Phantom Sense

by Richard A. Lovett & Mark Niemann-Ross

I’ve never understood how it could be stalking if all you’re trying to do is keep her safe. I just want to be a good father. Make up for all those years of being AWOL because CI-MEMS is a full-time job. You can’t be a father and CI-MEMS. That is, you can be one—that’s the same as for anyone else. You just wind up with big chunks of time when you have to choose between being AWOL from the Corps or from your family. And if you give your family more than a generic because-my-country-needs-me hint as to why, then you’re both in trouble.

Or that’s how it had been back before I became Staff Sgt. Kip McCorbin (Ret.). Before the (Ret.) bit, that is. Once that happened, it was just me… and the secrets.

Twenty years of missions. Twenty years of always being away. Chad, Ethosmalia, Kurdistan, the Altiplano Breakaway. Twenty years of never being able to explain. Then, when it ended and I finally could get my family back, it came at a price, like suddenly being blind. No, that’s not right. There are schools for the blind, a whole infrastructure for helping them learn to cope. As long as I had the Sense, I wouldn’t even mind being blind. Who needs eyes of their own when they have hundreds at their command? When you’ve been given a sense beyond eyes, beyond anything the norms have ever experienced?

Losing that is like losing your sense of touch. The world’s still there but you can no longer fully interact. Worse, in fact, because people at least know what a sense of touch is. Here, the only ones you can talk to are Corps psychs who only think they relate. How could someone understand what it would be like to lose the sense of touch if he’d never had it in the first place?

Twenty years of missions, and all the while Cora Ann was growing up. “Where’s Daddy?” had given way to “what-ever,” until, when they finally told me I was ready to re-enter the Sense-less world, Denise’s lawyer said it would be best if I just kept my distance. “She’s at a difficult age,” she said in one of her kinder comments. “The last thing she needs is you back in her life.”

Hell, they’re all difficult ages. Toddler, middle school, high school. Back when I had the Sense, I used it on furloughs to track her through her days, step by step. What father wouldn’t? Especially when the furloughs were so short, so few? Her first week at school, oh so brave, oh so frightened. Getting her navel pierced? Secretly, she thought, but I was there. First kiss? The guy was a total geek, but so was she. Back then, a solider-type was most emphatically not what she wanted. Back then, her rebellion took the form of geeks and peace rallies—my little radical, growing up in fits and starts when I wasn’t there, more and more often hiding from me when I was.

The damn psychs always had the same questions.

How do you feel about that?

What do you do when you feel that way?

I’ll tell you how I feel, what I do.

For three whole years, I panicked whenever someone walked up behind me, or when I rounded a corner and found something I didn’t know was there. It didn’t matter if it was a kid’s skateboard or another rehab patient on his own escorted walk. It was the not-knowing that mattered.

Three years of deconditioning until finally I convinced them I was again a norm. In CI-MEMS, that’s not a term of respect, but the psychs never picked that up. Three years of learning to live without, but never really succeeding because the absence is always, always there, like an itch you can’t scratch or an amputee’s phantom limb. The arm he thinks he can lift to grab that cup of coffee. The leg he tries to stand on when he gets out of bed, because a lifetime of conditioning tells him it’s there, only it isn’t. Because his nerves insist it’s still there even though its absence is the single, dominant factor of his life.

With a limb, you can explain all that. With a limb, you can get a prosthetic nearly as good as the original. But how could you explain losing the Sense, even if talking about it wasn’t a breach of everything you’d once sworn your life to protect?

That’s what I wanted to say during deconditioning. De-con, the Corps called it, complete with the stupid hyphen. Just one more big con, if you ask me: the illusion that when the missions were all over and done, you could go home and live a normal life. Total BS, something the psychs needed to believe so they could feel better about what they were doing. But I never said any of that because then they might never have let me out.

For three whole years, I tried to pretend I didn’t need anything but the senses I was born with. Didn’t feel that the lost one was still there but not, like the amputee wondering why the coffee cup won’t move when he reaches for it. Until eventually they gave me a pension and released me to the real world. Fifty-one years old, unsuitable for a job. Unsuitable for a family. Unsuitable for life.

The first thing I did was move to the Pacific Northwest. I’d spent a summer there and remembered the amazing, Mediterranean summers. Warm, dry, and pleasant. And miraculously insect-free. You could sleep all night with the windows open, no screen, and nary a gnat. Dine outdoors without flies in your food. A climate where nobody with the Sense would voluntarily go.

Then I saw Cora’s latest VidBook post.

I’m not supposed to be viewing her blog. She never let me in as a buddy, but you don’t spend as many years as I did on black ops and not know a bit about computers. Not to mention that she’d used her name and zip code as her password. CoraAnn78718. I’d cracked that even before the psychs released me to normal life.

I woke screaming.

I was blind, Senseless. The enemy was out there, and I didn’t know where. I didn’t know where anything was. Anything could be around the next corner. In the hallway, waiting to pounce, the moment I headed for the bathroom. How do people live like this? How could I live like this?

“I want it back!” I screamed into the night, my voice a raspy whine because I’d screamed this on so many nights since I no longer had to look like I was recovered. “Oh, God, I want it back! I want it back I want it back I want it back I want it BACK!!!”

It was worse than losing Denise. Worse than Cora. This had been part of me. A part that would never, ever be again. Even after three years with the psychs, there were times I wasn’t sure I could make it.

Jerret was afraid. So was I, for that matter. CI-MEMS was designed for urban warfare. Tight quarters, where the Sense gave you overwhelming advantage. Not to mention that the rest of the squad protected you like their very lives depended on it. Casualty rates on missions with CI-MEMS operators were one-third those of other ops—and we usually drew the more dangerous missions. It was a good incentive to keep the operator alive.

The first to be aware of danger, the last to face it, that was us. But not in this damn desert, where any sniper with a night scope could nail you from way beyond Sense range. It said something that they’d put two of us on this squad. Too much chance of losing one or the other, someone must have figured.

Jerret’s hand twitched, dislodging a member of my swarm that had gotten too close, tickling the hair on the back of his wrist. Sloppy on my part. I’d been concentrating on my fringes, hoping to catch some trace of a Ladenite sniper before he caught us.

Jerret knew what the insect had meant. “I’m okay,” he whispered. A human couldn’t have heard him from two feet away, but my bugs got it. Only he wasn’t okay. Heart rate, respiration, skin conductivity, breathing, pupils… all indicated fear. Not to mention deception. Jerret was scared to death. Right on the verge of losing it. Luckily, he didn’t ask me because he’d have caught me in the same lie. All these open spaces. We just weren’t designed for them.

Cora’s VidBook post wouldn’t have caught anyone else’s attention.

“You wouldn’t believe the flies here!” she gushed into the camera, holding it too close, like everyone does, making her look like her nose was three sizes too big. Actually, it’s a perfect match for the lively blue eyes and long, blond hair so achingly like her mother’s at the same age. “They follow me everywhere! Yesterday four of them—I counted—zipped into the bedroom before I could shut the door. Then they just kind of hovered as I changed clothes. Can you imagine that? Cuh-reepy! Don’t they have any girl-flies to peep?”

Zip code 78718 is in Austin, Texas. I’ve never seen her apartment—I don’t want more court orders—but I know Austin. It has flies, but it’s nothing like Virginia, where she grew up. Not in November, anyway.

It was probably nothing, but you don’t survive twenty years in CI-MEMS without being paranoid. Even if you’re not on a black op, they send you to places where anybody, even the kid begging for change, could be carrying, and where 90 percent of the rest hate you anyway. The easy missions are the hunter/killer ones, where your job is to find a specific target while dodging noncombatants. Then, at least, everything’s cut and dried. The patrols that turn you paranoid are the ones where you’re just passing through, trying to spot real threats without slaughtering the maybes.

When I was new to the Corps, I tallied two statistics. Bad guys taken out and guilty-acting innocents saved. But after a while, I realized that tallies don’t matter. Each mission is a world unto itself. Get in, do the job (meaning get the right people and not the wrong ones), and get out. Preferably with the rest of your unit alive.

I was good at it. Even in the first weeks of training, they told me I had an unusual ability to integrate. What they didn’t tell me was this meant the loss, when it came, would be all the more devastating.

I woke with the instant, unmoving alertness only years of missions can train. This time I wasn’t in bed; I was on the couch. The TV was on—a get-rich-quick infomercial or something equally late-night brainless.

I wasn’t alone. I could Sense someone behind me. He was looking out the window, his face a blur of face paint. Blue jeans and a dark serape. His Uzi was carelessly gripped in one hand, but the nonchalance was deceptive, the relaxation of a snake at rest, capable of coiling and striking before you even knew what happened. He’d done it before, and would do it again until somebody coiled and struck faster. He wasn’t expecting anything like that at the moment, but still, he was ready for quick action, studying the road outside, waiting, watching. Waiting for something like my patrol, still out of sight around the corner. His pulse was low, his breathing steady. A trained killer, perfect in his element.

I drew back from my fringe, preparing to report. Take him out or bypass him? The sentry on the other side of the building wasn’t as alert. If we could get a couple men in unseen, I could guide them, coordinate the attack, a wordless game of follow-my-swarm and attack when I gave the signal, which could be as simple as a fly buzzing in the ear. We’d done it before, sometimes against as many as four targets spread across a thousand-foot front, one of the reasons I’d quit counting.

But something didn’t fit. I couldn’t find anyone to report to. Had the sentry somehow gotten everyone but me? And where was my real body, anyway? I was so far extended into the Sense I seemed to have lost touch with my own surroundings.

It was the TV that did it. The infomercial was in English. Not Spanish, Arabic, or anything else. It was telling me how to make a fortune investing in foreclosed properties. Not something a serape-draped sentry would be listening to, even if he was willing to put up with the distraction.

Still, it was all I could do to force myself to look back. But there was nothing there but a bookshelf. My own books, my own apartment. Me. Alone. In Seattle. As I’d been for two years.

I sat up, pulled the phone from its charger, dialed a too-familiar number.

“Yeah?” a voice said.

“It happened again.”

“Flashback, hallucination, or phantom eye?”

“Not sure.” I describe the scene. “Might have been the Altiplano. After a while, they all blur.”

“Yeah. Last night I was sure there were snakes in the room. Why snakes? I never even saw one in the field. That was the least of my worries.”

We talked a bit longer, until I was really ready for sleep. I had no idea who he was; we’d found each other online, and communicated by dummy accounts and encrypted lines. Secrecy’s a hard habit to break. But it was better than calling the Corps psychs and getting a diagnosis like paranoid schizophrenia on your record.

The Sense is a lot of things. It lets you see around corners or into any room with a crack big enough for an insect to slip through. But it’s more than seeing. If they make a microdetector for something, they can mount it in a swarm.

For a lot of operators, the information’s just that: data. You need a computer to interpret it and run the swarm, and you wind up sitting back on base with a bank of electronics: coffee in hand, A/C, the whole nine yards.

But that’s just fancy remote sensing.

If you’ve got the ability to integrate, the data cease to be data. Add an interface descended from those used for prosthetic limbs, like that concert pianist who plays Chopin with a mechanical hand, and you’ve got true CI-MEMS. The data bits disappear and you wind up with things you simply know, on par with it’s raining or I’m on a tropical beach.

Most people never make that leap. But for those who do, CI-MEMS is more than a way to see around corners. It’s an emotion-sensor in the air. In a crowded bazaar you know who’s hostile and who’s just scared. Who’ll run away if you give them a chance, who’s just out to save face, who’s a true believer.

Back on base, though, nobody wants you around. Everyone’s got secrets—and while you may not know the details, you sure as hell know when one’s there. Not to mention being able to win at poker even if you promise not to peek. Keeping track of things becomes a habit, even when there’s no real need. Maybe that’s how stalkers are born. The Sense makes you allergic to surprises. If you can know, you want to. If you can’t, you get desperate.

The intel had been absolutely clear. The Ladenites were somewhere across the valley. Five square klicks of boulders, snakes, and who knows what. There were at least fifteen of them, fifteen who the sat intel had caught going in, but not out. Drones had seen four of them again, IDing two as important enough to be worth an incursion into a nominally friendly country.

We’d come in low and quiet, shortly after dark. A quick drop, a not-so-quick march, and now we were staring across the damn Valley of Death, like a scaled-down version of the six hundred. We should have circled east, higher up, and come back, along the ridge. But now, with dawn looming, our only hope was that their lookout wasn’t all that well equipped.

“You see anything, Jerret?” I spoke softly, right at the limit of my ability to form the words. No need for radios; our swarms were the best way to communicate. If the answer was worth anything, I’d pass it on to the grunt assigned to keep me alive, and he’d hand-signal it to the others. I suppose in theory the enemy could zero in on the link to and from my bugs, but unless you’re using dragonflies or something else big enough to carry a real transmitter, the range is pretty limited. Anyone who has the equipment to sort it out from the background mish of cordless phones, microwave ovens, and garage-door openers is too well dug in for us anyway. In the city, at least. Here, to the right equipment, Jerret and I might stand out like beacons.

Cora’s next post was the one that really got my attention.

“You wouldn’t believe how hard these flies are to kill! It’s like they know what a flyswatter is, because the moment I pick one up, they’re gone. I finally got one last night, when it followed me into the shower. I turned up the water and steamed that sucker, good! Thwacked it with a towel while I was at it.”

Lt. McCarthy was going to be hurting tomorrow. If we lived that long. He was staring across the valley through night-vision glasses, in a vain hope of seeing things Jerret and I hadn’t been able to spot, and in the process he’d scooched though a field of something like miniature prickly pear cactus. My swarm had all the night vision the patrol really needed, and I could see the spines sticking out of his forearms like a stubble of blond hairs.

I should have felt sorry for him, but only newbies go that heavy on the pain blocker. From the number of spines, he must have wormed his way through a whole patch of the stuff without noticing. Do things like that a few times, and you decide a bit of short-term pain’s not as bad as it sounds. Yeah, with less block, you’ll hurt more if something awful happens, but the awful stuff is what we’re all trying to avoid, anyway.

Usually, only senior officers get command of CI-MEMS patrols. We were just too valuable to risk. But Lt. McCarthy was green. “Don’t worry,” he’d said as we were leaving base. “Captain Thomas has the Shanghai flu, but he’ll be okay. I grew up in Arizona. I know all about deserts. We’ll do fine.”

Someday, maybe officers will know better than to lie to CI-MEMS operators. It creates “interesting dynamics,” a base shrink once told me. Maybe. One thing I’d learned was that outing the liar’s worse than playing elephant-in-the-living-room. Though in this case the grunts didn’t believe him any more than I did.

If there’s a single piece of my life I wish I could do over, it’s the day I hit Denise.

I didn’t mean to, at least not that way.

Three weeks earlier, I’d flunked a physical—nothing serious, just a bit of arthritis, creeping blood pressure, and a few other things that might or might not be problems in a couple of decades but that they couldn’t risk in the field. Nor did they have a post for me as an instructor. Sorry about that, etc., but we’ve got all we need.

The first step in De-con is simple. They just quit supplying you with insects. Since most only live two to four weeks, and some are always nearing the end, you decline pretty rapidly. But until you’re below 20 percent, you can live at home.

I’d lost that much of my swarm on missions, several times. The blast from a big explosion can do it. And there was the time a wind gust blew my entire fringe beyond retrieval range. Not to mention bats. Even if you’re watching for them, they’re damn fast and hard to dodge.

But this was different. Lose your swarm in the field, and the techs’ll get you replacements as quickly as they can wire ’em up. Here each loss was forever. The psychs say withdrawing that way’s better than going cold turkey. Maybe. What it feels like is extended death.

For ten days, I felt my swarm die. There must have been some chemical in the air, because I was losing them way too soon. I desperately wanted to hold on to what I had. Would have done anything to buy an extra week, day, hour.

Then the neighbors bought their kid a remote-controlled toy—some flying thing that was probably supposed to be a Moon lander. That shouldn’t have been a problem, but there must have been something wrong with my bugs’ control chips, because the toy threw out enough interference to mess up contact with what few remained. In the field, somebody would have fixed that, fast. Here, I didn’t even bother reporting it. They’d have just told me I was ready for to go inpatient a week ahead of schedule. No big deal. Except to me.

Denial is one of the world’s most powerful emotions. As long as I was free and mobile… as long as I had some remnant of the Sense… I could pretend the end wasn’t really going to happen. Not yet. Tomorrow maybe, but not today. Until then, I could at least pretend.

Denise didn’t know about the Sense. All she knew was that I was special ops and that the spiral tattoo that covered most of my back and shoulders had something to do with it. What, precisely, she’d known better than to ask. But other than a calculator on the inside of my wrist, I’d never favored body art, so she had to have guessed it was some sort of bio-mod.

One of the ironies of De-con is that with the insects gone, the Corps figures there’s no need to remove the tat. They think it’s a kindness, but actually it’s a daily reminder of what I’ve lost, like the photos of Denise and Cora Ann I still kept on my nightstand, smiling over me like they no longer do in real life.

Lt. McCarthy was in my section, so monitoring him was my responsibility.

“You see anything, McCorbin?” He spoke louder than necessary, as though he didn’t quite get that I had insects in the very bush he was attempting to peer through.

I inched through sketchy cover until I was close enough for quiet conversation, suppressing the urge to say something insubordinate. How the hell could I see anything? I had my fringe extended as far as possible, but it was only a fraction of the way to the opposing ridge.

“No,” I said. Nothing but rocks. Big ones. Any of which could have a dozen Ladenites behind it.

“What about Lapp?”

“He’d have told me if he did.”

The lieutenant was a vague blur of desert camouflage in my real sight, but in the Sense he stood out like an emotional beacon. Unsure. Frightened. Determined to prove himself. A whole slew of ways to get us killed. There are things CI-MEMS operators rarely talk about, even among themselves. Knowing your squad leader’s self-doubts is one of the scariest.

Scarier still was the subtext. Whatever else he was, Lt. McCarthy was no coward. We were about to become the Light Brigade… though instead of six hundred of us, there were only a dozen.

I woke screaming.

I was blind, Senseless. The enemy was out there and I didn’t know where. I didn’t know where anything was.

We’d been flitting from doorway to doorway, nearly invisible in midnight camo. I’d been at the rear—but not by much, because the place felt like a trap and we needed my perimeter as far ahead as possible. Still, I’d found nothing out of the ordinary. Maybe there was nothing to find. The scariest missions were those where the intel was wrong. Where you inched from house to house, waiting to Sense something before the bullets stitched you… only to discover, hours later, that there had never been anything to find.

But this time there was something. I just never got a chance to find it.

Booby traps are one of the things I most feared. Even simple tripwires can be hard to spot. I found better than 95 percent of them, but when I missed one, someone died. It wasn’t one of those things I liked to think about.

The only thing I knew for sure was that the entire street exploded. No, that wasn’t right; there were no gouts of flame, no crashing masonry. These people didn’t want to blow up their neighborhood. These were flash-bangs: concussion grenades. Or maybe just big firecrackers. I’d had someone toss one of those in a dorm room the year I tried college, before I decided that that life wasn’t for me. In the confined space, it might as well have been a concussion grenade.

Whatever they were, there were a lot of them, all wired to go off at once. My entire perimeter was off-line, probably dead.

The enemy was out there, alert now, with me suddenly blind as a norm. I was the one who was supposed to know where they were, but even as I sent my few remaining assets up the street, I knew it was too late. And it was all my fault. My fault because I’d not seen the tripwire. My fault because I’d not found the enemy before the explosion. My fault because I’d had so much of my Sense on the perimeter that I now had too little left to do anything other than watch my squad die. Dead from a trick I should have anticipated, a trick that had nearly cost me my hearing in college. My fault—

I sat up, pulled the phone from its charger, dialed.

“Yeah?”

“It happened again.”

“Flashback, hallucination, or phantom eye?”

“Nightmare.”

Or maybe a daydream. Sometimes it’s hard to tell. Long ago, after a mission on which we only escaped because I could pinpoint the enemy well enough for our snipers to get them through blacked-out windows, I got wondering how, if I were the enemy, I’d beat myself. Flash-bangs was how I’d do it. Or anything that would knock out my swarm over a broad front, all at once. Make me a norm, render the patrol helpless. Then close in for the kill.

We got about halfway across the valley. Still out of Sense range.

The first to buy it was the grunt assigned to baby-sit me. PFC Aston Stanley. One moment he was worming forward toward the next bush. The next, a high-velocity round punched through the hollow of his neck and into his chest. I knew because I had several bugs right there and could feel the impact, feel the consciousness vanish as the shock made jelly of his chest and gut.

“Sniper!” I yelled, and was already moving, one-two-three seconds before I heard the report of the shot that killed him. Three seconds away. A thousand meters. Impossibly beyond Sense range.

A bullet raised dust in the spot where I’d been half a second before. I braked hard and rolled back the direction I’d come from, just in time to dodge a second round. However many snipers there were up there, they were damned good. And obviously equipped with night scopes.

Desperately I looked for a place to hide. Reversed course again, dog scrambling, hands and toes. This time, the round missed me by farther than before, but that was false reassurance. At this range, the bullet only spent a little more than a second in flight. I couldn’t outguess the sniper forever.

There were no rocks big enough for meaningful cover. Bushes were worthless. As long as the sniper knew where I was, he’d just shoot through them. He might miss a couple times, but he’d get me eventually.

It was the Sense that saved me. At the first sign of trouble, I’d scattered my reserves, looking for somewhere, anywhere to hide, dedicating my biological eyes to my frantic efforts to dodge.

What my Sense found was an arroyo, cutting across the valley floor in front of me. I didn’t even bother to see how deep it was. Still scrambling—getting to my feet took too much time—I zigged, zagged, got lucky three more times, and then was falling, headfirst, as a final round spat gravel from the gully wall.

As far as Denise knew, I was about to ship out on yet another mission and wanted every possible minute with her. We’d always been like that, spending those last nights clinging to each other, willing the clock to stop, determined not to waste those precious moments sleeping, because they might be all we’d ever have. For once, there was no risk of being shot, but I still wanted to carry every second’s memory into De-con.

Absurdly, it was that desire that cost me my marriage. Irony strikes hard when you have years to regret.

Before CI-MEMS, those final evenings had been just her and me. Then, that had been enough. When you’re young, you’re sure you can read your lover’s mind.

I don’t know what happens to most couples. Maybe, if they stay deeply enough in love, they never forget how to read each other. Me, I quit having to guess. CI-MEMS didn’t literally tell me what she was thinking, but it did let me know her mood as clearly as my own. When she said, “I love you,” I could feel the depth of it, as hundreds of tiny sensors read the trivia of breath, heart rate, skin conductivity, and skin temperature—not simply as data, but as a gestalt that converted her words to a reality at least as much a part of me as she was.

But now, my swarm was dying and the damn kid’s remote was making a hash of what remained. Hour by hour, I was becoming more disconnected. Hour by hour, Denise seemed more distant. At the time, these seemed like separate crises. Only in retrospect did I put them together.

She was in the kitchen, opening cupboards, moving boxes and cans to see what lay behind. Her way of working out a shopping list. Me, I just go to the store and buy whatever looks useful. I’ve had enough hyper-preparedness on missions.

She didn’t notice until I came up behind, put my arms around her, and nuzzled her neck. “I’m sorry about all the times away. This is the last one.”

She turned, pulling back to see me better. “Really?”

We’d talked about retirement before, but only in a general way. “Really. There’s just one more thing they want me to do. It’s even in the States.” Actually, it would be on base, but I wouldn’t be allowed to see her until I was released, so there was no sense telling her. “No risk of anyone shooting at me.”

I expected her to launch herself into my arms, but instead, she drew further away until she was backed up against the edge of the counter. “It’s about time. Cora used to worship you. You may have noticed she’s not been around much.”

I had, but I’d put it down to general teenage-itis. But now that I thought about it, she’d been that way on my last couple of furloughs, too. Emotionally AWOL from me, just as I’d been from her. Obvious, now that I thought of it, but most of the time, she’d been beyond Sense range. If a tree falls in the forest, and all that. After enough time, the Sense doesn’t just help you interpret reality, it is reality. When she had been around, the contacts had been fleeting hints of a vague wrongness I’d ascribed to normal teenage angst.

But I hadn’t really tried, either. Both of those furloughs had been cut short. Emergencies in places where American troops weren’t even supposed to be. More opportunities for the tallies of success and failure I’d quit making—not because I’d truly managed to focus on one mission at a time, but because each number in the tally—whether a life spared or a life wasted—was a person, with his own Denise and Cora waiting somewhere.

Tell that to the psychs, and they’d say I’d ceased to believe. But it wasn’t that. Some of these people really were bad guys. But in the process of doing what I had to do, year after year, I’d done something to myself, something that made it both more urgent and more difficult to be around Denise, around Cora.

Or maybe I was just burning out. There’d been some pretty hairy missions and even if I could have talked about them, I wouldn’t have, because to say anything would have been to reveal just how close I’d come to dying so many times. Without the Sense, I wouldn’t have made it through more than a handful of them. Without the Sense, I wouldn’t be alive now. With it gone, I would soon no longer feel alive.

“I’ll make it up to her.”

“If it’s not too late.”

There was an edge to her voice I’d never heard before. Or maybe it had been there—it wasn’t as if we’d never argued—but no longer able to Sense beneath the words, I suddenly found it overwhelming.

I let a few flies buzz close, but they told me nothing useful. Skin temperature 94.2. Respiration 16. It was just data. My swarm had shrunk to the point where I could no longer tell how she felt.

“Are we okay?” I blurted.

“What do you mean?”

“Are we okay?” I hesitated. Took the plunge. “Do you still love me?”

“What on Earth would make you ask that?”

“That’s not an answer. Do you still love me?”

“Like when we were kids?”

“Yes… No… Like when…” Like when we clung against the partings. When we thought each moment might be our last. “Like we used to.”

Once, even without the Sense, I’d been able to read her soul through her eyes. But that was then. The Sense had augmented me but it had also contracted me. Now, I couldn’t read anything.

“Like we used to,” I said again.

She might have saved the moment with a kiss. Instead, she sighed. “Oh, Kip, of course I love you. It’s just that you’ve been gone so much… And when you come back… It’s as though part of you is somewhere else. Like you don’t really want to be here.”

“That’s not it. It’s just the job—”

“That’s what you always say. Well, this is ‘just’ ”—she fingered quote marks in the air—“us. ‘Just’ me. ‘Just’ Cora.”

I felt as though I’d been slapped. And I still couldn’t marshal enough bugs to get an integrated read. Heart rate 89. Pupils narrowed. Were those good signs or bad? A trainee could look it up in a manual, but I’d been deeply integrated for so long that I needed a true, fully functioning swarm. Friend/foe. Danger/safety. Love/love-lost. I no longer had enough sensors to translate “data” into “knowing.” I was losing that ability just when it felt like my whole life depended on getting it right.

“Are you seeing someone else?” I asked.

“What?” Skin conductivity 7.3. Breath 22. “What the hell are you talking about?” She swatted at a bug, distracting me as I reflexively pulled it back, feeling as though she was trying to destroy what little remained of me.

“You heard me. Are you seeing someone else?”

She pushed past me, heading for the side door, into the garage. “If you have to ask, you don’t really know me.” A moment later, the garage door rumbled up and tires squealed in the driveway.

The gully was deep enough to hide me, but also deep enough to dislocate my shoulder.

I’d always been told that on the pain scale, unless you go way high on the pain blocker, dislocations are about as close to a ten as you can get. But there’s also something about them that’s the stuff of nightmares. In training, there was a guy who slipped on a run, fell, and dislocated a finger. His left pinky, to be precise. I’ll never forget it, sticking out at an angle fingers aren’t supposed to point. We didn’t have a medic, hadn’t had any training yet in first aid, and it was just the two of us, so we ran back to base. Four miles. He never said a word. I didn’t either, but I couldn’t shut out the image of that hand. And now it was me. It wasn’t just the pain; it was the knowledge my shoulder no longer looked like a shoulder. My vision was tunneling toward a black spot and my ears felt stuffed with cotton—no sound but my pulse, receding by the second.

Then, training took over. Pain tab first. But not too much, because setting a shoulder correctly requires you to feel what you’re doing. Otherwise, you can wreck it forever. Or worse, damage nerves that helped integrate my tat with my swarm.

Next step: breathe deeply, calm down. Not easy because I didn’t have much time. The Ladenites knew where I was and would be here in minutes.

I thought of Denise, Cora. Fought back despair. If I was ever going to see them again, I had to do this right. I willed my breathing to slow, hoping my heart rate would follow. Thought of home. Thought of those before-departure nights in Denise’s arms. Felt my heart rate slow. Sensed myself to verify it was true.

Then I had to roll over on my stomach.

The first time it didn’t work. Bone rubbed against bone, thrumming through my entire body. For a moment, I thought the cotton would win and I’d pass out, helpless while the Ladenites found me. But when you really have to stay conscious, you can. On the third try, I made it onto my stomach and lay there, heaving, sweat cooling in the small of my back.

Next step, use the good arm to move the bad one out to the side. Slowly, because it hurt like hell. Forget the Ladenites who might already be heading this way. I had to do it right, and right was slowly. Besides, none of this had affected my swarm, and the familiarity of the Sense helped calm me. Reality was more than my own body. Nothing dangerous was coming yet.

Finally, the hard part. Reach upward and back, as though trying to scratch my back. Use the good arm to draw the bad one up and over. And then, snick, with a white-hot stab of pain, the shoulder was again a shoulder.

The disaster came later that evening. By mistake. A trivial, stupid, senseless accident. A Sense-less accident.

After Denise made her exit, I retreated to the basement—a cocoon into which I pulled what remained of my Sense with me. I tried to watch football. Couldn’t work up the energy to care. Channel-surfed. Wondered where she’d gone. Wondered if she was now with him. Wondered who he was. Wondered, in my more sane moments, if I was wondering the wrong things. Wished I knew. Wished I still had the ability to know.

And then, amazingly, I fell asleep.

Emotional trauma does that to you. One moment you’re balling your fists, wanting to punch through walls, as though you could physically hammer your way out of the box your mind has put you into. Then, suddenly, you’re so tired you can’t think. So tired the beer on the end table is an enormous dead weight, not worth the effort to lift, and instead of drinking yourself to sleep like you thought you were going to, you’re just suddenly, overwhelmingly asleep.

Until, of course, you wake.

Nowadays, waking comes too many times, too soon, at the behest of a middle-aged prostate. The first time, I stumble to the bathroom and try to pee in my sleep. Sometimes it works. Second time? No way. By then I’ve had the magic five hours—the amount the Corps says you can function on (if slightly zombified) nearly forever. At five hours, what you think is, Don’t think about it!Don’t… don’t… DON’T! Which of course means you can’t help but think about it. It being the Sense. Or Denise. Or Cora. Whatever was most hurting when you lost strength to lift that beer.

However long Denise was away, it wasn’t that long. What woke me was the knowledge someone was there. A swish of feet, a muffled thunk, a shadowed shape between me and the stairs, between me and escape. After enough years in the field, you sleep lightly, wake quickly, and give no sign when you flip from one to the other.

Flashback, hallucination, or phantom eye? Who knows? Once upon a time, she’d have come quietly up, hugged me, and kissed my ear. Once upon a time, I’d have known this, pretended to be pleasantly surprised anyway.

Now, everything was a surprise.

For one horrible moment, I was back in the ravine.

They were coming for me. How many I wasn’t sure. I’d had my fringe out too far, too long, and had to pull them back to recharge. With my shoulder dislocated, I hadn’t been able to do it. If you don’t bring the bugs within a couple of centimeters of the tat, the connection’s too remote and you burn too much glycogen powering the charger, like a marathoner hitting the wall. You have to charge them close-up.

But until I’d gotten the shoulder reset, I just couldn’t concentrate—not enough to hover insects close enough to do any good.

Now, as I struggled to make up for lost time, I had bugs stacked up like fighter pilots practicing touch-and-goes: zooming in close enough to pick up a bit of charge, then moving out so more could take their turns. I’d be lucky not to lose a few, as the charges faded in their cybernetic brains and whatever remained of the unmodified insect took over and flew off to do whatever it is insects do on their own.

Meanwhile, I had to move. There’d been no shooting for several minutes, and my squad clearly hadn’t won. The Ladenites had to be on their way.

My first job was to reconnoiter. As bugs recharged, I sent them up-gully, looking for branchings. If I could get far enough before the gully got too steep or narrow, I’d be back in the land of boulders and just might be able to keep out of sight. Box myself in and I was dead.

For sixteen hours, I played cat and mouse. Several times, I had clear shots, but didn’t dare take them. With the Sense, I could keep ahead, but it was sixteen hours of hyper-vigilance. Sixteen hours of trying to ignore the increasing stiffness of my shoulder. Sixteen hours of being the hunted, rather than the hunter.

When rescue came, I was nearly too tired to care. So tired it took me a moment to react when a fly not mine landed on my arm. So tired I could barely make my eyes focus to see the tiny chip behind its head. So tired, I didn’t realize I was safe, not even when the other team’s CI-MEMS operator approached, accompanied by none other than a miraculously ambulatory Captain Thomas.

Captain Thomas and his team circled up-valley and around, as we should have the night before. Three hours later, I heard gunfire, saw the star-bright pinpricks of muzzle flashes. Soon after, they were back with me, taking less than an hour to cross the distance over which I’d played a day-long game of life-and-death hide-and-seek: the confidence of those who’d gotten close enough for their CI-MEMS operator to be sure he’d found everything they were looking for.

They brought two more survivors. One was a grunt who’d managed to find his way to a boulder field from which he could dodge to safety, rock-to-rock.

The other was Jerret.

I hoped like hell I’d never be like him.

There’s a way it should be when the woman you love comes up unexpectedly behind you. First is the jolt—the realization someone’s there. Then the recognition: a turn, a kiss, pulling each other close and wishing you need never, ever let go.

And while I’d long been faking the surprise, the rest—the never wanting to let go… that had been as real on our twentieth anniversary as our first. It was just that Sense had replaced surprise, data had replaced intuition. Nor was the ravine the only time I’d nearly died: it was merely the most protracted.

Too many emotions all at once. Too little knowledge. When that happens you fall back on training. No, you fall back on survival.

If I’d had a weapon, I might have killed her.

I have no idea what I thought I was lashing out at. I had too little Sense to know anything other than where she was. I certainly didn’t see a petite woman. More like a hulking enemy.

Getting out of a recliner is normally a clumsy process. But in panic mode it’s easy: convulse your hamstrings to push the footrest down, then use the momentum to launch your body forward. That last bit of Sense, or perhaps memory, told me where I’d left the beer can. Energized now by fear and adrenaline, I had plenty of power to lift and hurl it, hearing but not fully processing the yelp as it struck her square on the jaw.

With the hulking menace now off guard, I cut back, hard—hard enough to hear my foot pop as I pivoted back toward the threat. A fracture of the fifth metatarsal, I’d later learn, but at the time I barely felt it. Instead, I drove a punch into the soft, unprepared belly, followed by a forearm across the exposed throat, driving her backward into the oak-paneled wall.

And then, finally, I realized where I was. Who this had to be. What I was doing.

I dropped my arm. “Oh my God.” An oath? A prayer? Who knows.

Denise didn’t care.

“You bastard,” she said.

I stepped back. Groped for words but found none, even as she headed for the stairs—out of my life.

“It wasn’t as though I didn’t have plenty of chances to actually have an affair,” she said.

I woke screaming. But this time, I wasn’t me. I was him, just as I’d seen him on the battlefield that day, with the wild-eyed stare of someone who’d never be the same.

He’d been a bad enough sight physically. Blood and dirt staining his face and uniform a muddy red-brown dusted in white, like an earthquake victim pulled from the rubble. A dirty kerchief wrapped a hand where, I later learned, two fingers were broken. More bandage, fresh gauze this time, supplied by his rescuers, peeked from beneath his helmet, streaked crimson where a wound still oozed.

He had no idea what had hit him. Whatever it was had knocked him out long enough for his swarm to lose direction, wander off, vanish. Long enough that when he woke, he was totally cut off. Long enough he was no longer the Jerret he’d been.

Something similar happens when you sleep, but then, you park your insects in standby mode. It’s as automatic as closing your eyes. But in combat you have every resource extended, recalling them only by conscious choice. Had my headfirst dive concussed me rather than dislocated my shoulder, I could easily have been Jerret. Now, at least once a week, I dream I am.

The psychs say gradual withdrawal is best. Maybe. But when I wake screaming… the end result appears exactly the same.

“I got a surprise today,” Cora told the mirror cam. She was vidblogging from her bathroom, where she’d hooked a camera to the mirror, talking while applying her makeup. I’d been startled the first time she did that, but so long as she was adequately dressed, I suppose the bathroom’s as good a place as any.

The camera was mounted above her head, rounding the curves of her face by foreshortening her image ever so slightly. If she stood in just the right place, it also caught her reflection in a mirror on the door behind, producing a vanishing-infinity effect as Cora fronts and Cora backs disappeared into the distance. It was like seeing her through an endless corridor: the type of thing people describe in near-death experiences, except that in those, there’s supposed to be a light at the end. Here, there were only ever-more-distant Coras, receding forever.

“I was in the mall, shopping for a new dress. This one in fact.” She stepped out of sight, then back, holding a black, scoop-necked gown. She’d always had good taste.

“Isn’t it cute? Anyway, as I came out of Allemontes I was sure I saw Jerret heading for the escalator. I ran over, but by the time I got there, he was gone. Maybe it was just someone who looked like him.”

She paused.

“And Daddy… I know you’re listening. I’m not stupid, you know. You didn’t hack onto this; I let you. You want to know about me… ?” She drew back, hands on hips. “Well, this is me. I grew up. I get to choose who I date. You were never there. And when you were there, there was nothing I could do to make you stay. Always another mission. Always off nearly getting killed. You don’t think I couldn’t tell?”

Tears beaded and she blinked. Blinked again. “Nothing I could do would make you stay. Do you remember me asking about that as a little girl? You just said you had no choice. Well even then I knew that was BS. Everyone has a choice. You chose to be elsewhere.

“Did you know, my sophomore year in high school, all those A’s were for you? I thought maybe if I was good enough you’d stay. Silly me. Soccer too. Mom told me you’d been this super-athlete before you went in the Army—sorry, Corps, whatever that was. Why didn’t you ever tell us anything? Anyway, the soccer didn’t matter, either. Even making all-conference wasn’t good enough. All you wanted was your damn adrenaline rush or whatever it was you got out of almost being killed all the time. Nothing I did was ever going to be more important. Nothing was ever going to be good enough.”

The tears were spilling now, threatening her makeup. “But it was good enough for Jerret. He didn’t care whether I got A’s or D’s. Didn’t care if I dropped out of college. And then suddenly you were back, telling me that if I loved you I’d quit seeing him. And then you were gone again. You had no right. Do you hear me? No right. I know he was a lot older than me. I know he was getting a bit scary—after I dumped him, he came back five times. I’m not stupid, Daddy. But it was my decision. Not yours. Not when you were then gone again on that ‘last’ mission. The one that was only going to last three months but went on for years. I can’t believe I fell for it.

“In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve got wounds, too. It’s just that mine aren’t the type to leave scars you can see.”

Her face scrunched, and she knuckled tears out of her eyes, undoing any pretense of saving the makeup. “Damn you, Daddy. Damn you for everything.”

Then her focus shifted and she swiped at the air in front of her, as fiercely as moments before she’d dug at her tears. “And what the hell is it with these flies?”

For a long time, I stared at her image, frozen in the act of reaching for the off-switch. I could have replayed the whole thing, but there was no point. I merely looked at her, remembering the little girl—the pert nose and half-smile, the eyes, now rimmed with ruined eye-liner, that once never left my own. The eyes in which, once, I could do no wrong. The eyes I had managed to wrong so deeply.

I would give anything for a chance to do it over. But would it be any different? Surely it hadn’t just been adrenaline I’d craved. It was the need to be whole: the knowledge that the moment the missions ended, they’d take it away. The dead, sick fear that someday, inevitably they would.

Sometimes I’d thought it might be better if I died in the field. Because with each passing year, the fear of the end had grown: a continual feeling in my gut, like dread crossed with nausea. But then I’d think of Denise and Cora, and know that coming home was worthwhile. Until suddenly, they were gone and it hadn’t been.

I never knew how Jerret found her. He’d been finishing De-con about the time I went in, and had been better at telling the psychs what they wanted to hear. Because if you didn’t, they’d keep you forever.

He knew I had a family, so maybe he just thought he’d let them know I was still alive. Not that it mattered with Denise. She may not have known where I was, but the Corps did, and dutifully served her court orders on me. Divorce. No-contact/keep-away. The whole shebang. Custody also—a real insult, with Cora only months from turning eighteen. They wouldn’t even let me out of De-con to defend myself. Sent some damn Corps lawyer to represent me—as if he knew anything about what really happened, because if I’d told him, he’d have told the psychs, and Cora would have been a grandmother by the time I got out.

Then one of the orderlies told me about Jerret and Cora.

I spent a week trying to figure out what to do. All the while wondering if they were having sex. Forcing myself not to think about it. But that’s not why I eventually went out the window. Even before the ravine, I’d never have wished a Corps member on her. Afterward? I’d seen his eyes. And if I could lash out at my wife…

When I’d first seen Jerret in De-con it had been a relief: a familiar face—the only one other than the soon-to-be-too-familiar psychs. It was only gradually that I realized how long it had been since he’d been choppered out of the ravine. After he was discharged, I did some asking.

Jerret had been in and out of De-con a half-dozen times.

“I can’t say anything specific,” one of the psychs told me, “but in the combination of PTSD and withdrawal, it’s the withdrawal that’s the hard part. You have to quit wanting it back. If you don’t, you’ll never get rid of the bad stuff, either.”

“Does that go for my family, too?”

She gave me one of those sympathetically sad looks they must practice in psych school. “Probably.”

That was the night I went out the window. For once, I truly knew my priorities.

I was only gone a couple of days, but they cost me two extra years of De-con. It would have been longer if, like Jerret, I’d not gotten good at telling them what they wanted to hear. Until recently I’d thought rescuing Cora had been worth it. But, that was because I thought I’d actually succeeded in rescuing her. As she put it, silly me.

Being in the Corps teaches you to strike fast. Court orders teach the opposite.

Technically, I wasn’t restrained from talking to Cora or even dropping by her apartment. But Denise wouldn’t see it that way.

For three days I tried to figure out what to do. Jerret and flies. I had no idea how he’d gotten them, but he was CI-MEMS again. Bootleg CI-MEMS, apparently.

Part of me was appalled. Cora had been wrong about one thing: Jerret’s visible scars were only the tip of the iceberg. Give him back a swarm and he’d still not be whole. He’d just think he was.

But I was also jealous.

What would I give to have the Sense back? My pension? My soul? Whatever tenuous link I still had to Cora?

For three days, I listened to her vidblogs, as she rattled on about her health-club job, her plans to go back to college and maybe become a physical therapist, the weather, friends—the aimless chatter of a young woman looking to find her life. No more mentions of Jerret sightings, pesky insects, or me.

Stupidly, I did nothing: the basic training of court orders, not the Corps.

Then on the fourth day, it stopped. No chatter, nothing.

She hadn’t missed a posting in six months. Maybe she was just busy. Maybe she had the flu. But the next day was the same. I called her work, but nobody had seen her. “She’s never missed a day before,” a bouncy-sounding young woman told me. “You don’t think anything happened… ?”

The day after that, I booked a flight and was on her doorstep. Nothing visibly wrong, but that didn’t mean anything, so I retired to my rental car with a super-sized cheeseburger, fries, and enough coffee to keep an elephant awake.

By dawn, I knew. Cora was gone.

Contacting Denise was risking an arrest, and being arrested for anything worse than unpaid parking tickets would probably put me back in De-con forever. Still, I had no choice.

“Woodruff Realty,” a voice not Denise said. “How can we help you?”

Denise had done well since divorcing me, but nobody has live, human secretaries any more. This had to be an answering service. Probably computerized.

“I need to leave a message for Ms. Woodruff,” I said. “Tell her it’s Kip, and it’s about her daughter. Tell her it’s urgent.”

“Certainly, sir,” the voice said, confirming that it was a machine. Nobody outside the military calls people “sir,” either.

Denise chose to call back, rather than have me arrested.

“This better be important.”

No hi, howya doin’. Jerret had somehow sold his soul to get CI-MEMS back. I’d lost mine trying to keep it in the first place. But it wasn’t the time for any of that. “I think Cora’s in trouble,” I said. “We need to talk in person.”

She agreed to meet at a Starbucks a few blocks from her Arlington office. Another flight, another lost night’s sleep. Both my pension and my body were going to take a beating before this was over.

Other than walls decorated with photos of autumn oaks and maples, the Starbucks might as well have been in Seattle. Probably why she picked it. Generically neutral. Not the perfect place to breach national security, but the best I was going to get.

“I was in special ops,” I said. “Mostly of the black kind.”

“I kind of gathered that. What’s that got to do with Cora?” She’d barely changed since the last time I saw her. Reddish blond hair parted in the middle, no gray showing at the roots, triangular face capable of an elfin grin that could melt your heart in a flash. Not that she was showing it now. At least she could no longer have me arrested. She’d agreed to this meeting. For the moment, the court orders were off.

“I’ll get to that. I was in something called CI-MEMS. Cyborg Insect Micro-Electro Mechanical Systems. It uses little, tiny chips to control insects. Houseflies were my favorite, but I could also do beetles, dragonflies, wasps… pretty much anything. I controlled them through that tattoo on my back. It’s basically a really fancy nano-electric neural interface.” Which is why they’d left it intact. Enough nerves had grown into the lattice that removing it would be like peeling away a layer of my brain.

Denise must have been good in her business. She had nothing to say, so she said it.

“The chips also carried sensors that let me use the insects for remote sensing. If they could see something, so could I. But it was more than seeing. I could sense hostility, tell friend from foe, know everything going on within about 1,500 feet.” I hesitated. Reached for the pain. Took the leap. “That time I attacked you… ?”

She nodded.

“They were taking my insects away. Retiring me. You came up and surprised me. Nobody had been able to surprise me for years. I thought you were… some… something else.”

If I expected absolution I wasn’t getting it that easily. “So when you were at home, you were spying on me?”

“Yes. No. It’s not that simple. It was like having a sixth sense. One that’s more real than any of the others. I couldn’t help but spy on you. Shutting it off would have been like death. Was like death. That last mission… ?”

“Yeah…”

“That was the rehab from having it shut off. It takes forever, and you’re never really right.” Or anything close to it, but she didn’t need to know that.

Sheglanced at her coffee. Looked back up. “So what does this have to do with Cora?”

“Jerret was also CI-MEMS.”

“And… ?”

“He took it worse than I did. I at least lost my swarm under controlled conditions.” And still managed to make a mess of it. “He didn’t. That’s why I insisted she break up with him.”

“And… ?” But now there was concern beneath the coolness.

“He’s back. I think he’s kidnapped her.”

The voice on the phone was the same as always.

“Flashback, hallucination, or phantom eye?”

“Something else, this time. I need to know how to get the Sense back.”

“Can’t be done. You’re on the wagon. That’s the whole idea.”

“Maybe for you and me. But not for everyone.” I explained. “Do you know where he might have gotten it?”

The silence lasted long enough I thought I’d lost the connection.

“Maybe.”

More silence.

“For God’s sake, where?”

“You’re sure this isn’t for you?”

“How long have I been calling you? Have I ever asked before?”

Another silence. Then a sigh. “Okay. You might try an outfit called EFR. Entomologic Futures Research. They’re in St. Louis. Rumor has it they’re looking to adapt CI-MEMS for civilian police work.”

“Rumor?”

“Good rumor. Very good rumor.”

Another airplane. Another lost night’s sleep. At least this time Denise was with me. Not like old times—we took separate rooms—but for the first time in years I wasn’t alone.

EFR had three floors of a converted warehouse, not far from the Arch. An up-trending neighborhood, but not yet too far up. Perfect for a venture-capital firm with a speculative product.

An hour of “I’m sorry’s” and other runarounds eventually took me to the office of Laurel Fuller, Entomologic Futures’ product manager, whatever that meant. A woman in her late twenties in a light-gray blouse, black jacket and skirt, eyeglasses to match, and an attitude that would have done my high-school librarian proud.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Our technological explorations are strictly confidential. Even if I had a clue what spy-mints was, I wouldn’t be able to help you.”

“CI-MEMS,” I said. “And I damn well know you know what it is.” A bluff, but when that’s all you’ve got, you go with it.

“Kip knows what he’s talking about,” Denise seconded. “He used to be a CI-MEMS operator.”

It was all I could do to keep from staring at her. Had she always been this good at things like this? Not the time to wonder about that. I pulled off my tie, started to unbutton my shirt. “Want to see my tat? If you’ve got insects, I can fly ’em.” Unless they’d changed the interface. But when the military licenses technology for civilian use they don’t make it more complex. Generally they dumb it down.

Laurel waved a dismissive hand. “Anyone can get a tat.”

“So bring in some bugs. What do you have?”

She stared at her fingernails. Picked at a cuticle. “Where did you serve?”

“The usual. Various -stans. The Altiplano. I can’t go into details.”

More fingernail picking. Then she punched a button on her desk com. “Mitch? Bring me two dozen Popillia.”

My turn to stare back. “Is that the best they’ve given you?” Japanese beetles aren’t worth much except in training. They’re easy to fly, but slow, clumsy, and easy to spot.

She shrugged. “They’re a good platform for our purposes.”

Twenty-four insects is hardly a swarm, and they didn’t have much in the way of sensors. Eyes and ears were about it. Either the military wasn’t yet ready to license the good stuff or Laurel wasn’t ready to trust me with it. Or maybe some of both.

But even with a lobotomized version of the Sense, I felt like God. I looked in every corner of the room, demonstrated to Denise that I could hear every word, could read an e-book over her shoulder. “Hemingway,” I said, when she picked a file at random. “I didn’t know you were into that manly-man stuff.”

“I’m not.”

“Oh.”

She relaxed, let me off the hook. “But I believe you about this insect stuff.” Not that she hadn’t before. Even without the Sense, I realized, I’d have known if she’d been lying. Some things you lose with time. Others come back. But damn, there was no reason to believe they’d come back for her, too.

“Me too,” said Laurel. “So you say this guy’s a rogue operator who’s got your daughter stashed somewhere?”

“Yes. And if he’s integrated—even at the low level I am right now—he’s way too dangerous for a SWAT team. He’ll see ’em coming before they even know where he’s hiding.”

Laurelpicked up a pen. Flipped it a couple of times in her fingers, then set it back down, precisely where it had been before. “Agreed. That would not be in our best interests.” She pressed an ear-chip, turned away, mouthing something. With a real swarm, I’d have known what she was saying, even if she was sub vocalizing, but these bugs weren’t up to it. Not that I thought they were the best she had. Nobody who wants to survive in venture capital gives away their secrets that fast.

A moment later, she turned back. “We can give you three hundred Tenibrio molitor and a dozen Bombus terrestis.”

“Mealworm beetles and honeybees?”

She shrugged. “Mealworms are easy to get. And we’re looking at bees as a means of… distraction.”

That’s not the only thing you can do with bees. There’s not much C4 you can strap to an insect, but if you know the guy you’re after is allergic to bee stings… Spend too long in black ops and your perspective changes. Still, killing a normal, healthy guy with a swarm of bees would be too slow, too cumbersome.

Laurel was talking again. “…better sensors than you just tested. The military’s not giving up their best stuff, but we’re really not sure what can be done with what we have: we’ve never had anyone fly it who really knows what he’s doing.” She paused. “I was beginning to think guys like you were all locked away somewhere.” Her eyes lifted, held mine for a moment. She knew more than she let on. “Want to take them for a test drive?”

Picking up a new swarm isn’t something you can do instantly. You have to synch them one at a time, then lock them in so nobody else can fly off with them, accidentally or on purpose. It only takes a few seconds per insect, but with three hundred, it adds up.

I have no idea what Laurel and Denise talked about in the interim. I could have listened, but I was off in a different land. With each added insect, my perceptions expanded. The data weren’t as good as I was used to, but there was no doubt I could integrate it. I was already doing so. I knew Laurel found the room too warm, while Denise, who wrapped herself in blankets even during Virginia summers, was chilled. I knew that Laurel was in her element—and a much more complicated person than she appeared. Denise was trying to act take-charge, but was inwardly tentative, afraid of a misstep.

With twenty-four bugs and limited instrumentation I’d felt like God. Now… ? What comes after God?

I brought a couple of Tenibrio in behind Denise, close enough to smell her hair, touch it. They’re quiet fliers, so she didn’t notice.

But Laurel did. “So, do you like them?”

Denise jerked, saw the beetles, her emotional read changing like someone had flicked a switch. I might as well have been Jerret invading Cora’s apartment.

“Sorry.” CI-MEMS would have told her I wasn’t. Not really. I was just sorry I’d been caught.

I swirled insects around the room, using the confusion to hide a few in a potted palm. Others I parked in the wastebasket, on a shelf of books, on the doorframe. A hundred extensions of myself, watching from all angles. Gathering data. Telling me how she was feeling. Circling her with eyes… with love.

But love wasn’t the only thing I was feeling. For years, Senseless, I’d fought off the old fears. Flashback, hallucination, or phantom eye? It hadn’t really mattered. Now, even with Denise right there and no sign of hostility from Laurel, I still didn’t feel safe. I wanted to extend my fringe, know what lurked outside the door: in the corridor, in the hallway, in the offices beyond.

I slid a few beetles under the doorframe, into the corridor beyond. A rail-thin man sporting a goatee and tiny, black-framed glasses was headed our way, a note projector in hand. For a moment, I was sure we were about to be interrupted, but he went on by without even glancing at the door.

I followed him and found a larger open space, a combination conference room, computer lab, and cube farm—about fifteen people presently there, but room for more. I didn’t have enough bugs to watch everything, so I let goatee-and-glasses go and turned my attention to a middle-aged man with thinning hair, cowboy boots, and a shirt tight enough to show off every ripple of a gym-built body. Even from fifty feet away, he radiated alarm, and my own adrenaline surged in response. A terrorist? A spy? Whatever he was doing, he was talking animatedly on a tat phone.

I kept some bugs at a distance, sent others in low, below the tops of the cubicles.

“Are you sure?” he was saying.

With military equipment I’d have been able to hear the response, even from the tiny speaker embedded in his thumb. But Laurel’s mics were barely good enough to catch his own voice, speaking softly into his pinky-mic. Shaka phones, they’d called these when they first came out. “Hang loose bro’,” and all that. All the rage for about fifteen minutes, until you realized what an idiot you looked like, using one.

“How do you like them?” Laurel repeated.

I pulled my attention back to her, to Denise.

“Not bad.”

Back in the cube farm, the man was still talking.

—”You tried it again? Just to make sure… ?”

—”But how… ?”

—”Yes, I know how; I wasn’t born yesterday. I mean how could it have happened. I thought—”

“They’re yours to keep,” Laurel said.

“Huh?”

“Use them to track him down.”

I wondered what a swarm like this cost. The Corps had never told us, but there had been rumors. “What’s in it for you?”

She shrugged. “It’s the decent, human thing to do?” She grinned. “And it’s good for us. Our investors wouldn’t appreciate news stories about our tech being used for criminal purposes. Find him, deal with it quietly, and they will be very grateful.”

She paused again. “We might even let you be a permanent beta tester. I’ve heard that people coming out of the program are… unhappy. What does it feel like to be… what do you people call it? Reconnected?”

“Integrated.” What it felt was very, very good. Like being whole again.

I slid my focus back to my perimeter.

The middle-aged gym rat was still talking.

—”I really don’t care…”

—”Just get rid of it. I’ll pay for that, but not anything else.”

I lost interest. Domestic drama, no threat. I pulled back, swirled the bugs, looking for danger. But at first, all I found were snippets of ordinary office conversation. A tech discussion here. A gossipy pair who knew more of the gym rat’s story than he’d like. An argument over where to get the best pizza.

Flashback, hallucination, or phantom eye? Full-blown flashback this time.

It was the pizza discussion that did it. One of the debaters was championing Scolioni’s deep-dish over Petrocelli’s New York-style. The other was arguing that deep-dish wasn’t real pizza. But only the deep-dish fan really cared. The other was just egging him on. Faking emotion without feeling it.

Suddenly, I was on foot patrol in a Middle Eastern market: a cube-farm for street vendors. Endless shops selling dates, figs, scarves, breads, and a thousand other things. Snippets of conversation, jostling elbows, haggles over price. Eyes wary for thieves and pickpockets. Vivid colors and vivid emotions, highlighted by the combination of Sense and adrenaline. Streets like this exploded in shrapnel almost daily. One slip in attention, and this could be next.

I was relatively new to CI-MEMS, about to learn that strong emotions weren’t always the important ones. They’re just the ones that are easiest to read: people who either loved you or hated you. People who were nervously watching for the next suicide bomber… or nerving themselves to push the button. Mercenaries studying their options. So long as you were alert, those stood out like emotional flares.

More dangerous are the subtler ones. The bomber who’s not afraid of his own death. The mother numbed by grief, with little left to lose.

But the most dangerous are the rarest.

The guy who nearly got me that day walked through my fringe without triggering even a trace of alarm. It wasn’t that I didn’t see him; he was wearing blue jeans and a sheepskin jacket—a Middle Eastern cowboy, guaranteed to stand out. But emotionally… zilch. Not angry, not fearful. About as bland as they come. Probably with enough knowledge of CI-MEMS to be specifically targeting me.

He was only thirty feet away when I saw the motion, with my real eyes, not the swarm’s. Had something on the fringe distracted me at just the wrong moment, I’d have died, right there. As it was, I saw him unzip his jacket, reach inside… and then, my Sense now directed full-force his way, felt just the barest flash of pleasure.

The Sense won’t detect a sociopath. Or certain types of psychotics. The most dangerous people are those who simply don’t care. Like this one.

Like the guy pretending to argue that deep-dish isn’t real pizza.

If I’d been physically in the room with a gun, I hate to think what I’d have done. As it was, it was only when I started sneaking bees under Laurel’s door that I woke to the fact I was in St. Louis, preparing to attack a geek for arguing about pizza.

Denise was watching me. I still had a hundred-plus pairs of eyes on her; I’d not diverted any of those for my foray into the cube farm, had never missed a move she’d made. I’d always been good at splitting my attention. That day in the market wasn’t the only time it had saved me.

Laurel was looking at me, too. Waiting for her answer. Reluctantly, I directed most of my sensors toward her, trying to get a better read. She was one of the dangerous ones, but not one of the super-dangerous ones. Emotions well in check, but not remorseless. Sure enough of herself to give me a swarm during our negotiations. But norm-ignorant of the strength of the emotions she’d unleashed? Maybe, maybe not. She might know exactly what she was doing. CI-MEMS doesn’t give that kind of information.

“It feels… great,” I said.

“So it’s a deal?”

“It’s tempting.”

“Then do it. Save your daughter. And yourself.”

Yes was on my lips. Sure, I’d thought the pizza-debater was some kind of terrorist. But I’d caught myself before I’d actually done anything. With time, surely I could learn even better control.

But Denise was still looking at me. I could almost feel her eyes boring into the side of my head, though even with the swarm I had no idea what she was thinking. For the first time in decades, I realized that this was normal. Not just normal, but the way things were supposed to be.

And yet…

In high school I’d climbed a 14,000-foot peak in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains. We’d made the summit by 10 am, hours before the usual afternoon thunderstorms. But puffy fair-weather clouds congealed with remarkable haste, and minutes later, we were leaping down boulders as thunder crashed and lightning seared the sky. With every meter of descent, I felt safer… safe enough that soon I slowed to a walk. When the storm’s power caught up with me, I dashed again, to the next glacial bench, the next meadow, the next tarn… only to pause again, as the storm gathered strength to chase me down once more.

I decided to be truthful. For Denise? Laurel? Myself? Another who knows.

“It really is tempting,” I repeated. “I feel alive, like I haven’t in years.”

Like I had on the mountain. Extreme life and near death. Maybe Cora had been right. Maybe you can’t have one without the other. Or maybe I couldn’t.

But with the life came the fear. Extending my fringe into the cube farm hadn’t been enough. I’d wanted to go to the street, to the buildings on the other side—to the three-seconds-even-to-hear-it sniper range I’d been unable to Sense the day of the ravine. Beyond that, even, because there are enemies in far corners of the globe who’d blow up shopping malls, train stations, Denise…

I’d spent years wishing I could roll back the clock. Now I could. But if I did, I’d become Jerret.

It took another hour, but I eventually pried out of Laurel (the old-fashioned way, by asking questions) that ERF was the only firm licensed to make or install civilian CI-MEMS chips. Beta-testing was being carried out by several firms, but if I could find one of Jerret’s flies, ERF could trace the chip and find out which subcontractor was involved. And with a hoped-for stock offering in a couple of years, ERF was very interested in snuffing out criminal uses, or at least keeping them quiet.

Eventually, Laurel gave me a gadget like an airport security wand. “Find a dead bug and this will read its chip. She paused. “If you can find a dead bug. Are you sure you won’t take our original offer?”

That night, Denise and I reviewed Cora’s vidblog from the time she first complained about insects. Nothing conclusive, but we both reached the same conclusion.

“The bathroom,” Denise said. “That’s the best bet. Maybe she managed to hit a few more.”

Another day, another airplane. At least this one wasn’t a redeye.

Getting into the apartment was a different matter. It was second-floor, which made coming in through a window difficult, even if we were willing to risk it. And there was no key in any of the obvious places: under the doormat, in or under the potted plants on her stoop, on the doorframe. Nothing we could find on or under her car, either.

“Screw this,” Denise said, and marched toward the manager’s office. “Stay out here. Do something… manly.” Briefly, I saw the elfin grin. “Preferably out of sight.”

A few minutes later, she emerged with a key. “That was easy. She’s got a daughter the same age.” She sobered. “It helped that she likes Cora. And the lease requires notice if she’s going to be gone for more than a week.”

Mentally, I counted. “This is only day seven.”

“So I exaggerated. Did you really want to wait ’til tomorrow?”

We found what we were looking for on the windowsill. It being Texas, there were a lot of dead insects, but only one had a chip implanted behind its head.

“Damn,” Denise said. “So he really did take her.”

“You doubted it?”

“Wouldn’t you? There’s a reason I divorced you. At the end, you weren’t exactly rational.” She looked up, met my gaze. “Was the withdrawal really that bad?”

“Yes.” If I’d known what it would cost, maybe I would never have taken the implant. But once I had it…

I remembered how it had been in Laurel’s office. The godlike power. The sense of being alive again. Had Denise not been there… “Jerret’s going to be pretty jittery.”

I read the number to Laurel over the satphone.

“-7987?” she asked.

I double-checked. “Yes.”

“Okay, that one went to Advanced Military Systems Consulting in… Tehachapi.”

“Where the hell’s that?”

“California. Between Bakersfield and Palm Springs. They’re one of our smaller subcontractors, working on security aps. Banks and things like that.”

“What’s the address?”

“Uh-uh. They’re our subcontractor. I am this close to a deal with the FBI. Those folks are going to tell me how one of their flies wound up in your daughter’s apartment, or by God, I’ll yank their contract and to hell with the banks. How soon can you get to Palm Springs?”

I shrugged, but we were voice only, so of course she couldn’t see it. “As soon as we can.”

“Meet me at the Hyatt. I’ll book you and your wife a room.”

“She’s not—” but Laurel had rung off.

Another day, another flight. Not the world’s easiest connection, actually. We had to change planes in Vegas. At midnight.

Laurel’s trip wouldn’t have been any easier, but if she was feeling it, she wasn’t letting on. “The Ontario airport’s a little closer, but the hotels here are better,” she said. “Did you have a good night’s sleep?”

Denise shot her a what-planet-do-you-come-from look, but I intervened. “Good enough.” The Corps had taught me that any sleep you actually wake up from was a good one. The past few years had raised doubts about that—the value-of-waking-up part, that is—but right now, I was on a mission. Even jetlagged and without a swarm I felt… surprisingly alive.

“Great,” Laurel said, ignoring whatever subtleties she might have observed. She handed me a scone that might as well have come from Denise’s Starbucks. “Let’s hit the road.”

AMSC’s offices were in a nondescript industrial park like a million others. The type of place that has a name like Swan Island, Bluegrass Meadows, or Mustang Heights, and where if you don’t know exactly where you’re going, you’ll wind up walking up and down roads not made for pedestrians, wondering why the hell you can go all the way from number 1401A to 1637D without ever seeing 1513C.

Laurel missed it the first two times, but she’d obviously spent more time in places like this than I had, because on the third pass, she found an unmarked door to a whole slew of offices with numbers in the 1510s.

Two minutes later, we had a bland-looking guy named Bruce Larch offering us coffee.

If he’d ever known real, physical danger, I’d be surprised. Roundish baby face. Too-quick smile, quicker handshake. I’ve bought cars from guys like him.

“One of our bugs?” he said. “In a missing girl’s apartment?”

“My dau—” I started, but Laurel cut me off.

“We’ve got the serial number. There’s no question it’s yours.”

“I have no idea—”

“Don’t give me that.” She stared at him, and I wondered how much money even lobotomized CI-MEMS might be worth on the open market. Laurel, I realized, was probably very good at what she did. “Kip here is one of our consultants. He’s ex-military CI-MEMS. Do you have any idea what those guys can do? Right now, he’s got a hundred bugs hiding in this room—no, you can’t see them, so there’s no point trying to look—monitoring your biometrics. He’s a damn walking lie detector…” She glanced my way. “Aren’t you, Kip?”

I nodded. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Denise looking too, but there was no way to respond and stay in the role in which Laurel had cast me.

“…so don’t scam me or we’ll pull your contract faster than you can get your tie caught in a paper shredder. Do you understand?”

Larch took a half-step backward, bumping into the corner of a beat-up desk that looked like it had come from Office Liquidators. His voice squeaked. “Yes.”

“You should also know he’s ex-CI-MEMS. Do you know what that means?”

Larch shook his head.

“It means he’s been through all kinds of shit you and I don’t want to think about, stuff that drives a lot of them right over the edge. PTSD. OCD. Paranoia.” She shot me a quick look, and I wondered how the hell she knew. Then I remembered the familiar voice on the phone. I wasn’t the only one. “It means he’s one scary dude, Bruce. And he really doesn’t like being played for a fool.” She turned to me. “How many people have you killed?”

I shrugged. “That’s classified.” I picked up a ballpoint pen up from Larch’s desk and pushed the button. Click.

She turned back. “So, Bruce, let’s abbreviate this. How the hell did your insect wind up in an apartment in Austin?”

If it’s possible for a doughy complexion to melt, Larch’s had. “What was that serial number again?”

Laurel recited it like she was talking to a six-year-old. “I think you know where it came from. Doesn’t he, Kip?”

I nodded. Click. Click.

“Don’t tell anyone,” Larch said. “If I lose my job…”

“That’s the least of your worries. Do you know who we’re working with at the FBI?”

Larch shook his head. “Who?”

“You don’t want to know. If you’re lucky, you won’t find out. Right, Kip?”

I nodded again. Click. Click. Click.

“So, last chance, Bruce. Your job’s toast. Want to spend twenty years in jail?”

For a moment, I thought she’d worked him too hard. Bruce’s complexion was positively gray. A heart attack wasn’t going to do us any good. Briefly, I wished I’d taken Laurel’s offer. With a swarm, I’d know if he was in medical danger. But I’d also wind up like Jerret. Damn. Time to act like the norm I now was. Time to act, even if I didn’t fully know what I was doing.

I set the pen back on the desk. “Relax. Tell us the truth and we can keep the FBI out of this. Lie…”

Larch sucked his lip. “Okay… I’ve got this thing about football. I like the Saints.”

“The New Orleans Saints?”

“Yes. And a few other teams. But last year they didn’t like me all that much. I kind of wound up owing a bunch of money.” He licked his lips. “A big bunch of money. To this guy named Ray Perkins. At least that’s what he goes by. Who knows what he’s really called. Rumor is he’s into all kinds of things. He’d found this bodyguard he wanted to hire. Ex-CI-MEMS, like you. So we made a trade. I got him a few Musca domestica, agreed to keep him supplied. Perkins declined to, uh, collect, the debt.”

“Where did you take the flies?” I asked. Briefly, I wondered if even someone like Larch could tell that my interest was more than professional. But I needn’t have worried.

“Some condo-hotel thing in Chicago. I don’t know the address. We went with a long-lived species, gene-mods, actually, so I only need to bring new ones out every six to eight weeks. Musca domestica, with double normal lifespan. Sterile, of course, so they don’t escape into the environment and mess up the ecology. Even the military’s not got ’em yet. Latest thing. Still beta-testing.” The used-car salesman, sure that if he could only talk long enough, we’d forget what we’d actually asked.

Laurel saw it too. “Glad to know we’re getting something for all that money we’re paying you,” she said. “Too bad you decided to give it to a criminal. What do they call that, Kip?”

I had no idea. “Treason? Espionage? Misappropriation of government secrets? Something like that.”

“You hear that, Bruce? You didn’t just give this guy bugs, you gave him super-secret bugs. One more chance. Where did you take them?”

“I told you, I don’t know the address.” He waved a hand at me, nearly knocking a Darth Vader bobblehead off his desk. “Ask him. He’ll tell you I’m telling the truth.”

“Fine,” Laurel said, taking me off the hook. She spun a computer toward him. “EarthMaps. And don’t tell me you can’t find it.”

“Remember,” I added, “misappropriation of government secrets is a felony.”

Larch collapsed into a chair. But he turned to the computer, clicked in, worked the controller. Took a dizzyingly fast joyride through urban sprawl. “There.” He stopped at a tallish building, maybe thirty floors. “I don’t know any more than that. They met me in the lobby, blindfolded me on the elevator. Believe me, I didn’t want to know what floor the guy operated out of. I’m pretty sure he had the whole floor to himself, though, because they didn’t seem worried about anyone else being in the hallway. But they kept me blindfold the whole time, so I don’t even know what he looks like. Just that he has this nasal accent, like he’s from New York or Boston or something.”

“Those are kind of different,” Denise said.

Larch seemed to notice for the first time that there were three of us in his office. “Sorry. I was born in Orange County. All that East Coast stuff sounds the same.”

“What about the bodyguard?” Laurel said.

“Ex-mil’s all I know. Though he must have been in the room, because the moment I opened the carrier, I could hear the insects fly out, one by one, like he was taking control of them, then and there. He never spoke, but Perkins called him Jay something or other. Jail? Something weird like that. Jayelle?”

“J.L.?” I asked.

Larch shrugged. “Could be. I really don’t get those East Coast accents.”

I woke screaming.

I’d been in the ravine, my shoulder not feeling like a shoulder. I was trying to reach behind my back like the first-aid said, only my arm wouldn’t do it because something was in the way and the Ladenites were coming, were going to get me, because I couldn’t get up and move, but who cared because it was the shoulder with the tat and I was blind and Senseless and might as well die but that made no sense because the tat was still a tat and the dislocation hadn’t torn a nerve, so where was my swarm? Why didn’t I know what was happening? Would I even know when a Ladenite tossed in a grenade, concussing me, killing me, letting my swarm get away… ?

Phone, I thought, as my senses gelled to the here-and-now. Only there wasn’t any phone because I wasn’t in my apartment. I was in some damn airport, with dozens of people staring at me like I was crazy. Which I guess I was.

Two of the dozens were Denise and Laurel. “Are you okay?” I think it was Denise who said it, but I wasn’t sure.

I nodded. I wasn’t ready for words yet. Not unless they were to a faceless voice on the phone who’d been there himself. My arm was pins and needles from how I’d somehow slumped and fallen asleep on it.

“What happened? A nightmare?”

“Something like that.”

“How often do you get those?”

“Couple of times a week.” I forced myself to keep talking. “Sometimes more, sometimes less. Especially when I’m not sleeping well.” Which I never was, but there was no point going into that.

“You didn’t do that when we were together.”

That wasn’t quite true. But the flashbacks had been different then, and as long as she was there, I’d been all right. At night, I never let myself roll far enough away not to be able to touch her. A fingertip on her back, shoulder, hip—the barest touch was all I needed. Heaven would have been to stay at home… and keep the Sense. Purgatory was having to choose. Hell was losing it all. I’m not much of a theologian, but I know a lot about hell. Hell is the never-ending land of if-only. Coulda-shoulda-woulda, that’s how the psychs put it, always with an implicit don’t go there, as if that’s possible. I coulda-shoulda said no to the Sense and served out my term as an ordinary grunt. But would I have done it?

I wrenched out of the past, looked at Denise. Really looked at her, for the first time since… The familiar laugh lines, now etched with worry. The once-perfect complexion just starting to change. A decade younger than me, aging well. “There was one time when it was a lot worse,” I said.

Her fingers touched her throat. “Why didn’t you explain?”

I shrugged. “It was classified.” Their answer, not mine. And they’d had me in De-con within an hour. Maybe I wouldn’t have cared as much about national security if I’d had more time to think. “But you’d have still thought I was too dangerous.” Which, in fact, I had been. Then there’d been Jerret, and after that she’d been as angry as Cora had been.

The Sense or her? If I could choose again, which would it be?

Then I realized that I’d been given a second chance and hadn’t made the same choice. Back in Laurel’s office, I’d been handed my dream—and walked away from it. Because Denise was there.

When you’ve only got one lead, at least there’s no uncertainty about what to do next. We needed to find out if Perkins was in that highrise. If he was, Jerret and Cora wouldn’t be far away.

The question was how to do it. The building was a cylindrical tower of blue-tinted glass, a lot of space to search. Not to mention that banging on doors was likely to get us shot.

It was Denise who came up with the solution.

“Look,” she said, “we know he’s got a whole floor to himself, right?”

I nodded. “Yeah.”

“And this is an older building. Late 1980s, maybe early 1990s. Certainly no later than 1995 or 2000.”

“If you say so.”

“So it’s not going to be full up. Trust me, this is what I do. That’s one of those dead eras in real estate. Everyone loves the latest/greatest, or the cool, older stuff. There’s nothing wrong with a building like this—they’re often great bargains—but for this guy to pick it… well, it says a lot about him.”

“Such as?” This wasn’t a side of Denise I’d ever seen.

“There are a couple of possibilities, but I’m guessing he’s about forty years old, grew up in a place like this when it was new, but not all that happily. He probably thinks that by redoing it he can somehow change all that.” Just like I’d tried to do with Cora, she didn’t say. But her gaze was an accusation.

Laurel saved me. “So what’s the relevance?”

“For Perkins, not a lot, unless I was selling to him. A lot of what I do is applied psychology. But the point is that this building isn’t full up: I’d guarantee it. Any floor with a vacancy’s not the right one. All we need is the vacancy list.”

Unfortunately, getting it wasn’t quite that simple.

Inside, the building seemed innocent enough. Starbucks in the lobby; overweight security guards behind a fake-marble desk. Banked elevators. Boutiques to one side, restaurant/brewpub to the other. An upscale health club in the back, with enough windows that only the most chicly fit would dare use it.

Plastic letters on a brass signboard announced office suites on the lower floors: bland-sounding names with alphabet-soup credentials. Jones Smith Consultants, LLC. Adain Pappalardo, NACT. That type of thing. Fancy-sounding lounge/restaurant on the thirty-fourth floor.

Denise had been online while I’d stepped into a Rite Aid for supplies. Now, barely glancing at the signboard, she pushed the elevator call button, then the button for the third floor. Two minutes later, we were in the sales/rental office, talking to a pale, dark-haired woman whose nameplate proclaimed her to be Hailey Carlton.

Denise handed over her business card. “We’re interested in apartments with lakefront or skyline views,” she said—a nice way of saying everything. “Your building is a bit old, but the location’s attractive. Do you have a vacancy list?”

Hailey smiled. “Yes, but since July, other than for the hotel floors, of course, it’s been sales only. We’re in the process of remodeling and converting.”

“That’s fine,” Denise said. “Even if they don’t wind up living here, Ki-, Kim and… Laura here might be interested in investment properties.”

Hailey grabbed a sheet of paper and plucked keys from her desk. “The market’s tight right now, but we’ve got twenty-three units available. Mostly one-bedrooms, but there’s a couple of twos, plus a three, coming up next month. How much are you looking to spend?”

“Whatever gets the best value. Can you just print out the list, and we’ll think about it?”

“You really ought to see them.” Hailey rose. “Pictures and floor plans just don’t do them justice.”

Two hours later, I’d seen enough cute kitchens, cozy lofts, and charming breakfast nooks for a lifetime. And we’d only actually seen half the units on the list. But at least we now had the list. Only four floors were full-up: the seventh, fourteenth, nineteenth, and twenty-fourth. If Larch was right, Cora had to be on one of them.

Back in the lobby, I tried to park Denise and Laurel in the Starbucks. “This shouldn’t take any more than ten minutes,” I said. “If I’m not back in twenty…”

“I’m going with you,” Denise said.

I glanced around. I hadn’t seen any insects, and Jerret would have trouble monitoring the lobby, even if he tried. Buildings like this had a lot of transmission-blocking steel, and it was too cold to put bugs outside for an external transmission relay. Still, there was no use taking unnecessary risks.

“You’re right. Let’s get a real lunch.”

“That’s not—”

But I had a hand on her elbow, ostensibly to steer her out the door, but actually giving it a little squeeze. A private signal. Shhh. I’ll explain later.

I’d done it automatically, without conscious thought. If I’d thought first, I’d have expected her to slap my hand away. Instead, she turned without resistance. “Okay.”

I glanced at her, stunned by the instant, familiar communication. Realized that in all those years, I’d never even thought about another woman. Realized I’d just assumed the absence of a new ring on her finger, too.

“I know,” she said. “But not now.”

Outside, wasn’t the right time, either.

“I’m going up with you,” Denise repeated.

“That’s not a good idea.”

“Why? She’s my daughter too.”

I looked at Laurel for support, but she’d been oddly silent ever since the Starbucks.

“Because he might recognize you.”

“Jerret? I don’t think I met him more than a time or two, and only in passing. He’s more likely to recognize you.”

“Hopefully not.” But that had always been a risk. We had to find the right floor, and the only way to do that was to go up the elevator, with no real excuse for stopping at Perkins’ floor. I was just hoping enough people pushed the wrong button each day for it not to be suspicious. At least Jerret wouldn’t have bugs in the elevator—way too much metal for that to have even a chance of working—but I wouldn’t put it past Perkins to have tapped into the security cams.

I’d thought about that earlier, but it was a big building and we hadn’t been doing anything out of the ordinary. Now, I reached into my bag and presented three of my Rite Aid purchases: sunglasses, a Chicago Bulls jacket two sizes too big, a matching baseball cap, and wrap-around sunglasses that came to weird, streamlined points at each temple. For good measure, I was also thirty-plus hours unshaven.

“How do I look?”

Denise hesitated. “Different. I’d walk right by you on the street, that’s for sure.”

Laurel snorted. “More like cross the street to avoid you. You look like hell on a hangover.”

I stopped mid-stride and stared at her. I hadn’t really been all that afraid Jerret would recognize me by sight. If he felt anywhere at all like I had with Laurel’s bugs, he’d be far more tied into his swarm than into any other sense. The disguise had been for me: to help quell doubts, so I could flatten my emotional state when I met his bugs. Because what I was really afraid of was the emotional read.

I started to explain all that to Denise… but instead I looked again at Laurel. Short, dark hair curling around her ears. Tailored suit, skirt short enough to show toned legs, but long enough to say not-for-you. A woman who belonged in a place like this. Denise fit in, too: softer, more feminine despite the age difference, comfortable in her own skin but aware that first impressions can be everything.

This type of place wasn’t me and never would be. Maybe I was going at this backward.

Another trip to the Rite Aid got Denise a pair of schoolmarm reading glasses. For good measure, I had her pull her hair into a severe bun. The net effect was to make her look five years older and twenty years grumpier.

Then we waited for happy hour in the lounge. My original plan had been to ride the elevator alone. Total-cool, total-in-control: fake sociopath. If I could manage to shut down my feelings. Now the goal was to have as much company as possible.

Another of my new supplies was a bottle of beer. The cheap forty-ounce type, whose only purpose is to get you really drunk, really fast. I had it in a paper bag, wino-style, and as we walked back to the condo building, I twisted the top and took a long, noisy slug.

Denise stared at me.

“I kind of need it,” I said, which was true, but not for the reasons she’d be thinking. I would have preferred slipping into a bathroom and dumping most of it into the sink, but she needed to see me drinking it, so I saluted her with the bottle and tossed back as much more as I could in a single swallow.

Once, when I was young and stupid, I’d joined a group at a high school track for a midnight “beer mile.” Four laps, four beers. A good way to get arrested if the cops caught you, but it had taught me what alcohol and I could and couldn’t do together. I’d won the race, in a little under eight minutes. Soon after, the alcohol got its revenge. In about ten minutes, I was going to be very, very unhappy.

As hoped, there was a crowd waiting for the elevator. I drained the rest of the beer, and stuffed the empty bottle in my jacket pocket. Thought about throwing up. Belched instead.

Then I shoved my way in, angering as many people as possible. Laurel looked at me appraisingly, but Denise’s glare felt like losing her all over again. I desperately wanted to take her elbow, give the squeeze that said: hush, wait, I’ll explain.

But I couldn’t. That was the whole point. The stronger, more confused the emotions, from both her and me, the less chance Jerret would see anything other than what I wanted. Domestic drama, no threat.

The doors sighed shut and the elevator shifted into motion—more smoothly than I’d have liked, but you can’t have everything. I staggered anyway, reached out, cursed, and managed to hit about half the buttons as I braced myself. I got another four or five pushing myself back vertical. During my brief stint in college, we’d called this Christmas-treeing an elevator—as in lighting up all the buttons with the old Yule spirit. A really good way to make friends with your fellow passengers.

Seven, fourteen, nineteen, and twenty-four. I’d managed to get all but nineteen. Damn.

If Denise had been watching, judging, I might not have had the nerve to push that last one. There was only one chance in four it was the one I wanted. But she was occupied with some guy in charcoal worsted who was telling her she needed to keep her husband under better control.

“He’s not my husband,” she was saying. “Not any more.”

It was another stab to an already queasy gut, but I took advantage of her distraction to put my thumb on the button for floor nineteen. “Bing!” I said in my cheeriest drunk-voice. I hit floor eighteen for good measure. “Bing! Bing!”

Charcoal Worsted grabbed my arm. “Enough, or the next bing will be me calling security.”

Floor nineteen proved to be the one.

I was glad it wasn’t one of the lower ones, because each time the door slid open, the rest of the passengers got angrier and angrier. Charcoal Worsted had taken to jabbing the door-close button before the door had finished opening: a move that might have felt satisfying, but did nothing to speed our progress.

By the time we reached floor nineteen, my stomach was very much in rebellion and my head already starting to spin. Why hadn’t I eaten something before trying this nonsense?

Luckily, checking each stop for flies had become nearly automatic. All day long, I’d been studying the elevator lobbies, trying to figure out where I would put bugs if they were mine. Especially if I was limited to Musca domestica, gene-modified or otherwise. Houseflies are great for surveillance, but if people see too many, they tend to react.

But I’d forgotten what it meant for Perkins to have an entire floor to himself. Jerret hadn’t shown the greatest subtlety in the way he’d stalked Cora, but now, with no need for it at all, he’d planted several dozen flies on the ceiling, fanned out to give plenty of angles into each elevator’s interior. It was arrogant, the implicit assumption of someone who felt like king, in the country of the blind. Though even if people noticed, how many would have a clue what it meant?

Charcoal Worsted muttered and again jabbed the close-door button, this time after the door had finished opening. Five seconds later, it was safely closed. I now knew where Jerret was. Hopefully, he didn’t know I knew.

Maybe it was the beer, but suddenly, I felt all the emotions I’d been cultivating strike with renewed force. Still, I was extremely happy I’d changed the plan. With that many flies scanning me, I doubt my fake-psychopath demeanor would have held up. Jerret might not have known exactly what was up, but he’d have smelled something.

By the time we reached the lounge, I was definitely buzzed. Denise stomped out, but I reached forward, took her arm. Forget the elbow squeeze. I needed to talk now, save what I could of our relationship. If I could.

“Floor nineteen,” I said. “That’s definitely it.” My stomach lurched. “I’ll tell you more in a minute. First, I need to throw up.”

Clearer-headed, I joined her and Laurel a few minutes later at a tiny table with a to-die-for view of the lakeshore. No flies. I looked, but Jerret wouldn’t dare invade this place. He’d get swatted for sure.

Denise was still angry. Laurel was working at some kind of straw-colored drink, no ice. Denise was sitting on a leather couch big enough for two, but she wouldn’t move over, so I sat next to Laurel.

“So that was all some kind a game?” Denise asked, even before I was fully settled. “First you want to be the big hero, charging off while I stay home—just like old days. Then, when I won’t let you, not again, not when its our daughter’s life that’s at stake, you pull this, this stunt, and make me think you don’t even care—treat me like… like, like a damn Army wife. Not a real one: the imaginary kind. The kind they tell you you should be, but who’s not really a person. A woman whose only role is to say, ‘Yes, I understand,’ ‘Yes, I’ll do what they tell me,’ ‘Yes, I’ll stand behind you,’ ‘Yes, I’ll be everything you need and never ask anything for myself.’ Yes, yes, yes, because… because you’re the one who’s always almost dying, and compared to that, what the hell difference do I make?”

Laurel started to rise. “Maybe I should meet you in the—”

“No, you stay here. You’re as much a part of this as he is. What did he do? Explain it all to you when he wouldn’t to me?”

She shook her head, but dropped back into her seat. Held up a finger to a waiter, pointed to her glass. “No. I just live a little closer to the world he comes from.” She looked at me. “The offer’s still open, you know. Once the big police forces get in the act, we’re going to have to train undercover agents. And in the interim… we probably need to keep a better eye on our subcontractors.”

This time, I didn’t even hesitate. “No.”

“I figured, but I’d be remiss in my job not to ask.” The waiter was back, with a second whatever-it-was. She nodded, handed him a bill, waved off the change. “And I’m good at my job. Very good. When we go public, I’ll be worth millions.” She stirred her drink, stared at it, stirred again. “Then, if I’m smart, I’ll get out, retire at thirty-five. If not… well, at least my father would be proud.” She took a swallow. Made a face. Took another swallow. “He made his first million in some damn dotcom before he was twenty-five. I don’t even remember what it was called. Lost it all two years later. Spent his whole life trying to get it back.” She stared some more into her drink. “Drank himself to death by the time I was in high school.”

She was looking at me now, her eyes so dark they were almost black. “You don’t think I didn’t figure all of this out? Shit, this whole situation just reeks of what I grew up with. Dotcoms? Military? It’s all the same. You get that daughter of yours back, you treat her right, do you understand me?” She drained the rest of her drink in a single gulp, rose, then turned one final time to Denise. “And all that stuff on the elevator? It’s because he knows you. You’d have given the whole show away simply by caring, like a normal person.” She snatched her purse, and for a moment, I saw a glint of moisture in her eyes. “See you at the hotel.”

The rescue plan was something we’d worked out two days earlier. When I woke the next morning, it looked just as risky as before—but neither had any new alternative magically materialized.

This time, Laurel had booked us separate rooms, but Denise and I had spent much of the evening in one of them, not holding each other, but talking like we hadn’t in years. It wasn’t just psychotics and sociopaths whose motivations could evade the Sense. Deeply suppressed feelings could do it, too, I was beginning to realize. When we’d married, the Corps was a presumed part of our lives. I’d never understood how much she’d come to resent it.

Laurel was the first to knock at my door, holding a nylon bag with a flat, angular shape inside.

“What’s this?”

“What’s it look like?”

I took the bag, but didn’t open it. “We talked about this.”

“And if it comes down to him or you?”

“That won’t happen.”

“Him or your daughter?”

Reluctantly, I opened the bag. Pulled out a 9mm Beretta…

…and suddenly was back in the market.

Flashback, hallucination, or phantom eye? If there’s a single flashback that dominates all others, this is the one.

You do not want to shoot somebody when you have the Sense turned on them, full-power. You feel the impact, watch the life drain away. Even sociopaths know pain, fear the darkness.

The whole thing lasted perhaps three, four seconds. I’d seen the man in the sheepskin coat reach inside his jacket, Sensed the sudden pleasure. Knew it was him or me…

Or maybe he was just reaching for a love letter from his girlfriend.

For two, maybe three seconds, I didn’t care. Three wild, unaimed shots, and he was down, the market suddenly still. Somehow, my sidearm was in my hand—my rifle still slung over my shoulder because, no matter how good you are at bifurcation, there’s always a risk of losing perspective and thinking you’re shooting from the position of one of your insects. Better to keep the rifle slung unless you consciously decide you need it.

I’d thought guiding others in for the kill was the same as pulling the trigger. I’d been wrong. I walked forward in a daze, oblivious to the possibility of additional attackers, ignoring everything but the body on the street. I had done this. All by myself.

He was lying on his back, the jacket half-open. Slowly, with thumb and forefinger, I pulled it all the way open.

The blocks of explosive strapped to his sides should have silenced any qualms. And at the time, they did. The Sense surged back and I felt the relief of my platoon mates, knew I had saved not just my own life, but dozens of others, knew the man before me would have been dead of his own hand, regardless of what I’d done.

That’s how it stood for years. Until the flashbacks. Now, all I see is his face: broad planes with incipient crows-feet. Startlingly blue eyes. A blunt, square nose. Matching jaw.

In the flashbacks, there is no suicide vest. Instead, he’s clutching a paper, covered in feminine handwriting. Handwriting just like Denise’s.

What would my dreams be if I had to shoot Jerret? I didn’t want to think about it. But when Laurel gave me a handful of clips, I took them.

The rest of the supplies were exactly what I needed. I didn’t ask Laurel where she’d gotten them and she didn’t volunteer. All those police connections, perhaps, though a lot of it was easy enough to get elsewhere.

Denise arrived shortly after. The night before, we’d argued about roles. I’d lost. I tried again now, but she was adamant: no more waiting at home. We also argued about timing. Laurel and Denise wanted to go in right away, perhaps catch everyone still sleeping if Perkins kept the type of hours guys like him do in movies.

But that was the type of nerves you see in soldiers on their first patrol. We’d do better later, when there were more people going up and down the elevators and when Jerret had had all day to become jumpier himself.

What I didn’t want to do was think about Cora, so I took Laurel and Denise to the Art Institute. A Picasso exhibit, I think. Afterward, I couldn’t have described anything I’d seen. Nerves aren’t just for first-timers.

Happy-hour found us again in the lounge: just Denise and me, no alcohol, waiting. I wanted the lounge at its fullest when the alarms went off. The more confused people filling stairwells and elevators, the better.

Her part of the plan was the simplest. Thanks to Laurel’s bag of goodies, her purse was full of smoke pellets—easy-to-use ones, made for paintball and for training firefighters. Better for our purposes than the military kind because they were smaller and non-toxic.

Denise, again in her schoolmarm glasses and tight bun—home-dyed a rather severe gray this time—would hit the eighteenth floor. That was a hotel floor, so she’d be looking for a supply closet, or better, a maid’s cart with a full trash bag. If she could do it without getting caught, she’d light a trash fire and supplement it with enough smoke pellets to make an impressive smudge. Then she’d be down the nearest stairwell, pulling fire alarms and dropping more pellets—anything to increase the confusion. Meanwhile, I’d go to the twentieth floor and wait for the alarms.

By 6:30, the lounge was standing-room only. Denise looked around. “Time?”

I nodded, reached across the table, took her hand. “Be careful. Stick to the plan and let me be the one to improvise. It’s what I do… did.” Her hand felt warm, natural. I gave it the tiniest of squeezes. “I—” My throat felt blocked, the words trapped. “I never—”

She squeezed back. “I know.” She gave a tight-lipped smile.

“Yeah.” There really wasn’t any more to say. “Let’s go get her.”

No battle plan ever goes off without a hitch. This one’s was an unexpectedly long wait for a second elevator, after Denise’s had left. Maybe I should have used the same one she did, but that would have left me on the twentieth floor, with nothing to do while waiting for the alarm.

As it was, I’d barely stepped off when the alarms sounded. Distant at first, muffled through multiple floors, then ear-splitting. I pulled the striker pin on a smoke pellet and tossed it in one of those useless brass wastebaskets hotels, banks, and convention centers love so much. Found another wastebasket on the far side of the lobby and dropped one in it, too.

Down the hall, a door popped open and a head peered out.

“Fire!” I yelled. “Get everyone out!”

Then I ran the opposite way, shouting and banging on doors. This was a condo floor, but it had a supply room, unlocked, as I’d hoped. I wrenched open the door, pulled down a shelf of paper towels, wadded them up in a big pile, and struck a match. Tossed in a half dozen smoke pellets for good measure, along with a couple of interesting-looking aerosol cans. By the time I left, one of the cans had already produced a satisfying bang, the sprinklers were starting to fire up, both in the closet and the hallways, and the smoke was thick enough that other people, hurrying for stairwells or elevators, were merely shapes in the gloom.

I found a stairwell at the end of the hall and pushed through. No panic bar, but a fire alarm, which I pulled in passing. No security cameras anywhere in sight. I’d not seen any yesterday, either, except on the elevators. Either this place had really good, hidden security, or the bare minimum. Hopefully the latter. Otherwise, even if we got Cora out, I was going to have a lot of explaining to do. Not the way I wanted to find out how good Laurel’s police connections really were.

The stairwell smelled like the Fourth of July. Apparently I’d hit the same one that, hopefully, had already led Denise to the basement.

The door snicked shut behind me, and I tested it. Locked. Damn. That meant it would be the same on Jerret’s floor. I’d been hoping the lack of panic bars meant no automatic locks, but touring the place yesterday, there’d been no way to find out. I dropped down a flight, suddenly glad for Laurel’s gun. But just as I got to the first landing, the door flew open, and I found myself staring down at a wiry, tough-looking man with a beard shaved into tiger stripes and what looked like a champagne glass shaved into the side of his head. A fashion-model-gorgeous Asian woman was behind him, in jeans and a silk blouse.

“Shit, Ray,” he said into a phone as I pressed backward against the wall, hoping he wouldn’t look up. “It’s real… Yeah… Yeah…”

“Yeah, it’s real,” the woman said. “Stay here and get cooked if you want.” She pushed by and clattered down into the smoke, pausing a few steps later to pull off her high heels.

Champagne-hair ignored her. “Forget that Jerret guy, bro. All he does is stay with his bitch ‘n’ all those flies. What the hell good’s he done us… ?” He stepped backward toward the corridor. “We really ought to get out of here.”

I was on the move even as the door started swinging shut. Even so, I barely managed to get to it. For a whole minute afterward, I held it, only millimeters from clicking shut, as several groups of people pounded down the stairs, some glancing at me, others fixated on getting down.

Alone again, I pulled a bandana out of my pocket and put it on, partly as additional disguise, partly to cut the fumes. I pulled the pins on three more smoke pellets, then opened the door just wide enough to toss them through. No yells, so apparently the hallway was now vacant. Blocking the door open with my foot, I lit a couple of strings of lady-finger firecrackers with a cigarette lighter, tossed them inside, and followed them up with a couple of M80s. Happily, the nearly closed door saved most of my hearing, but Jerret had to feel like he was on the receiving end of my tripwire nightmare: concussion, smoke, shock—and probably a bunch of insects already knocked off-line.

Time for the coup de grace. I pulled out another of my Rite Aid supplies, a can of home-and-garden wasp spray, yanked open the door, and looked for bugs.

They were there, of course, on the ceiling. Jerret was probably already pretty well into a flashback—and I didn’t want to give him any chance to recover. If he hadn’t been in a secure room when the commotion began, he’d have responded by retreating to the safest place he could think of and shifting as many assets as possible to his perimeter. And it was hard to imagine he wouldn’t have Cora with him. I needed to find out which room they were in before the place was overrun with firefighters.

In one quick motion, I shot a jet of wasp spray at the flies. It was good stuff, and about half of them dropped instantly. More than I wanted—the plan depended on not killing them all—but Jerret’s reaction was instant: the equivalent to touching a hot burner. I zapped a couple more flies for good measure, but he was already pulling back, desperate to keep from losing any others.

I chased down the hallway, following the flies. Most were faster than me, but those that had gotten a partial dose of the bug killer were a bit wobbly, and even in the smoke I was able to keep them in sight. Then we reached a door—number 1903, a detached part of my mind noted—and they started diving into a gap beneath it. It wasn’t a huge one—when Jerret had cut it into the carpet, he must not have been thinking of a possible mass retreat—so there was a bit of a jam-up as flies were coming in from all directions. Clearly, he was putting the survival of his swarm ahead of maintaining his periphery.

This much I’d planned. Time now to improvise.

First, I shot as many of the remaining flies as I could with the spray. That confined Jerret’s remaining Sense to the room. There was a spyhole in the door, though he was probably still too shocked to think to use it. Nevertheless, I ducked sideways, out of sight. He’d have a gun, and might start shooting. The fire alarm was deafening, almost enough to put me into a flashback, and I knew what was going on. Jerret had to be over the edge.

Armed and irrational. A bad combo, but the only one I was sure I could use. And with his Sense bottled up, we were now on equal terms.

But I didn’t have much time. According to my watch, it had only been three and a half minutes since Denise had pulled the first alarm, but there would be firefighters running up the stairs any minute. I had two choices: shoot my way in and try to get Jerret without letting anything happen to Cora… or get him to come out.

It would have been simple to work myself into a killing rage. It wasn’t as though Jerret had been a long-term member of my unit. We’d only done a few missions together and had barely talked on base. Since then, he’d seduced my daughter, kidnapped her, and for all I knew, raped her. Or maybe he thought he was protecting her, or even married to her.

But I’d looked into his eyes the day after the ravine. Told the same lies to get out of De-con. Flown Laurel’s swarm. Jerret was me, but for the grace of God. If there was a God. Two weeks ago, I’d have said there wasn’t. But two weeks ago I was a different person: Jerret, but for the grace. Killing him achieved nothing. Killing him was killing myself… again.

For once there was no flashback. I couldn’t afford one, but I think something in me had truly changed. With a silent prayer to a God I’d never even have contemplated two weeks ago, I decided to stick to the plan.

“Lapp,” I yelled, in my best field-commander voice. “This building is under attack, by…” I hesitated, then decided in-for-a-penny-in-for-a-pound, “Ladenite terrorists.”

I struck the cigarette lighter, tossed more lady fingers, smoke pellets, and another M80 down the hallway. Good-bye ears. Hopefully they’d recover by the time I needed them. I struck the lighter again and played the wasp spray across it. Hurrah for LPG propellants; the stuff made a dandy blowtorch. I aimed it across in front of the spy hole, blackening Jerret’s door, just for the hell of it.

“Lapp,” I yelled again, using the spray can to light yet another string of lady fingers. I was going to run out of them soon. “Our CI-MEMS operator is dead. Your unit needs you.”

Nothing to do now but wait. I pulled the bug-spray can back, away from the spyhole, reluctantly let the flame die. Then, as the door began to open, I fogged the hallway with the remaining contents of the can. Might as well take out as much of his swarm as I could, the moment he stepped out. I couldn’t afford to get it all, but the fewer bugs he had, the less likely he’d be to get a read on me, the less likely to snap back to reality at an awkward moment.

He emerged slowly, one arm wrapped around a terrified Cora, the other hand holding an Uzi.

I hadn’t expected the Uzi, had expected a sidearm instead. We needed to get out fast, and quietly. Otherwise, we were going to have a lot of dead firefighters if Jerret met them in the smoke, looking, in their protective gear, like storm troopers.

Whether Cora was terrified of Jerret or of all the bangs and alarms was hard to determine. But when she saw me, even in the smoke, strobe lights, and din—even with the bandana, hat and glasses, gun—her mouth went wide in a startled O. Maybe she said something. My ears weren’t exactly my best allies at the moment. Maybe she was merely about to speak. I met her eyes, shook my head. Stay with him, I mouthed. Or maybe I said it. I was having nearly as much trouble hearing myself as hearing anything else.

“Lapp,” I said, forcefully enough that I could almost hear it. “We need to get out of here. Extend your perimeter for maximum threat avoidance.” Briefly, I regretted killing so much of his swarm. Still, there ought to be enough left to do the job. “We do not have the firepower for a fight. We need to get out and report to base. Do you understand?”

If he recognized me, it wasn’t as Cora’s father. Maybe from the missions we’d shared. More likely as a generic battlefield figure from a long-off flashback. As long as I could keep him there, we’d be safe. I wouldn’t have to kill again.

I shifted my gaze to Cora. “Do you understand?”

She nodded, still wide-eyed.

“This is what I do,” I said. Paused. Remembered Denise. Hoped she was safe. “Did.” My hearing was definitely coming back. “I will get you out.”

She nodded, still wide-eyed. “Da—”

Much as I longed to hear her Daddy—Daddy without the damn you, without the weight of all those wasted years—it was the one thing I couldn’t let her say.

“That’s enough, private,” I barked. “Lapp’s on point. The rest of the unit”—I looked at her as pointedly as I could risk—”will follow his lead. Quietly. Do you understand?” She nodded, silent again. “Good. Let’s roll.”

Cora nodded again, and we started down the hallway. Jerret’s lead wasn’t quite standard, a possessive arm still clutching his “private” in a distinctly non-military manner. But still, we were moving, very much dependent on each other. It had been five minutes since the first alarm. By now, there had to be firefighters in the building.

I don’t know how much of his swarm Jerret had left, but it was enough, because getting out was startlingly easy. Easy enough to again make me wish I was integrated. Until, that is, I looked at Cora. Then it was easier to be as I was.

He found a smoke-free stairwell jammed with people trying to get down from the lounge, and cooperated when I suggested that Uzi-under-the-coat might be a better stealth mode than Uzi-in-plain-sight. Not that he ever let go of Cora, except for the moment when he tucked the Uzi under his coat. For about two seconds, I thought she was going to run—a bad thing because Jerret’s training would make sure that Uzi-under-the-coat become Uzi-in-plain-sight, very, very quickly. But again, I shook my head, and again, she deferred.

Then we were in the basement, and from there into the parking garage.

I’d warned Denise not to react when she saw Cora. But it was all she could do to stay in character. “Mission accomplished,” I said, just to remind everyone we weren’t out of the woods. “Driver, take us back to base.”

Laurel climbed in front. Jerret opened the back and started to maneuver Cora in ahead of him, but I cut him off. “Lapp, you’ve got shotgun.” He started to protest, but this wasn’t negotiable. “Now, soldier. That’s an order.”

He let go and slid into the front. Moments later, Denise, Cora, and I were in the back. Cora in the center. No thought to that one: the duckling, however well-grown, flanked by the parents. A moment later the car was full of flies. No way we could leave them behind; try that and Jerret would have been back in the here-and-now faster than I could possibly come up with a way to stave it off.

But there weren’t that many flies. Forty, maybe fifty, tops. And Jerret was clearly losing his focus on the “mission;” flies were drifting into the backseat, hovering near Cora, circling her head, brushing her cheeks, hair, ears, lips.

Cora never moved, even as a tear slid from her eye and a fly landed to taste it. With a clarity that might have come from a swarm but didn’t, I realized she hadn’t been raped. Not in any conventional fashion, anyway. This—this was Jerret’s way of making love: like me watching Denise in Laurel’s office, carried to its extreme.

Traffic in the parking garage had been minimal—most people fleeing a high-rise fire aren’t going to risk getting trapped in the garage. Jerret’s voice was distant, muffled by the squeal of tires as Laurel gunned up the ramp toward the street.

Or maybe my own hearing hadn’t completely recovered. “What did you say?” I asked.

But it hadn’t just been my hearing. When he spoke again, his voice was soft, forlorn. Not a soldier’s. Or a kidnapper’s. “So few…”

I knew what he meant, but Cora didn’t know I did. “Usually there are a lot more flies,” she said. “Something happened to the rest.”

“So few,” Jerret repeated. He was becoming agitated. “Where are the Ladenites? Where’s the rest of the unit? What happened to my swarm? There was a guy with a spray can…”

Uh-oh. I made sure my gun was ready. Cora saw, and another tear followed the first. But she said nothing.

Please, God, if you exist, don’t make me have to do this.

Laurel saved the day. “Here, soldier, take this.” She fished in her pocket, dropped pills in his hand.

“What are they?” Suspicion hadn’t yet hit his voice, but it would.

“Anti-withdrawal medicine. Take it.” She was talking to him, but in the rear-view mirror she was watching me.

“What kind?” His voice was stronger, and my gun was now pointing at him, through the back of his seat. Please, God…

“Valium,” she said. And Ambien. I knew. The prescriptions had been mine. Not that I liked to use them. I preferred my flashbacks unmedicated. “Use your swarm,” Laurel added. “See if I’m telling the truth.”

Reluctantly, Jerret pulled a few flies away from Cora. Then a few more.

“I can get you a new swarm,” Laurel continued, once she was sure she had his full attention. In the rearview mirror, she actually flashed me a grin. “Isn’t that right, Kip?”

Laurel had found a way both to save the day and ensure her millions. “Yes. I’ve flown it.”

More flies moved from Cora, into the front.

“But you have to give up Ms. McCorbin. You can’t have both. We’ll give you the best insects outside the military, but you’ll have to do what our psychologists tell you, and wear a tracking bracelet, because you have to let her have her own life. Isn’t that right Kip?”

That one was easy. “Yes.”

“You really don’t have much choice, because otherwise the FBI’s going to get you eventually, and they really don’t like kidnappers.” She paused, accelerated onto Lakeshore Drive, watching a fire truck heading the opposite direction. Our doing, or something else? There are, I realized, things you never know… and never have to know.

“Right now, you’ve got to take those pills. Because otherwise Kip here is going to have to shoot you. And you know he’ll do it if he has to. Isn’t that right, Jerret?”

Jerret looked down at the pills. He turned, looked over his shoulder at Cora—his eyes, not the swarm’s. She was leaning slightly against me now, and I felt her stiffen. But her face showed nothing. Then, ever so slowly, Jerret raised his hand, tipped the pills into his mouth, swallowed. The opposite choice from the one I’d made. The only one he could possibly make.

“Good job.” Laurel sounded like she was talking to a child. She looked at her watch. “We’ll be in St. Louis in five hours if everything gets out of the way.” She again glanced in the mirror. “Want to come with us?”

I looked at Denise, Cora. Shook my head.

“Didn’t think so. Midway Airport’s on the way. Tickets are on me. Send the bill.” She paused. Jerret was already starting to nod off. “And remember what I told you, okay? Everyone in this life is walking wounded. I’ll take care of him; you do what I told you. Make this a win-win-win-win. You, me, Jerret, her. You hear me, Kip?”

I nodded. Started to grin, but she was deadly serious.

“Because life doesn’t give you many of those, so you damn well better not waste them.” There were tears in her eyes, too, and suddenly, it no longer seemed funny. There but for the grace of God. Her, me, Jerret, Cora. We were all each other, but for the grace.

The car was on the Stevenson Expressway, heading southeast, the electric motor’s whir barely loud enough to mask Jerret’s soft snore.

I lowered the gun, slipped on the safety. Looked at Cora, into the eyes in which once, I could do no wrong. Realized that life sometimes really does give you second chances. Can and will, without the shoulda-coulda.

I longed to put an arm around her, pull her tight, hear that all-restoring Daddy. But it was way too soon. Instead, I broke the gaze, looked across her at Denise. And wondered. Was there enough grace for a win-win-win-win-win? You sure as hell don’t get many of those. I didn’t know, but I wasn’t in any hurry to go back to Seattle. Especially in gray, rainy November.

Content

Phantom Sense
by Richard A. Lovett & Mark Niemann-Ross