“Mom,” he said. “Dad’s on his way back. He’s radio dark, but wants you to know he’s bringing a group of Genjix in.”
She nodded. “Got it. Tell Ines to have the quarters in the dungeon prepared. The ones with the external locks, please.” Cameron still looked like he had something else on his mind. “What is it?”
“There’s a girl with them. My age. Kind of. I think…” he paused. “I think she’s a host.”
That gave Jill pause. She saw the confusion in his eyes and the hesitation when he spoke. God, she hoped the girl wasn’t cute. As a mother, she just wasn’t ready for that yet. If this girl was a host and attractive, his fifteen year-old brain might explode.
Your worst fears realized?
“Up there with Roen grocery shopping carte blanche without a list.”
Jill pointed at the stairs. “Shower. Now.” She watched as her son slung the rifle off his shoulder and put it in the weapons closet, and then scampered up the stairs. This was probably the worst time for a host girl to come into his life, especially a Genjix.
Trust me, we hate humans going through puberty too.
Cameron was a good son; his three parents saw to that. Between Roen and her putting all their energy into him and Tao’s constant mentoring, he had little choice but to grow up the way they molded him. However, due to their special circumstances, he also had a worryingly unusual childhood, and hadn’t grown up with many children his age.
They had had to pull him out of the second grade when the new administration ordered the IXTF to sweep all of the schools in the Washington DC area with Penetra scanners during the government purge. He spent most of his childhood either constantly on the move with Roen and Jill, or living with her parents in San Diego, only finally returning home after Jill’s operation in the Pacific Northwest was up and running. Even with Tao to guide and keep him company, it had been a very lonely childhood.
The family had settled down on the outskirts of Eureka, California, four years ago, and this was the longest they had stayed in one place since the Great Betrayal, when humanity had learned about the Quasing. Now, Jill was responsible for Prophus operations from Vancouver down to San Francisco. Her job was especially critical, since the Quasing Underground Railroad ran directly through this region.
The tension between the Eastern and Western hemisphere had been ramping up for years, with diplomats on both sides predicting the breakout of World War III soon. The extensive naval blockades on both sides made transportation by ship dangerous. Traveling by plane was near-impossible, since there were Penetra scanners at every airport.
That left the thin stretch of ocean between Siberia and Alaska the safest option for refugees fleeing Asia. The overland path across the Bering Strait, through the North American continent toward safe havens in South America was one of the most trafficked and dangerous routes for the thousands fleeing Genjix domination in Asia. Interestingly, the refugees fleeing the continent were nearly equal parts Prophus and Genjix.
The Council Power Struggle had taken a toll on many Quasing and their hosts. For over half a century, Vinnick with Flua, and Devin with Zoras, had been the most powerful on the Genjix Council. Ever since the upstart Enzo succeeded Devin and became the leader of China, Enzo and Vinnick had waged open conflict, now known as the Genjix Power Struggle, that had spilled over across many other regions.
In recent years, the United States had tightened their borders, and the job of smuggling Quasing refugees had become more dangerous. These days, Jill half-expected the IXTF to burst into her farmhouse at any time. Couple that with raising a teenager…
She looked down and cursed. The first batch of pancakes had burned. She slid them into the garbage with her spatula and started over. She had thought taking command of the Pacific Northwest region would be a quiet change of pace from undercover work in the dense metropolitan cities of Chicago and Washington DC. Boy, had she been mistaken.
The work she did now was more important than any work she had done on the Hill for Senator Wilks. Back then, she had just helped create policy that might or might not have trickled down to the people she was trying to help. Now, she was on the front line. If Jill made a bad decision or her team failed, people could die or get captured by the IXTF. She directly saw the consequences of her failures. It was a sobering experience.
Jill switched over to Roen’s channel. “This is Hen House. What’s your location? Heard you’re dark. Can you talk?”
“For you, darling, any time,” his voice piped across the comm cheerfully. “We’re just outside of the perimeter, a little over a klick out.”
“I hear you went grocery shopping. Scrambled?”
“Roger. Five bad eggs. One scrambled. Four live chicks. Will need to incubate.”
“Already on it. Hey, Bad Seed mentioned one of the eggs was…”
“…his age. Yes ma’am, she is.”
“Is… is she pretty?”
There was a very long pause.
He finally answered. “Is this a trick question? Because to be honest, I can’t think of a good way to answer this without getting busted by you, the girl’s father, or some higher power. Therefore, I’ll let you be the judge of that.”
“I see. Are their feathers clipped at least?”
“Affirmative. They look a mess. Probably haven’t eaten in days.”
Jill looked down at the small stack of pancakes she was building and went to the pantry to get more flour and eggs. Fifteen minutes later, a red light on the screen came on. Roen must have reached the entrance to the tunnels. They would be at the main safe house shortly.
Jill wiped her hands of the pancake mix and removed her apron. She pulled back her hair and checked herself in the mirror. She left her pile of pancakes, snapped her holster around her waist, and walked into the pantry closet.
On the far wall, behind the five-pound cans of tomato paste, she punched a code on a number pad and waited as part of the floor next to her swung down to expose a spiral staircase. She trotted down the metal steps and went to meet her new guests, as any good host would.
The farmhouse, an old converted lumber mill near the Pacific Ocean, looked run down and decrepit from the outside. The interior reinforced the exterior image and looked perfectly ordinary. Under the farmhouse, however, was a fortified bunker prepped with enough supplies to last several years. The house stood on top of a mined-out gold plot with underground tunnels that snaked for several kilometers in either direction. At one point, back when most of the land here wasn’t part of the United States, this was the Prophus command center for the entire western half of the country. Now, it served an even more important job.
There were two escape routes carved deep into the ground: a hidden tunnel that led westward two kilometers to an underwater cave where one of the remaining Prophus submarines – a tiny unarmed commercial submersible once used for tourism – served as their escape vehicle. The other tunnel was a straight shot east into the Redwood National Park to the edge of a cavern mouth. A dozen mountain bikes served as their getaway vehicles for that route.
Roen had corralled their new guests into the main open area of the safe house. It had roughly the same footprint as the farmhouse above it, except the ceilings were low, which made the space feel claustrophobic. That wasn’t a problem for people like her and Roen, but for some of their guests – that Russian in particular, who had to tilt his head to the side when he stood up – it looked decidedly uncomfortable.
There were half a dozen cots and couches lining the sides of the room and a large square table in the center. A television was attached to the wall on the far end, a stack of free weights stood in the near corner, and a Ping-Pong table was opposite it. The very first person Jill trained her sights onto as she came down the staircase was the girl.