“A new creature, specifically designed to challenge us.”

“So fast? Don’t they have to grow?”

He did not respond, there was no point. The thing was here and it was moving toward them, stopping, inhaling, then coming carefully closer. The eyes were totally dark, as if some sort of black lens covered them.

“Is that a mask?”

Mark waited. Even blind, a seven-foot monster such as this was obviously extraordinarily dangerous. Who knew what kind of capabilities the design skills of an endlessly ingenious machine mind might have given it?

Ahead of them, an abandoned cable car stood in the middle of the street. The California Line, which went down Nob Hill. Other than that, the street was empty, no wrecked cars, no people. Except for a broken or abandoned vehicle here and there, the streets in this area were stripped, their contents now in the bay.

As they moved off, the thing behind them sniffed the air again and again, its hissing, eager breaths the only sound but for—what was that? Then Mark understood that he was hearing the distant cries of ordinary seagulls. They swarmed in a vast horde out on the bay, scavenging the remains.

The creature now stood still, not facing in their direction. But Mark was not fooled. He touched Gina’s shoulder, saw her tight nod of acknowledgment.

The thing leaped toward them from a hundred feet away, arms spread, long fingernails gleaming. It had used the sound of their breathing to locate them.

“Brace!” Gina shouted to Mark—but the thing unexpectedly twisted in the air and leaped on her instead.

It uttered a blasting, heart-stopping shriek as she sliced into its neck with her knife. Mark prepared to see the arms wrap her and the claws rip her, but there was another surprise. As they went crashing to the pavement locked in battle, a huge, muscular tail appeared and swooped around her.

Mark dug his knife into its base, and the thing went rolling away—but then, from the parapets of the church, from the roof of the building across the street, more like it came leaping down at them.

He felt Gina’s back to his, heard her hard breath, and in the next instant was hit by the first of the descending creatures, which he struck so hard in its wire-tight lower abdomen that his fist followed the knife into the pulsating organs, which he cut with the fury of the mad.

The creature threw its head back, but its shriek never came, it died instead with an expiring sigh.

Mark pushed it off him and leaped up toward the others, which were thirty and forty feet in the air, descending quickly, but controlling their drops just as he and Gina could. He jumped neatly, but Gina was less skilled, and she went high, shouting her surprise as she soared far above the dropping creatures, scrambling in the air, trying to control herself.