking eyes you could imagine.

  It was Number 1—The Prayer!

  My parents’ killer… my ultimate nemesis… the darkest stain in all my nightmares.

  Chapter 16

  I WANTED TO run and hide. I wanted to teleport myself to another continent or, heck, another planet. But this was Number 1. I couldn’t afford to be scared. I couldn’t afford to get distracted. And, most of all, I couldn’t afford to miss this chance to find out what he was doing here.

  And that was a problem, because he was a street-width away from me behind a wall of insulated glass. Unless I wanted to get closer and run the risk of being seen, it was going to be hard to find out what they were saying.