A feeling of defensiveness rose up inside him. “What about her?”

“Come on, Peter,” Alicia said, and he heard the exasperation in her voice. “I know she wants to pair with you. It’s no secret. She’s First too, it would be a good match. Everyone thinks so.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“I’m just saying. It’s obvious.”

“Well, it isn’t obvious to me.” He paused. They had never spoken like this before. “Look, I like Sara fine. I’m just not certain I want to pair with her.”

“But you do want to? Pair, I mean.”

“Someday. Maybe. Lish, why are you asking this?”

He turned his face toward her again. She was looking through her scope across the valley, slowly sweeping the horizon line with her rifle.

“Lish?”

“Hold on. Something’s moving.”

He rolled back into position. “Where?”

Alicia quickly lifted the barrel of her rifle, pointing. “Two o’clock.”

He pressed his eye to the scope: a solitary figure, darting from one stand of scrub to another, a hundred meters past the fence line. Human.

“It’s Hightop,” Alicia said.

“How do you know?”

“Too small to be Zander. Nobody else out there.”

“He’s alone?”

“I can’t tell,” Alicia said. “Wait. No. Ten degrees right.”

Peter looked: a flash of green in the scope, skipping like a stone over the desert floor. Then he saw a second, and a third, two hundred meters and closing. Not closing: circling.

“What are they doing? Why don’t they just take him?”

“I don’t know.”

Then they heard it.

“Hey!” The voice was Caleb’s, high and wild and full of fear. He was up and running toward the fence, waving his arms. “Open the gate, open the gate!”

“Flyers.” Alicia rolled to her feet. “Come on.”

They raced back to the crawl space; Alicia quickly opened one of the containers stacked by the hatch. She withdrew a pistol of some kind—short, with a fat, snub-nosed barrel. Peter had no time to ask. They ran back to the edge and Alicia pointed it up and over the turbine field and fired.

The flare shot skyward, dragging a hissing tail of light. Peter instinctively knew he shouldn’t look but he couldn’t stop himself, he looked anyway, his vision instantly seared by the image of the flare’s white-hot center. At its apex the flare seemed to stop, suspended in space. Then it exploded, bathing the field in light.

“We’ve bought him a minute,” Alicia said. “There’s a ladder down the back.”

They slung their weapons over their shoulders; Alicia descended the ladder first, taking it like a pair of poles, her feet not even touching the rungs. As Peter scrambled down, she shot another flare, arcing it over the station toward the field. Then they ran.