“How many?” Abby asked Op Nine.
“It’s difficult . . .” He shaded his eyes with one huge hand and squinted toward the sparkling light. “Thirty, perhaps forty legions.”
“Legions?” I asked. “What’s a legion?”
Abby said to him, “Not all, then.”
He shook his head. “A search party.”
“A search party of what?” I asked.
“Can we outrun them?” she asked.
He said quietly, “ ‘Their horses are swifter than leopards, and are more fierce than the evening wolves: and their horsemen shall come from far; they shall fly as the eagle that hasteth to eat.’ ”
“I’ll take that as a no,” she said. “Then we engage.” She started to turn away. He grabbed her arm and pulled her back.
“No!” he said in a fierce whisper. “Our mission is to acquire the target. There is still time.”
“Time for what?” I asked, but I really didn’t expect an answer by this point.
Now the orange on the horizon had deepened to a fiery red mixed with bright white sparks. The stars winked out as the burning light advanced, filling the night sky, and a breeze noticeably warmer than the cool desert air began to blow across our faces.
“We must take cover,” Op Nine said. “Immediately.”
Abby turned and started toward the others, making some kind of complicated hand signal as she went, and right away they opened the storage compartments on the foils and began pulling out what looked like brown tarps.
Op Nine had said we needed to take cover immediately, but he didn’t move a muscle. He stood stock-still and stared at the flickering lights of white and gold. The breeze had turned into a full-fledged wind that grew hotter with each passing second. The ground started to tremble.
“Uh, Op Nine, didn’t you say we had to take cover?”
He shook his head as if rousing himself from a dream.
“Yes. Come, Kropp.”
He threw my arm over his shoulder and helped me back to the foils. The agents had spread the brown tarps over the vehicles and now were crawling underneath them. Ashley crouched beside one, motioning to us.
“Alfred,” Op Nine said. “This is very important: do not look into their eyes. They will know what you fear.”
He lowered me to the ground and I started to crawl under the tarp. He grabbed my arm and pulled my face close to his.
“And what you love.”
He had to shout over the wind, which was howling by this point, spraying us with stinging grains of sand. He let the tarp fall and I felt someone’s hand on my wrist, pulling me away from the edge.
“Don’t move,” Ashley whispered. “Don’t talk.”
The darkness under the tarp faded, or maybe I was getting used to it, because after a minute I could see her bright blue eyes darting back and forth. Ashley’s hand was white-knuckled on the CW3XD that lay across her lap, her index finger caressing the trigger. Ashley was afraid.
The tarp rippled and snapped around us as the gale worsened and sand popped against the material, making this strange hissing sound like gas escaping from a bottle. I could hear something else too, as if the wind was a curtain rippling as this sound passed behind it. Voices, or maybe not voices but somehow the echo of voices, and I started to shake as the tarp around us began to glow red.
It was very close now, whatever it was, and the closer it got, the more I shook. It was hot and stuffy under the covering and I was sweating, but I shivered like I had a fever. Op Nine’s warning echoed over and over in my head: Don’t look into their eyes! Don’t look into their eyes! My mind became like a slice of Swiss cheese, stretched thin, full of holes filled with darkness, and that darkness was full of horror.
Dimly, under the howling wind, I could hear someone screaming. She needs to be quiet, I thought. Ashley, be quiet! But it wasn’t Ashley screaming, of course; it was me.
Then, as if it shot through one of those holes in my mind, a hand reached for me in the darkness, soft and warm, and without thinking I pulled her into my arms.