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  “I have faith,” said Kildare, glancing at his not-yet-activated hunting tracking unit. “I have faith their gamers will hunt you down, and then my parents will probably eat your carcass if you don’t get very, very far away from here right now.”

  Should I have revealed myself then and there? It seemed an obvious thing to do. But was it too obvious? How was I supposed to be certain this wasn’t a trap?

  The answer, of course, was that I couldn’t be certain of anything. I bit my butterfly tongue and stayed right there, looking to all the world just like one of its billions of innocuous insects.

  Chapter 40

  HOW MUCH TIME was I losing just resting there and debating everything I saw through my thousand-lensed butterfly eyes?

  There was no way Kildare could be the enemy, I thought. I mean, what kind of evil space alien practically bawls his eyes out saying good-bye to a creature of an entirely different species, one that his parents want to kill and eat?

  I could only imagine what my father would say if he knew I was forty miles outside Tokyo developing sympathies for the son of Number 7 and Number 8 on The List of Alien Outlaws on Terra Firma: I was just too darn gullible. When you think about it, wasn’t that precisely why I’d failed to notice that the little girl in the test had really been an alien? I saw her, and, like some just-landed-on-Earth simpleton, I assumed she was a poor, sweet little innocent whose life it was my mission to save from demon motorcyclists. Now, here I was out in the real world stalking my real enemies, and yet this time I didn’t think it could be a trap?

  Still, the way the creature had simply replied, “Faith,” to Kildare, kept echoing in my head. Why shouldn’t I have faith in my own instincts? Hadn’t I gotten this far relying on them?

  The second I made up my mind to begin to turn back into my regular self, the creature raced up, belched a cloud of donut-scented gas in my face, and, with a distinct note of mischief, said, “Catch me if you can, Alien Hunter!”

  Startled, I tumbled to the ground, the stalk of bamboo crushed by my sudden human weight.

  “Wha—Daniel?” Kildare said, as shocked as I was. “How did you find us?”

  I ignored him and kept my eyes on the Pleionid. “You said you wanted to find me!” I blurted as I struggled to my feet.

  “If you are who I think you are, you won’t have too much trouble,” the Pleionid replied, winking a puppy eye at me and breaking into bubbly giggles again. “Can’t be too cautious!”

  And, with that, it was gone. Or, rather, it would have seemed gone if I hadn’t been aware of some of its abilities and known what to look for. A nearly-impossible-to-detect flicker of motion, like the faintest breath of wind in the grass, was racing across the field.

  “Where’s it going?” I yelled back at Kildare, already sprinting after the Pleionid.

  “You’ll have to catch him to find out!” Kildare shouted, fading away behind me as I hit—thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty miles per hour—trying desperately to catch up.

  It was racing right for the train tracks, which, I quickly realized, were about to be occupied by a Tokyo-bound shinkansen, hurtling our way at more than a hundred miles per hour.

  I put on an additional burst of speed, sending up a rooster-tail of mud and rice plants behind me. I felt a little bad—some farmer was going to be upset at the furrow I was making through his paddy—but there wasn’t time to apologize or to fix things right then.

  I was just a dozen or so yards behind the Pleionid when I realized it was aiming to cross the tracks a split second ahead of the approaching bullet train, thereby trapping me on the other side of it or, perhaps, leaving me smeared across its pointed nose.

  Fortunately, I happen to be able to leap higher than a speeding locomotive. Unfortunately, as I cleared the hurtling train, I didn’t see any sign of the Pleionid.

  What I did see was an alien I recognized from the GC Tower boardroom.

  A hunter.

  Chapter 41

  THE OWL-FACED GOON was squatting in the rice paddy and had some serious alien-tech camouflage going on. But since I was coming down from thirty feet in the air, it wasn’t hard to see him or his wicked-looking weapons.

  Of course, I was brilliantly disguised as a teenager taking a superhuman leap over a bullet train, so it wasn’t too hard for him to see me either. His wicked-looking weapons were soon blasting away in my general direction.

  I hit the ground and leaped sideways, then—faster than any bullet train—I charged. Getting in low under his spray of weapon fire, I tackled him, then I applied that kansetsu waza joint-locking move that Miyu had used on me. In a moment, I was standing on his armored neck and looking down into his panic-stricken, silver-eyed, noseless face.

  “You’re—you’re—” he gasped.

  “Yeah,” I said, “your friendly neighborhood Alien Hunter. Now tell me, what are you doing here?”

  “The Puh-puh-puh-plee—”

  “Pleionid?” I asked.

  He nodded and started sputtering again: “Puh-puh-puh-please don’t hurt me. I’ll leave Earth, I promise!”

  “Tell me how you tracked it here. The hunt codes weren’t supposed to go out till the hunt started, and that’s not for another half hour.”

  “I ha-ha-ha—hacked the system.”

  “How does it work?”

  “It tracks pleiochromatech emissions. N-n-n-now, will you puh-puh-please let me go?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “So you can die, Alien Hunter!”

  And, with that, I came to realize that owl-headed goons like that one have certain defense mechanisms I’d failed to anticipate. I won’t give you the blow-by-blow on what happened next, because it gets a little gross, and your parents or teachers might take this book away from you if I spelled it out in too much detail. But let’s just say this particular breed of alien—the Dookian—when under duress, is apt to spray the highly caustic contents of its intestines at its attacker.

  The long and the short of it is that this one did it to me, and it was easily the single-most-disgusting experience of my life. Fortunately, however, it wasn’t fatal and didn’t prevent me from karate-chopping him into the next prefecture.

  When I was done cleaning his repulsive goo off me—I had to materialize a full case and a half of Handi Wipes to get the job done—I found the tracking unit he’d hacked and quickly determined that the Pleionid had already gotten thirty miles ahead of me, heading east toward Narita Airport.

  I took off running at a comfortable two hundred miles per hour (any faster and I usually get a bit of a headache from the concentration it takes not to trip). Soon, I was closing in on my quarry.

  But it wasn’t headed quite all the way to Narita Airport. Instead, it stopped in the middle of a beautiful garden in the town of Ushiku. But it wasn’t the plantings that were the most noteworthy feature of the place. That distinction went to a bronze man who happened to be taller than Godzilla.

  Chapter 42

  DEPENDING ON THE movie, Godzilla is seldom depicted as much bigger than two hundred and fifty feet tall. The Amitabha Buddha statue at Ushiku is almost four hundred feet tall, and that’s not counting the base he stands on.

  To give you some perspective, that means that it’s more than twice the height of the Statue of Liberty; it also has a place in the Guinness World Records. Yeah, it’s that ginormous.

  Also suffice it to say the Pleionid wasn’t content to meet me someplace convenient like a snack bar, ticket booth, or even in the viewing room located in the chest of the statue. No, my ultracamouflage little quarry went straight to the top—crawling like the world’s fastest and most purposeful oil slick up the exterior of the colossus, all the way to the head, where it proceeded to lodge itself in the statue’s left ear. I watched and watched (and kept checking the hacked tracking device) until it appeared that the Pleionid had finally stopped running.

  Now I just needed to figure out how to get up into the Buddha’s left ear without making th
e local news and the Facebook pages of every camera-wielding tourist on the grounds. Which basically ruled out sprouting wings like Maximum Ride, leaping like Superman, scaling the statue like Spiderman, or laying the statue down on its side like the Hulk.

  So I ended up doing the tourist thing and rode as high as the attendant-driven elevator would take me: up into the statue’s slit-windowed chest. From there, it was only modestly difficult to duck behind a display and do my tried-and-true butterfly trick. I flitted under the door marked WORKERS ONLY and soon found myself inside the cavernous, girder-spanned interior of the statue.

  The statue’s ears were open to the outside, although chicken wire had been put across them to keep birds and bats from roosting inside. That didn’t stop the Pleionid, though. Without breaking the screen, it had somehow crossed through. Another trick I’d love to figure out.

  “Danaus plexippus,” it said simply.

  “What the—?” I said, with my typical articulateness.

  “Your species of butterfly, Alien Hunter,” it replied, its voice disarmingly rich and wise-sounding. “But why don’t you turn yourself back into your human form. Your insect voice is hard for me to discern with the wind blowing up here.”

  Oh, yeah. I forgot I was a butterfly. I turned myself back into my human form and looked down at the big-eyed, furry-skinned creature.

  “Sorry for all the running,” it said.

  “No big deal,” I replied, although I realized as I collapsed to the cool bronze floor that I was pretty darn sore from that little chase. “I’m thinking of taking up cross-country in the fall.”

  “Cross-country?”

  “Running for school. It’s a sport. You run outside.”

  “Ah, well,” it said. “Now I have a sense for your ‘cross-country’ abilities. That was one reason why I had you chase me. To make sure that you were indeed the Alien Hunter. But also I needed to teach you something.”

  “Teach me?”

  “Yes, Alien Hunter, teach you. My time is short. And we must ensure that yours is not.”

  “But you’re safe for now. Why can’t we just get you away from here, someplace where they can’t find you?”

  “As should be quite obvious from the fact that I am the very last, we Pleionids don’t live forever. Now, give me your hand.”

  I laid my hand in its hand, thinking this couldn’t possibly be a trap—and it wasn’t. But what happened next was the last possible thing I would have expected.

  My mind was bathed in color, light, shapes, motions, incredible beauty, unbearable sadness, and—most of all—an amazing depth of understanding I’d never experienced before.

  Suddenly, I saw how Pleionids had harnessed the chemistry of pleiochromatech to change shape, to make themselves practically invisible, to squeeze through tiny crevices, to radiate color, to share thoughts by touch. Most stunning of all, it gave me a glimpse of the true beauty of our universe—and of the horror of the threats that face it.

  In short, it gave me the biggest mojo download of my whole life.

  “Wh-wha—”

  “Don’t say a word,” it urged, smiling up at me faintly and pulling its hand away. “I have to go now. And this time, don’t follow, okay?”

  My mind was still wading through a newfound sea of light and knowledge, and all I could do was nod and stutter my thanks.

  “Don’t forget the good, Daniel,” the Pleionid said. “And now, if you would, please duck!”

  Chapter 43

  I REFLEXIVELY DROPPED to my belly as an enormous inky black shape brushed past me. What the heck? I sprang to my feet just in time to see the black form widen. It happened too quickly to get a good look, but the creature seemed to resemble one of those bizarre-looking, huge-mouthed, predatory deep-sea fish—except that it could fly. It opened its enormous, long-toothed jaws, aiming for the Pleionid.

  “No!” I shouted, diving into its path. In less than a second, I had turned myself into a stick of the hardest substance I could think of: diamond. And I was now wedged between the open jaws of the inky black shape. It shook its head and roared in frustration, and I felt my stick-shaped self start to tremble. Diamonds may be one of the hardest substances on Earth, but this guy was definitely from another planet.

  “Thank you, Alien Hunter,” the Pleionid said sadly. “But it is now my time. You must not sacrifice yourself. The world needs you.”

  “No! Don’t do it!” I screamed. But the Pleionid was already leaping toward me. He knocked me out from between the alien’s jaws, which came crashing down and swallowed the Pleionid whole.

  I will carry that image to my grave.

  A wave of nausea came over me as the Pleionid’s killer somehow passed out of the statue’s ear and into the night. But there wasn’t time to react—more shapes were coming up behind me, and fast!

  I was sure that as a diamond I’d end up in one of these goons’ pockets, so I changed myself back to human form and spun around. Climbing up the girders toward me were a half dozen of the hunters I’d seen in Number 7 and Number 8’s boardroom meeting.

  “Double bonus,” hooted one of them.

  “The Alien Hunter and the Pleionid on the same safari!” another yelled. “We’ll be famous!”

  “Don’t let him out!” shouted one of the taller hunters as he did one of those two-finger Special Operations gestures where you tell your squadmates to fan out.

  Wait a minute. They were supposed to be solo agents. So why were they working together? I could hear them racking and priming their weapons and in a moment the whole place stunk of ozone and molten metal as a half dozen plasma pulses arced through the darkness toward me.

  Still reeling from the horrific vision of the black shadow of death swallowing that beatific little creature, I somehow managed to leap over their heads, grab a lateral girder, and pivot myself down through the darkness to the interior roof of the viewing room, a few stories below. I can only imagine what the tourists inside thought when hearing all the thumps, weapon pulses, and shouting over their heads.

  And then there was an awful whine, a whine I knew from dreams as well as I did from real life—one of those conscienceless alien poachers was priming an Opus 24/24!

  Great. This was just great. Human civilians under my feet, a sacred metal statue all around me, a half dozen aliens working together to blow my brains out, and I was so tired and disoriented and scared I could barely see straight. Some superhero I was turning out to be. If the cards continued to fall like this, I would be responsible for the untimely deaths of more than a hundred innocent souls.

  Then in a flash, I realized the Opus 24/24 was no longer charging, which meant it would soon be firing.

  I leaped up as a pulse of pure pain arced from a saw-toothed muzzle, and evil yellow tendrils blossomed across the interior metalwork of the statue.

  Normally I would have stood my ground, normally I would have been happy to go down swinging, but normally I wasn’t living with the burden of just having witnessed the death of the last member of a legendary—and irreplaceable—alien species. I couldn’t even think straight. Heck, I probably would have had trouble tying my shoelaces right then, I was so freaked out.

  And then it came to me—pleiochromatech. I’d just been shown how to make it and how it worked. I didn’t need to fight; I could hide.

  I dove down into the wealth of knowledge the Pleoinid had just given me… and through an act of sheer will that I don’t know how to explain, I flattened myself into a slick of invisible flesh, and slid down into the darkness while my pursuers raged with frustration.

  Chapter 44

  THEY SAY THE best way to recover from a tragedy is to throw yourself back into regular life. And since the only regular thing I know to do in this life is hunt bad aliens, that’s exactly what I did.

  At 8:20 a.m. I was on my way back to school to have one last meeting with Kildare. I couldn’t shake my hunch that he was part of the solution, not the problem. And the alternative—waving the white flag and lea
ving Japan like my father wanted me to—just wasn’t in the cards. Especially not after I’d learned that Number 7 and Number 8 weren’t a couple steps away from having the human race destroy itself; they were one step away. And not after I’d just let the last living Pleionid get eaten by some nameless, faceless, game-obsessed alien beast.

  As it turned out, though, I didn’t have to get all the way back to school to find Kildare. Three blocks away from the main entrance, I just about collided with him as he rounded a corner on his bicycle.

  “Hey,” I said as he skidded to a stop. His eyes were red and puffy.

  “Oh, Daniel, hey.”

  “Want to give me a lift the rest of the way?” I asked. “I could sit on the rack.”

  “I’m not going to school,” he blurted. “My father won’t let me go anymore.”

  “Your dad is actually forbidding you to go to school? What is he—like, the Anti-Dad?”

  He started to say something but clamped his mouth shut before it could get out. The pain in his eyes said it all.

  “Well, small world,” I quipped, trying to cheer him up. “I’m having a crapalicious day, too.”

  He nodded and tried to smile, but the poor guy was starting to shake.

  “Hey,” I said, “I know just the thing.”

  “You’re going to go make my father change his mind?”

  “Better than that. You and I are going to take one of the most important courses of study that school offers.”

  “But I told you, my dad’s not letting me go.”

  “This is an off-campus course.”

  He looked at me skeptically. “Oh yeah? What’s it called?”

  “Introduction to…hooky.”

  Chapter 45

  WE HEADED STRAIGHT to Harajuku, the hippest district in the entire city of Tokyo. From Burton Snowboards to Harley-Davidson to Under Armour to North Face to Adidas—name your favorite company and they have a store in Harajuku. And, chances are, it’s mobbed with teenagers.