When I opened my teary eyes, I saw the flickering outlines of three soldiers superimposed over the image of the grenade in flight. I watched in a stupor as one of them limped toward me, an Asian guy with his knee wrapped in a thick bandage. Which probably made him one of the guys from Fort Dolores, maybe Quan.

"He ruined my leg." The guy tapped my temple with the barrel of his assault rifle. "I should put a bullet in his head."

My headache burst into Technicolor pain, and I cringed backwards.

"They want him alive," a hard-faced man with a goatee said.

"Whatever you say, Teegan." The limper pointed his gun at my knee. "I'll just take his patella, then. It won’t but sting a little."

"Stop jerking off and help me secure the vest on him." Teegan held what looked like a straightjacket crossed with a bulletproof vest. "That’ll shut him down."

"Let me put him to sleep first."

The butt of the limper’s assault rifle blurred toward my face. Then cracked, a hard impact three inches from my nose. Slamming right into an orb.

Which caught the limper in the throat as the other two orbs flashed crazily at his buddies. A short sharp shriek turned to a wheeze and a soldier crumpled.

Teegan, on the other hand, moved. Faster than possible. He pivoted so quickly that the last orb, unsteady from my dizziness, whizzed past him. He spun and tossed the vest at my face in a single balletic moment. I’d never seen anyone move like that, so beautiful and so deadly, so I panicked. Two other orbs swarmed him wildly. One punched him in the shoulder and another drove toward his face, and he backflipped from the platform.

I gaped as he disappeared into the darkness. Who was that? What was that?

Well, he was lying in a heap on the dirt floor now.

On my hands and feet, I blinked until my vision cleared, then wiped tears from my cheeks. I grabbed one of the fallen soldier's assault rifles from the walkway. I'd never touched one before, but I'd done plenty of target shooting with Dewey's rifle, after Bernard taught us the basics. And hell, if child soldiers in Third World hellholes used assalt rifles, I’d manage.

Except one thing kicked my fear into terror: 'secure the vest on him.'

The vest looked like body-armor crossed with a breastplate, built to clamp down on the orbs, to prevent me from using them. Which meant these people knew me, they expected me. That explained the flashbang grenade: if you wanted me alive, first you battered me unconscious.

Stolen novel; please report.

How had they known about the orbs? How’d they known that I’d followed them into New Park? Onto this block, into this excavation?

I knew the answer as soon as I asked the questions: Shandra.

They’d caught her, somehow, while I'd been in Maddie's house or on the subway. Maybe she’d tried trading herself again. I loved Shandra like a sister but she was half-crazy on a good day, and today hadn’t been good. She must've told them all about me.

I waited until the blobs of light inside my eyelids faded, then crossed to the edge of the walkway. My footsteps sounded muffled and distant. The rancid stench filled the air. I stood there shakily, wrestling with my urge to run and hide. To call for help, to curl into a ball. There was no time for any of that, because Ed's presence--all these soldierss--proved that I'd come to the right place. Dewitt was in here somewhere. I just needed to grab him and run. Easy as blueberry muffin.

So I dropped into the gloom, landing on the ground level in a narrow hallway with plywood to either side.

I gripped the assault rifle so tightly that my hands ached. I took a few breaths, tasting something foul in the air, then slunk forward. The passage emptied into a big dark room, two stories high and lined by scaffolding. When I’d scanned the room from the walkway above, I’d seen earth-moving equipment and a table with hardhats and a thermos.

This time my orbs, scouting ahead, saw something new.

Two people stood in front of a glistening rocky wall. The man looked like a defensive lineman who had a taste for cheesecake, with thick arms and a bull neck. He wore his blond hair in a ponytail, and his heavy face looked affable except for the scar: a rope of tissue from forehead to chin.

The woman looked like a school librarian--alert face, bony shoulders, her steel-gray hair in a tight bun except for one lock waving in a stiff breeze that sprung from nowhere in particular.

Thirty feet away, my orbs couldn’t reach them. So I slipped one orb into the shadow of the scaffolding and dropped the other two an inch above the ground, scouting fast for threats.

They found plenty. Four soldiers in the gloom, armed and tense, waiting for the command.

My knees were trembling. Maybe from the flash-bang grenade, maybe because I'd never been this scared in my life. Still, I lifted the assault rifle and pressed the stock to my shoulder and stepped from the shadows where only the two people could see me.

The ponytailed guy turned an off-kilter smile toward me. "Man, you’re something else." His voice boomed in the contained space. "What are those things?"

I sighted down the barrel at him. "Where’s Dewitt?"

"He’s safe."

"You’re not," I said, aiming at his chest. The barrel only shook a little.

The rancid smell intensified and I heard rustling in the shadows: soldiers trying to draw a bead on me. But as long as I stayed in the blind spot that the orbs had triangulated, I was safe. At least from gunfire.

The ponytailed guy chuckled. "Settle down, kid."

"I’ll ask you one more time," I said.

"Cool your jets, we’re just talking here." He smiled at the woman. "Isn’t that right, Mrs. Spandle?"

"Whatever you say, PJ," she murmured.

My finger tightened on the trigger and he said, "What if I’m the only one who knows where your buddy is? If you kill me, you'll never--"

So I shot him in the thigh.