Unknown

I nodded.

“I’m going to loosen one cuff,” he said, “and you move both arms in front. No other stunts. You try anything woo-woo and my friend Agent Klein there will put a bullet right in you, are we clear?”

Agent Klein certainly was. He was a young man with curly brown hair and a semiautomatic pistol, which he held unwaveringly pointed at the center of my chest.

“I understand,” I said, and looked straight at Agent Sanders. “I will cooperate.” For now.

He did exactly what he said, stepping behind me to unlock one side of the manacles. I moved both hands forward, sighing a little in relief, and held them out, wrists together. Sanders reattached the cuff with a snap, and I felt a spark go through me—not enough to hurt, just enough to verify that the cuffs were still live. I lowered my hands to my lap.

“Better?” he asked. It was a rhetorical question, and that was very likely the only consideration I would get from him, so I did not respond at all. Sanders likewise didn’t wait for an answer. “So here’s what we know. We know that this camp over there is run by an organization of fringers. On their recruiting materials they like to call themselves the Church of the New World. They’ve got a Web site, bulletin boards, social networks, and a YouTube cha

He paused to take a drink of bottled water. When I nodded, he walked over to a laminated map of the United States, with locations circled in red marker. La Jolla, California, where we were now. An X mark was over a circle in Colorado, where the original version of the Ranch we’d found had been located. There were two more places circled. Both, to my eyes, looked remote, far from the nearest large city.

Sanders tapped the crossed-out circle in Colorado with the closed cap of a marker. “We were just setting up the surveillance for this place when you and your friend Luis busted the door and raised hell. Great job, by the way. Lots of dead people, missing kids, one hell of a mess left for us to try to make sense of. Thanks for that.”

“I was not aware I had to clear my plans for rescuing a stolen child with you.”

“Well, you do now.”

“For how long?”

“How does forever work for you?”

“Better than it does for you,” I assured him, and smiled, very briefly and sharply. “I don’t care about your problems, Agent Sanders. I want Luis Rocha. I want to rescue the children. I leave you to deal with the rest, if you can.”

Sanders dragged a chair over across the uneven ground, thumped it down in front of me, and sat with his elbows on his knees, leaning forward. He held my gaze as he said, “That’s not good enough. Far as I can tell, this is a Warden mess of some kind. A Dji

“Read you in?”

“Tell me everything I need to know.”

“Simple enough. Nothing. Withdraw your people. Shut down your operation. Leave.”

Sanders sighed and sat back, folding his arms across his chest. The folding metal chair creaked in complaint. He looked over at Agent Klein, who was still aiming his gun straight at me, and said, “Greg, why don’t you get me and my guest a couple of cups of coffee? You drink coffee, right?” That last was directed at me. I said nothing. “Two. Thanks. This is going to take a while.”

Klein looked startled, and he looked over at his boss for a moment. “Sir? You sure?”

“I’m sure. We have an understanding, right, Cassiel? You try anything with me, and I will bury you and your friend Rocha so deep that the president and the Joint Chiefs wouldn’t have high enough clearance to even know you ever existed. You think Guantánamo was bad? You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

I blinked. “Are you trying to intimidate me?” I was honestly curious, because I had been cowed before—rarely—but it was not very likely to come from this man, with all his rules and limits. “Because for all your posturing, I don’t think you are a bad man. I think you are afraid of me. You shouldn’t be. As long as you don’t interfere with me—”

He gave a short, hard bark of laughter. “Interfere with you? Lady, you’ve done nothing but fuck up our lives around here since you landed on Earth. Now, you tell me what I need to know about how the Wardens and the Dji

“Or?”

“Or you’re not going to like me very much,” he said.

I didn’t like him now. I didn’t see how that would be much of a change.

He didn’t push me. Agent Klein returned with two disposable cups filled with thick black coffee. I accepted one and held it in both hands, breathing in the fragrant steam. Agent Sanders guzzled his.

“Where is Turner?” I asked.

“Sent him out,” Sanders said. “Figured that with the bad blood of him selling you out like that, you might want a piece of him. So you can consider him off the case, as far as you’re concerned. All right?”

“Turner worked with you on countermeasures for Wardens,” I said. “For how long?”

“How about I don’t discuss classified government programs?”

“Oh, I assure you, you will discuss it. Whether you discuss it with me, with Lewis Orwell, with Joa

“Turner’s our asset. We’ll protect him.”

I didn’t like the direction this was going. Inevitably, it would end one place—with a civil war between the normal human world and the human Wardens. The Dji

It was, as Luis would have phrased it, a cluster fuck.

Which brought my mind back to the subject I was most interested in. “I want to see Luis,” I said. “Now.”

Sanders and I engaged in another staring contest. He finally broke it and looked at Agent Klein, who was standing at rest, with his hand not very far at all from his gun. “Get him,” he said.

“Sir—”

“Just get him.”

We waited in silence while Klein was gone. I sipped my coffee. Klein had disappeared around the edge of the tent, and I’d heard a vehicle start and pull away. They weren’t keeping him here, at their forward base; there was a secondary encampment, one where they would probably take me, eventually. There was no virtue in acting too soon. And the coffee wasn’t bad.

Agent Sanders had sense enough to know I wouldn’t speak again until my request had been fulfilled, so he stood up, drank his coffee, and conferred with other agents in the room. When he was done with that, he came and stood over me.

“You made it inside,” he said. “Actually inside the compound.” He sounded impressed.

“In,” I said. “But just getting in is not the problem. There are safeguards. Alarms. Guards.” I thought of the bear-panthers, coursing in packs in the trees, more effective than any human force that could be deployed. “If you think to raid that compound, you’ll be destroyed.”

“Oh, I’m not trying to raid it,” he said. “Not yet. But I’m very interested in exactly what you saw while you were there.”

“Nothing,” I said. “Manicured grounds. A gravel road. A large curved building that glowed from within. That’s all I had time to see.”

He tried asking me more questions, but I had already given him as much as he was going to get from me, and eventually he recognized that fact and fell silent.

Fifteen minutes later, I heard the growl of an engine, the crunch of tires, and then the silence as the driver shut down the vehicle. Slamming doors.