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Producing the vial of fluid she’d stolen from Project: Stargazer, she said without preamble, “They found this in the Predator’s blood. In layman’s terms, it’s like distilled ‘lizard brain,’ the part that kicks in under extreme survival conditions.”

McKenna took a gulp of beer. “So?” he said, sensing she was eager to tell him more.

“Remember I told you they rip out people’s spines?”

“Trophies, you said.”

“Right. But if a Predator’s first and foremost a survivor, wouldn’t it make sense to collect DNA ‘souvenirs?’”

McKenna raised his eyebrows. “From people’s spines?”

“Brain stem. Close enough.” Casey knew she wasn’t painting a clear picture. It was a bad habit. Her thoughts seemed to coalesce cleanly in her head, but getting the words out in the proper order was another thing entirely. “Look, suppose—just suppose—that these space creatures are… siphoning off our lizard brain juice.”

Now McKenna laughed, although she could tell he was a little insulted. “You don’t have to overdo the layman’s terms.”

She held up a hand in apology. “I think they’re attempting hybridization,” she said. “It would explain the human DNA, now, wouldn’t it?”

McKenna’s brow furrowed. Casey could see his mind working and knew she’d been right in her assessment of his smartness. McKenna might be a rough-tough soldier boy, but there was a brightness about him, an ability to take information on board, adapt, calculate the odds, make quick decisions. If she was being honest with herself, she guessed she should never really have doubted his intelligence. You didn’t get to be an officer in the Army Rangers without being mentally agile.

“Collecting survival traits from high-end specimens,” he said, nodding.

“From the strongest, smartest, most dangerous species on every planet they visit, to make upgrades to their own race. Hybrids.”

McKenna studied her. “Are you just pulling this theory out of your ass?”

“This new Predator, the bigger one,” she said, ignoring the question, “did you see its eyes?”

His nod was almost imperceptible, but it was there. McKenna knew exactly what she was talking about.

“They’re evolving, Captain,” she said. “Changing.”

“Being upgraded,” he murmured.

“And here’s the clincher,” she said. She leaned toward him, as if so eager to impart her information that she wanted to close the gap between the words leaving her mouth and reaching his ears. “Project: Stargazer? The shitshow that recruited me? A stargazer’s a type of flower—an orchid. And not just any orchid…”

McKenna fixed his gaze on hers. “A hybrid,” he said softly.

* * *

After speaking to Casey, McKenna did what he maybe should have done as soon as they arrived here. Using one of the burner phones they’d acquired, he keyed in the most familiar phone number of his lifetime.

It only rang once. When Emily answered, her voice was frantic.

“It’s me,” McKenna said.

“Tell me he’s okay.”

McKenna turned to look at his son, sitting apparently contentedly with Nebraska, who was smoking a cigarette, and taking care to blow the smoke in the opposite direction. “He’s fine. He’s with me. I’ll bring him home when it’s—”

“It’s okay,” she interrupted. “Don’t say anything. Be safe.”

She hung up. No explanation.

McKenna frowned. Emily’s message had been loud and clear. She wasn’t alone.

* * *

Emily ended the call, trying to hide the vengeful sneer on her face. Her boy was okay—that was all she had needed to know. She turned her back on the cadre of black ops agents who’d filled her kitchen, and dropped the phone into the sink’s garbage disposal. One of them shouted and another reached for her, but they were too late to stop her from flicking on both the water and the disposal. The sound of the sharp blades chopping up the phone while the water ruined anything they might salvage gave her a thrill of pleasure, deep in her chest.

She turned toward them, letting them see her fury.

“You guys fucked with the wrong family.”

Still blazing, she pushed through the agents filling her kitchen, crossed to the open door leading to Rory’s basement sanctuary, and clumped down the wooden steps. Just before the call from Quinn, a couple of guys, surveillance techs, had gone down there without her permission, and she wanted to know what they were up to.

Entering the basement, she was incensed to see one of them pick up a remote-control T-rex that was standing atop one of Rory’s notebooks in what he called his ‘Control Area’ and toss it disdainfully over his shoulder. The T-rex hit the floor with a clatter. Emily hurtled across the room like a tornado, snatching up the dinosaur as she went, and shoved her way between the two men. Waving the T-rex in the startled tech’s face, she barked, “Hey! Don’t throw the toys!”

The tech looked at her with an expression that was half-sneer, half-apology, as if he was uncertain how to respond. Before he could decide, there was an almighty crash from the kitchen above, and it wasn’t merely the sound of something being dropped or falling over, but the sound of major damage—the kind of sound you might hear if the kitchen ceiling collapsed, and the entire contents of the room above smashed through onto the floor below.

Emily and the two techs froze, looking up at the basement ceiling, as if they expected that to collapse in on them too. Then the two guys reacted, drawing guns almost in unison, one of them dashing past a bewildered Emily and up the stairs, while the other—the one that had thrown the T-rex—looked at her and held up a hand, suddenly solicitous: For your own safety, stay here.

They waited. Heard running footsteps. And then—suddenly, shockingly—the sound of gunfire. Three, four, five shots.

Emily went rigid, raising herself up on her toes, her fingers spasming out like the defensive spines on a puffer fish.

Holy shit, what was happening up there? She couldn’t believe she was hearing this. Gunshots! In her house?

She was terrified, yes, but she was also angry. How dare they? Whoever this was, how fucking dare they? Almost unconsciously, she began to walk toward the basement stairs, her steps slow, cautious, her eyes fixed on the now closed door at the top.

Maybe she should hide? Arm herself? Who would be next through that door? Friend or foe?

And then, a hard, bright, furious thought: What the fuck have you got us into here, Quinn?

After the crash and the running footsteps and the gunshots came silence. Three seconds of silence… four… She took another tentative step forward.

And then the world fell in on her.

Or rather, it fell in behind her. Another crash at her back, like a small bomb had gone off, and suddenly she was throwing herself forward as her head and shoulders were showered with splinters of wood and flecks of plaster.

Rubbing her streaming eyes, choking on dust, she clambered to her feet and turned—and in an instant, it was as though everything she had believed, everything she had relied on her entire life, was ripped unceremoniously away. Because standing in her basement, beneath a hole which even now was raining swirls of white dust down onto its shoulders, was what appeared to be a demon from Hell. Ten feet tall, maybe more, it had a face like all her worst nightmares rolled into one, and in its fearsomely taloned right fist it was clutching the still twitching body of a dead mercenary.