‘Oh, it was definitely alive. I didn’t notice anybody looking sick. But then again, I wasn’t looking at them. Why?’

‘We had three of them.’

‘There are three of those things?’

‘All variations of each other. With that many animals mixed together in one body, things are bound to go wrong. At the same time they were making them, Laylah, the lead physician, was working on an apocalyptic plague. It was supposed to be for us humans, but there was a lot of experimentation to make it as gruesome as possible. Somehow, one of the strains got passed on to the sixers.’

I remember Uriel talking to Laylah in his suite before the last aerie party. He was pressuring her pretty hard to cut corners and make the apocalypse happen faster. I’m guessing she’s been cutting corners all along to meet his demands.

‘The sixers infected the angel doctors. They got sick, then about a day or two later, they were exposed to the sixers again, and that massively accelerated the disease. They bled out in the most horrible way. It looked excruciatingly painful too. It was everything they were trying to do with a human disease, only it killed angels and locusts instead. The human lab workers were fine, and so were the sixers. They were just carriers of the disease.’

‘Do you have one in a cage somewhere?’ I ask.

‘The infected sixers were all killed. I was ordered to dispose of the bodies. Angels don’t do dirty work like that. Before I burned them, though, I managed to sneak two vials of their blood. I used one to infect the new batch of sixers that they created. I was hoping it might cause some random damage.’

‘Did it?’ I ask, thinking about Raffe even now.

‘I don’t know. After the accident, they separated the projects to avoid further contamination, so I lost track of it.’

‘What did you do with the second vial of blood?’

‘I kept it for study. That’s what we’ve been using to try to come up with an angel plague.’

‘But no luck?’ I ask.

‘Not yet,’ says Doc. ‘Not for a long time to come.’

‘Time we don’t have,’ says the Colonel. ‘Next idea.’

Our goal is easy to identify – we need to come up with a way to survive the onslaught tonight. But we just talk in circles, trying to figure out how to do it. For all we know, we could be the only freedom fighters showing up at the Bay Bridge.

As we drive up the peninsula, we talk.

And talk.

And talk some more.

I’m trying not to yawn, but it’s not easy. It feels like it’s been a week since I slept.

‘The angels might not even know which bridge is the East Bay Bridge,’ says the Colonel. ‘We need a lure or something that will attract them away from the Golden Gate.’