LITMIR.BIZ

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up at her. “Press your thumb on the button.”

      Dekka did it, because if she didn’t, Sam would. He would of course be furious if he found out she was protecting him. The thought brought a small smile to Dekka’s lips. Sam and Astrid didn’t need more of the FAYZ, they needed college and work and lives and hopefully, someday, a bouncing little baby that they’d name Dekka if she was a girl.

      That was Dekka’s fantasy for them, anyway.

      “Am I going back to work tomorrow?” she asked.

      Tom Peaks shook his head.

      Dekka unclipped the name tag with her cover name—Jean, her middle name—reached across, rolled down the window and tossed the tag out to clatter on the blacktop.

      “Wherever you’re taking me, my bike had better get there too, and without a scratch. Oh, and fill the tank.”

ASO-2

      ANOMALOUS SPACE OBJECT–2 struck planet Earth after its million-year trip, landing precisely where it was expected to land—in a section of the North Sea just off the coast of Scotland that had been surrounded by NATO ships—American, British and Dutch. Below the water one British and one US submarine were holding the perimeter around a French deep-sea exploration submersible. Ships from the Russian Navy and the Chinese Navy looked on from a barely discreet distance, their surveillance equipment all atingle.

      But the meteorite played a trick on all of them. The seventeen-pound object hit perfectly in the target zone moving at about ninety thousand miles an hour, but like a rock slung sidearm toward a pond, it skipped.

      The first skip carried it six miles.

      The second skip carried it just two miles, but that two miles took it to the Isle of Islay where it struck a rock outcropping—still moving at fantastic speed—and broke apart.

      Homeland Security Task Force 66 immediately diverted every resource at its disposal—the international naval force and their marines, land-based police and military forces—and turned the sleepy Isle of Islay—pronounced “eye-la” and best known for sheep and Scotch whisky—into something between a war zone and a bad action comedy. Within an hour the coast of Islay was beset by dangerous-looking ships, while helicopters buzzed around like bees who thought Islay was their hive.

      All the activity brought the islanders out of their homes and fields and businesses to see what was going on. Once they had deduced that the military and police of several nations were all searching for a meteorite, out came the metal detectors and the sifters and the shovels. The locals might not know what the rock was, but they knew it had value.

      Yet it was not greed that caused the biggest problem, rather it was kindness. It was young Delia Macbeth, fourteen, who saw her little brother, Sean, just three years old, playing with a chip of dark rock. The chip was oddly shaped, in that if you held it a certain way it looked a bit like Mickey Mouse. Sean was sucking on the rock and at first Delia did the proper big sister thing and took it from him. Then Sean started bawling, so Delia did the easy thing and gave it back.

      After all, it was just a rock, and if Sean wanted it that badly . . .

      Search teams swept the lower half of the island and eventually recovered sixty percent of ASO-2.

      Sixty percent.

      The other forty percent was scattered across fields and woods. And about three ounces of it was in the greedy fist and slavering mouth of a three-year-old with a notoriously bad temper.

3

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THE COMMITTING OF CRIMES

      DAYS PASSED. HOMEWORK was done. School was attended. But school had ceased to be the center of Cruz’s life.

      They had dinner once with Shade’s father, Professor Martin Darby, just back from Scotland. He was a good-looking man, a silver fox type, formal by nature, but trying to be accessible. “Please, call me Darby, everyone does.”

      He tried to play the cool dad, but his interest and attention were elsewhere. He seemed overly formal with Shade, and she returned it in kind. Not that there was any hostility; on the contrary, the affection and mutual respect were clear, and something Cruz envied terribly. But Professor Darby’s mind was not on his daughter, let alone his daughter’s new friend, who—even a distracted astrophysicist had figured out—was not a boyfriend.

      Above all, Shade and Cruz planned. Which was to say, Shade planned with ferocious efficiency and relentless logic, as it began to dawn on Cruz that while the scheme might seem wildly improbable, even impossible, it was no such thing for her impressive new friend.

      Cruz had never met anyone like Shade. Not even a little like Shade. It was as if there were two people living in that pretty, scarred body: a high school science nerd and a shark. Sometimes Cruz played a little game with herself, seeing Shade’s unblemished left side as representing an interesting but essentially normal high school girl; and the right side, the side with the scar, as the shark. The girl Shade Darby was funny and relaxed and even moderately empathetic; the predatory fish? Well, as the famous movie line went, the shark had “lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eyes.”

      Yes, there were times when Shade frightened Cruz a little. But that frisson, that sense that she was dealing with a person far larger than could possibly fit within this girl, just added to Cruz’s growing infatuation. Writers—even unpublished ones—loved characters, and Shade Darby was definitely a character.

      Was it the shark that kept Cruz from asking Shade why she was doing this? Was it the invisible but very real barrier that Shade erected around that question and around her past?

      At the very least Cruz wanted to ask about the scar. It was not subtle; it was like something out of an old Frankenstein movie, a good six inches long and cross-hatched. Shade could have worn her hair in such a way as to hide it, but she didn’t. She could have worn turtlenecks, but she didn’t. She wore the scar proudly, it seemed to Cruz. Or was the right word “defiantly?” It had the odd effect of accentuating her prettiness, but at the same time it gave her an aura of toughness and mystery.

       I don’t want to push her. I don’t want to lose her.

      Cruz had thus far in her writing life stuck to short stories and the occasional bit of not-great poetry. But she had enough of the instincts of a writer to recognize that here was a story. Maybe a cautionary tale of obsession. Maybe a weepy rise-above-it tale in which Shade coped with the death of one parent and the emotional absence of the other. But that was certainly not how Shade saw herself, and when Cruz was with Shade she could not help being swept up in Shade’s determination. Shade was like an ebb tide sweeping Cruz out to sea, out to danger and yet . . .

       And yet, you are willing to be swept, Cruz. Aimless and friendless, you are just so much flotsam on the river of life.

      One thing had become clear: there was no more harassment from anyone at school, and somehow this was Shade’s doing, though Cruz had no notion of how her friend managed it. The student body simply seemed to have figured out that Cruz was under Shade’s protection, and that was all it took. Cruz did not become popular overnight; in fact, if anything she felt people avoiding her, but they did not hassle her, and for now that was enough.

      Cruz sometimes wondered what Shade was like before losing her mother. Had she always had this split personality? Had she always had a gift for ruthlessness and the iron will to go with it? Had she ever just been a normal high school girl? Did whatever it was that took her mother’s life harden her? And was it the kind of hard that was only on the outside, or did it go all the way down?

      Cruz

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