Pursuit

"I always wondered what we'd look like if we swapped sexes," Rath said, gri

"Now we know," Lo

Ava hadn't thought of that. She blushed, but hoped her illusory black beard covered it. "Sorry to disappoint you guys, but this is just camouflage. Less than skin deep. I picked this illusion because the Feds are looking for two girls and a guy, not the other way around. “

"Good thinking," Rath said, meeting her gaze for a moment. Though he was still gri

Then he looked away and the moment passed. Ava dismissed it as her imagination, or maybe even some unintended trick of the gender-bending, mindwarp-driven disguises she had created. She fell silently into step behind Rath and Lo

She watched as Rath reached into his jacket pocket, withdrew the large, crumpled wad of cash he'd taken from the yuppie whose wallet he'd filched back inside the terminal, and extended a hand to flag down a cab.

We're actually doing it, Ava thought, allowing hope to return. We're going to get away.

Walking past the car rental area, Special Agent Billings glanced down at his handheld EM detector, knowing that the odds were very much against his finding the three fugitives before they made it out of the terminal. There were simply too many exits, and there just wasn't time to seal them all. Once outside, the aliens could easily get their hands on a car and make a clean getaway.

Then Billings saw the energy spike on the detector's small LED readout. He understood immediately that the Harding girl must be expending a great deal of psionic energy at the moment, no doubt using her mindwarp talent to alter the appearance of herself and her two friends.

And she's somewhere nearby, he thought, examining the readings more closely. Following the GPS coordinates as they scrolled onto his screen, he pressed a couple of buttons to display the range and distance of his prey, relative to his present position. Then he trotted quickly across the concourse and through the large glass doors that led to the curbside.

The readout on his device was going crazy. / must be right on top of them, he thought.

Straight ahead, beside the curb, a yellow taxicab waited. Two smartly dressed men and a woman approached it, their flights evidently having just landed, and started to get in.

Billings recalled what the files on the Harding girl had said about her powers. She evidently possessed at least a limited ability to reach into people's minds and manipulate what they saw. Or what they thought they saw.

Maybe she should have whipped up an illusion of some luggage, he thought. Strange that not one of them has any. He consulted the range and distance data again on his device one last time, making absolutely sure.

It's them, he thought, then sprinted toward the cab before the trio finished closing its doors. Dropping the detector, he pulled his gun, grabbed the rear passenger door, and flung it open.

"Freeze! FBI!" he shouted.

With surprising strength, the slight woman seated in the center of the backseat shoved the man at her right, throwing him straight into Billings.

The agent and the other man fell backward onto the curbside. Billings felt the wind rush out of his body. The man looked confused, but it was obvious that he intended to run. Travelers stepped around them. Someone cursed, then moved on.

Billings rolled into a crouch and brought the smaller man down with a quick rabbit punch. The man slumped toward the sidewalk, unconscious.

By the time he hit the ground, he had transformed into a slightly built teenage female with dyed-blue hair and hardcore alt-rock clothing.

Someone screamed. Billings heard an engine roar and the squeal of tires quickly laying part of their treads on the roadway. He looked up from the unconscious Harding girl to see the taxicab streak away. A dark- ski

Noting the cab's plate numbers, Billings grabbed his radio and called for backup, though he doubted anyone could move fast enough now to keep the perps from getting out of the airport.

One down. Just two more to go, he thought, handcuffing his sole prisoner. He knew that this one, Tess Harding, was the one his superiors wanted captured most of all.

As another pair of agents and a large black sedan arrived to help him whisk her away, he wondered why the other aliens had sacrificed one of their own.

"That was really smart, Rath," Lo

Rath slammed the accelerator down, as though the entire airport, and the roads that led into and out of it, were his own private video arcade.

"Ava was just dead weight," he said.

She scowled, holding on to the dash as Rath swerved around a hotel shuttle. People dived out of the crosswalk, their luggage scattering in all directions. "Hello? Ava was the only thing that kept our magic makeovers from disappearing! “

Rath turned into a parking garage, almost going up onto two wheels in the process. "She was also a bell around our necks. “

"What are you talking about? “

"Ever wonder why the MiBs only seem to come after us when Ava is nearby, using her Obi-Wan whammy? And how come we never had much of an alien-hunter problem until after she came back from wherever it was she disappeared to for all those months after we went to Roswell to drag Zan Lite off to the Antarian Summit? “

Lo

"Might be a coincidence," was all she could think of to say. "Remember, the cops and the Feds might have captured us because we were having that noisy fight with those alien-possessed freaks. “

"The freaks chased us into the warehouse because they followed Ava there. “

"Still might be a coincidence. “

Rath brought the cab to a stop across a pair of handicapped parking spaces and threw his door open. It crunched into the side of the neighboring car.

"Yeah," he said. "And monkeys might fly out of my butt. I think the MiBs know how to track her by her powers. So now they can have her. “

It took Lo

Lo

But the approaching whine of a siren reminded her that there was no time to dwell on that. Rath got out of the cab first, and Lo

Their powers got the doors on both sides open in seconds. Lo