“Realize this,” he said, pulling her in closely. “We’re all dead. Do you understand that? If we don’t do that, your mother, the others, will kill us all. All those people taken all over the world into those ships fifteen years ago, they’re returned. And they’ve been placed all over the world, in all the gaps between. This is what they intended. Unless we take him out.”

Kate looked helplessly at the screen where a feed of the mesa was coming in from a satellite. From its vantage point, she could even see the F-15 fighter jets emerging from every direction.

“Fire!” the general bellowed.

They watched the jets approach, knowing they carried Tomahawks.

Oh, William.

She gasped as the planes suddenly exploded, all at the same moment.

“What the hell is that?” the general screamed. “What just happened? What fired on them?”

“Sir, it doesn’t look like anything did,” the soldier at a computer stammered. “It looks like they just smashed into something.”

“There’s nothing to hit, only fucking air!”

“Unless when those drones went down, when William’s phone died, something went up that we can’t see,” Kate said. “Something those pilots couldn’t see either.”

The image on the screen just showed the undisturbed mesa, with the burning remains of the wreckage lying on the edge of an imperceptible barrier.

The boy felt the intrusions into his body. There was a dullness, a numbness. When a sudden infusion ripped into his body, there was at last pain, his eyes burning in the light.

He didn’t remember his name. Only that it considered him a boy. And it was both angry and pleased with him.

He saw them. All of them, all of their faces at once. Four in every large population, in smoke, in storms, in death and disease. But now there were hundreds more, in clusters, standing together. Who were they? Why were their eyes that milky white? Who was the beautiful woman with brunette hair? The girl with black skin? The old woman with curls of white?

He knew that, just like him, they had no thoughts, no memories, no concerns. Blissful, unmoving. Waiting.

For him.

It guided him. Beyond their minds. Into the fabric of their bodies, their veins, their cells. Deeper still, to the foundation of their existence.

It was there that the irregularities of the molecules were apparent, as if each of the strands of curving phosphates had been infected. While the purity, the original designs of the DNA strands, were still intact, they had been corrupted, twisted. The irregularities were visible, like a plague that was still not yet complete.

A flicker of memory flashed, of what he had done with the four in igniting the weapons within them. He understood it now; the very essence of how he, alone, could command them all. He was the missing part of the distortion.