She nodded. “The road opens out just past this bit, and then you can put on some speed.” She stared through the windshield into the darkness. “The Beta Team is out there somewhat. Belinda should have dealt with them by now, or maybe there’s another team as well.”

”Are you worried about them?” I asked, a sinking feeling in my stomach. We’d managed to fight off those other goons, but if there were more. . .

Astrid shook her head. “They’re all low-level. Usually, I wouldn’t worry about them. Except the core is vulnerable today. Thanks to you, Jeremy. She’s been preparing for you. I don’t think the soldiers know about her. What they said about Armageddon makes me think they were on some warpath against beastkin.”

“Why Armageddon?”

Astrid shrugged. “Who knows.”

She? The core? Armageddon? Dozens of questions raced through my mind. The desire for answers was drowned out by another, much greater desire: self-preservation.

”I’m going to be in deep shit when this is all over,” I said to myself. The government didn’t look kindly on any factional warring between humans and Outworlders.

After a couple of minutes, the road began to open out as Astrid had said it would. I pumped the gas, pushing my car up past what it was usually comfortable with.

Soon, we were racing down the broad dirt road at 100 miles per hour. My little Pulsar thrummed and shuddered with the effort.

A high-pitched, electronic chime sounded from my spell panel.

Monster Girl Detected!

Type: Psycher

Do you wish to dial beast control?

Select: Yes? / No?

”What’s this?” Astrid furrowed her brow as she leaned over to look at the panel’s LCD screen.

”Damn it,” I said. This was a PentaTech application I’d downloaded off an IRC server, and those soldiers had been wearing the company’s logo, so maybe this could be tracking us somehow. I’d never actually dialed ”Beast Control” before, but I now figured that whoever was on the other end were obviously evil motherfuckers and that detecting Outworlders was not some glitch in the program. They probably tagged the location and sent their death squad to find lonesome Outworlders to use for gods-know-what.

I had to remove the program ASAP.

”The road is straight here. Do you mind taking the wheel for a second?” I asked Astrid.

”Sure,” she said with a shrug. ”Is something up?”

”Nah. Just going to delete this thing.”

Once Astrid had gotten a hold of the wheel, I leaned across her to access the touchscreen on the spell panel. I tapped two lines of code into the command line to permanently delete the Beast Detection application. I sighed when it bleeped its confirmation at me.

Deleting the program seemed a little too easy, but I had a quick glance over the coding on the back-end and couldn’t find any trace of it.