Deactivate.
Joyce’s voice in the earpiece. Tight. Then tighter.
I want them out of commission when we get there.
Nick kept his hand on the butt of the pistol Joyce had returned to him an hour before, and he waited. Maya watched the third monitor on the folding table. Five red dots at the edge of the compound. The clot moved.
“They’re coming,” Maya said.
“Yeah.”
“On foot.”
“Yeah.”
“Together.”
“Yeah.”
She sat back.
“Joyce had us marked,” she said. “Didn’t he.”
“Zeiss has a pistol on me and you’re in the back of a Humvee he’s driving in twenty minutes. Yes.”
“You gave them the wrong can.”
“I gave them frogs.”
Her look held for a long count, then she let it go.
At the edge of the burning compound, Spartacus took his last count of the standing.
Achilles was not standing well.
The alpha stepped to him through a smoke that smelled of burned cocaine and burned men. He raised the wrong-articulated fingers Sherman had bred into him.
He hooked his claws under the box bolted to his skull and ripped. Cartilage tore. Blood sheeted down his jaw. The regulator hit the dirt ticking.
He pulled the one from Achilles.
He tore the others out one by one, fast and filthy, before any human hand could touch them again.
The four of them stood in the dusk with wet patches above their ears and something moving between them in registers no human had ever mapped. Orestes made a sound. Perseus answered. Hector put his snout against Achilles’s neck. Achilles, throat armor black with his own blood, pressed back.
Spartacus looked once at the barracks.
He turned his head toward the logging road.
He went.
The other four fell in behind him at a long easy lope, and the two spitters, running low, ran wide on either flank. The ankylosaur stayed in the lobby of Pepe’s mansion. He had found, in the brass planters along the back wall, a pattern of tropical ferns that was, for him, the best thing that had happened to him in four months. He grazed. The marble of the floor under his armored haunches had been quarried in Carrara and shipped at private cost. The marble had been laid by an Italian crew over three weeks. The ankylosaur did not know any of this and would not, on the way out, be able to tell anyone what he had eaten there.
In the Humvee, Zeiss drove with the pistol on the console and one eye on the rearview.
Nick rode shotgun. Maya sat in the rear bench with her hands loose on her knees.
“Did you think you could fool us with the frogs,” Zeiss said.
“Figured once I had the can somebody would come after me.” Nick watched the road. “Decoy buys time.”
Maya made a small sound in her throat. Nick held the road.
“Your boyfriend gave us the wrong can of genes,” Zeiss said, to the mirror.
“You?” Maya said.
Nick let the word sit. The convoy was slowing. Up ahead the Control Wagon had come to a full stop and a man was out of it, walking forward.
“Why are we stopping,” Zeiss said.
The radio crackled to Kroner’s voice.
Too narrow to turn around.
Joyce.
We can’t back up all the way to the village.
Sherman.
Quarter mile away. Coming fast.
Nick worked the distance in his head. A raptor at a lope covered a quarter mile in under fifty seconds.
Fifty seconds.
A scrap of his mother’s kitchen song flashed through his head and was gone.
Ahead, Baron von Drax stuck his head out of the Mercedes.
“Why do we wait,” he called.
“Problem on the road ahead,” Joyce called back.
Von Drax climbed two steps out of the car to see, and his face did the thing a face does when it has time to understand but not time to prepare.
“Mein Gott in Himmel,” he said.
They came.
They came in a V, and the V widened as the road widened, and the spitters pressed in off the flanks with their mantles up. Spartacus hit the Control Wagon at a full run and went over the hood of it like a dog taking a fence.
The convoy broke.
A mercenary on a bike got half a turn before Hector plucked him clean off the seat. The bike went on down the road at idle, riderless, until it caught a root and laid itself down. Another rider got further — got, for a bad second, the impression he had a chance — and then Pollux landed behind him on the saddle and wrapped two arms around his chest, and the rider glanced back to see who had joined him, and the mantle opened in front of his face like a black umbrella.
In the Humvee, a sickle-claw came down through the windshield and punched Zeiss to his seat through the sternum. The foot lifted. Nick kicked his door and rolled.
Maya was out the rear passenger side before the claw dropped twice.
—got to get to the— and the thought broke because she hit the dirt shoulder-first and the ground came up to finish the sentence for her. She rolled. She was up. She was running.
They made the ditch behind an upended Humvee eight feet apart. A streak of blood crossed her cheekbone. Not hers.
“The pistol,” she said.
“Got it.”
“Joyce.”
“Yeah.”
Ten yards down the road Joyce was crawling out from under a flipped Humvee on his elbows. Field jacket, pale hair, a pistol in his hand.
Nick thumbed the safety off. He held it low.
Maya went under the Humvee on her belly to reach the body of a narco on the far side who had, she could see, a small pistol trapped beneath his thigh.
She made half of it.
A hand closed on her ankle and pulled.
She came out in the road on her back looking up at a pair of light boots and a pistol pointed at her face.
“They didn’t stop,” Joyce said. Same voice he had used on the plane out of Switzerland. A man who had been right and was, in the moment, finding it unpleasant to be right. “No insulin. No adrenaline.”
“Willpower,” Maya said.
The corner of his mouth did the Joyce thing, half up, half bored.
“They’ll be back,” he said.
“Probably.”
“No reason to think they won’t kill you too.”
She had, for most of her adult life, made a discipline of telling the truth to men with guns.
“No reason,” she said.
He brought the pistol closer. The muzzle hung ten inches from the bridge of her nose and the front sight drifted into her vision and settled there. Behind Joyce, through the trees, the Mercedes was trying a turn in a series of bad gear changes.
“I’ll save them the trouble,” Joyce said.
Nick hit him from the side at the speed of a man who had, at twenty-three, trained for exactly this.
They went down together.
The pistol cracked. The round punched the Humvee beside Maya’s head and she felt the heat of it across her brow and she was rolling. Nick and Joyce rolled the other way into the road trading punches, and Joyce’s pistol bounced loose into the dirt.
Joyce got a knee up and kicked Nick off him. He came up on his knees looking around.
The halberd was there.
Von Drax had handed it that morning to the U.S. Colonel as a gift for his private collection of Things A Man Ought to Have, and the Colonel had left it on the floor behind his seat. In the crash the SUV had spilled its contents. The halberd lay across the raw root of a ceiba tree, blade dirty.
Joyce came up with it.
He swung.
It was a good swing. Nick ducked under it. Joyce came around with the butt of the shaft and clipped Nick’s temple and Nick went to one knee and got up again.
“I was wrong about you, Nick.” Joyce was smiling. The smile was real. “I thought you were smart. I thought they’d baked all the idealism out of your skull in that POW camp.”
The halberd came down. Nick caught the shaft on his forearm and the forearm said no and his hand opened. He lost the pistol in the scramble.
Joyce swung again and opened Nick’s shoulder from collarbone out to the point of the deltoid. Nick backed up, bleeding.
Up the road Maya came up off the dirt with Joyce’s pistol in two hands. She pulled the trigger. Empty chamber. She pulled again. Empty.
“How did you do it, Nick,” Joyce said. He had backed Nick up to the tree line. He was taking his time. “How did you sabotage this.”
“They did it on their own.” Nick breathed through his teeth. “They watched. They waited.”
Joyce rushed him. Nick caught the root of the ceiba with his heel and went down backward, and for a count of one he was on his back in the dirt with the halberd raised in Joyce’s two-hand grip the grip of a woodsman about to chop.
“Still think they chose you?” Joyce said.
Something behind Joyce put a foot down on bent sheet metal.
Joyce turned, fast, bringing the halberd around, and the blade went into a chest that was not made of flesh but of body armor over flesh, and the armor stopped the blade at the laminate and the flesh took the last two inches.
Achilles stood over him.
Achilles had come a mile from the compound on a wound that should have put him down at the gate.
He roared. He closed a hand on the shaft and pulled the halberd out of his own armor in a single draw. He dropped it. He lunged.
Nick scrambled backward on his palms.
Joyce’s scream was a short bad scream and it stopped.
Achilles dropped what was left of Joyce and turned toward Nick. His head hung wrong. His eyes were not focusing in the same plane.
“Achilles,” Maya called, soft, from ten yards up the road. “No. Stop.”
He turned his head toward her. He tilted it — the tilt Sherman had drawn in the notebook on the training platform four months back, a dog’s tilt at a sound he had forgotten he knew.
He took one more step.
He fell like tall timber.
Spartacus came out of the trees with the other three behind him.
Nick stayed on the ground. Maya stood.
Casper darted in front of her low and hissed and put his mantle up, and Nick, on the ground, said the two words you say: don’t move.
She held.
Spartacus came forward through the wrecked vehicles one slow foot at a time, and the smell of him was the smell of an animal that has been inside a burning building. He put his snout an inch from Maya’s cheek. He took two long draws of her. The nostril worked. He moved down her arm. He moved to her hip. He was smelling for the chemistry he had been bound to, the small signature he had been taught on Isabel Chartiers’s purple sweater in the corridor in Switzerland.
He found nothing on her.
He turned and put his snout on Nick. Again nothing.
He walked three paces to Achilles, rolled the body over with a foot in the careless motion a man uses to turn a log. He held there for two beats with his face against Achilles’s neck, then rose.
He straightened.
He lifted his head and made a sound the engineers at Biosyn had never heard him make, not a roar exactly, not a trumpet exactly, a kind of announcement that Maya, who had spent her life with big cats, heard as an announcement.
He turned.
He went into the jungle at a long easy lope with the other three behind him, and the canopy took them in pieces, and then whole, and then not at all.
Maya ran to Nick.
“Are you all right.”
“First time I’ve been wounded with a fifteenth century weapon.” He examined the shoulder. Long cut. Not deep. “How far you think they’ll get. Without insulin.”
She looked into the green they had gone into.
“Hard to say.”
He got his arm across her shoulder and they started down the road toward the village, stepping around what the squad had left, and behind them, in the ditch beside the caged Humvee, Joyce’s field jacket moved once in the breeze from the river and did not move again.
The canopy closed over him. Spartacus did not come back.