Faster than my eyes (with raptor vision) could track, one thick leg shot out and whipped my feet out from under me. I caught myself on my hands just in time for him to kick my side hard enough to make my breath fly out of my lungs and give me that so-attractive fish-gasping expression.

The flock, except for Angel, was on their feet in a second, but I made a “Don’t attack” gesture — just in time, because the soldiers had once again shifted forward. With iron control, I slowly sucked in my breath, hoping they wouldn’t start lasering everything in sight. I took inventory: legs okay; ribs really, really bruised, maybe cracked. It hurt a surprising amount, which made me realize that it had been a while since I’d had broken bones. Clearly I needed to review my street-fighting skills.

“You do not give orders,” Gozen said in his weird almost-human-but-not-quite voice. “You follow orders.”

I bit my lip so I wouldn’t tell him to go stuff his orders. Apparently he picked up on things like that. Gozen was unlike anything we’d come up against before. He was bigger, faster, human enough to be subtle but machine enough to have no conscience. I did think he was probably too heavy to fly, so yay for that.

I gathered my feet under me, refusing to wince. Keeping a sharp eye on Gozen, I stood up cautiously, motioning the others behind my back to stay out of his range. Unless he could shoot bullets from his eyes, which I wasn’t putting past him.

“We are against global warming,” Gozen intoned.

Was that a statement or a question? Were we part of the “we”?

“Uh-huh,” I said carefully, backing away slowly. “That’s good.”

“Therefore we are violently opposed to your kind,” Gozen went on.

Not so good.

I quickly decided I believed in global warming. “But we’re against it too!” I said, keeping one wary eye on the Transformer-bots. “We were in Antarctica helping to stop global warming!”

“No. Humans created the problem. Humans are destroying the earth. You are destroying life.”

“Okay, now, see, you’re wrong here on a bunch of levels,” I said quickly. “First, we’re not even completely human! Did you miss the wings? I mean, jeez. Plus, as I just pointed out, we were trying to stop global warming! We’re totally against it!”

“Yeah!” said Gazzy. “We’re trying to save the world! It’s our mission!”

Gozen turned slowly, and my heart sped up when his gaze stopped on Gazzy. I moved to put myself between them.