A tendril of link data tickled her nose: SOMETHING’S HERE. She moved swiftly to the next room in the hallway, a master bedroom leading out to the balcony. The wide glass doors were all broken, but the curtains still hung across them, thin and frail as ghosts. They billowed gently in the night air, and Kira almost fired her rifle when the shadow of a figure passed across one. The silhouette of a man outside on the balcony, too ill-defined to distinguish.

“Don’t move.”

Another shadow, facing the first. Neither seemed to be holding a gun; either could be wearing a helmet. She moved her rifle back and forth, locked in indecision. Which one is Green?

“Don’t shoot me.”

“Where is the other?”

“I don’t know, she ran ahead.”

“She is in the house.”

“I said I don’t know.”

Kira brought the rifle to her cheek, holding it tightly, focusing her aim. She only had one shot—she had to pick the right target, and she had to hit it. The curtains billowed again, and she realized with shock that she didn’t even know where the men were standing; depending on where the moon was, those shadows could be cast from anywhere. She stepped backward quietly, retreating to the hall. She had to find another vantage point. She stood a moment at the top of the stairs leading down to the first floor, but backed away from those as well; she didn’t want to give up the high ground. But she didn’t want to give the last soldier an open path to the boat, either, so she crept back up the hall toward the third-floor stairs. Stepping around the dead Partial, linking once again to the powerful DEATH particles, she remembered the link data she’d felt on the border marker two days before. It had completely overpowered her, the liquid pheromone so concentrated she’d barely been able to function until the smell of it cleared from her nose. A real Partial, with a more sensitive link mechanism, would be even more affected. She glanced behind her, set aside the rifle, and pulled the dead soldier into the little girl’s bedroom.

“I’m very sorry about this,” she whispered. She pulled off her shirt and wrapped it tightly around her face, already gagging from the body odor and mildew, but hoping desperately that they’d be enough to protect her. The face is too mangled, she thought. I’ll have to go in another way if I want to find the right spot. She pulled the soldier’s combat knife from the sheath on his belt and thought back to her medical training, picturing the diagram of the nasal cavity and calculating the approximate location of the pheromonal glands. She placed the knife gently in the corpse’s mouth, lined up the tip against the center of the soft palate, and shoved.

FEARBETRAYALDEATHBLOODRUNHIDEDEATHSCREAMFEARBLOOD