“There’s a chopper on the ground to my side,” Cam said.
“Oh, shit,” Medrano said. Alekseev barked at Obruch in Russian, but Cam said, “No, it crashed. It’s not a problem. I don’t see anyone moving there or—”
Deborah gasped.
There was a witch in the rubble below, dark-skinned and wild-haired. She flung one hand up at them as if casting a spell.
“Pull up!” Deborah screamed. “Pull up!”
Obruch obeyed instantly. The engine whined as he lifted the chopper into a hard leftward turn. The additional thrust pulled Medrano against Deborah, squeezing her bad shoulder, but she had never been so glad for a sense of motion.
What was she throwing
“What did you see!” Alekseev said.
“She’s below us. She was on my side.” Deborah had lost track of the helicopter’s direction as they curled into the sky, but Obruch leveled out and brought the nose around. Deborah spotted her again. The witch leapt through the black dunes and fell and bounced up, her coat flapping in the helicopter’s downdrafts.
“I see her!” Deborah shouted.
Was it Freedman? Their file photos showed a heavyset woman. This fast-moving spook was wiry and hunchbacked, her shoulders bulging above her waspish frame.
Who else would it be? This woman appeared to have waded through two or three platoons of Chinese soldiers, hurling nanotech, downing helicopters — but it could be anyone, couldn’t it? What if the Chinese had captured other American researchers or some of the top scientists in Europe or India?
The witch scampered down the smooth, fallen length of a cinder block wall and limped into the space between a car and a tangle of wire. Then she disappeared like magic.
Deborah interrupted. She’d recognized the word down and said, “Colonel, wait. You better put us on the ground away from her or she’ll kill us, too.”
If Alekseev’s calculations were correct — if it was really her — Freedman had gone southward as she left the hospital for some other destination. They would have missed her without the fields of dead men to mark her path. Where was she headed?
Obruch powered the chopper down into the wreckage fifty yards from where they’d last seen her. “Cam, you’re with me!” Deborah shouted, opening her door to the noise and dust of the rotors. “The rest of you stay here!”
“Fine. Don’t let her get past you, but don’t crowd her, either! Do you understand?” Deborah squinted through the ash with more dread than excitement. “She’s carrying some kind of nanotech!”
If Freedman kills us,
We have to take that chance.
The three of them ran into the choking wreckage beneath the helicopter. Deborah only had one hand to grab at the debris. She slipped and banged through a heap of bricks and mortar, bent pipes, a cracked porcelain toilet. Soot burst up from every footstep. She heard Alekseev barking for directions from Obruch, but she was too busy fending her way through a soft, rotting skin of cloth to look back. Then she was startled by two sounds in front of her. Metal banged on wood and Deborah was confronted by the witch, surprisingly close.
She ran toward me! Deborah thought, stunned. Her throat was too dry to get out more than a rasp: “Wait —”
The witch stood above her. She’d climbed over a heap of wooden slats propped up on a fallen street sign. Ash streaked the two bent white panels set in a crisscross on the pole, and yet the black lettering was legible: CRESTVIEW AVE. and EAST I6TH ST. The military officer in Deborah thought that was important. This was ground zero. They’d found their woman.
It had to be Freedman, didn’t it? But the witch was faceless. Bodiless. She might have been a walking silhouette. The dark oval where her face should be blended perfectly into her straggly black hair, and her clothes were powdered with ash. The only definition in her thin, hunchbacked frame was her eyes. The white eyes smoldered with power and torment and then her arms spasmed, too.
Deborah stared at those dark hands for one jagged heartbeat, transfixed by the other woman. She wore a knapsack. That was the odd bump on her back. Deborah also saw a thick welt up her left forearm, a failed suicide’s mark. At some point she’d cut herself.
“Wait. My name is Major Reece—”
The witch raised both fists.
She’ll kill me, Deborah thought, but then Cam shouted, “Kendra! Kendra Freedman!”
The witch turned her head.
“U.S. Army Rangers!” he shouted. “United States Army Rangers! We’re here to rescue you!”
24
Every muscle in Freedman’s body tensed like a hair trigger. Whatever she was holding, Cam didn’t want her hands to snap forward and throw it. “I knew Albert Sawyer!” he shouted. “I’m your friend!”
One problem was that they wore Russian uniforms. Another was that Freedman’s face was a wild mask. Her eyes rolled and popped with fear.
“I’ll kill you!” she barked. “Stay back!”
“I knew Albert Sawyer,” he said.
This time his words seemed to register. Her head ducked and lifted again, not in a gesture like a nod but like a woman double-checking her thoughts. For an instant, Freedman seemed unaware of them. But she didn’t lower her arms.
Cam slid into the shallow pit where Deborah stood below Freedman, putting himself at the same disadvantage. He thought it might calm her.
“Sawyer’s dead now,” he said gently. He hoped this news was something they could share.
Instead, when Freedman’s eyes rose, her expression was filled with new terror. “They’re all dead,” she said, and yet her voice seemed disconnected from the rest of her. It was flat and distant. Was she even talking to them?
Kendra Freedman was insane. At some point, she’d experienced a psychotic break.
Deborah repressed a low sound like a moan, but she didn’t try to run. She stood her ground, entrusting her life to him. He wanted to take her hand. He wanted to say We’re going to be a// right, but Freedman needed to be the sole focus of his attention. Her sleeve had shot back from her hand and Cam stared at the scar on her wrist. He had known would-be suicides. Sometimes they were beyond reach.
“We’re here to rescue you,” he said. “My name is Cam.”
She ignored him. The chopper was still hammering over the ruins behind him to his right. Her gaze flickered in that direction, then shifted to his left. At what? Alekseev? Cam would have yelled at the Russian to keep away if he hadn’t been afraid to raise his voice.
“I’m your friend,” he said.
“Stay back!”
“We’re here to—”
“I’ll kill you!” Freedman nearly fell when the pile beneath her shifted, her left hand slashing outward for
