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“Earth to Maigo.”

She slowly shushes me. “Shhh.”

Collins looks as confused as me. Maigo doesn’t seem to be in pain. And she’s not unconscious. So what’s she doing?

“Hey, boss?” It’s Woodstock in my ear bud. I glance back to where I know Future Betty is waiting, but see only the barren, foggy island.

“Go ahead.”

“Everything okay out there?” With the array of cameras surrounding the craft’s hull projecting the view outside on the interior surfaces, Woodstock can watch everything that’s happening outside. “That was quite the swan dive. Didn’t quite stick the landing.”

“Fine,” I say.

“What about Maigo?”

“Not sure.” I lean down to look at her face. She looks calm, but her eyes are shifting behind her eyelids, like she’s in REM sleep.

“Can she move?” he asks.

I’m about to clarify the situation when I realize his asking any of these questions is abnormal. He’s generally willing to kick back, listen to whatever fifty years too young pop star he’s into now, and wait to be summoned. So why is he suddenly interested in Maigo’s mobility?

“Woodstock...what’s our situation?”

“Cloudy with a chance of Russian MiGs.”

I stand and look to the western sky. “Next time, lead with that bit of information.”

“They’re actually north of us,” he says, revealing that he is indeed watching. “Headed toward Alaska. They’re probably just probing our response times. They do it a lot. And three F-22s have scrambled out of Eielson to escort the MiGs until they’re headed away from U.S. airspace. But...”

“We’re on Russian soil,” I say. “They can’t help us here.”

“Bingo.”

I crouch back down beside Maigo, leaning my face low to the ground, so I can look up at hers. “Maigo. I know you can feel what’s down there. But we need to find a way to it. Now. Can you—”

“It’s testing me,” she whispers.

“Testing you? How?”

She gives a slight shake of her head. “I think...I’m not sure. But it’s watching me. I can feel it.” She lifts a hand and places it on her head.

“Do you know what it is?” Collins asks.

“Is it a Kaiju?” I add. “Like Nemesis?”

“I...it’s big. But I don’t know what it is.” She grunts in pain, and I nearly reach out to hold her again. “Ugh. It... Gestorumque?”

She speaks the last word in a deeper voice, with inflections that are not her own.

“No,” she says, then in the deeper voice, “Atlantide?”

“No,” she answers herself.

“Vixnoctus?” the deep voice asks.

Maigo seems torn by the question, brow furrowed, fingers gripping and crushing stones to powder. Before she can answer, Woodstock’s voice returns.

“MiGs just turned south! They’ll be here in two minutes! Get back here now!”

“Maigo,” I say, knowing she could hear Woodstock just as well as Collins and I. “We need to go.”

“Can’t,” she says.

“We’re employed by the U.S. government. My face is recognizable. Our presence here won’t be looked upon kindly, and they’ll have a good idea of why we’re here. Whatever is buried beneath us needs to wait, or they’ll—”

“It won’t let them,” she says.

“Jon,” Collins says, her voice a warning, her eyes on the sky to the north.

“I can’t move her,” I say. Even if she didn’t physically resist, my psychic bond with her will pull me back into her connection with the thing beneath us and send me flying again. Maybe worse.

Collins knows this as much as I do. She also knows that she doesn’t have the same bond with Maigo. Before I can protest, she leans down and slides her hands under Maigo’s armpits. When she’s not flung away or sent into a trance, she hoists and grunts. Maigo is the same size as the average teenage girl, but far heavier thanks to the density of her muscle mass. But when it comes to the human variety of toughness and determination, Collins is hard to match.

Maigo doesn’t fight the pull, and the moment she’s lifted away, her body goes limp.

“One minute!” Woodstock says, and I see the Future Betty’s hatch opening out of thin air, just twenty feet away. Woodstock moved closer to us without us even sensing the craft’s approach or descent.

Collins isn’t going to make it in time, so I run up next to her and reach out.

“Don’t,” she says.

“Have to risk it.” Hoping that Maigo’s connection with the thing below us really has been severed, I reach under her left arm and lift.

Nothing happens.

“Let’s go!” I say, and together we drag Maigo across the rough surface, leaving twin trails in the loose grit and stones. She’s hard to get up the ramp, but Woodstock starts raising it before we’re inside, helping lift Maigo’s heft. The raising ramp dumps us inside the passenger compartment. We sprawl on the floor, a tangle of limbs. “Go, go, go!” I shout.

“Hold on,” Woodstock whispers and points up. Through the ceiling, which is projecting the sky above, I see two slate gray MiG-29s cut through the sky overhead. They bank hard to the left and continue in a tight circle around the island. They’re looking for us. And they’ll see Ivan out there, sprawled on the ground beside his piss-scrawled name.

We lift off and ascend vertically, moving slow and steady. Woodstock keeps the front end facing the two circling MiGs, keeping them in view as we rise up toward the altitude they’re maintaining.

“Well, they definitely knew something was up,” he says. “That’s for damn sure.”

“But how?” I ask, lifting Maigo into a seat and strapping her in. She’s just starting to regain consciousness. She still looks a little out of it.

“Maybe waking that thing up sent some kind of detectable signal?” Collins asks, sitting across from Maigo and strapping in.

“You woke something up?” Woodstock asks. “Something small and furry this time, I hope.”

I sit down beside Maigo. “No idea, but we—”

“Shit.” Woodstock brings the circling Future Betty to a stop. As the two MiGs continue their loop around the island, four specks appear on the horizon. “Four more birds, incoming from the west.”

I move to the cockpit, sit beside Woodstock and look through the front windshield, which isn’t glass at all. Like the rest of the vehicle, it’s simply projecting the outside view on the inside hull. The four craft are nearly on top of us already. “How did we miss them?”

“No radar signal,” he says, pointing at the display that shows the two circling jets, but not the incoming visitors. “But they’re coming from the west, and our two friends outside aren’t freaking out. I think it’s safe to say they’re Ruskies, too, and that we should get gone.”

Maigo gasps. When I look back, she’s sitting up straight, eyes wide. Her head snaps toward the cockpit. “Look out!”

A cloud of black dots drop from the bellies of the four approaching aircraft and then cruise toward us at hypersonic speed.

“Strap in!” Woodstock yells at me.

The buckle clicks just as Woodstock launches us vertically, crushing me into the seat. Even if I hadn’t been buckled in, I wouldn’t have been able to leave the seat. We stop hard and the belt pulls on my gut. Then we’re spinning and turning downward, watching the missiles pepper the island where we had just been. Fireballs erupt across the rocky surface. I see the now tiny figure of Ivan sit up. He raises his hands before being consumed in flame.

“They knew we were here,” I say. “They were hoping to catch us on the island.”

“Like I said, it’s time to get gone.” But instead of taking us up and away, Woodstock quickly descends. I realize why a moment later when four fighter jets rush past, the roar of their engines blocked by Future Betty’s sound dampeners. The bi-wing design and stealth approach help me identify the craft as Russian Mikoyan LMFS. They’re fifth generation multirole aircraft capable of attacking land and air targets with an array of weapons concealed in their oversized weapons bays. Until this moment, myself and everyone else in the U.S. government, at least officially, believed they were still in development.

“Up, up and away,” Woodstock says, and I’m crushed into my seat again as we rocket straight up to forty thousand feet, far above the fighters, and cross into U.S. airspace just seconds later.

7

We’re back over the East Coast fast enough that Russia could never claim I was anywhere near Big Diomede without looking like buffoons. Of course, for that to really be true, I have to be seen, my presence here a matter of public knowledge. So as we descend over Beverly, Massachusetts, I ask Woodstock to let Collins and me off at Lynch Park.

Maigo hasn’t said much about her encounter with the mysterious thing beneath the island, and I don’t think she’s going to. Not until it starts making sense to her. But we’ve confirmed that something is buried there. Something big. Something that requires a pilot. What it called a Vixnoctus. A voice. The same way Maigo had been for Nemesis, and Endo was now. That alone tells me that I want whatever is buried there to stay that way. I’m sure a lot of paleontologists and archeologists might disagree, but some secrets are better left buried.

“You sure you don’t want me to stay with you?” I ask Maigo, while standing by the still-closed hatch with Collins. “We don’t have to do this.”

“I’m fine,” she says, sounding drowsy. “I’m going to sleep.”

“With Lilly at the house?” Collins says, sounding skeptical. Lilly is a bundle of mischievous energy. She’s more level-headed than she used to be, especially when on mission, but locked up in the Crow’s Nest, she can be trouble. We’ve negated this somewhat by purchasing every game system imaginable, but she beats and grows bored with games nearly as fast as we can buy them.

“We’ve got Titanfall,” Maigo says. “Will take her at least a few hours to beat. That’s all I need.”

For Maigo, four hours is a good night’s sleep. She doesn’t seem to need much more, and this is really the first time I’ve actually seen her sleepy.

“Okay,” I say. “But if she keeps you awake—”

“I’ll tell Hawkins,” she says.

“Tell Joliet,” Collins says. “She’s small, but I’ve seen her crack the whip.”

“Nice,” I say and chuckle. “Try not to use that phrase with Lilly.”

Collins looks befuddled.

“Crack the whip,” Maigo says. “It’s an allusion to lion taming.”

“Geez,” Collins says. “Shit. Please don’t repeat it.”

“Just go,” Maigo says, smiling and shooing us toward the ramp, which has started to descend. “Have fun being spotted in public.”

I turn toward the exit and stop. The view ahead is leafy green. “Uhh, Woodstock...”

“You said you didn’t want to be spotted,” the old pilot gripes. “Too many people in the park to set down in the grass, so this is the only way. You can either make like monkeys and climb down, or we can let the world know we have an invisible stealth plane.”

I look back out. We’re just fifteen feet from the ground, backed up to a tree on the backside of the park, overlooking the rocky coast of Beverly Harbor. Then we’re inside the tree, pushing slowly into the branches.

“Better?” Woodstock asks.

I lift a branch and see a clear path down through a maze of sturdy limbs. I motion toward the hole I’ve just made and turn to Collins with a grin. “After you, madam.”

Collins shakes her head, but offers no complaint. She slides down onto a branch and climbs toward the ground.

Maigo takes the branch from me so I can follow Collins, but I pause for a moment. “If you think of anything—”

“I’ll call you,” she says.

I hold out a pinkie. “Pinkie swear?’

She raises a single eyebrow.

“They grow up so fast,” I say, and I climb down onto the branch. I cling in place, watching the hatch close. Maigo maintains eye contact with me, until the hatch is closed. Then they could be gone, or they could be laughing at me while I climb down. It’s impossible to tell with the X-35.

I drop down from the tree next to Collins and scan the area. I can hear people in the distance, but there’s no one around. The park was destroyed three years ago. Its two beaches, open grassy area, half-shell theater and ice cream stand were reduced to char. Only the brick walls of the old rose garden survived the moment Nemesis’s orange membrane was punctured by an overzealous Air Force pilot. The resulting explosion destroyed a good portion of the harbor in both Beverly and Salem, crushing homes, businesses and parks alike. While many homes are still being rebuilt, the park looks like new. It became a symbol of the city’s resilience. The grass grew green. The melted playground was replaced by a megalith of primary colors. And the rose garden blooms with an array of roses from around the world, including an orange variety at the center, symbolizing the containment of the blast that claimed thousands of lives. That blast nearly destroyed the Crow’s Nest, which is just a mile away atop Powder Hill.

We head down the sloping grass toward the red brick walls of the rose garden. It’s become one of our favorite places to get away. To think. And other things. The smell of roses reaches us before we even enter. I pause at the main entrance. Two lion statues face inward, just beyond the entrance, looking at a columned atrium on the far side of the sunken garden. There used to be a fountain inside it, but it hasn’t worked in decades. I read the saying carved into the walls on either side of the entrance. “Whosoever enters here let him beware. For he shall nevermore escape nor be free of my spell.”

Collins steps past the entryway and into the garden. “I, for one, wouldn’t mind staying here for a lifetime.”

We meander along the paths for a moment, the warm sun on our faces, surrounded by the buzzing of bees and the scent of roses. Then voices. Loud ones. We walk to the open side of the park, facing the Atlantic Ocean. Just beyond the marble statue of The Falconer, standing guard between it and the garden is the seawall, which drops down to the park’s beach that wasn’t melted into a sheet of glass three years ago. But standing between the statue and the ocean is a group of people arranged in a circle, throwing a ball back and forth, chatting loudly. The few people outside the circle snap photos with their phones, no doubt updating Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr or whatever it is hip people use these days. I still have a MySpace account.