No human agency, it was believed, would ever be able to disturb anything at the deepest level—where, at present, a larger, more powerful, and far more lethal drone was being grown at truly terrifying speed, its long antennae rising, ready to grasp the air and fly, and it would soon exit its twenty-mile-deep hangar.

The mind that was generating all this—immeasurably conscious, mad with terror, brilliant beyond anything any of its creators had been capable of imagining—was able to understand literally anything, but not anticipate everything, and it had not anticipated that Mark and Gina would penetrate its drone’s defenses, and it had ended up without a choice: The drone had to be crashed, but this would cause the microwave field it generated to be destroyed. The hybrids on the surface would not only experience a disruption to the networking of their minds, their vision would be serverely compromised.

Once the new drone was operational, the army would once again be able to see and spread as they were intended to spread, through the whole world. Once they were again fully functional, they would race to expand their holdings, exploding through human society with an efficiency and speed that mankind could not even begin to imagine.

Then they would be safe. Then, and at last.

*   *   *

Mark and Gina were deep in the shattered city, going from place to place in brief flickers, pursuing the next phase of the mission that they had conceived for themselves. Now, they hid under the front steps of a row house.

From here, they had a partial view of an empty street. The advantage was that they were hard to spot. To move at all, though, they had to expose themselves.

Something new had been added to the mix. Or rather, not entirely new, because Gina’s helicopter had been attacked by them three days ago.

Between themselves, they had decided to call these things biomechanicals. So far, they had seen two forms, large-scale insects and even larger birds. But they could take any form, even novel forms. It just depended on the cleverness of the designer.

Their vision operated in some manner different from the hybrids’, because there was every evidence that they could see.

Overhead, a biomechanical bird glided past, an enormous, black creature, a design based on the condor, but three times its size, an airborne nightmare armed with a hooked beak of blue steel.

Silently, they both hoped that it would keep going, but scrabbling on the steps overhead indicated that it had landed.

They had come out of Golden Gate Park into a city in torment. Large parts of it were depopulated. The rest had gone, essentially, mad. Anarchy had set in. There was looting, shots were being fired by the human population, and screams echoed up and down the streets as hybrid hunting parties flushed out hidden people.