Her reaction was almost inhumanly fast; she pushed up again, turned and attacked the car with a kind of savage energy. She pounded it with her fists and her knees, denting the panels, smashing a lone intact window on the passenger side. Within a few seconds, her fists were leaving bloody smears on the powder-blue paint; she seemed to neither notice nor care.

Watching her, Dryden caught movement at the left edge of his vision. He turned and saw two of the other fallen agents moving on the ground, rolling, getting themselves upright. One of them, a man in his forties, absently held on to the M4 he’d been carrying when he fell. He got up on his knees, took hold of a small tree and pulled himself to his feet; he stood there swaying.

Then he let loose one of those impossible, throat-ripping screams, and clenched his hand tight on the M4’s grip—pulling the trigger in the process.

The weapon opened up on full-auto, the firestream chewing apart leaves and dirt at the man’s feet. It went on for three seconds and then the rifle’s magazine ran dry. A second later the man took the gun by the forestock, the way he would have held a baseball bat, and attacked the tree he had pulled himself up by.

“Look,” Danica said, her voice hardly above a breath.

Dryden followed her gaze—to Jack Grace.

The man still sat where he’d passed out, against the fence, but his eyes were open, staring at the ground near his feet. His hands were clenching and unclenching, slowly.

“Rigel,” Danica whispered. “This is what it does.”

Dryden stared at Grace and the others, letting it sink in. He took in their screams and their frenzied movements, and tried to imagine the kind of mind that would have invented a chemical weapon like this. That wanted to sell it. That wanted it to be used against civilians by the thousands.

And it would be—next week or next month or next year. There would be no stopping it, once it got out to the buyers.

Now the question that had plagued him for hours returned:

We saw this stuff used against a whole town when we were kids, but that’s not why the military wiped our memories. What did we see that was even worse than this? What was a bigger secret than this?

Across the yard, Grace had gotten himself up in a crouch, rocking in place, his breathing fast like the black-haired woman’s had been. Behind him, scattered across the stretch of forest that Dryden could see, all of the other agents were either moving or fully upright. The more distant shrieks, coming from unseen others in the woods, were too many to count now—and every few seconds there came another sporadic rattle of gunfire.

Dryden stepped back from the gap in the wall. “Time to go,” he said.