“This will probably hurt,” she said.

Laura strained to smile. “I’ve already been shot. How much worse can it get?”

“Jack,” Aubrey said. “Slow down for just a minute.”

Jack slowed and pulled to the curb, turning to watch the surgery.

Aubrey wiped the exposed bullet with gauze to dry it. She positioned the tweezers and pulled.

It didn’t come—the tweezers slipped off and Laura let out a little gasp.

It felt like a drill was boring down into her—even now, even with the bullet motionless.

“Hang on,” Aubrey said, whispering something to herself and repositioning the tweezers. They weren’t made for surgery. They were for plucking eyebrows. They barely fit around the bullet.

Aubrey pulled again, the tweezers hanging on a second longer this time, but eventually sliding off.

“Dammit,” Laura wheezed, and brushed Aubrey’s hands away. She grabbed the bullet between her thumb and two fingers, dug deep into the skin with a guttural groan, spit curse words through gritted teeth, and yanked the bullet free. She gasped and exhaled, and threw the bullet at the window, cracking it.

Bright red blood bubbled from Laura’s chest, and Aubrey immediately placed a heavy gauze pad over it, and affixed it in place with surgical tape.

The immediate pressure was gone, but the burning, searing pain remained.

Aubrey sat back in the car, plainly exhausted. She looked at Jack. “We need to find a place to get you cleaned up.”

“And then we need to get out of this car,” Jack said. “It looks like a murder scene.”

Laura tried to sit up more in the seat, wincing as she did but not stopping. “We need to figure out where we’re going to go, too.”

“We have these bracelets,” Aubrey said, pointing to her wrist. Her bracelet was splattered with a little blood, and she wiped it clean. “They’re supposed to be like a free pass, right? They say we’re healthy.”

“They’re a free pass assuming our faces don’t show up on any wanted posters,” Laura said. “The only reason the captain would have used that detonator is if he thought we were terrorists. And nothing happened back there, so the only reason he would have thought we were terrorists is if someone radioed it to him. Someone whispered in his ear that he needed to disable all of us.”

“Speaking of,” Aubrey said, “we still have these things on our ankles. I assume they’re tamperproof.”

“I destroyed the detonator.”

Jack spoke. “Do we know if that’s the only one? Can they be detonated by someone else? More remotely?”

“Listen,” Laura said, pointing ahead and talking through gritted teeth. “Look at that neighborhood. What do you bet that half those houses are empty? Let’s go get cleaned up.”

“What if they have alarms?” Aubrey asked.

“The freaking Space Needle just collapsed. I don’t think police are going to care about a burglary.”

User: SusieMusie

Mood: Whatever

It’s time to talk about the military, I guess. I was lucky, too young to go. But now they’re talking about kids my age having to go there, too. Be fearless, everybody. They say there’s a virus or something.

FORTY-NINE

JACK LET AUBREY DRIVE THE rest of the way. Her eyes were much worse than his, but he felt too light-headed to stay behind the wheel.

They picked a road off a major street, and searched for houses that looked empty, unprotected. It seemed like no one had cars here. Rowley’d said that Seattle had been hit harder than many cities, but would that make everyone flee? Maybe it was just because these houses were more expensive—these people could afford to run for the mountains, or Canada, or the little islands in Puget Sound.

Aubrey checked several houses—invisibly peering in windows—before they broke into one.

There didn’t seem to be an alarm—there were no keypads anywhere—and they took turns in the shower.

It was the first time that Jack had looked at himself in the mirror, and he was horrified. The grazing wound over his ear had mostly stopped bleeding, but his hair was matted and tangled in dark patches, and his entire left side was soaked, from his shirt to his shoes.

He washed quickly—the hot water was off. He wondered if that was a precaution the family took before evacuating, or if terrorists had hit the natural gas lines somewhere in the city.

He tried to scrub around the cut, but even so there was a constant stream of red dripping down his body and into the drain. And he couldn’t control the raging, splintering pain in his heightened senses. He had to give up, trying to rinse and numb the wound with cold water.

When he was out of the shower, Aubrey appeared with the first-aid kit. She had him kneel in front of the sink, and she gently—excruciatingly—rubbed at the wound with a washcloth. It took three clean towels to dry his head and dab the blood from his gash before she was willing to put the antibiotic gel on the skin and wrap gauze around his skull like a headband.

“You’re enjoying this just a little too much,” Jack said, as she finished the painful process and taped the gauze in place.

“I’m not going to let you get infected,” she said. “You have such a nice face.”

Laura came down the stairs wearing clothes that looked a little too old for her, a little less trendy, but they fit well enough. Aubrey was in a similar style, though she was drowning in a two-sizes-too-big fleece jacket.

“We need to talk, guys,” Laura said. She was walking a little more gingerly than before, but you could hardly tell she’d been shot in the abdomen. Not for the first time, Jack thought that he’d love to trade powers with her.

Laura tossed a bottle to him. “Painkillers,” she said. “I found them upstairs.”

Jack took a tablet and swallowed it.

“I assume,” he said, “that you want to talk about what we do next?”

Laura nodded as she sat, and Aubrey plopped down in an easy chair, stuffing her hands in the pockets of the jacket.

“We can turn ourselves in,” Jack said, not because he really believed it, but because he wanted to get it out on the table. To his surprise, it was Aubrey who spoke first.

“No,” she said. “They want to kill us. And, even if they didn’t want to before, they do now.”

“It could have been a mistake,” Jack said.

“Do we all want to risk our left foot on that?” Laura said.

“So what other options do we have?” he asked. “Hide out somewhere? Go on the run? Escape to Canada?”

“There are terrorists in Canada,” Aubrey said, and the other two stared at her. No one had heard that.

“The newspaper upstairs,” she said. “It’s dated three days ago. It says there have been attacks all through British Columbia and Alberta.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Jack said. “Since when do terrorists go after more than one country?”

“When more than one country is pissing them off,” Laura said. “Al-Qaeda went after the US, but they also went after all sorts of places in Europe and Africa. They just don’t make the news because we don’t care as much unless it’s happening right in front of us.”