Villain (Gone 8)

But a feeling of being watched nagged at her, and when she looked up, she saw the ghostly gray plane gliding overhead, outlined against the stars. It banked away, and Francis thought she was done with it. But then, in the sky, a flare of flame.

In the time of a single heartbeat, it all came together in Francis’s mind. It was not meth cooking that had blown up the compound, it was the gray ghost in the sky, the gray ghost she’d seen on any number of news broadcasts: a Predator drone.

And it had just fired a second missile.

Francis punched the accelerator, and the bike leaped from sixty miles an hour to a hundred and ten in two blinks of an eye as the highway just a hundred yards back exploded. The blast wave nearly knocked her over, the bike fishtailing madly as she was pelted with gravel and felt the wave of hot air.

She roared on through the night, fear welling inside her alongside hope. The compound had gone up in smoke and flame. Her mother was probably dead, and maybe the day would come when she would mourn that properly, but right now it just meant that in all likelihood no one would be following her.

Except of course for whoever had just used a Predator drone to launch missiles, one of which had, incredibly, just blown a big hole in the westbound I-40. Her first thought after her mind returned to something like normal function was that the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Agency, was getting awfully damn serious about cracking down on drug gangs.

But her second, more dangerous thought was that the Wells Fargo bank’s interior security cameras might still have been working on a Sunday. In which case . . .

It was after me!

She had some cash, a half tank of gas, an open road, and no goal but to somehow join up with that black girl on the Kawasaki.

That, plus a power whose uses she had barely begun to understand.

CHAPTER 8

The Symbiosis of Good and Evil

“ACCORDING TO GOOGLE Maps, it’s 10.3 miles from here to the county line. Round trip just over 20.5 miles.”

“And?” Cruz asked, indifferent.

They were in the backyard of their illegally occupied home, Cruz sitting on concrete steps, Shade pacing back and forth on what might have been a lawn once upon a time but was now a patch of dirt scarcely punctuated by the occasional weed.

“I want you to time me. I want to see how fast I am. And I want to see whether this works.” She held up a tangle of black nylon straps and a tiny black camera.

Cruz shook her head slowly—not negation, disbelief. “That’s what you think is most important? Really? We’re squatting in someone’s empty home, Malik is losing his mind, and—”

Shade gritted her teeth in frustration. “Listen to me, Cruz. Any time you want to take over and figure out our next plan, go for it. All right?” She slapped her chest angrily. “I don’t want the job, okay? I’m in way, way over my head, do you get that, Cruz? Way the hell over my head! I’m doing what I can, trying to at least find out what powers I have.”

Cruz let the anger burn out. “What’s the camera about?”

“I have an idea, probably a stupid one,” Shade said, calming herself. “Look, I think the more secrets the government can keep, the more trouble we’re in. People think Rockborn are the big threat, and the government is the solution. We need them to decide the opposite, at least some of them. We need at least some people out there who don’t think we’re some new kind of cockroach that needs to be stamped out.”

Cruz nodded, her expression cautious.

“I’m going to morph. I’ll strap the camera on as tight as I can, and I’ll take off as fast as I can. As soon as you see me disappear, push the stopwatch on your phone. As soon as I reappear, push it again.”

It was not, in fact, Cruz’s phone; it was a phone belonging to someone named Janice Harms. They had a routine for this kind of thing now, regular patterns of theft. Shade could snatch a dozen phones with a quick run through a mall or a Walmart, and inevitably one would have an easy password. Then they would quickly turn off the find-a-phone feature and use the phone for no more than twenty-four hours before replacing it. A lot of phones were stolen on any given day in the United States; not even HSTF-66 could track them all, let alone send investigators.

Shade turned her mind to the now-easy task of transforming. Strange, she thought, how easy it has become. I radically change my body like some kind of instant puberty, but it has become almost second nature to me. I might even stay in morph, were it not for . . . But that was a bad line of thinking because it led directly to the fact that Malik could not escape the Dark Watchers.

Shade closed her eyes for a moment, centering herself, trying to shut out everything else: Malik, Cruz, her father, all the people whose lives she had ruined. The instant she was morphed, the Dark Watchers were on her, like whispering ghosts.

She kicked off with a powerful thrust and ran, arms pumping, legs a blur, energy from who knew where. She ran down the highway, easily passing cars and trucks doing seventy, passing them so fast they seemed to be crawling.

Faster and faster until those speeding cars were mere blurs, until the desert landscape was nothing but a tan smear, until the jeans and T-shirt she wore over her angular, insectoid morph shredded, with a piece of it actually burning from the air friction.

The experience of moving at top speed was not like what she’d seen in movies. The passing world could be a blur, but because her perceptions were also accelerated, she could shift focus and see the passing world clearly as a series of still shots, like isolating one frame of a movie.

Sound was distorted, though, and there was no help for that. Her speed was nothing compared to the speed of light, but it was close to and occasionally exceeded the speed of sound. Sounds that were coming toward her from in front, from the direction of travel, arrived at a much higher pitch than normal. Sounds coming from behind were either low and draggy if she was below Mach 1, or fell away completely above that point.

She passed Mach 1, confirmed by the rumble that vibrated through her body, followed by a deepened silence, but as a regular thing breaking the sound barrier was a bad idea—it advertised her presence with a loud crack.