The man’s skin began to slough off, swept away in chunks by the wash of the still-turning rotor.

“Gina, I feel just like you do. We can’t help it but we don’t need to give in, Gina. We have to find the controls, that’s how to put a stop to this.”

“But what happens then? What if there are ten of this thing? A thousand? And more weapons, and more hybrids?”

“Rule of the infantryman: Keep putting one foot in front of the other and stay alive.”

The chopper nosed over and tumbled away, the fourth body sailing gracefully beside it, until the clouds closed around them and they were gone.

Gina watched, her eyes wide, her face covered with sweat. Then she turned away, and he saw the anguish and the disgust.

“You loved it, and you hate yourself for it. Same as me.”

She sucked air through bared teeth. “Why does it feel so damn good to watch them die?”

“The machine part of us despises man and finds human suffering delicious. We have to keep our emotions focused on our humanity.”

Her devastated eyes regarded him. Around them the huge device shuddered, moving fast now.

“The controls are here,” she said. “That’s why I came here.”

“How did you know?”

“I was taught something about this machine. In a school in San Francisco. I don’t know the name of the school and I don’t know when I was there, but as soon as I saw this thing, I knew how it worked.” She drew back a black panel, revealing a cell like the ones in the tunnels. In it was a sleek hybrid body, which Mark immediately hauled out, with a wet sound. Its pale skin shimmered, then flushed red in the sunlight. The body, as big as he was, writhed in his arms until he threw it off the catwalk. It arced out, its hands grasping, its legs pumping, then dropped down toward the clouds, kicking and clawing as it fell away, its voice a fading series of cries.

The interior of the cell was wet and red, its surface mottled with golden specks that he knew were leads that would link the pilot’s nervous system with the machine.

“Don’t even think about it,” she said.

“I have to think about it!”

He peered into the dim, confined space.

“Mark, without him, it’ll crash. So let’s just get off it before that happens.”

“I have to try.”

“Mark, no!”

He pulled himself into the interior. It was like being in an MRI scanner made of dense paper, but even more confining.

It was pitch-dark here, and totally silent—and then it wasn’t. He was not only here, he was inside the whole hybrid mass everywhere that it was, and he was miserable and sweating and hungry and packed with hate, such hate as he had never known, raw, essential, darker than dark.