We had gone through the plan, but Carl hadn’t told me we wouldn’t be there together.
“How the hell am I supposed to get past an armed guard?”
“I’ll take care of that for you. Once I do, just wave your phone over the keypad and then enter the code. You remember the code?”
“839-201,” I said. “How do we get you out of there?”
“I’ll make my own way out eventually. It will just”—they hesitated—“take some time. This body wasn’t going to be useful to you anyway. Do not think of me as being in one place. I will be with you.
“OK, I should have it disabled within the next five minutes or so,” they said, and then the monkey disappeared over the other side of the wall and I was on my own.
And so I went back into the woods and dragged myself through the leafy, dense undergrowth, trying not to trip and fall every six feet. I was not trained for this. I felt like my pants were full of bugs, and in my defense, the number of bugs in my pants wasn’t zero. Before that day, I had spent as much time in jungles as I had in outer space.
But I made it through. I had the giant cinder block building in sight after less than ten minutes of walking. Something in me hoped that the guard by the door would be sleeping, or maybe just gone. But no, a man in military fatigues stood next to the door. In his arms, he held the kind of rifle people take to wars.
Now was the time to just trust. I walked out of the woods and toward the building. What must it have looked like to that guy—this figure in a black hoodie and pants just stepping out of the forest?
“Hello!” I said, if only to be polite, when I was still thirty or so feet away.
“Hello,” he said, in a thick accent I didn’t recognize.
“I need to go into this building.”
“Do not come any closer.” He reached for his belt, which held a walkie-talkie.
I hadn’t thought about walkie-talkies! I was much more worried about the big ol’ gun. I stopped in my tracks, unsure what to do. He held the walkie-talkie to his mouth and then, all at once, he crumpled.
CARL
I left a surprise at Altus. I am technically a benign infection. But if my parts do not communicate with each other, they stop being me. They do not have consciousness, but that does not mean that they disappear, or even that they stop infecting new cells. When I severed my connection to the parts of myself that were at Altus, that did not destroy them. They just stopped being me. And in the moment before I snipped that thread, I sent a signal for those bits of me to hide, to change shape, to go stealth, and then to infect everything they could.
And I believed that they would go undetected by my sibling. I believed they would spread. I believed it because that was the only way we could succeed. If my sleeping network had been detected, it was all doomed anyway. But when that guard collapsed in front of Maya, I knew it had worked. That was a true test of signal strength, to interrupt the consciousness of a man that my sibling had so completely infiltrated.
Of course, it was like a beacon to him. I had hung a sign on Altus that said “Under Attack,” and I could already feel his response rising.
APRIL
I heard a man yelling as I walked to the front of the plane. “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU THINKING! YOU CAN’T JUST LAND A PLANE WITHOUT TOWER CONFIRMATION OR FILING A FLIGHT PLAN! GOOD LUCK HOLDING ON TO YOUR LICENSE AFTER THIS!”
But then, as my face was lit by the lights coming from the building, his frustration faded.
“Jesus,” he said in a mix of awe and exasperation. “Umm . . . come with me, I guess.”
And so I left the plane, alone.
Once inside the tiny terminal, I sat for about fifteen minutes before a group of five dudes came into the waiting area. One of them was Peter Petrawicki.
“April, this is a surprise honor.” He stuck out his hand.
I knew that this would happen, but that didn’t mean that I was ready for it. I hadn’t spent much time with anyone except my best friends since I got my new face, and now here was my archnemesis, in a crisp blue button-down and khaki pants flanked by hired muscle acting like nothing at all odd was going down.
“Peter,” I said, and I reached out and grabbed his hand, smiling. Normal, normal, normal!
“Do you want to go have a chat? I’m sorry if you caught us a little off guard. It is the middle of the night.”
“Yeah, that’s my bad,” I said, sounding cool, but feeling very small, very alone, and completely terrified. “It just seemed suddenly urgent that I come visit you,” I said.
“Well, let’s get to a conference room and we can talk about it. But first, I hope you don’t mind, we’re all about secrecy here, can you hand Davis your phone?” He gestured to the biggest of his companions. They had clearly all hastily dressed, but nonetheless each had a jacket on that could very easily be concealing a gun. I handed my phone to Davis, thinking that this plan was terrible and that I hated everything about it.
As he led me out of the hangar and through a courtyard toward a large building, Peter Petrawicki did what he did best.
“April, when I heard you had come back, I was . . .” He paused for dramatic effect. “I was just so relieved. The
