The orbs slipped down my sleeves and dropped into my palms while Rachel lifted the book like a weapon. She slippeda round the bed, with me a step behind, then gestured at the drinking glass shattered on the kitchen floor.

I nodded--and the buzzing sound dopplered past us, and a deformed cockroach landed on the wall beside her shoulder. Alarm jolted through me--I didn’t know why--and the orbs swung closer as the bug leapt at Rachel's face.

She batted the cockroach across the room with the book. The roach landed on the wall, pumped a few times, then sprung into the air and looped in a lazy circle.

"You okay?" I asked.

"Don’t let it touch you," she said, her voice tight.

She tilted the book, showing the white furrow that slashed across the front, the pages inside showing through the hard cover. Because that roach had chewed a half-inch deep in a fraction of a second. LIke a drill bit. Not a cockroach. Not a normal insect at all. Imagine what that’d do to flesh.

I swore. "Should I--"

The bug whipped toward Rachel's face with a high whine. I shouted in alarm and she swung the book again--too slow, but an orb flashed past me hammered the bug into the wall.

A black circle in the off-white paint.

My breath came too fast.

The other two orbs hovered a foot away until the buzzing stopped.

"What the hell?" Rachel said.

"I don’t know," I said, my heart pounding. "I don’t know."

I felt a flicker of alarm and saw another misshapen cockroach crawling on the cord of the dusty ceiling fan, quiet and harmless as a ladybug. I sent the two free orbs closer and the bug didn’t react, just kept creeping along.

"Squash it," Rachel said.

The orbs weren’t feeling a threat, so I hesitated--and the buzzing started again, from inside the wall behind the embedded orb.

Plaster spat from a spot six inches away, and the first bug exploded back into the room. It had drilled a hole through the wall and returned.

The bug wheeled through the air, smashing a lamp and erupting through the mattress, sending foam flying and sketchbooks cascading to the floor. A bowl of alligator clips tumbled from the workbench and the bug landed hard on the side of the minifridge.

The buzzing changed to a squeal, and an instant before the orbs slammed into the bug, it disappeared into a hole. A new hole, bored through the fridge casing in three seconds.

Stolen story; please report.

Rachel stepped beside me, holding her gun in a two-handed grip.

The orbs hovered. The minifridge shifted a quarter-inch. Then started rocking slightly.

"I could be making a cabinet right now," Rachel said.

The bug exploded from the back of the fridge. Mist filled the kitchen and the orbs wheeled and Rachel holstered her gun and grabbed a frying pan in the same motion.

Then nothing happened. I couldn't see the bug anywhere. A few seconds crept past on barbed legs.

"Okay," I said. "Maybe that’s--"

The bug shot at me from beneath the table and an orb clipped it immediately. It spiraled to the countertop and Rachel slammed it with the frying pan, then slammed it again.

We waited. No buzzing or squealing.

"Get close," she said.

I stepped closer.

"Not you," she said.

"Oh." I brought the orbs close.

Still no noise.

She lifted the frying pan, and the counter was intact below. No escape hole burrowed through. No bug, either. For a moment, my breath caught--then Rachel gave a wry laugh and turned the frying pan upside down.

There, on the bottom, was a clot of gunk. Hair and scabs and fingernail clippings held together with a thick paste.

"You sure can pick ‘em," Rachel told me.

"That’s not--that can’t be--"

"Uh-huh." She turned to the main room, holding the frying pan by her shoulder. "That's a mozzy. That's your girlfriend. She creates killer wasps from her saliva. Let’s get the other one."

"I don’t think that one’s dangerous."

"I don't care what you think."

Yeah, fair enough. I sent the orbs hovering around the ceiling fan. "Why’d you put your gun away?"

"A stray bullet through these walls? With my luck, I’d kill a family of seven." She scanned the ceiling. "Besides, I have you. Where’d it go?"

I felt a spark of curiosity from an orb hovering near the ceiling fan blades. It hadn’t found the second bug, but it had noticed a bright white rectangle atop one of the ceiling fan blades.

"There," Rachel said, pointing to the floor under the workbench.

The bug crawled along the carpet, weak and unsteady … then stopped. Wobbled. Fluttered once. And keeled over.

I nudged it with an orb. "Dead."

"You sure?"

Another nudge. "Yeah."

"Dead of what?" Rachel crouched beside the unmoving bug. "She calls them ‘mozzies'."

"Well, they’re all insectoid and dangly."

"And don't mosquitoes only live a couple days? Maybe it died of old age." She nudged the dead bug with the frying pan. "You said Maddie’s not a longshot."

"I didn’t know. I--I would've known. She would've told me."

"You're adorable." Rachel crossed to one of the overturned shoeboxes, crammed with glossy photos, each one a mozzy on a tiny stand. Not alive, thank God. "She made hundreds of them."

I nodded, my attention on the orbs floating past the ceiling fan.

"So where are they now?" she asked. "The rest of her mozzies? Look at all these empty spaces."

"I don't know." Through the orb, I deciphered two words traced in the dust beside the white rectangle: TOP SEKRIT. "With Maddie, I guess."

"Maybe there’s storage in the basement. C’mon, we’ll ask the super."

"Give me a second," I said. "I’ll make sure these are dead."

Spelling the word ‘sekrit’ was Maddie’s way of proving she'd written that note. She used to write 'sekrit' on the love notes she left me, back when she did that sort of thing.

The instant Rachel left the room, I knocked the white rectangle from the ceiling fan with an orb. Paper fluttered and spun, and I caught a business card in my hand. It was folded in half to stand like a tent, to improve visibility for me--for my orbs.

Because who else could see that high? Nobody.

Did that explain the mozzies? If I hadn’t been threatened, I never would've loosed the orbs. So had Maddie sent some mozzies in here to make sure I used the orbs, to make sure I found the business card?

A little convoluted, but possible. Except how did she suddenly have mozzies? It was like I didn't know her at all.

The card was for a place called ‘Steerage,’ in a town called Red Hook.

And on the back, the scrawled words: "L – come alone."