It returned to the case and folded itself up.

She slammed the lid. “Boy, do they stink.”

“You can’t exactly bathe ’em, can you?” the Richardson figure said.

“There’s gotta be something. You don’t think bugs smell until they’re big like this. Let’s see, now, what we got?”

She pointed a small control at George’s body, and the hissing grew in intensity. Steam curled out of the mouth, then shot out both mouth and nose, then around the eyes.

The skin turned purple and blew up like some sort of horrific balloon, almost ripping the clothes to pieces.

“Good,” the hybrid muttered. As she pocketed the device, the skin sank down like a deflating tire. Nothing was left of the skeleton or the organs, so it sank down into a wrinkled jumble of loose clothes.

Her hands swept it. “I don’t want to get in this.”

“You have to.”

“I won’t!” But even as she shouted protest, she threw off her clothes and lay down on the skin, her porcelain white body making it seem almost dark in comparison. “I’m not doing it,” she cried as she slid into the skin. She moved like a snake struggling with its molt.

“The planes are getting lower,” the false Linda said, her voice crisply urgent.

What appeared to be George Hammond came to his feet. “He was ugly and now I’m ugly. I want to be beautiful.”

“Your voice is ridiculous.”

“I just heard him for a few minutes!”

“Try harder!”

The three of them moved out into the clearing. Silver transport aircraft circled in a vast blue sky.

“Linda” spoke into the satphone.

“We’re good to go. Bring ’em in.”

“Put Hammond on.”

The hybrid girl in Hammond’s skin took the satphone.

“Looks good,” she said in a somewhat better approximation of his voice.

A moment later, the planes banked sharply and began to descend.

All around the edges of the clearing, hundreds more hybrids waited.

The most powerful military unit on the planet began dropping into the clearing that would become its tomb.

Chapter Twenty-Two

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

SOLDIERS’ HEARTS

Beneath the West Coast of the United States is a vast zone of factures and fissures, areas that have shattered as the Pacific Plate slowly collides with the continental shelf. Close to the surface, these regions form the great fault lines of California, but far down, much farther than human instruments can measure except in a general way, voids are filled with hot gases and glowing with the eerie yellow-white of superheated rock.

Some are huge, and some even communicate with the surface along enormous flues hundreds of miles long, feeding the hot springs that pepper the region, the most famous of which is, of course, Old Faithful in Yellowstone Park.