The Demon Crown

1

The dead man lay sprawled facedown, half in the sand, half in the grass.

“Poor bastard almost made it back to his boat,” Professor Ken Matsui noted.

He stepped aside to allow the team’s doctor — a young woman named Ana Luiz Chavos — to examine the body. Anyone officially setting foot on Ilha da Queimada Grande, an island some twenty miles off the coast of Brazil, was required to be accompanied by a medical doctor, along with a representative from the Brazilian navy.

Their military escort, First Lieutenant Ramon Dias, checked the small motorized skiff that was camouflaged and hidden among some rocks a few yards away. He snorted derisively and spat into the waves. “Caçador furtivo… idiota.”

“He says the man must’ve been a poacher,” Ken explained to his postgraduate student. The two of them had traveled together from Cornell University to this remote Brazilian island.

Oscar Hoff was twenty-seven, shaven headed, with a sleeve of tattoos down his left arm. His exterior gave him a hardened, street-tough look, but it was all show for that occasional young coed who mistook the book for the cover. From his presently sallow complexion and the sickened twist to his lips, it was clear this was the first body the student had stumbled across. Of course, the state of the deceased likely didn’t help matters. The body had been picked and scavenged by birds and crabs. A black stain soaked the sand in a wide pool around the body.

Dr. Chavos seemed little bothered by the condition of the deceased. She examined one bare arm, then the other, then sat back on her heels. She spoke matter-of-factly in Portuguese to Dias, then to the waves as she stared toward the sun hanging low in the sky. Sunset was only a couple of hours off.

“Dead for at least three days,” Ana Luiz assessed aloud and pointed to the man’s left arm. From the elbow to his wrist, most of the flesh was blackened and necrotic. A flash of white bone shone through the melted tissues. “Snakebite.”

“Bothrops insularis,” Ken surmised as he glanced up the neighboring rocks and toward the rain forest that crowned the heights of this hundred-acre island. “The golden lancehead pit viper.”

“It is why we call this place Snake Island,” Diaz said. “This is their island. And you’d do wise to respect that.”

It was the pit vipers’ dominance on the island — and their endangered status — that restricted access to Queimada Grande to the Brazilian navy. They came once every two months to service the lone lighthouse here. Even that beacon was automated after the first family of lighthouse keepers — a wife, husband, and three children — were all killed one night when snakes slipped inside through an open window. The family tried to flee but were bitten by more vipers hanging from branches along the forested path to the beach.

Since then, tourists were forbidden from setting foot here. Only the occasional scientific team was allowed to visit, but even they had to be accompanied by a doctor armed with antivenom and a military escort.

Like today.

With the substantial backing of his Japanese financiers, Ken was able to wrangle this last-minute trip, tucking it in before a storm that was due to strike the region tomorrow. He and his student had to rush from their hotel in the small coastal village of Itanhaém in order to take advantage of this opportunity. They barely made the boat in time.

Ana Luiz stood up. “We should collect and secure your two specimens and head back to the mainland before we lose the light.” Their Zodiac pontoon boat was beached in a neighboring sandy cove. “You don’t want to be here after dark.”

“We’ll be quick,” Ken promised. “It shouldn’t take long considering the sheer number of lanceheads roaming this island.”

He slipped out a long-poled hook and turned to Oscar, giving the student some final instructions. “There’s about one snake for every square yard of this island. So stay back, and let me take the lead. And keep in mind that at any time you’re only a step or two away from death hiding in a rock or lounging in a tree.”

Oscar glanced to the body on the beach. That was likely reminder enough to be extra cautious. “Why… why would someone risk coming here alone?”

Ana Luiz answered, “A single lancehead fetches upwards of twenty thousand dollars on the black market. Sometimes more.”

“Wildlife smuggling is big business,” Ken explained. “I’ve run across a few such biopirates in different corners of the world.”

And this body is certainly not the first I’ve seen as a consequence of such greed.

Though only a decade older than his postgraduate student, Ken had spent most of his time in the field, traveling to various corners of the world. He had dual PhDs in entomology and toxicology, blending the two degrees into the field of venomics, the study of compounds found in poisonous animals.

The combination of disciplines was especially fitting considering his own mixed background. His father was first-generation Japanese and had spent time as a child in an internment camp in California, while Ken’s German mother had emigrated as a young girl after the war. A common joke while growing up was that their family had created its own mini-Axis stronghold in the middle of suburbia.

Then, two years ago, the pair had passed away, dying within a month of one another, leaving behind their blended heritage in Ken’s pale complexion, dense dark hair, and slight squint to his eyes.

Likewise, his mixed-race background — what the Japanese called hafu—had undoubtedly helped him acquire his current grant. The research trip to Queimada Grande was partially funded by Tanaka Pharmaceuticals, out of Japan. The goal was to discover the next wonder drug hidden in the cocktail of toxins found in the venom of this island’s inhabitants.

“Let’s get going,” Ken said.

Oscar swallowed hard and nodded. He fumbled with an extendable set of snake tongs. While such a tool could securely grab a serpent, Ken preferred a simple hook. It caused less stress to an animal. If the tongs were used too aggressively, a snake could react to the threat and lash out.

As the group set off from the beach, they stepped carefully with their calf-high leather boots. Sand quickly turned into a rocky stretch, studded with low bushes. Fifty yards upslope, a dark fringe of rain forest beckoned.

Let’s hope we don’t have to go in there to find our specimens.

“Search under the bushes.” Ken demonstrated by reaching out with the hooked tip of his pole and lifting the lowermost branches. “But don’t try to secure them there. Let them slither into the open before attempting to grab them.”

Oscar’s tongs shook as he tried to follow Ken’s example on a nearby bush.

“Take a deep breath,” Ken encouraged. “You know how to do this. Just like we practiced at the zoo back home.”

Oscar grimaced and probed his first bush. “All… all clear.”

“Good. Just one step at a time.”

They continued with Ken in the lead. He attempted to ease his student’s tension by keeping his voice light. “It was once believed that the lanceheads were brought to the island by pirates looking to protect their buried treasure.”

Ana Luiz chuckled, while Dias merely scowled at the thought.

“So not pirates, I guess,” Oscar said.

“No. This particular set of vipers got stranded on this island some eleven thousand years ago, when sea levels rose and flooded the land bridge that once connected the island to the coast. Isolated, they had no true predators and reproduced rapidly. But the only food source was up in the trees.”

“Birds.”

“The island is on a major migratory path, so the snake’s bounty is refilled every year. But unlike land-bound prey, birds proved to be trickier. Even after climbing trees, the snakes couldn’t exactly run down a bird that took flight after being bitten. So they evolved a more toxic venom, five times stronger than their cousins on the mainland.”

“In order to kill the birds more quickly.”

“Exactly. Lancehead venom is truly unique, bearing a cornucopia of toxins. Poisons that not only melt flesh but also cause kidney collapse, heart failure, brain hemorrhages, and intestinal bleeding. In fact, it’s those very hemotoxic components in their venom that show high promise for developing drugs to combat heart disease.”

“And that’s why we’re here,” Oscar said. “Hoping to find the next captopril.”

He smiled. “At least, that’s what the fine folks at Tanaka Pharmaceuticals are counting on.”

In fact, it was not a foolhardy gamble on their part. Captopril — Bristol-Myers Squibb’s bestselling hypertension drug — was isolated from a close cousin to the golden lancehead: Bothrops jararaca, another Brazilian pit viper.

“And who knows what else we might discover buried amid all the poison found here?” Ken added. “Prialt is a powerful pain reliever that just came on the market from Elan Pharmaceuticals. It was derived from a toxin found in poisonous cone snails. Then there’s a protein discovered in the venom of Gila monsters that is being investigated as a miracle drug for Alzheimer’s. More and more, companies around the globe are investing significant resources into venom-based drug discovery programs.”

“Sounds like it’s a good time to be a toxicologist specializing in poisonous animals.” Oscar grinned over at him. “Maybe we should go into business ourselves. Venoms ‘R’ Us.”

Ken playfully poked at his student with his snake hook. “Concentrate on catching your first specimen, then we’ll talk about a partnership.”

Still smiling, Oscar moved over to another thorn-encrusted bush. He bent down and eased its lower branches. Something shot out from under the fringes and skated across the rocks. Oscar yelped and stumbled back. He bumped into Ana Luiz and knocked them both to the ground.

The two-foot-long snake aimed straight for their warm bodies.

Ken jabbed out and scooped the serpent by its midsection. He lifted it high, careful not to overcompensate and send it flying. The snake’s body went immediately slack within the loop, its tiny head swiveling, tongue lashing.

Oscar tried to crawl back farther.

“Don’t worry. It’s just another of Queimada Grande’s inhabitants. Dipsis indica. Also known as Sauvage’s Snail Eater.” He shifted the snake away. “Totally harmless.”

“I… I thought it was trying to attack me,” Oscar said, his face flushing with embarrassment.

“Normally this little Snail Eater is docile. Admittedly it’s strange it came after you.” Ken glanced along its intended trajectory. “Unless it was merely trying to get to the beach.”

Like the poacher…

Frowning at this thought, he glanced in the opposite direction, toward a ridge of rock ahead and the forest beyond. He returned the snake to the rock and let it dash away, continuing its flight toward the sand.

“C’mon,” Ken urged and climbed up the slope.

Beyond the top of the ridge, a sand-strewn bowl opened. Shocked, Ken stopped at the edge, surveying the impossible sight before him.

A tangle of yellow-golden bodies covered most of the rocks and open stretches of sand. There were hundreds of them. All golden lanceheads, the island’s kings.

“My god…” Oscar gasped, visibly shuddering.

Ana Luiz crossed herself, while Dias lifted his shotgun and pointed it down into the sandy hollow. It was an unnecessary precaution.

“It looks like they’re all dead,” Ken said.

But what killed them?

None of the meter-long golden lengths appeared to be moving. And it was not just the vipers. Another body lay at the bottom, facedown and motionless.

Dias spoke to Ana Luiz in Portuguese. She nodded. Ken understood enough of the Brazilian language to surmise that this must be the partner to the poacher on the beach. Or at least the two men were similarly dressed.

Still, despite the lack of immediate danger, everyone remained rooted by the sheer horror of the sight.

Oscar was the first to speak. “Is that guy still breathing?”

Ken squinted. Surely not. But his student’s eyes proved to be sharper than anyone else’s. The man’s chest indeed rose and fell, though shallowly, haltingly.

Ana Luiz swore under her breath and started down into the bowl, already freeing her medical pack from her shoulder.

“Wait,” Ken urged. “Let me go first. Some of the lanceheads might still be half-alive. And even dead snakes can bite.”

Ana Luiz glanced back at him, her brow crinkling in disbelief.

“There are countless stories of people decapitating a rattlesnake or cobra, only to get bitten when they picked up its head. Even hours later. Many ectothermic — cold-blooded animals — share these same postmortem reflexes.”

He shifted ahead of her, lifting and moving each snake’s body out of their path with his hook. He worked slowly down the slope. All of the lanceheads appeared to be truly dead. They showed no response to his passage or presence, which was significant considering the aggressive nature of the species.

As he continued down, a strange stench grew around him. There was the expected reek of meat left too long in the sun, but it was undercut by a sickly sweetness, like a flower growing in rot.

For some reason, the scent immediately set his heart to pounding harder, as if triggering some innate sense of danger.

With his senses heightened, he finally noted that the neighboring rain forest was disturbingly quiet. No birdsong, no chirp of insects, only the rustle of leaves. He stopped and lifted an arm.

“What is it?” Ana Luiz asked.

“Get back.”

“But…”

He retreated a step, then another, herding her behind him. He focused on the body on the ground. He now had a good angle on the man’s face. His eyes were gone. Black blood thickly caked his nose, clotted over his nostrils.

This was a corpse.

Still, the torso moved — but it was clearly not driven by any last breaths.

Something’s inside him, something alive.

He hurried faster. Still, he feared taking his eyes off the body. Behind him, he heard Ana Luiz reach the others atop the ridge. From the rain forest before him, a new noise intruded. A low hum wafted out from the shadows, setting his hairs on end. It was accompanied by a strange hollow knocking. He wanted to blame it on branches bumping one another, but there was no wind.

Instead, he pictured bones rattling.

He swung away and bounded the last few yards up the slope.

As he neared the top, he gasped breathlessly. “We have to get off this isl—”

An explosion cut him off. A fireball rolled into the sky to his right, rising from the cove where their Zodiac was beached. A small black helicopter sped through the trail of smoke. Gunfire chattered from its undercarriage. Rounds sparked across the rocks, ripping through the sand.

Oscar fell first, his throat gone in a bloody ruin.

Diaz attempted to return fire, but his body went flying backward.

Ana Luiz turned to run, only to get struck in the back.

Ken flung himself back into the bowl. He was a moment too slow. His shoulder erupted with fire. The impact sent him spinning through the air. As he struck the ground, he rolled down the slope, tangling himself with the cold bodies of the dead lanceheads.

Once he came to a stop, he remained where he was, half-buried in snakes, keeping still. He heard the attack helicopter rush overhead, then come sweeping back in a low arc.

He held his breath.

Finally, it retreated to the beach, likely double-checking that the Zodiac was destroyed. He listened as the thumping of its rotors faded farther away.

Was it leaving?

Ken feared to move, even as the nagging hum rose again from the rain forest, louder now. He shifted his chin enough to view the nearest fringe of trees. A mist — darker than the shadows — sifted through the branches, rising through the canopy. That weird clacking grew louder, more furious.

Something’s coming…

Then the world became fire.

Great blasts rose from the forest, casting up spiraling gouts of fire. The cannonade of explosions spread in succession across the forested highlands of the island. Fiery pieces of shattered tree trunks and branches rained down around him. Black smoke rolled across the rock, choking and bitter, consuming the remainder of the island.

Ken crawled, coughing and gagging.

He tasted a bitter chemical tang on the back of his tongue.

Napalm… or maybe some other fiery defoliant.

Lungs burning, he crabbed out of the bowl and rolled down toward the beach. He aimed for the water, for the small skiff camouflaged among the rocks by the poachers. He prayed the smoke hid his escape. Though half-blind, he felt his hands reach cool water. He slid into the sea and worked his way toward the lone boat.

Behind him, fire continued to spread and consume the island, slowly burning it to the bedrock.

He reached the skiff, clambered over the side, and collapsed on his back. He would wait until sunset before risking the open water. By then the pall of smoke across the waves and the cover of darkness should help hide his flight from any eyes still in the sky.

Or at least, so he hoped.

In the meantime, he used the pain in his shoulder to keep him focused, to stoke a desire that burned with as much heat as the firestorm beyond the boat.

He hugged his thick bag to his chest.

It held one of the dead lanceheads, collected before he fled.

I will know what happened here.

2

The old man knelt in the temple garden. He sat formally, in the traditional seiza manner, with his back straight, his legs folded under him on the stone path. He ignored the deep ache in ninety-year-old knees. Behind him, the ancient pagoda of Kan’ei-ji was dusted in the last of the spring’s cherry blossoms. The height of the celebrated season had passed three weeks ago, when tourists flocked to Tokyo’s parklands to ogle and photograph the beautiful harmony of the peak blossoming.

Takashi Ito preferred these last days of each season. There was a melancholy to the air that echoed the sadness in his own heart. He used a small fan to waft away the dried, brittle petals from the waist-high stone before his knees.

His efforts disturbed the tendrils of smoke rising from a small incense burner at the base of the stone. The fragrance rose from a mix of kyara, a type of fragrant agarwood, and koboku, an extract from magnolia bark. He fanned the tendrils of smoke toward himself, seeking the blessing and mystery to be found there.

As often in this moment, a snatch of poetry from Otagaki Rengetsu, a nineteenth-century Buddhist nun, sifted through his thoughts.

His gaze followed a lone black streak of smoke into the air until it vanished, leaving only its sweet fragrance behind.

He sighed.

Like you did so many years ago, my dearest Miu.

He closed his eyes in prayer. Each year, he came here on the anniversary of his marriage, when Miu tied her heart to his in secret. They had been only eighteen at the time, so full of hope for their life together, bound as much by love as purpose. For ten years, the two had trained together, honing skills that would be needed. During that brutal time, they had celebrated their successes and nursed the bruises from punishments inflicted upon them by their hard masters. They were paired because of their complementary talents. He was unyielding stone; she was flowing water. He was thunder and force; she was silence and shadow.

They thought themselves invincible, especially when together.

His lips scowled at such youthful foolishness.

He opened his eyes and inhaled one last breath of smoke rising from the burner. The kyara chips had turned to ash by now. Kyara was more expensive by weight than pure gold. Even its name in ancient Japanese meant “precious.”

Each year, he burned kyara in memory of Miu.

But this anniversary was special.

He stared down at the smoldering sticks of koboku on the mica plate. They were new to this ritual. The burning of koboku was a centuries-old tradition of Samurai warriors, to cleanse mind and body prior to battle. In this manner, he imbued his love of Miu with an old promise.

To avenge her death.

He stared at the stone before him, inscribed in lines of ancient script. It was not his wife’s gravestone. Her body was forever lost to him ages ago. Instead, Takashi chose this block of granite to serve as her makeshift headstone, because of the words found here, written in 1821, by her great-grandfather, Sessai Matsuyama.

Her ancestor had placed this marker in these Buddhist gardens to console the spirits of those he had killed. Sessai had been a great benefactor to the sciences and commissioned many volumes and texts, including the Chuchi-jo, an anatomical study of insects that was now considered a national treasure for its artistically rendered drawings of butterflies, crickets, grasshoppers, even flies, proving beauty could be found in the smallest creatures. To achieve this great accomplishment, many insects had been caught, pinned, and died for the sake of this science. Out of guilt, Sessai Matsuyama had erected this memorial to their memory, honoring their contribution and perhaps seeking to lighten his karmic burden for their deaths.

Miu had dragged Takashi here many times, her face shining with pride. She had hoped to eventually follow in her great-grandfather’s footsteps, inspired by his passion. But even such a simple dream became nothing more than smoke, destroyed in a moment of gunfire.

He slipped the sleeve of his shirt higher to expose his inner wrist. His skin was now paper-thin, unable to hold the ink that had marked him with the same symbol that once graced Miu’s soft flesh in the same spot. It represented a set of tools framed around a crescent moon and a black star. It was an honor to bear such a mark, proof that they had survived the training of their masters, the elusive Kage. He remembered kissing her wrist after they had been tattooed, his lips seeking to draw the sting of the needle. The act had bound them as thoroughly as their secret marriage.

But now even this connection to Miu was fading.

He dropped his sleeve and stared again as fire consumed the last of the incense, the aromatic trails vanishing into the air.

Where does it go?

He had no answer. All he knew was that Miu was lost to him forever. She had died during their first mission, to steal a treasure from under the noses of their enemy. Shame burned through him as he recalled fleeing from her body through a dark tunnel, forced away by both gunfire and the need to make her sacrifice mean something.

In the end, the mission had been successful. Later, when he eventually learned the true nature of what had been recovered from that cursed tunnel, he took it as an omen. His gaze swept the lines written on the ancient monument. While Miu could never follow in her ancestor’s footsteps, Takashi had taken up that mantle for her.

With a small bow, he rose to his feet. His two retainers tried to come to his aid, but he took it as a matter of pride to wave them back and stand on his own. Still, he did accept his cane once he was upright. Bony fingers clutched the rose gold handle, sculpted into the beak and fiery cowl of a phoenix.

It had taken him decades of study and financing, but finally he would exact his revenge and return Japan to its former glory — and to achieve it, he would use the very treasure that had cost Miu her life.

Satisfied, he turned and headed across the garden toward the pagoda, his cane thumping along with his hammering heart. The temple of Kan’ei-ji was founded in the seventeenth century. Its grounds had once encompassed all of neighboring Ueno Park, where the city’s zoo and national museums now resided. The temple’s downfall began in 1869 when the Japanese emperor attacked the last of the Tokugawa shoguns who had sought to usurp his reign and who had taken refuge within the temple. Bullets from that siege could still be found imbedded in sections of the wooden walls.

Few seldom visited this lonely temple now, its bloody past nearly forgotten.

But I will make this nation humbled by war remember its former glory.

He rounded the pagoda and crossed under the boughs of a large cherry tree. His passage disturbed the last of the clinging blossoms. Petals floated around him, as if Miu were blessing him. He smiled softly and continued to the street to await his limo. Leaning on his cane with one hand, he rubbed the faded tattoo on his wrist with a thumb.

It will not be much longer.

Soon he would join Miu — but not yet, not before he exacted his revenge and elevated Imperial Japan to its rightful place as masters of this world.

While he sat, his mind drifted into the past, as it did more often with each passing year. He and Miu had both been bastard children of aristocratic families. Shunned for sins that were not their own, they had been cast aside by their respective families and ended up within the Kage. In Miu’s case, she had been sold to them. Takashi had sought them out of bitterness.

At the time, the public knew little about the Kage, whose name simply meant “shadow.” Rumors and whispers abounded. Some believed they were descendants of a dishonored clan of ninjas; others even considered them ghosts. But eventually Takashi learned the truth, that the cabal’s lineage went far back in time. They bore many names, assuming different faces across the globe. Their purpose, though, was to grow stronger, to root deeper into all nations, to use dark alchemies and later science to achieve their ends. They were the shadows behind power.

Here in Japan, as war broke out, the Kage briefly came more into the open, discovering opportunity in the chaos. In particular, the Kage were drawn to the blood and pain flowing from a series of secret Japanese-run camps, where morality held no sway. The Imperial Army had constructed covert research facilities in northern China — first at Zhongma Fortress, then in Pingfang — specializing in biological and chemical weapons development.

To fuel this project, the army collected subjects from local Chinese villages, along with bringing in captured Russians and Allied POWs. From there, three thousand Japanese scientists set about experimenting on the unwilling subjects. The researchers infected patients with anthrax and bubonic plague, then surgically gutted them without anesthesia. They froze the limbs of patients to study frostbite. They raped and exposed women to syphilis. They tested flamethrowers on men tied to stakes.

At these facilities, the Kage worked in the shadows, seemingly to help, but mostly to gain whatever advantage they could from the knowledge gleaned by these ghastly experiments.

It was then that word reached Kage’s masters of the discovery of a secret that was believed to have been lost to them forever. They had attempted to secure it nearly a century ago — a potential weapon like no other — but failed. Now they had another chance as word sifted forth from the United States. Near the end of 1944, a small acquisition team, fluent in English, was dispatched to secure it.

The mission proved successful, but it had cost Miu her life.

Unfortunately, afterward, the war came too quickly to an end when two bombs were dropped on Japan, one at Hiroshima, the other at Nagasaki. Takashi always wondered if the motivation for such an extreme action by the Americans could be traced to that theft in a tunnel beneath their capital.

Ultimately it didn’t matter.

After the war, Takashi secured what was stolen: a boulder of amber. The secret it preserved remained too dangerous to wield at the time. It would take many decades for science to advance enough to take advantage of the prize, long enough for even the Kage to finally meet its end.

A few years back, the Americans had exposed the cabal and dragged it into the light, where shadows always withered and died. By that time, Takashi had risen enough in the ranks of the Kage to learn its other names, including the one used by the Americans.

The Guild.

During the resulting purge, most of the various factions of the shadowy cabal had been rooted out and destroyed, but some fragments survived. Like a ninety-year-old man who few thought could be a threat. Other stray pieces also scattered and went into hiding. Since then, Takashi and his grandson had been gathering these seeds in secret, building their own Samurai force, while biding their time.

And now, after much study — both in remote labs and in select field tests abroad — they had nursed and developed a weapon of incalculable strength and malignancy.

They had also settled upon a first target, both as a demonstration to the world and a strike against the very organization that had destroyed the Guild.

Specifically, two agents who were instrumental to its downfall.

As his limo glided through the traffic to the curb, Takashi smiled. He felt weightless, knowing that the location where the pair currently holed up was a significant omen, too. It was the same place Imperial Japan had struck its first devastating blow against a sleeping giant — and where Takashi would do the same again now.

The devastation would far outshine what had befallen those islands in the past. This first attack would herald the end of the current world order and christen the painful birth of a new one, one in which Imperial Japan would rule for eternity.

Still, he pictured his two intended targets.

Lovers, like Miu and I.

Though the pair didn’t know it, they were equally doomed.

3

This is the life…

Commander Grayson Pierce lounged on the sunbaked red sands of Kaihalulu Bay. It was Hawaii’s off-season and late in the day, so he had the small cove of red-black beach to himself. Plus this particular location was mostly known only by the locals and required a bit of a treacherous trek to reach.

Still, it was worth the effort, both for the spot’s privacy and its unspoiled beauty.

Behind him, a steep-walled cinder cone, its flanks thickly forested with ironwood trees, cradled the cove. Over the centuries, its iron-rich cliffs had crumbled to red sand, forming this unique beach before vanishing into the deep-blue waters of the bay. A short distance offshore, heavy waves crashed against a jagged black seawall, casting mist high into the air, catching the brilliance of the setting sun. But closer at hand, sheltered by the reef, the water lapped gently at the sand.

A naked shape rose from those waves, bathed in sunlight, her face lifted to the sky. The drape of her black hair reached to mid-back. As she waded toward shore, revealing more of her body, seawater coursed over her pale almond skin, tracing rivulets along her bare breasts and down her flat stomach. A single emerald stud decorated her navel, sparkling as brightly as her eyes as her gaze settled on him.

No mischievous grin greeted him. Her features remained stoic to the undiscerning eye, but Gray noted the slight tilt to her head, the barest arch to her right eyebrow. She moved toward him with the sultry grace of a lioness stalking its prey.

He propped himself up on his elbows to better appreciate the sight. His legs still toasted in the day’s light, but shadows cloaked the rest of his naked body as the sun sank into the cliffs behind him.

Seichan climbed the hot sand and closed the distance. As she reached him, she stepped a leg to either side. She climbed over his body and loomed above him. She came to a stop at the shadow’s edge, still bathed in sunlight, as if trying to make the day last just that much longer.

“Don’t,” he warned.

She ignored him and shook the cape of her soaked hair, scattering cold droplets over his sprawled form. His tanned skin immediately prickled from the chill. Her gaze never left his face, but the arch of her brow rose higher.

“What?” she asked. “Too cold for you?”

She sank down upon his waist, settling atop him, stirring him with the heat found buried there. She dropped forward, a hand landing to either side of his head. She stared into his eyes, her breasts brushing his chest, and rumbled low, “Let’s see about warming you up.”

He grinned and reached around her. He glided his palms down to the middle of her back, then tightened his arms in an iron grip. He cocked a knee for leverage and rolled her under him.

“Oh, I’m plenty warmed up.”

An hour later, shadows had swallowed the two of them, along with the rest of the beach. Still, bright daylight cast forth rainbows through the mists rising from the jagged seawall out in the bay.

Gray and Seichan huddled together, still naked under a blanket, spent and exhausted. The fading heat of their passion warmed through them, making it hard to tell where one began and the other ended. He could stay this way forever, but it would soon be dark.

He craned toward the cliffs framing the cove. “We should head out while we can still see the trail.” He glanced over to the two wetsuits drying on the sand nearby and the toppled stack of scuba equipment they had used to explore the reefs around Ka’uiki Head. “Especially if we want to haul all our gear out of here.”

Seichan made a noncommittal noise, plainly unconvinced to leave yet.

They had rented a small cottage south of the small town of Hana on Maui’s picturesque east coast, a region of lush rain forests, waterfalls, and isolated beaches. They had planned on staying only a couple of weeks, but three months later, they still were here.

Prior to that, they had been traveling for half a year, moving place to place with no itinerary in mind, all but circling the globe. After leaving D.C., they had spent time in a walled-off medieval village in France, taking residence in the attic of a former monastery. Then they flew to the savannas of Kenya, where for a fortnight they shifted from tent camp to tent camp, moving with the timeless flow of animal life found there. Eventually, they found themselves amid the teeming sprawl of Mumbai, India, enjoying humanity at its most riotous. Afterward, seeking isolation again, they jetted off to Perth, Australia, where they rented a truck and drove deep into the wilds of the Outback. After that long desert trek, to cleanse the dust off their bodies, they continued to a hot-springs resort nestled deep in the mountains of New Zealand. Once recharged, they worked their way slowly across the Pacific, hopping island to island, from Micronesia to Polynesia, until they finally settled here, in a place that was a veritable Eden.

Gray sent the occasional postcard to his best friend, Monk Kokkalis, mostly to let those back in D.C. know that he was still alive, that he hadn’t been kidnapped by hostile forces. Especially since he had left so abruptly, with no warning and no permission from his superiors. He had worked for more than a decade with Sigma Force, a covert group tied to DARPA, the Defense Department’s research-and-development agency. Gray and his teammates were all former Special Forces soldiers who had been drummed out of the service for various reasons, but because of exceptional aptitude or talent, they had been secretly recruited by Sigma and retrained in diverse scientific disciplines to serve as field agents for DARPA, protecting the United States and the globe from all manner of threats.

According to his own dossier, Gray’s expertise was an amalgam of biology and physics, but in truth his training went deeper than that, courtesy of his time spent with a Nepalese monk, who taught him to search for the balance between all things, the Taoist philosophy of yin and yang.

At the time, such insight helped Gray come to terms with his own troubled childhood. Growing up, he had always been stuck between opposites. His mother had taught at a Catholic high school, instilling a deep spirituality in Gray’s life, but she was also an accomplished biologist, a devout disciple of evolution and reason.

And then there was his father: a Welshman living in Texas, a roughneck oilman disabled in midlife and forced to assume the role of a housewife. As a result, his father’s life became ruled by overcompensation and anger.

An unfortunate trait passed on to his rebellious son.

Over time, with help from Painter Crowe, the director of Sigma Force, Gray had slowly discovered a path between those opposites. It was not a short path. It extended as much into the past as the future. Gray was still struggling with it.

A few years back, his mother had been killed in an explosion, collateral damage from Sigma’s battle with the terrorist organization known as the Guild. Though blameless, Gray still struggled with guilt.

The same couldn’t be said for his father’s passing. Gray had a direct hand in that death. Bedridden and failing, his father had languished in the debilitating fog of Alzheimer’s, slowing losing more and more of himself. Finally, obeying his dad’s frail request for release (Promise me…), Gray had delivered a fatal overdose of morphine.

He felt no guilt for that death, but he couldn’t say he had come to terms with it, either.

Then Seichan had offered him a lifeline, encouraging him to set aside his responsibilities for a time, to escape from everything and everyone.

He grabbed her hand and did just that.

Seichan had her own reasons to vanish, too. She was a former assassin for the Guild, trained from a young age to serve them. After several run-ins with Sigma, she was eventually turned and recruited by Painter Crowe. She had been instrumental in bringing down the Guild, but her past crimes forced her to forever remain in the shadows. She was still on many countries’ most-wanted lists; the Mossad even maintained a kill-on-sight order.

Though Sigma offered this former assassin some cover, she was never fully free from her past.

So they had fled together, using the time to heal, to discover each other and themselves. No one tried to reach him, even after Gray failed to show up for his father’s funeral. They simply respected his need to vanish.

For the past nine months, the two had been traveling under false papers, but he was under no misconception. He knew Sigma kept track of his whereabouts, both for professional and personal reasons. The team was in many ways a family.

Gray appreciated them giving him this leeway.

I’ve certainly earned it.

Still, a part of him knew this entire trip was an illusion, a momentary respite before the real world came crashing down around them again. Lately, a vague pressure had been building, a tension whose source he couldn’t pinpoint. It was less a sense of imminent danger than it was a feeling that they were nearing an end to this sojourn.

He knew Seichan felt it, too.

She had grown moodier, less settled or satisfied. If she had been a lion in a cage, she would have been pacing the bars. He knew one other certainty. She wasn’t dreading this trip coming to an end — she was looking forward to it.

And so am I.

The world was calling to them.

Unfortunately, it didn’t wait for them to answer.

A rumbling noise intruded upon their quiet moment on the beach.

Gray sat straighter, his breath quickening with the hair-trigger training from his years with the Army Rangers. While there was no outright threat, his body was tuned from countless tours of duty in sand-blasted deserts to monitor every detail around him. It was an instinct drilled into his bones. Tiny muscles tightened, and his vision sharpened, preparing himself to move at a moment’s notice.

Across Kaihalulu Bay, a trio of prop planes — Cessna Caravans from the look of them — headed toward shore. While it wasn’t unusual for such small aircraft to be hopping between islands, it struck Gray as strange that they seemed to be flying in a tight formation, as if the pilots had military training.

“That’s not a sightseeing group,” Seichan said. She must have noted Gray’s tension and what had drawn his attention. “What do you think?”

As the trio neared the island, the two flanking aircraft split away to right and left. The center plane continued its trajectory straight for their cove. Gray took in several details at once. The aircraft weren’t Cessna Caravans, but the company’s sleeker and smoking-fast single-piston brothers, a model known as the TTx. Each of these hellcats also carried large barrels fixed to their undercarriage.

Before Gray could fathom what was happening, a black-gray mist jetted from those tanks, streaming out under high pressure and leaving a thick contrail in each plane’s wake. It built into a wide, dark cloudbank hanging over the water. The strong trade winds rolled those heavy mists toward shore, toward their tiny cove.

The centermost plane continued directly at them. By the time it cruised over the seawall in the bay, it had expended the last of its load. It continued to shore and screamed low overhead, not slowing. Gray expected it to bank up and over the heights of Ka’uiki Head behind them.

Instead, the aircraft smashed nose-first into the forested red cliffs.

The explosion shattered trees and blasted rocks high into the air. A fireball rolled into the sky, carried aloft by a column of oily smoke. Gray huddled with Seichan, using their beach blanket like a makeshift shield against the rain of flaming debris and hail of pebbles and sand.

Echoes of other crashes reached him, marking the demise of the other two aircraft. Closer at hand, a large boulder struck the water near shore, casting up a high flume.

Still, Gray ignored the immediate danger and kept his attention fixed on that wide black cloudbank rolling toward them, driven by the prevailing trade winds.

A single white-plumed egret, frightened by the crash, took wing from the neighboring forest to the right. It fled from the smoke and fire, heading out toward the bay. Still, it must have sensed the menace posed by that ominous cloud. Wings beat faster as it strove to climb above it.

Smart bird.

It successfully crested over the mists — but not high enough. A dark gray tendril wafted skyward, as if sensing the passing prey. The egret’s path jerked violently as the bird brushed against that threat. Its wings flapped in a panicked beat. Its body contorted, wringing a cry from its neck. Then it plummeted in a tight spiral toward the sea. Its body vanished into the thick of the cloudbank.

“Poison,” Seichan said matter-of-factly, recognizing the reality of the situation.

Gray wasn’t so sure of her assessment. He pictured the coil of mist seeking out the bird. But no matter the true threat, they were in trouble.

He searched right and left. The trio of planes had left a swath of mist across the eastern shoreline, at least a mile wide, if not more.

And we’re at the center of it.

As the dark fog rolled closer, a faint humming drone rose above the crash of waves. Seichan cocked her head, plainly hearing it, too.

Gray frowned.

What the hell?

He squinted at the threat. As he watched, the buzzing cloud appeared to shift and billow independently of the prevailing trade winds… revealing it to be a living thing.

A swarm, he realized.

Taking this new detail into account, he weighed their options. Even if they could traverse the precarious trail along the cliffs, they’d never reach cover before the swarm swept over them. They’d be swallowed up as surely as that unlucky egret.

Gray had to accept the inevitable.

They were trapped.

With a sleek body built for speed, it led the others toward the coastline. Small wings beat frenetically at the air, but it was instinct that truly drove it forward. Mindless to all else but what was written in its genetic code millennia ago, it raced toward the scent of green leaf and fresh water.

Purpose defined its form. It bore the longest antennae of its brethren, splaying out at the ends with friable hairs, better to pick up the slightest vibrations. Its faceted eyes encompassed most of its head, staring unblinking toward their objective. While its wings might be shorter, its thorax was larger, more muscular, granting the scout greater maneuverability and agility in the air. Behind the thorax was a smaller-than-normal abdomen, packed with pheromone glands, but bearing no stinger, for it was no fighter.

Its short existence had one goal: to absorb sensory input. Fine hairlike sensillae covered its entire body, making it acutely sensitive to chemical changes and temperature fluctuations. The hairs even assisted with hearing, though large membranes stretched over a hollow cavity on either side of its head served that function better. Additional sensillae in its mouth absorbed odors from the air, sniffing out food or water, along with monitoring the flow of pheromones from those around it.

As it flew, it sensed those nearest neighbors, fixing their position in its brain.

It absorbed more and more information until a threshold was reached. Unable to contain it any longer, data blasted out of its body. It transmitted to its closest neighbors, communicating via bursts of pheromones, then further refining the information through changes in cadence of its wings or by sawing its hind legs noisily.

Information quickly flowed back to others, where it was absorbed, shared, and spread in a growing cascade.

Soon, what it knew, they all knew. But it was rewarded for its efforts, as information flowed back to its body, molding its awareness to a finer edge. After a time, the scout’s body was absorbing as much as it was transmitting.

It began to lose any sense of individuality.

As it winged onward, the outpouring and feedback accelerated, becoming a torrent that flooded throughout the swarm, binding it together, building toward a perfect harmony of intent.

As the swarm swept over the rolling water, the goal ahead grew into focus. Details filled in, piece by piece, dot by dot, coming from its own sensory apparatus and those around it. Viewed through thousands of eyes, the coastline’s image grew clearer. A wall of rock rose from the pounding waves.

The scent of leaf and rot grew stronger as the swarm descended toward its new nesting ground. Other life roosted there already, evident from their movements, their calls, even their breaths. But they were no threat.

This certainty was as much a part of its genetic code as its wings or antennae.

With its role and purpose ending, the scout slowed its path and began to falter. It drifted back into the swarm. Several of its smaller brethren, spent by their duty, tumbled into the salty water.

They were no longer needed.

As landfall neared, the next line of workers drew forward, filling the leading edge of the swarm. This new caste had their own genetically driven purpose: to assess any dangers and clear the way forward from here.

One of the new workers buzzed past overhead. It was far larger, its abdomen already menacingly curled, exposing a jagged stinger and the ripe venom gland at its base.

The duty from here fell to this new class of hunter/killers.

The soldiers.

4

Seichan recognized they were out of time.

“Forget the wetsuits,” she warned, tugging up the bottom half of her bikini. Her eyes remained fixed on the swirling swarm as it swept shoreward.

Gray dropped the suit he had been about to climb into. He already had his swim trunks on. After the past weeks under the sun, his skin glowed with a rich tan, while his ash-brown hair — unkempt and long to the collar — had bleached shades lighter, accenting the brightness of his blue eyes. He also hadn’t shaved in a few days, leaving the hard planes of his face roughened by shadowy stubble.

His eyes flashed at her as he hauled up a scuba tank from the sand. It was already strapped to its buoyancy vest. He hung the gear over one shoulder, then picked up the other set.

Seichan hurried toward him. She nabbed her mask from the sand and snugged it atop her head, then took the second tank. She hefted the equipment to her back and climbed into the vest. The weight dug into her bare shoulders as she rushed across the red sand with Gray.

Out in the bay, the swarm crested over the seawall. The black cloud rose high, filling the breadth of the cove. The droning had grown into a low roar. The winds carried a strange, sickly sweet scent to the beach, like lavenders growing in filth. She tasted it now as much as smelled it.

An inadvertent shudder of revulsion shook through her.

At her side, Gray flinched, ducking his head and swatting at the air.

Something struck Seichan in the upper arm. It hurt like being snapped by a rubber band. She glanced down. A wasplike insect clung to her bicep, wings fluttering to a buzzing blur. It was huge — as long as her thumb. Its black, glossy abdomen bore jagged stripes of angry crimson. Momentarily shocked by the monstrosity of its size, she was slow in reacting.

It stung her before she could knock it away.

The pain was immediate, like someone drove a lit match into an open cut.

Then it got worse.

She gasped, dropping to a knee. Fiery agony exploded up her arm. Muscles tore off bone — or at least it felt that way.

To the side, Gray tried to stamp the wasp into the beach with his heel. He managed to break its wings, but its hard body merely sank into the sand. The stubborn wasp immediately scrabbled free and raced overland toward Seichan. She lurched back, but Gray kicked it into the water before it could reach her.

By now, Seichan’s arm had gone limp and hung uselessly at her side. Still, the pain spiked higher. Tears rolled down her cheeks. She had never experienced such agony. If she had an ax, she would have chopped off her own limb.

With trembling lips, she forced out a breath. “Gr… Gray…”

He hauled her up, tank and all. “We have to get underwater.”

That had been their plan: to use their scuba gear to escape the threatened cove.

She wanted to obey, but her legs refused to cooperate. She wobbled, growing disoriented. The world wavered. She felt the first convulsion as she toppled face-first toward the sand.

Gray caught her and dragged her quaking form into the waves.

More wasps suddenly fell out of the air, raining down like fiery black hail.

Their tiny bodies struck the sand, shot past her face, and pelted into the bushes and leaves. To escape the onslaught, Gray wrapped her in his arms and flung them both underwater.

But even in the cold depths, her body continued to burn.

C’mon, baby, hold on…

Gray tugged his mask in place and rolled Seichan under him as he kicked for deeper water. The weight of their combined gear pulled them down along the seabed. Desperate and fearing the worst, he used his free hand to secure her mask over her nose and eyes. He then scooped up her loose regulator, tilted the lower edge of her mask, and blew a blast of air under there to clear it before securing it in place again.

Seichan’s body tremored beneath him, but the worst of the spasms seemed to have subsided. He studied her face as he worked the regulator’s mouthpiece between her lips. Her eyes were open, but her pupils rolled. She was plainly still dazed.

He reached to her hand and was relieved to feel her fingers squeeze back.

She was coming around.

He shifted her hand up to her regulator. Can you manage on your own? he asked with an exaggerated lift of his eyebrows.

She seemed to understand and nodded.

Good.

He swung an arm to hook his regulator and bring it to his mouth. Once breathing on his own, he glanced up. The sun was near to setting, but the sea was bright enough to discern small black dots peppering the water. Eddies marked where several bodies squirmed. Most appeared tiny, but a few were larger, marking the presence of those monstrous wasps.

Growing up in the hill country of Texas, he had his share of run-ins with bees and heard stories of neighbors dealing with Africanized swarms. The latter species would notoriously hunt you down if you disturbed their nest. Even jumping in a pool or lake was no guarantee of safety. The bees would hover over the water, waiting until you popped your head up, then attack again.

He stared at the swarm.

This species seemed to be following the same game plan.

But luckily we don’t have to come up for air.

At least, he hoped that was true.

Before he continued, he adjusted his float position in the water by filling the air bladders in his buoyancy vest, then helped Seichan do the same. He kept them hovering six feet below the surface. Satisfied, he herded Seichan farther out into the cove, while keeping a close watch on her. He didn’t know what other surprises might be lurking in the wasp’s venom.

He remembered Seichan’s agonized expression. In the past, he had seen her shot, knifed, even pierced through the gut by an iron spear. Nothing slowed her down. For the pain of a wasp’s bite to bring her to her knees, the bastard must be packing some potent venom. He suspected a few more stings and her heart might have stopped.

Respecting this danger, he continued away from shore. He passed the seawall and aimed for the brighter water beyond the cliffs of Ka’uiki Head. He periodically checked over his shoulder. Through the diffraction of the water, he could still make out a shadowy haze of the swarm up there. While the mass had made landfall, the bulk seemed to be hugging the coastline, hanging back cautiously.

Maybe they were letting the big wasps clear the way first.

Gray had to admit the tactic worked on them.

He continued straight out, trying his best to escape the swarm’s shadow. Unfortunately, the sun eventually set. The resulting twilight made it difficult to tell if the horde still churned overhead.

Gray considered surfacing and using his LED dive light to scan the skies, but even if he had cleared the swarm’s edge, he worried the shine might draw its attention.

So he kept going, using his wrist compass as a guide.

Better safe than sorry.

Still, he couldn’t continue this way forever. Without wetsuits, the chill of the water would wear them down, especially Seichan. She had been steadily slowing, her left arm dragging behind her. He needed to get her out of the ocean and someplace warm. Knowing that, he turned them in a southerly direction, aiming for the beach a mile away where their seaside cottage stood atop a volcanic cliff.

As he pressed on, the waters slowly darkened. Soon he could barely see his hands, let alone Seichan. He finally relented and tugged out his dive light from a vest pocket and squeezed its button. The brightness through the water was momentarily blinding. Inwardly, he winced, fearing he was lighting a beacon for the swarm to follow.

No choice.

As his eyes slowly adjusted, the midnight world beneath the waves revealed itself. Ridges of reefs stretched below and outward. Everything seemed to be in motion. Bright yellow and red anemone waved in the current, while the prickly black spines of urchins shifted slowly below. Ahead, a school of blue Hawaiian flagtails fled from their path, skirting around a slower-moving eagle ray. As he crossed a wall of coral, a white tip reef shark suddenly darted away with a muscular flick of its tail.

Beyond the light’s glow, other larger shadows moved.

He imagined they were sea turtles, which were abundant around Maui, but he kept a wary watch for some of the true predators that prowled these waters. Tiger and bull sharks occasionally attacked swimmers or snorkelers around Maui. He didn’t intend to become one of those statistics.

He glanced to Seichan. She had fallen farther behind. He slowed and drew alongside her. He raised a hand and inquired about her status by signaling her with an okay sign. She lifted her stung arm enough to return the sign, but she did so weakly. The worst of the poison must be clearing, but it had plainly taken its toll, as had the long swim.

She waved him on, grimacing at him — not in pain, but in irritation.

Her stubborn determination was easy to read.

Keep going already. I’ll keep up, goddammit.

He shifted around and continued, but he stayed alongside her now. Stubbornness only got you so far.

Slowly, each kick and paddle propelled them farther from the beleaguered section of shoreline and closer to their destination. He periodically checked the compass strapped to his wrist.

Shouldn’t be much farther.

Still, it took them another thirty minutes to finally reach the shallows of their beach. Gray popped his head up first. They were nearly out of air. The gauges on their tanks were deep in the red zone. He checked to make sure the skies were clear, then helped Seichan clamber up to the thin rocky beach. They happily shed their tanks at the water’s edge.

With an arm still around her waist, he felt her shiver. He had to all but carry her toward the cliff face ahead. Their cottage perched at the top, where a glowing window beckoned.

Seichan pushed out of his grip and sank to her knees in the sand. She lifted an arm toward the cottage. “Go…” she gasped out.

“I’m not leaving you. I’ll haul you the whole way if I have to.”

It was a promise he didn’t know if he could carry out. His own legs felt like rubber.

“No…” She scowled at him, breathing hard. She waved an arm toward the north. “Ball… ballpark.”

He shook his head, not understanding — then it struck him.

Oh, no.

His body stiffened. Adrenaline pumped steel back into his legs.

This morning, they had parked their Jeep along Uakea Road, between a community center and the Hana Ball Park, which consisted of a freshly mowed baseball diamond, a soccer field, and a couple of tennis and basketball courts. Seichan had commented on a sign posted outside the park, announcing a Little League tournament set for this evening. She had suggested grabbing hot dogs and watching the game.

He pictured its location.

As a crow flew, the park was only a quarter mile inland from the red sand beach.

He imagined the commotion from that game.

All the music, cheering, lights…

“Take one of our bikes,” Seichan said. “You gotta warn them.”

He stared up toward the cottage. They had rented a couple of motorbikes so they could explore trails too thin and treacherous for a regular vehicle.

He glanced back to Seichan, who must have read the concern on his face.

She frowned at him. “I’ll get up there on my own. May take me some time, but I’ll alert Sigma, get them mobilizing a local response.” She pointed again. “Go. Before it’s too late.”

He nodded, knowing she was right.

He checked his watch. The game was scheduled to start in ten minutes. He’d never make it there in time, but he had to do what he could. Clenching his jaw, he sprinted for the switchback that led up the cliff to the cottage.

As he reached the trailhead, he glanced back. Seichan was on her feet. Her legs shook but her face was stony with determination. Their eyes met. Both knew the danger Gray was rushing toward — and one other certainty.

Their vacation was over.

5

Painter Crowe had been expecting this call for months.

Trouble always had a way of finding Commander Gray Pierce. It was why Painter, as the director of Sigma Force, had been keeping tabs on the errant agent during the man’s long walkabout around the globe. Still, Painter could never have imagined or predicted how this particular trouble would have presented itself.

A swarm of wasps?

Exhausted but strung taut by tension, he combed fingers through his black hair, tucking a lock that had gone snowy white behind one ear. He had ended his call with Seichan ten minutes ago and sent an alert up the chain of command, both to his superiors at DARPA and to the appropriate authorities in Hawaii. As he sat at his office desk, he pondered the strangeness of the situation, taking to heart Seichan’s warning before she had hung up.

This was no random act of Mother Nature. It’s a biological assault.

A knock at his open door drew his attention forward. A slim shape whisked into the room. Captain Kathryn Bryant was his second-in-command. Despite the time being after midnight, her shoulder-length auburn hair was combed and braided in the back, as conservative as her attire: navy blue suit, crisp white blouse, black leather pumps. Her only flash of color was a jeweled pin on her lapel, a tiny gold-enameled frog. She’d been awarded the gift by an amphibious team she had joined during a marine recon operation for naval intelligence. One teammate from that mission had never come back. She continued to wear the pin in his memory.

After her stint with the military, Painter had recruited Kat as an analyst for Sigma. She quickly grew to be as essential to operations here as the directorship — maybe even more so.

“We’ve got a far larger problem brewing on those islands,” she said brusquely.

“What do you mean?”

Kat reached his desk and tapped at an e-tablet in her hand, then pointed to one of the three flat-screen monitors mounted to the walls of his office. A topographic map of the Hawaiian Islands bloomed on the screen. He swung his chair back from his desk to better view the image. Small red dots peppered three of the largest islands.

“It wasn’t just Maui that was attacked.” She stepped over and tapped a red zone along the island’s eastern shore, where Seichan had reported the attack. “We’ve also got reports of similar assaults on Oahu and the big island of Hawaii.”

Painter stood and joined her. He had hoped to attribute all of this to some lone attack, perhaps ecoterrorists trying to prove a malicious point.

On the map, Kat pointed to the state’s capital, Honolulu. “A Cessna crashed near Diamond Head, about the same time as the three on Maui.” She then shifted her finger to the largest Hawaiian island. “Over in Hilo, a hospital sent out a broadcast for emergency help. They’ve been overrun by people suffering from varying degrees of stings. Including a few fatalities.”

Painter remembered Seichan’s warning.

This was no random act.…

It seemed she was right. This attack had been coordinated.

Kat continued, “So far we’ve heard nothing from Kauai or any of the other smaller islands, but I suspect it’s only a matter of time. I have Jason scanning all newsfeeds, social media, and law enforcement chatter across Hawaii.”

“Why out there?” Painter pondered aloud. “Why those islands?”

“We don’t have enough intel yet to make any suppositions.” She studied the topographic map. “But perhaps Hawaii’s remoteness is part of the reason. Beyond the immediate danger to the populace, the introduction of an aggressive foreign species could wreak havoc to the state’s isolated ecosystem.”

It was a chilling thought, but such long-term concerns would have to wait. They had a more immediate question to answer.

“What exactly are we facing?” he asked. “What was unleashed on those islands?”

Kat turned back to him. “I’ve already placed a call to an entomologist over at the National Zoo. Dr. Samuel Bennett is a leading expert, respected around the globe. From Seichan’s description, there can’t be many wasps that big.”

“Good. The sooner we know what we’re dealing with, the better.”

That was one of the key advantages to having Sigma’s command center buried beneath the Smithsonian Castle. The group had ready access to the many labs and research centers of the Smithsonian Institution, which included the National Zoo.

From this location, Sigma could also tap into the neighboring halls of power, both at Capitol Hill and the White House. Painter had no doubt his immediate superior at DARPA, General Gregory Metcalf, was already alerting the powers-that-be and ramping up a federal emergency response.

But those cogs and wheels moved too slowly.

It was why Sigma Force existed: to lead surgical strikes when necessary. They were the front line against the chimeric and shifting threats of new technology. With the cutting edge of science changing so rapidly and in so many unexpected directions around the globe, the United States needed a team that could respond as quickly and with as much agility. That was the core of Sigma Force’s mission statement: to be there first.

Kat’s phone chimed. She glanced down at the number. “Seems our entomologist keeps late hours. It’s Dr. Bennett.”

“Put him on speakerphone.”

She nodded, tapped her phone’s screen, and held the device between them. “Thank you for returning my call so promptly, Dr. Bennett.”

“My assistant called and shared your urgency, which certainly got my attention. I don’t get a lot of emergency calls from DARPA. Not in my line of work. And not in the middle of the night.

“Still, we appreciate your cooperation.” She nodded to Painter. “In fact, I have my boss on speaker with us.”

“Oh, okay. So what’s this all about?”

“Did you get my description of the wasp that I forwarded?”

“I did indeed. That’s the other reason I returned your call so quickly and can answer your question so promptly. I received a similar inquiry about a month ago, someone asking about a wasp like you described. Over three inches. Black body with jagged crimson stripes across its abdomen.”

Painter leaned closer to the phone. “Who contacted you?”

“Someone out of Japan. Working for a pharmaceutical company. Hang on. Let me get to my desktop, and I can pull his name from his last email.”

As they waited, Kat stared at Painter and cocked her head.

So much for Sigma always being there first.

Bennett spoke as he searched for the information. “Like I told this other researcher, there’s no Hymenoptera species that matches such a classification. The closest is the Asian giant wasp, which can grow to be three inches long, but its patterning comes in yellow and black. A close second is our native tarantula hawk wasp out of New Mexico. It’s a whopping two inches long, with a helluva sting, but its body is solid blue-black with orange wings.”

Painter grimaced at the thought of being stung by either of those species.

Bennett continued, “Now if I had a specimen, I could learn more. Maybe it’s a heterochromatic mutant of one of these known species. In other words, genetically related, but a different coloring.”

Kat sighed. “Unfortunately, we may have plenty of specimens for you to study before too much longer.”

“I’d certainly love to get my hands on — ah, here’s that email!” Bennett cleared his throat. “The researcher’s name is Ken Matsui. According to the letterhead, he’s a professor at Cornell University. Department of Toxicology.”

Painter frowned. “I thought you said the request came from Japan?”

“That’s correct. It seems he has a grant with Tanaka Pharmaceuticals. He emailed me from their location in Kyoto. I can text you his contact information there.”

“We would appreciate that,” Kat said. After thanking the researcher, she ended the call and faced Painter. “What do you think?”

“Clearly someone’s encountered this species well before today’s attack.” He returned to his chair. “We need to speak to this Professor Matsui as soon as possible.”

“I’ll get on it.” She began to turn away, then hesitated. “But what about Gray and Seichan?”

“It’ll take some time for emergency services to respond. For the moment, they’re on their own.”

“What about our guy we have on the ground out there?”

Painter sighed. For the past nine months, he had been not only tracking Gray but also positioning a rotating series of Sigma operatives along his path. At the start, Kat’s husband, Monk Kokkalis, had been in Paris finishing up some work with Interpol on an animal smuggling ring, so he was already conveniently near Gray’s location in the South of France. After that, Painter had contacted Tucker Wayne — who was at a game park he co-owned in South Africa — and asked him to be ready in case Gray needed any help during his time roaming through the jungles of that dark continent. And on and on from there. It was perhaps a foolish waste of resources, but knowing Gray, trouble would find him or he would find it himself.

It was only a matter of time.

For this latest assignment in Hawaii, it hadn’t been hard to persuade agents to assume this duty. While there was no pressing reason to station anyone among those islands, a few weeks of R&R on a beach was an easy sell.

Unfortunately for Gray, the roll of this particular dice had landed on snake-eyes in regard to which agent had just rotated out there.

“Kowalski’s on the other side of Maui,” Painter said sourly. “At a resort in Wailea. I’ve alerted him, but it’ll take him an hour to reach a helicopter and cross the island.”

“So Gray and Seichan are truly on their own.”

“Perhaps, but knowing Gray, he’ll do what he can to help.”

“You mean put himself in harm’s way.”

Painter grinned wryly. “That’s what he does best.”

6

Hunched low, Gray raced his motorbike north along the Hana Highway. He ignored the speed limit, easily doubling it. The tail of his T-shirt flapped in the wind. He hadn’t had time to get properly dressed. He still wore trunks and had shoved his feet into a pair of worn hiking boots resting on the stoop of his rented cottage.

As he passed the Hasegawa General Store, he braked hard, startled by red taillights stretching ahead. Refusing to be caught in that traffic jam, he skirted to the shoulder and sped alongside the line of stalled cars.

The source of the congestion quickly became evident.

Through the muffle of his helmet, he heard sirens. His heart hammered in his throat as he throttled up his engine.

Am I already too late?

Worried, he cut across the lawn of a church to reach the next side street: Hauoli Road. After making the turn, he aimed for the noise and flashing lights. The Hana Ball Park lay a couple hundred yards down the road, where it dead-ended at a native community health-care center. A fire engine stood crookedly in the center’s parking lot, along with a couple of ambulances and squad cars. A yellow helicopter swept past overhead as Gray reached the ballpark.

He skidded his bike to a stop, let it drop, and ran the last of the way down the packed road. Onlookers crowded the pavement, gawking at the bustle of the response teams. Confused parents herded children, some in Little League gear, through the throng. The baseball diamond’s grandstands were packed, but most of the patrons had their back to the field and stared across the road at the emergency vehicles.

No doubt the game had been canceled or delayed due to all the activity.

Past the baseball diamond, the park’s soccer pitch had turned into a makeshift picnic area. Closer at hand, a row of food trucks had parked along Hauoli Road, selling snow cones, hot dogs, even barbecue. Hawaiian music blared from the field’s speakers, competing with noise of the sirens.

Gray headed through the circuslike crowds toward the health-care center parking lot. He needed to find someone in authority. Still, he kept an eye on the sky. In the glare of lights, he spotted no evidence of the swarm’s presence. In addition, no one around him seemed panicked, only curious.

If there’s no swarm, then why all the emergency vehicles?

He followed the helicopter as it swung over the forests behind the community center. The chopper aimed toward Ka’uiki Head. The spear of its lights revealed a faint trail of smoke spiraling into the night sky.

He grimaced as he remembered the Cessna TTx nosediving into the side of Ka’uiki’s cinder cone. He now understood why the emergency teams were already on hand. Of course, the dramatic crash of a trio of planes had drawn this commotion.

The emergency must have forced the cancellation of the ball game, but before that happened, the crowds had already gathered for the tournament and now stayed to watch the action.

It was a perfect storm of events that could lead to a disaster.

He rushed through the commotion, sidestepping a shouting match between a driver leaning out of one of the traffic-snarled cars and someone at the vehicle’s front bumper. As a final retort, the driver lay into his horn, adding to the cacophony.

Gray flinched at the noise, but he kept watch on the sky.

Would all this commotion draw the swarm or hold it at bay?

He finally reached the community center’s parking lot. He crossed toward a stocky black man with salt-and-pepper hair who wore blue slacks and a starched white uniform with a prominent badge. He carried a yellow jacket over one arm, a match to the bright yellow truck next to him. Likely the fire chief for Hana. The man huddled beside a large Hawaiian outfitted in baggy fire gear.

Gray caught a part of their conversation as the two men shouted to be heard.

With a radio in hand, the Hawaiian leaned toward the chief. “—lowered Watanabe to the wreckage. He says there’s no body.”

“So the pilot ditched before the crash?”

The fireman shrugged heavily. “Seems so.”

Gray knew that hadn’t happened, which meant the planes must have been unmanned, flying like drones. He knew a Cessna TTx had advanced autopilot features, but not enough to pull off this stunt, not without additional engineering.

He stepped close enough to draw both men’s attention and took off his motorcycle helmet. “There was no pilot,” he said as introduction.

The pair eyed him up and down, their brows furrowing with disdain. He couldn’t blame them for this reaction. Unshaven, wild-haired, and wearing only a T-shirt, trunks, and hiking boots, he didn’t come off as the most reliable-looking resource. He also knew how insular the locals could be when it came to dealing with a haole, a foreigner.

He spoke quickly before he was dismissed. “I was on the red sand beach when the planes crashed.” He thrust out his hand. “Name’s Gray Pierce, former Army Ranger, now an adjunct commander with DARPA.”

That wasn’t entirely true, but close enough.

The chief ignored his hand and continued to look at him with a sour expression, but the fireman next to him narrowed his eyes, plainly reassessing this haole standing before them.

Gray lowered his arm. “You all have a larger problem. A danger far greater than any spreading fire. Those planes were crashed purposefully, but before doing so, they unloaded swarms of wasps into the air.”

“Wasps?” The chief frowned and rolled his eyes.

Whatever credibility Gray had a moment ago faded from the other fireman’s face. They must think he was high on a potent strain of locally grown weed, which was practically a staple here.

Gray struggled to find the words to make them understand the threat. “These are big wasps. Like nothing I’ve seen before. The woman I was with got stung by one. Almost instantly incapacitated her.” He waved to a clutch of boys in Little League uniforms across the street, chattering and laughing. “I suspect it would only take a sting or two to kill—”

The chief had had enough and shoved a palm at Gray. “We don’t have time for this nonsense.” He turned to the other. “Palu, get this asshole out of here.”

The other hesitated, even glancing skyward.

“I know how this sounds, but you must listen to me.” Gray focused on the native fireman, knowing his chief would not listen. Back in the military, Gray had run into obstinate superiors, men too prideful in their position to see past their noses.

Palu seemed torn. “Chief, maybe we’d better at least check his story out.”

“Like we have the manpower to chase wild—”

The radio in Palu’s hand squawked. All three men looked down as a spat of harsh screaming rose from the tiny speakers.

Palu shoved the radio to his lips. “Say again, Chopper One.” He tilted his head, listening for a response, but the answer came from above.

A rhythmic thumping drew all their attentions up. A yellow helicopter with the word FIRE emblazoned on its belly swept into view, canting wildly back and forth — then plunged into the woods behind the community center. The crumpling crash cut through the sirens and music. The crowd went silent as a fireball rolled into the night sky.

The brightness briefly revealed a dark cloud looming above the forest, cresting high, like a black wave about to crash over the town of Hana.

Palu looked to the haole at his side, but Gray could only state the obvious.

“It’s too late. They’re already here.”

With powerful beats of her four wings, the soldier hovered at the head of the swarm. Her hum carried back to the others, full of warning as she assessed the threat and landscape ahead. Rows of tiny spiracles — pinpoint holes along thorax and abdomen through which she breathed — vibrated angrily, casting out a whistling cry to her caste.

Fellow soldiers gathered and packed the swarm’s vanguard, communicating by sound and pheromone. All their antennae pointed forward, swiveling at their bases, testing the scents carried on the breeze.

Sweetness…

Flesh…

Salt…

They shared what they learned.

As she waited with the others, she bent the eleven joints at the ends of her antennae, weaving a map of those scents inside her brain. A billowing force built before her, full of the promise of sustenance for the swarm. A cloud of odors rose before her.

The mélange of those smells stoked her hunger, which in turn triggered a surge of aggressive hormones. Muscles contracted in her abdomen, causing sharp lances to slide along the grooves on either side of her stinger, honing her weapon.

She waved her antennae a final time and focused on the source of this delicious smoke.

Instinct demanded her to possess it.

Her sisters felt the same.

Signaling one another, the soldiers plunged as one from the swarm’s edge and dove toward that source. As they fell, they drew closer together, becoming a dark arrow pointed toward their goal.

Other senses continued to draw information, refining what she knew.

Large membranes over hollow pockets on either side of her head vibrated to the myriad sounds that spiked through the fog of odors. In turn, the swarm’s angry buzzing was cast forth, only to rebound back with more details of the landscape ahead. With each wingbeat, she learned more and shared with the others, as they did with her. Structures and shapes began to coalesce, constructed of sound and echo.

As they raced below, she became both fighter and army, both one and many. She closed in on the source of those odors. Propelled by a millennia-old drive for territory, she would not let anything stop her. Ancestral memory, imprinted in her genetic code, erased fear. Her ancient sisters had felled greater foes than any found in this new land so far.

Still, she brought to bear more of her senses, readying herself for the battle.

Two large black eyes — each fractured into several hundred hexagonal facets — studied what lay ahead. She took in color and shape, but her eyes had evolved for one keen purpose: to detect motion.

Her gaze fixed to each twitch and flail around her as she whisked through a pall of scents and odors. Everything was in motion, but her brain noted vectors and tides within this chaos. It allowed her to rank the dangers ahead.

She ignored the forces that fled from her path.

They were no immediate threat.

Instead, she knew she must clear away anything that blocked her path, that challenged her dominance. Her wings blurred faster, fueled by aggression, daring any to defy her from reaching her goal.

But her eyes remained alert for the greatest threat.

Movement caught her attention — a flow of motion toward her.

She focused on this coming contest, whipping her anger to a boil. An image of this challenger pushed through the bedlam of her senses. It was still more shadow than substance.

She plunged toward it, while still attuned to the other soldiers. Her antennae noted a draft of distress, a flare of pheromone as one of her caste was trampled to her left. Immediately, others raced along the trail of pheromone, drawn by the death, intending to multiply their strength and poison to eradicate whatever killed one of their own.

She ignored it, concentrating on the danger coming straight at her.

The challenger’s image grew clearer.

She assessed the figure and hunted for the best place to attack it. She smelled the salt of its sweat and blood, but instinct guided her toward the carbon puffing from its breath. Eons of ingrained experience had taught her to focus her poison there.

She curled her abdomen and readied her stinger.

The threatening form rushed toward her.

She lowered her head, arcing her wings higher, and dove to attack.

7

As Gray ran, he snapped down the face shield of his motorcycle helmet — and not a moment too soon. A large wasp struck the visor hard enough to make the polycarbonate ring. It clung there with its six jointed legs, an inch from his nose. Its wings beat in a furious blur. Its armored abdomen jabbed at the shield, over and over again, hard enough to be heard, like a determined woodpecker on a tree trunk.

Gray stared cross-eyed for a moment, assessing the enemy at close range.

A deep-seated horror froze him momentarily, as if something ancient in his genetic code responded to this threat. And maybe it had. He had read how phobias could change a person’s DNA through epigenetics, passing a fear from one generation to another, as a survival instinct against deadly predators.

Gray shuddered at the sight of the sharp stinger, easily a quarter-inch long, striking his visor.

Before he could move, a thick glove swatted at his helmet and knocked the wasp away. “Here!” He turned to find the fireman, Palu, standing there, holding out a silvery fire blanket. “Cover yourself and get to shelter!”

Gray took the lightweight fabric and wrapped it over his shoulders. With one hand, he clutched it to his neck. The blanket only draped to his knees, leaving his calves exposed, but it was better than nothing.

Palu had donned the rest of his full bunker gear. Besides his yellow trousers, turnout jacket, and helmet, he had pulled on a firefighting hood with a clear SCBA mask over his face, leaving little skin exposed. Hauling a white hose over one shoulder, he pointed his other arm toward the community health-care center.

“Go!”

Gray glanced in that direction. In the parking lot, the fire chief sat in his truck, a handheld radio at his lips. His voice boomed from his vehicle.

“SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER! WHEREVER YOU CAN. CARS, HOMES, THE COMMUNITY CENTER. GET OUT OF THE OPEN!”

The warning came too late. All around, people fled in every direction. It was pandemonium and bedlam, scored by Hawaiian music blasting from speakers at the ballpark. Screams and curses and crying added to the chorus.

A father ran past Gray carrying a small girl on his shoulder, waving an arm as wasps chased them. The child sobbed, both in panic and from a large red welt on her cheek. The man banged sidelong into a car, where a Good Samaritan inside risked opening the back door and hollered for them to get inside.

Similar scenarios broke out all around him as homes and stores gathered people inside, but there were too many still trapped in the park or streets. Bodies thrashed on the pavement. Parents huddled over their children, shielding them, as wasps hurled down.

The handful of emergency personnel on hand tried to help, dragging whom they could to safety, suffering for their efforts. But even they were too few to save so many.

Not that they were giving up.

“Go!” Palu ordered as he lowered the hose’s nozzle to his hips, which ran back to the engine tanker.

Down the street, another fireman had a hose attached to a fire hydrant, while a third rescue worker used a large wrench to unlock its flow. Water suddenly jetted high. The fireman waved the fierce column through the air, trying to drown the swarm out of the sky. But it was like fighting a wildfire with a squirt gun.

A cold certainty firmed inside Gray.

I need to buy them more time.

He gripped Palu’s arm and shouted through his face shield. He pointed back to the engine tanker. “Is that a CAF system?” he asked.

Palu nodded.

As Gray had hoped, the fire engine was outfitted with compressed air foam, a thick knockdown retardant for fighting fires.

And hopefully more.

“Follow me!” Gray shouted.

As he turned away, he shook wasps from his silvery blanket. For now, the reflective fabric seemed to confuse the insects.

Let’s hope it stays that way.

Gray headed across Uakea Road toward where he’d dropped his bike. He prayed his plan would work — and that Palu’s hose had a long enough reach.

A glance over his shoulder showed the stout Hawaiian keeping pace with him, digging with his legs to haul the heavy white hose by himself.

Gray sped up, leaving Palu to follow as best he could. He reached the row of food trucks parked along Hauoli Road and crossed to one selling Hawaiian shave ice. It was shut tight with a pack of people and children inside.

“Can’t fit anyone else in here!” the proprietor yelled through the screen door. The mesh was thick with giant wasps, which appeared to be chewing at the fine wire, trying to get inside.

“That’s okay.” Gray panted and shifted over to a sliding service window. “Pass me your bottles of your syrup.”

“What?”

“Just do it!”

Gray glanced to a snow cone smashed in the grass a few yards away. A thick clot of wasps covered the slush.

The window slid open and someone handed him a bottle of blueberry-flavored syrup. He took it, twisted to the side, and threw the glass bottle like a Molotov cocktail. It flew high over a neighboring fence and exploded against the blacktop of an empty tennis court.

He turned back to the truck. “More!”

As those inside fed him bottle after bottle, he flung them into the same court. His efforts were soon rewarded. Wasps started flocking in that direction, drawn by the bright smell of sugar. Even the cluster crawling over the truck’s screen door gave up their efforts to chew their way inside and flung themselves off, buzzing toward the promise of an easier bounty.

Gray had hoped his lure would work. In the past, countless family picnics had been plagued by persistent hornets, wasps, and bees. He remembered his father once swallowing a yellow jacket that had fallen into his beer can. Gray suspected these creatures would be no different than their smaller cousins.

I mean, who doesn’t like dessert?

He didn’t know what fraction of the swarm would be diverted, but any portion he could pull away from attacking those left outside would buy time for emergency personnel to get additional people to shelter.

“That’s all I have!” the proprietor shouted, drawing back his attention.

Gray nodded and retreated a few steps, where he met Palu. “Wait until there’s a good swarm at the tennis court… then let ’em have it.”

“You are one lolo buggah,” Palu said in native pidgin. It was likely an insult but the big man’s wide grin suggested he was also impressed. “Now get your okole somewhere safe.”

“Not yet.” Gray stared at thick trails of wasps streaming high above.

Some of these bastards might not have a sweet tooth.

He hunched deeper into his silvery blanket and rushed to the next food truck. The side was painted with a dancing hot dog in a bun. He repeated the same maneuver, this time flinging torn-open packages of wieners into a nearby basketball court.

As he tossed the last of the dogs, a huge flume of white foam arced high to his right. He followed it back to where Palu was down on one knee, aiming the nozzle toward the tennis court. The fireman showered it across the hovering mass of wasps in the air, coating them heavily and driving them down to the thick carpet of churning bodies feasting amid the broken bottles of syrup.

Palu noted Gray’s attention. “I got it, brah! You go!”

Gray considered doing more, but he was dissuaded when a wasp latched on to his bare calf and stung him. He danced backward as if that would do any good. A second lance of pain brought him to his senses. He used his hiking boot to scrape it off and stamp it into the pavement, which only seemed to irritate it. It took grinding his heel atop its armored body to finally get a satisfying crunch.

By then, his other leg had become a tower of fire.

He tried to limp down the street, but whether the swarm noted his distress or were drawn by the odor of their crushed comrade, wasps pelted his fleeing form. His helmet rang with the impacts, and he felt strikes against the silvery blanket.

Agony climbed to his hip, making it harder to keep moving. His breath gasped between his clenched teeth. His vision wavered with tears. His entire world became pain. All he wanted to do was fall to the ground and scream.

Still, he forced himself to continue along the street, looking toward the community center’s glass doors. It seemed an impossible distance.

Never make it.

With each fiery step, he became more convinced. He no longer had control of his right leg. He fell sideways and caught himself on the hood of a Ford Taurus. Faces inside stared at him with concern, but they were packed tight in there.

No more room at the inn.

He pushed off to continue toward the community center. But he had exposed his hand for too long. Before he could tuck it under the blanket, a wasp landed on his wrist. Gray flung his arm, dislodging it before it could sting him, but he also lost his tenuous balance.

He toppled toward the curb, his arms swinging, which only drew more wasps.

He prepared to curl into a ball and do his best to pull his limbs under the fire blanket — but a force struck him in the middle of the back and rolled him across the pavement for a couple of panicked heartbeats.

He gasped as his vision whited out. It took him a full breath to realize his helmet’s visor was coated in foam, as was most of his body. Palu must have drenched him. An arm hooked his waist and pulled him upright.

Gray swiped his face shield to clear it.

Palu had hold of him. “We go!”

Gray felt no need to argue.

The fireman dragged him along, while still manning the hose with his other arm. As he half-carried Gray past the basketball court, he blasted foam across the wasps gorging on the piles of hot dogs over there.

Then the hose sputtered, and the arc of foam collapsed to a dribbling stream.

The tanker must be out of CAF.

Palu dropped the hose and firmed his grip on Gray, readying for a final run for the community center. Then a new noise intruded.

Sharp, insistent barking.

It drew both their attentions to the left. A scruffy terrier hid behind the baseball diamond’s home plate. A red leash ran back to a small boy crumpled on his side at the bottom of the backstop fence. His head lolled back, froth bubbling at the corners of his lips. His limbs twitched convulsively.

He was going into anaphylaxis.

Gray pulled in that direction, but the tall backstop blocked the way. They’d have to circle far around the fence to reach the child. Such a delay could mean his death, but Gray had to make the attempt.

Palu tried to restrain him — perhaps also recognizing the futility of this rescue attempt — then swore and followed Gray toward a gate fifteen yards away.

We’re never going to make it in time.

Already the boy’s limbs had stopped moving, and the dog’s barking had turned into a forlorn whine.

Gray tried to hurry, but adrenaline and desperation did little to dampen the fiery pain. Wasps bombarded their every step. Foam still coated most of Gray’s exposed limbs, but a determined wasp burrowed through the thick coating and stung the soft flesh behind his left knee.

Fresh agony flared, drawing a cry to his lips.

At his side, Palu did the same and swatted at his own belly. One of the bastards must have found its way under the hem of his fire jacket. Panicked, Palu let Gray fall and ripped open his coat and smacked the culprit off his chest, but pain dropped him to his hands and knees.

They were both on the ground now. Gray’s limbs tremored and quaked, overwhelmed by the poison. He stared toward the boy. He caught the terrier’s desperate gaze, begging for help.

Sorry, buddy, there’s nothing—

Then movement drew his attention farther out into the diamond. A thick, snaking shadow uncoiled from the sky and draped down to the pitcher’s mound.

Gray blinked, trying to make sense of the sight.

A rope.

He stared up its length to a large shadow hovering high overhead. It was a helicopter running without lights, likely to avoid drawing the swarm.

A large shape plummeted down the line and reached the ground. A pair of boots pounded into the dirt mound. The giant figure straightened, decked out in a full wetsuit, including a hood, mask, even a tank on his back. Through the faceplate of the mask, a familiar grizzled face scowled at the situation.

Gray could not comprehend the sudden arrival of someone he knew, but it didn’t matter. He yelled with all his strength and pointed toward the backstop fence.

“Kowalski! Grab that boy!”

Twenty minutes later, Gray stood behind the sealed glass doors of the community center. He stared out at the aftermath of the swarm’s attack. He counted more than a dozen bodies still sprawled in the outfield or soccer pitch. And there were likely more victims beyond his range of view.

Rescue teams had begun to arrive, dropping people in protective gear. But the situation remained dire. Eddying dark swirls of wasps still swept across the park and empty streets, while the larger shadowy mass of the swarm hung higher, hovering above.

Kowalski strode up to him. “Kid’s going to be okay according to the doc. Dog, too.”

“Thanks to your timely arrival.”

Gray pictured the gorilla of a man throwing the boy over his shoulder, then grabbing the dog by the scruff. He helped Gray and Palu over to the community health-care center, where a team of local nurses and doctors did their best with their meager resources to attend to the injured.

Kowalski had already explained how he had come to be here. It appeared Painter had been keeping tabs on Gray’s travels. Normally he would have resented being babysat, even from a distance, but considering a boy now lived because of the director’s caution, Gray could hardly complain.

“You just can’t keep your ass out of trouble, can you?” Kowalski said. The big man had stripped out of his protective wetsuit and wore boots, a pair of knee-length cargo shorts, and a Tommy Bahama shirt. He waved sourly at his attire. “There I was, about to head to a nice dinner at the Four Seasons with Maria, when I get this call to pull your butt out of the fire.”

It seemed Kowalski had used this babysitting assignment as a paid Hawaiian vacation, bringing along his girlfriend, Dr. Maria Crandall, a geneticist from Georgia who had helped Sigma in the past. The pair made an odd couple, but then again, her work dealt with Neanderthals. So clearly she had a type.

“Of course, maybe it’s just as well. Maria wanted to go to some restaurant that served raw food.” Kowalski shook his head. “What’s the point of paying to go to a place that’s not going to cook your stuff? It’s stupid, I tell you.”

“Then it sounds like you’d fit right in.”

Kowalski scrunched his heavy brow. “What do you mean by—?”

They were interrupted as two figures approached from an office. It was Hani Palu and his battalion chief, Benjamin Renard.

Palu had gotten rid of his heavy fire jacket, but still wore baggy yellow trousers held up by bright red suspenders. The Hawaiian clapped Kowalski on the back. The two could almost be brothers from another mother. Palu stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Kowalski, both standing well over six feet. The pair had dark hair, razored nearly to the scalp. But the Hawaiian’s face was rounder than Kowalski’s and certainly less scarred.

The two were also worlds apart in attitude.

Palu smiled broadly and often, even in these grim circumstances. Whereas Kowalski wore a perpetual scowl, as if expecting the worst at any moment.

Chief Renard pushed forward and held out a cell phone toward Gray. “You have a call. From a Director Crowe.”

“Thanks.” He took the phone and stepped a yard away. He was not surprised Painter had managed to hunt him down here.

He cradled the phone to his ear. “So what’s the situation?”

“I was hoping you could tell me… at least in regard to events out there. It seems Maui was not the only target of this attack. Honolulu was also hit, as was Hilo on the big island of Hawaii.”

Gray turned to the glass doors, trying to imagine such a poisonous swarm boiling into major population centers on those two islands.

“Kat also suspects the city of Lihue on Kauai might have been targeted, but a sudden downpour with high winds may have spared the place, driving the swarm out to sea.”

“If that’s so, how do you know Lihue was even a target?”

“A Cessna washed up on a beach not far from the city. With no pilot.”

“A Cessna TTx?”

“Exactly.”

Painter let the implication hang in the air. Gray was surprised after nine months how easily he fell right back into sync with the director. He also knew the director was holding something back and began to get an inkling of what it might be.

“Were any other sites on Maui attacked?” Gray asked.

“No, just Hana.”

Gray considered this detail. Maui had larger population centers, both the city of Kahului — where the international airport was located — and the more touristy stretch on the far side of the island.

“Then why only hit such a small place like Hana?” Gray pondered aloud.

“That’s a good question.”

Gray pictured the trio of aircraft aiming for shore, with the centermost one bearing directly toward the red sand beach.

“Unless they weren’t just targeting Hana,” he suddenly realized. “They could’ve been trying to take us out, too.”

Two birds with one stone.

He stared past the doors to the bodies in the fields.

Were they all dead because of me?

“We suspected the same,” Painter admitted. “If we’re right, that means someone knows you were out there. Someone close enough to know you were at that beach.”

Gray cringed inwardly.

If they should learn we survived…

He swung his gaze to the south, remembering who was out there all by herself.

Seichan…

8

From the porch of the old cottage, Seichan watched the trespasser creep through the fence row and along the garden path. The movements were furtive, keeping to the darkest shadows, approaching in short, lightning-fast advances. This predator clearly knew how to stalk its prey.

She waited near the doorway.

She had been expecting this visit all night.

Seichan slipped down to a knee. She did not want to put the other on guard.

The intruder glided low to the porch steps, vanishing momentarily from Seichan’s line of sight.

C’mon, already…

As if hearing her summons, the figure leaped into view and landed lightly atop the porch planks. Glassy eyes reflected the meager glow slipping through the shaded kitchen window. They fixed Seichan with a steady stare.

“About time,” she whispered to her guest.

A plaintive meow answered her.

Seichan lowered the plate of minced ahi tuna.

The black cat looked to the offering, then away. She stretched her long legs, splaying her paws, feigning disinterest.

“That’s all you’re getting.”

After another moment of hesitation, the cat swished her tail and stalked forward. She sniffed the plate, nosed the food, then began to eat, tentatively at first, then with more gusto.

Seichan risked stretching out a hand and scratching a single finger atop its head. A low growl flowed, though the cat never stopped eating. The creature was clearly feral, but over the past three months, Seichan had coaxed it closer and closer. She had noted the swollen mammary glands, suggesting the cat had a litter of kittens hidden somewhere out there.

Gray had scolded her for feeding the stray, counseling her on the devastation wrought by the wild cat population on the island, how they were endangering many bird species.

She ignored him. She remembered all too well what it was like to live on the streets after escaping the orphanage in Laos. She had been as feral as this cat, doing what she could to survive. Eventually the Guild had found her and trained her to hone those same street skills into deadlier pursuits.

She stared at the hungry cat. Though she was free of the Guild, a part of her could never fully escape her past. So she fed the stray, while trying to ignore the deeper motivations behind her actions.

Gray has enough on his mind.

After his father’s death, he had needed this escape from the real world. While he had accepted his role in ending his father’s life, sparing the proud man of needless suffering and loss of dignity, she knew a part of Gray remained haunted. She caught him often staring blindly into the distance. He never talked about his father, but his ghost hovered at his shoulder. Many nights he tossed and turned or simply slipped from their bed to sit on the porch.

She let him have those moments to himself.

With a sigh, she straightened and let the cat finish her meal. She rubbed her upper arm, trying to massage away the residual numbness from where she’d been stung. The fire had subsided in her arm, but a dull headache had settled between her eyes. This pain, though, was from tension and not an aftereffect of the venom.

She stared to the north, toward the source of her nervousness.

What’s taking you so long?

Earlier, Gray had called after reaching the community center in Hana, letting her know he was okay. But since then, nothing. He had warned her to stay at the cottage, as the situation in the small town remained chaotic. She imagined he was coordinating with Sigma back in the States, especially considering the unexpected arrival of Joe Kowalski.

Still, she remained on edge, anxious for an update.

The distant echo of sirens from Hana had faded awhile ago, but the silence afterward only heightened her sense of misgiving.

She paced barefooted to the cottage’s porch rail. It creaked when she leaned on it. According to the caretaker, the cottage had been built in the mid-forties, around the time the last sugar plantation had closed here. The thatch-roofed homestead sat a hundred yards off the highway, perched atop volcanic cliffs. The wooden structure was raised on stilts and ribbed by thick bamboo supports, harvested locally from a nearby forest. The furniture inside was all crafted of native koa wood. The old patina almost glowed.

For the past sleepy weeks, Gray and Seichan had the surrounding hundred acres all to themselves. Most of the grounds were untouched, a piece of unspoiled Hawaii, but closer at hand, the landscape was a paradise of papaya and banana trees, set amid towering palms. Wild gardens abounded, flowering with red ginger, yellow plumeria, and pink hibiscus.

Her gaze lingered on a plank swing hanging from a nearby mango tree. She and Gray had spent many hours there, lost in their own thoughts, watching the late-afternoon shadows stretch into evening.

She inhaled the night’s perfume, drawing it deep.

The place reminded her of her home back in a small village in Vietnam. The jungles here were different, but there remained a similar sense of timelessness and connection to the natural world that harked to her childhood. Her fingers found the small dragon pendant at her throat, a gift from her mother before the woman was ripped from her life. Seichan had been loved back then, a love that infused their small hovel, transforming it into a magical place.

And maybe that was what truly made this cottage feel like home now.

She stared at the swing, remembering Gray’s fingers entwined in hers as they sat together.

He had made this place a home.

She paced again, unable to escape a sense of trepidation, a feeling that everything was coming to an end. It was not his love she mistrusted, only her continuing capacity to accept it. These months on the road had been wonderful, beyond anything she could have imagined with another person. But at the same time, this was a dreamlike sojourn, one from which she’d have to eventually awaken.

And then what?

Under the harshness of reality, could this last? Or even should it?

The cat growled, drawing Seichan’s attention around.

“Quit complaining. There’s no more—”

The cat had her back to the plate, staring out toward the forest of palm trees. The deep-throated growl faded to a low hiss as the cat slunk warily to its belly.

Seichan followed the example and crouched. She shifted away from the glow of the kitchen window.

Someone’s out there.

Gray dialed the number for a third time. He was holed up in the community center’s office, using their landline to try to reach Seichan. Unfortunately, the remote location of the cottage offered no cell service, which limited his communication options.

He listened as the connection rang once — then nothing but dead air.

He slammed the receiver down.

Earlier, he had reached Seichan by phone, but the emergency here must have finally overloaded the local systems. He cursed himself for abandoning his satellite phone when he left the States, but the device was Sigma property. Back then, he had wanted privacy and feared the phone would be used to track him.

Fat lot of good that did.

He stared out the office door at Kowalski. Clearly Painter had still managed to keep tabs on Gray.

Knowing he would have no better luck with the phone, he headed to the lobby. Kowalski straightened from where he was leaning against a wall. He had the stub of an unlit cigar clenched between his molars. A large nurse behind a desk stared daggers at him, as if daring him to try to light it.

Gray interrupted their standoff. “No luck reaching her. I’m going to make a run for my bike and head out there myself.”

“Could be worrying over nothing,” Kowalski groused. “And if there’s trouble, knowing her, she’ll handle it just fine.”

Gray knew both statements were roughly true, but he wasn’t taking any chances. If he and Seichan had been specifically targeted as part of this attack, he planned on facing any repercussions at her side.

“You hang here, while I check on her.” He spotted a familiar broad-chested figure by the main doors and crossed over. “Palu, do any of your men have gear that might fit me? A jacket, maybe trousers?”

Palu must have understood his intent. “You planning on going back out there?”

“A friend of mine might be in trouble.”

“Okay, then I’ll go wit’ you.”

“Thanks, but there’s not enough room on my bike.”

“Who says we take your little bike?” Palu lifted an arm. A set of keys dangled from a finger. “I have a better ride.”

The big Hawaiian nodded outside to a bright yellow SUV parked a few yards away. The words BATTALION CHIEF were emblazoned on the side door. Clearly it belonged to his boss, who was currently preoccupied with a radio interview.

“Plus I know a shortcut,” Palu added. “Get you there wikiwiki.”

Gray nodded, happy to accept the offer. “Let’s go.”

A gruff voice at Gray’s shoulder startled him. Kowalski had followed him over, moving with surprising stealth for someone so large. “If he’s going, I’m going.”

Palu shrugged. “Mo’ better.”

“Fine.” Gray waved to the door. “We all go.”

Kowalski paused long enough to light his cigar, glaring back at the nurse behind the desk. They then rushed out the glass doors and through a cloud of smoke rising from a smoldering barbecue set up at the entrance. The acrid pall was meant to guard against the wasps still buzzing out there.

At least the worst of the attack seemed to have passed. Stars twinkled above. The majority of the swarm had rolled off into the dense rain forest that climbed the northeasterly flank of Mount Haleakala, a dormant volcano that formed half of Maui. While the immediate danger had dissipated, Gray suspected this was only the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

But dealing with such a threat would have to wait for now.

They reached Chief Renard’s truck — a Ford SUV equipped with sirens and a light bar — and clambered inside. Palu hopped behind the wheel, while Gray joined him in front. Kowalski simply sprawled across the backseat.

Palu started the engine and got them moving.

A familiar buzz rose near Gray’s ear. He ducked and glanced back. A large wasp landed and climbed across the inside of the window behind him.

Kowalski took his cigar and casually stubbed its lit end onto the wasp. Its body exploded with a sizzling pop. He then returned the stogie to his mouth.

Gray settled back to his seat.

Okay, maybe the guy has his uses.

Crouched low, Seichan watched the black cat dash down the cottage’s porch steps and vanish into the flowering shrubbery. That wasn’t an option for her. At least, not yet. She had to assume that whoever was out there had the place surrounded.

She considered her options.

Shadow or fire.

The Guild had grilled those two approaches into her whenever she found herself cornered. Shadow involved staying calm, using stealth and subterfuge to slip out of a snare. Or she could fire up her adrenaline for a direct assault, breaking the snare by force.

Unfortunately, she had no firepower to blast her way out of here. As arbitrarily as she and Gray had moved from country to country, they hadn’t been able to transport any sidearms. Traveling as civilians, they had no way of circumventing customs laws, and they had spent too brief a time in places to bother securing weapons through the black market.

Still, she wasn’t totally unarmed. She had a sheaf of daggers, throwing knives, and a well-balanced Chinese cleaver secured in a leather roll. Only one customs official ever questioned her collection. To justify her possession of such an assemblage of cutlery, she had claimed to be a freelance chef and carried around a forged Diplôme de Cuisine from Le Cordon Bleu as proof.

Sadly, the knives were currently secured in the back bedroom on the cottage’s far end, and she dared not expose herself long enough to get inside.

Which left her no option but to follow the path of the shadow.

This decision was made in a single breath — with the next, she was already in motion.

9

“Anyone have eyes on her?”

Atop the cliff above the pounding waves, Masahiro Ito listened as each of his genin reported in from their positions around the thatch-roofed cottage. Fifteen minutes ago, the strike team had arrived by pontoon boat. They had paddled to shore, running dark, and scaled the cliffs fifty yards north of their goal to keep their arrival quiet and unseen.

Masahiro cursed whoever had alerted their target. He had ordered the others to stay hidden, to await the return of the American. His grandfather wanted both the woman and the soldier dispatched this night.

But now the situation had changed. Their target — the Eurasian woman, a traitor to the Kage—had disappeared just as the team had moved into position. One moment she appeared to be feeding a cat, and then she simply vanished off the porch. With the element of surprise gone, they could no longer hold back. The woman must be dispatched before she notified her partner of the ambush.

“Negative, Chūnin Ito,” Masahiro’s second-in-command radioed in. “No one has her in sight.”

He clenched his jaw.

All five of his men were former Kage assassins, recruited by his grandfather after the destruction of the organization. As the hierarchy was brought low, few in the Echelon — the upper levels of the Kage—survived the global purge. As far as Masahiro knew, only his grandfather managed to avoid notice.

Who would give an elder of ninety years more than a second glance?

It was a mistake.

As the Kage collapsed, Masahiro’s grandfather shielded him, not by hiding his grandson in some hole, but by pushing him further into the limelight. Masahiro became vice president of R&D for Fenikkusu Laboratories, a company founded by his grandfather decades ago. He was even granted a board position.

Still, his grandfather had assigned him another duty, one unknown to the board: to covertly gather the genin—or lower men — of the Kage, those who had scattered after the organization’s fall. He was to take them under his wing and build them into a smaller but deadlier force.

Following his grandfather’s guidance, he patterned this new group upon the shinobi, the secretive warriors of feudal Japan, a group who would later be bastardized and mythologized under the name ninja. His grandfather, Takashi, believed in the older ways, when Japan was at its most glorious. Though over ninety years of age, Takashi was the new group’s jōnin, or leader. Masahiro was granted the title of chūnin, or “middle man.” All the genin reported directly to Masahiro.

It was an efficient means of organization, one that had served the shinobi for centuries. Even their ancient training was honored, used to further hone the skills of the genin under him.

To that end, Masahiro carried a traditional katana, the sword sheathed over his back. He also bore a kusarigama—a steel sickle attached to a length of weighted chain — coiled at his waist.

While these were old weapons of the shinobi, Masahiro had updated their arsenal with modern tech. He and the others wore dark green camouflage with lightweight Kevlar body armor beneath and were armed with stubby 9mm Minebea machine pistols equipped with suppressors and night-vision scopes.

Still, each member of the strike team also wore the traditional tenugui, a length of cloth used to hide one’s features, but which could also serve as a belt or even a rope for a quick climb.

Masahiro adjusted his tenugui higher on the bridge of his nose.

Where is this woman?

Frustrated, he knew he could wait no longer.

“Close in now,” he ordered. “Kill on sight.”

Seichan crouched in the bower of a hundred-year-old mango tree. Its crown stretched thirty feet wide above her head, creating a pool of darker shadows below. She balanced barefooted on a limb as thick as her thigh.

Moments ago, she had leaped headlong over the porch rail, careful not to brush the rickety wood. Anticipating the enemy might be equipped with night vision or infrared, she rolled under the porch and past the stilts that supported the cottage. She used the wooden bulk to hide her passage, then darted back out into the thickest patch of garden, running low, until she could clamber up the nearest tree, seeking higher ground.

She expected focus to be on the cottage or the grounds.

Hopefully, not up.

She kept frozen on her perch. Her only movement was the silent breath in and out her nose. Then a rustle of dried leaves alerted her. A darker patch of shadows slipped under the wide bower below her. As she waited for her moment, she searched for anyone else in the immediate vicinity.

No one.

She took in this detail and judged the spread of the combatants. From there, she extrapolated the number necessary to surround the cottage and estimated a team of five to seven.

Not great odds, but she’d handled worse in the past.

Of course, back then she had been armed — with more than just a mango.

It’ll have to do.

She gently tossed the ripe fruit to the left.

Below, the figure swung in that direction, one eye fixed to the gun’s scope. With the target’s back turned, she reached down to the rope knotted around the tree limb under her. It trailed down to the old swing where she and Gray had idled for many lazy hours. She hauled the line up, tilting the plank seat and drawing it higher.

Before the figure could turn back around, she dropped quietly off her perch. As she fell, she tossed a loop of rope over the man’s head — then landed on the crooked seat with both feet. Her weight snapped the noose tight around her victim’s neck. Still balanced on the plank, she twisted and grabbed the man’s skull and finished what the rope had failed to do.

Vertebrae broke, and the man’s limbs went limp.

She stepped off the swing and relieved the man of his weapon.

So much for shadow.

She hefted the submachine gun to her shoulder.

Now it’s time for fire.

A volley of blasts drew Masahiro’s attention toward the cottage. The assault was under way. The suppressed gunfire sounded little louder than the clapping of hands. He shifted away from his position at the top of the cliff.

His team must have finally rousted the woman out of hiding.

Only a matter of time now…

He listened for two more breaths as the night went quiet again. He heard the soft shush-shushing of the waves behind him. Then another spate of gunfire erupted, only from a new direction, closer to his position.

Suspicion rankled through him. He crouched and touched the microphone buried in the folds of the tenugui covering his lips. “Status report?”

As he waited, his heart pounded. He sensed something was wrong.

Another short burst reinforced this.

Then Jiro, his second-in-command, radioed. He sounded winded, his voice strained. “She’s secured a weapon. Took out three others.”

More gunfire interrupted the conversation, followed by a sharp rattling cry.

Make that four…

Masahiro’s chest tightened with fury.

Jiro spoke again, his voice hushed now: “Chūnin Ito, it is best you retreat to the boat.”

Before he could refuse, a new voice cut in over the radio, sultry and calm, her Japanese flawless. “Or you can wait for me to join you.”

Masahiro clenched the grip on his weapon. It seemed the woman had secured more than just a gun off one of his teammates.

She taunted him. “Or are you too much of a koshinuke?”

He bristled at the insult. He was no coward. Yet he also recognized she was goading him to act rashly. He took a deep breath, then spoke calmly.

“I will secure the boat and wait for you there, Genin Jiro.”

“Understood. I will find her.”

A snort of derision answered this challenge. “Then let us play.”

Seichan stood with her back to a palm tree as the exchange ended. She had her eyes closed, the stolen radio earpiece in her hand. She had heard the whisper of Jiro’s last words rising somewhere to her left.

While her interruption had failed to spook the others or get them to overreact, she had managed to get a bearing on the gunman sharing the forest with her. She had already estimated that the group had arrived by boat, likely beaching somewhere north of the cottage’s location. The coastline to the south was too jagged with rocks and pounded by heavier surf.

She weighed the odds of reaching the beachhead before the leader escaped by sea. Earlier, she had used the advantage of surprise and her knowledge of the local terrain to defeat four of the men, but the final target blocking her — the one called Jiro — would be wary and ready.

So be it.

She accepted the fact that she could not reach the leader in time and put all her attention into capturing Jiro alive. She planned on interrogating the man, picturing her knives rolled up in the cottage nightstand.

I will get him to talk.

She set off to the left, passing through a thicket without stirring a branch. She paused periodically to use her gun’s night-vision scope. Each peek illuminated the landscape in bright shades of gray. Her ears strained for every creak, rustle, and snap.

She had memorized the grounds, as she always did with any new surroundings. It was as instinctual as breathing after so many years. She knew every bush, tree, and rock. So when she spotted a stationary boulder amid a grove of papaya trees forty yards to her left, she knew it didn’t belong there.

She settled to a knee behind a hibiscus bush, took aim, and fired two rounds dead center, avoiding a head shot if possible. She kept an eye on her scope. The bullets shredded through camouflage fabric and toppled the target over — revealing nothing beneath it but a frame of crossed branches.

A decoy.

Biting back a curse, she leaped headlong to the right. The hibiscus bush exploded under a spray of automatic fire. She landed on a shoulder and rolled to her feet. She kept firing blindly in the direction of the attacker as she ran. She didn’t expect to hit him, only to drive him into cover.

She gritted her teeth as she fled. She would not underestimate her opponent a second time. She abandoned any pretense of capturing the clever man alive. When faced by such an adversary, there was only one safe play.

Kill or be killed.

Unfortunately, she failed to fully comprehend the game being played.

As she flew around an outcropping of volcanic rock, she found a figure already waiting there, with a weapon leveled at her chest. It was a trap. She had been flushed here on purpose. She immediately knew the man was not Jiro.

But rather his leader.

The bastard had not fled back to his boat after all.

She pictured the grin hidden behind his mask — as he fired at her.

Masahiro savored the kill.

Unfortunately, he was premature. The woman was still in motion when she flew into view. She used that momentum to pirouette sideways, slimming her profile, her arms high. His first volley of rounds ripped past her stomach, close enough to tear through her blouse.

Before he could adjust his aim, she hammered her arm down. The butt of her stolen gun struck his wrist. Pain burst there, and he lost hold of his pistol.

Fortunately, the impact also jarred the weapon from the woman’s grip.

They stared at each other for a half-breath — then both moved at the same time.

The woman lashed out with a roundhouse kick, while dropping low to retrieve her weapon. He leaped back to avoid the strike and grabbed the hilt of the katana sheathed across his shoulders.

As she scooped the pistol, he yanked the short sword from its scabbard and swept it at her face. She leaned back at the last moment, the blade slicing past her nose.

Though he had failed to draw blood, the damage was done.

Following the ways of the shinobi, he had packed the top of his scabbard with a powerful irritant. In the past, warriors had used powdered red peppers to subdue their victims; he updated the formulation with ground ghost pepper and dry bleach.

The effect was instantaneous.

The woman gasped as a waft of powder struck her eyes. The reflex drew the irritant deep into her nose and lungs.

She fired blindly, hacking and choking as she retreated.

He sheltered behind the rock and waited until she emptied the weapon’s magazine. When the volley ended, he retrieved his pistol and gave chase. He intended to run his prey down himself.

But she remained fast, even incapacitated.

Within a few yards, a form burst alongside him out of the forest.

Jiro.

Masahiro pointed after the woman, and they set off together, both eager for the kill.

Blind and breathless, she had no hope of escape.

With tears streaming down her cheeks, Seichan ran. She held her arms out before her. Each gasp seared her lungs. Her eyes felt like two hot coals in her skull.

It was as if she fled through the heart of a forest fire.

Only these woods remained watery and dark.

Her shoulder struck the bole of a tree and sent her careening to the side. She absorbed the impact, flowing with it to keep her footing. She dared not fall. She heard branches breaking behind her and the footfalls of her pursuers.

Through the pain and tears, she focused on the blurry glow through the darkness ahead, a beacon in the night. The lighted window of the cottage. She needed to reach shelter and buy herself enough time to secure her knives and hopefully a balm for her eyes.

No other choice.

She forced one leg after the other, racing toward that light. She used the flow of the ocean breeze and the slope of the ground to further guide her. Branches and thorns tore at her. Sharp volcanic stones ripped at the soles of her bare feet. Still, she sought to run faster as the others closed in on her.

She expected at any moment to feel rounds pound into her back.

Finally, the air opened up around her. The bushes and low tree branches stopped dragging at her body. She must have cleared the forest and entered the cottage gardens. The glow of the kitchen window beckoned, as bright as the sun to her inflamed eyes.

So close.

Then her world exploded.

Two supernovas burst to her right, circling the cottage on that side, coming straight at her.

Blinded by the glare, she froze, a deer in headlights.

Headlights…

A voice boomed at her, impossibly loud.

“Seichan! Drop flat!”

She obeyed, trusting the man who held her heart. She stumbled a few steps into that radiance, then sprawled on her belly. The twin supernovas ran up and over her. The gust of a large vehicle’s passage whipped her torn blouse. She smelled exhaust as it cleared her.

Gunfire erupted behind her.

Then the heavy thud of metal hitting flesh.

She remained where she was, too exhausted and in pain to move.

Car doors slammed, and then a form dropped to his knees next to her.

“Are you okay?” Gray asked.

“I am now.” She rolled with a groan, barely able to make out Gray’s features. “Did… did you get both of ’em?”

“Only one. He managed to shove the other guy out of the way at the last moment.”

She pictured this act and knew what it meant.

Jiro had sacrificed himself to save his leader.

“Kowalski went after the bastard, but he vanished into the dark. Even if we don’t find him, I don’t think he’ll be back.”

She stared off into the woods.

At least, not yet.

Masahiro raced the pontoon boat away from the shoreline. He rounded a volcanic peninsula to put rock between him and the cliffs near the cottage. He had already radioed the float plane to rendezvous with him and prepare for the voyage away from these islands.

He sighed as he glanced back to shore.

The bio-attack had gone as planned. The only exception was in Kauai, when a sudden storm had waylaid operations there. Otherwise, matters had been set in motion on the other islands, and nothing could stop what would happen from here.

He faced the open ocean again.

Despite the success, he burned with shame.

He had failed in his grandfather’s vendetta. The two most involved in the downfall of the Kage still lived.

And it is my fault.

Still, he intended not to repeat this failure, but to learn from it.

In the meantime, he would have to be satisfied to see these islands burn — especially as it would be the Americans themselves who would destroy Hawaii.

They would have no choice.

Once the truth revealed itself, the world would demand it.

He smiled within the folds of his tenugui.

Until then, the suffering here will be glorious to behold.