LITMIR.BIZ

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then shushing him before he uttered a single word. The two men stood in the middle of their scattered campsite, listening intently, scanning the skies for the red light.

      There was no sign of it in any direction.

      It was gone.

      “What. The. Hell. Was. That?” asked Donny.

      “I don’t know,” replied Walt, his eyes shining with excitement. “I’ve never seen anything move like that. Never. And I…” He trailed off, still staring up into the sky.

      “You what?” asked Donny. He was beginning to smile at the incredible weirdness of the moment, glad that he had shared it with his friend.

      “I thought I… heard something,” said Walt. “When it passed through, just for a second. Something crazy.”

      “What was it?”

      “Laughter,” said Walt, a smile of embarrassment rising on his face. “It sounded like a girl, laughing.”

      Fifty metres above their heads, Larissa Kinley floated in the cool air, a smile of unbridled pleasure on her pale, beautiful face.

      It had been reckless to swoop through the little campsite, and it was almost certainly a breach of regulations, but she didn’t care; she knew full well that neither of the men had been able to see her at the speed she had been moving, just as she knew they wouldn’t be able to see her now, even if they happened to look directly at her. The matt-black material of her Blacklight uniform disappeared completely into the darkness of the desert sky. And neither man was looking, in any case; they were chatting excitedly to each other, their words perfectly audible to her supernatural ears. She savoured their conversation for a few moments, then spun elegantly in the air and flew slowly back towards the wide white expanse of the dry bed of Groom Lake.

      Larissa loved the desert.

      Its vast expanse made her feel tiny; made her feel free. She would obviously have been forbidden from flying during the hours of daylight even if doing so wouldn’t have caused her to burst into flames, but once the sun was down, she was allowed to take to the skies. Such freedom was wonderful after more than three months in Department 19, where her every movement was scrutinised and subject to seemingly dozens of rules and regulations. Part of it was simple geography: the Loop was hidden away in the middle of one of the most densely populated countries in the world, whereas NS9 sat at the centre of several hundred square miles of land that belonged to the US government, land that no member of the public was permitted to enter. Everyone knew Area 51 existed, but no one knew what really happened there, and the military were quite happy to let the UFO conspiracies run and run; they worked as a fantastically efficient red herring.

      She had been in the desert for almost three weeks. When Cal Holmwood had told her that she was being sent on secondment to NS9, she had immediately assumed she was being punished for something. It had seemed unthinkably cruel that the Interim Director, who was fully aware of the situation that had developed between herself and Jamie Carpenter, would send her halfway around the world to do a job that any number of Operators could do just as well. But she was beginning to revise her opinion of his motives.

      Larissa missed Jamie and Kate and Matt; her friends made her happy, and Jamie made her positively blissful at times. But they were often the only things inside Blacklight that did. She was a vampire member of an organisation whose sole reason for existing was to destroy vampires, and although she had proved herself time and again since being allowed to join, there were plenty of Operators inside the Loop who still looked at her with barely concealed disgust. Part of it was the fact that she had spent her first days there in a cell on the detention level, part of it was the perception that she had endangered the life of Jamie’s mother to serve her own needs, but mostly it was the mere fact of who, and what, she was. She was surrounded by hostility, and suspicion, with no indication that either was going to end any time soon.

      At NS9 she had instantly been given a fresh start, the clean slate she knew she would never be granted at the Loop. She had been made to feel welcome and valued, and had made friends, so quickly and naturally that it had surprised her: men and women whose company she enjoyed, who made her feel normal and gave her energetic self-loathing a rest. As she drifted over Papoose Lake, descending slowly towards the wide-open doors of the NS9 hangar, she saw one of them waiting for her in the long rectangle of yellow light. She slipped easily to the ground and smiled at Tim Albertsson, who grinned back at her with his perfectly straight, perfectly white, all-American teeth.

      The tall, broad former Navy SEAL was Larissa’s handler during her secondment in the desert. He was of Scandinavian descent, as his blond hair and blue eyes would readily attest, and a member of NS9’s elite Special Operator programme.

      “Nice flight?” he asked.

      “Very nice,” she replied. “Beautiful in fact. It felt like I could see all the way to the ocean.”

      “With your eyes, you probably could,” said Tim.

      Larissa laughed. “Maybe.”

      “Dinner?” asked Tim. “I’m meeting everyone in the diner.”

      “I can’t right now,” replied Larissa. “I’ve got a meeting with the Director, and I’m going to try to call home in a few hours. But I’ll come round if I get time in between.”

      Tim nodded. “Say hello to Jamie for me if you don’t make it,” he said.

      “I will,” said Larissa, knowing that she wouldn’t.

      “Cool,” he said, and smiled widely. “I might see you later then.”

      “Maybe,” she said, and walked into the hangar, her heart thumping in her chest.

      *

      Larissa waited until the lift began to descend, then leant heavily against the metal wall.

      Her heart was refusing to slow down. Part of the reason, she knew, was Tim, with his handsome face and his hair and his casual, easy-going confidence, but it was mostly because of the realisation that had been steadily building inside her for the last week or so. It intensified whenever she was about to speak to Jamie, because it was the one thing she couldn’t tell him; the one thing she knew he wouldn’t want to hear.

      She got out of the lift on Level 1 and floated along the corridor. She never thought twice about flying inside the NS9 base, never felt self-conscious or worried that the next person she saw would give her the look of contempt she had become all too used to. Inside the base that everyone called Dreamland, the only emotion her vampire abilities provoked with any regularity was good-natured jealousy from Operators who wished they had her strength and speed.

      Larissa knocked on the door of the Director’s quarters and felt it swing slightly open. The door was rarely closed, let alone locked, and she had never seen a single guard stationed outside it; it was just one of the many ways that NS9 differed from Blacklight. She pushed it open, calling General Allen’s name as she did so.

      “Come on in,” shouted a voice.

      Larissa floated through the door. The room beyond was square with a wide desk standing to one side. On the wall opposite a vast black screen had been hung, reaching almost from floor to ceiling, and at the back of the room stood a wooden table on which was arranged a silver tray full of bottles: whisky, brandy, vodka, gin. Beneath the table was a small grey fridge that Larissa knew was always full. The table stood between two doors that led into the rest of the General’s quarters; above it, the wall was covered with pennants and banners and scarves in the black and gold colours of the West Point football team.

      Larissa had spent a number of evenings in this friendly, comfortable room since arriving at NS9. General Allen was a warm, garrulous conversationalist and she enjoyed his company immensely. He regaled her with stories of the men and women she had met during her secondment and the ones she had left behind in England, stories of adventure and daring and blood and death. Last time, he had told tales of Henry Seward and Julian Carpenter, two men for whom the General had enormous affection. She had listened intently as he described the three of them, all young

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