“Wait,” I said, “does your phone still work?”

It did, and I called the station where Ears was headquartered. If something was going on, he’d know about it. He heard everything that came through. I had a feeling others would be hearing everything that came through this phone as well—and I didn’t know whether Ishango might have gotten to Ears by now—but I had to take the risk.

On the second ring came that familiar voice: “One Hundred Twelfth Battalion Headquarters. Sergeant Perkins speaking.”

“Ears,” I muttered, instinctively cupping my hand over the mouthpiece to make clear that this call was on the down low.

“Jordan?” he said. “Dude, they’re looking for you.”

Whew. Ishango’s soldiers would never say “Dude.”

“What do you know?”

“I could lose my head for talking to you.”

“Just tell me where they’re looking.”

There was a long pause.

“Okay, not looking. They know where you are—you and your girlfriend and her mom.”

“Are they coming for us?”

The pause lasted so long that I wondered whether we’d been disconnected, but then he spoke: “They’re monitoring everybody, tracking everybody. They’re not going to go into town to get you. They figure you can’t do much damage there. They’ll just stop you when you’re on the move. That’s all I can say. Don’t call back.”

The line went dead.

“Okay, let’s do those X-rays,” I said as I put down the phone.

Maggie and her mom took me to the back room and made me take off anything metal, which wasn’t much. Over twenty to thirty minutes, they X-rayed almost every part of me. If I hadn’t been irradiated by the power plant, I’d gotten more than my share here.

When it was over, we returned to the office to examine the images on the computer. We moved upward on my body: my feet were fine, but then my knee—I don’t know what it was supposed to look like, but it was bright white on the X-ray. Dr. Gooding said that meant it was made of metal. The whole knee had been replaced plus part of the femur.

There was more normal stuff as we moved up—pelvis, intestines, stomach—but, wait, my right kidney was bright white. And my pancreas, and spleen. Then six ribs, all on the right side. And my right arm. Wherever there was a scar, there was white, indicating that something had been replaced.

“Check my head,” I said. “That’s where the last scar is.”

There it was, a wicked-looking thing: a heavy base at the top of my spinal column and then spindly arms reaching throughout my brain.

“No one could take that out,” Maggie’s mom said. “I have no idea how they got it in.”

“It must be what’s giving you all the special skills,” Maggie said. “Like how you know how to fight and all that.”

I took Maggie’s hand and held it. “The flaming skeleton in the woods,” I remembered aloud.

“What flaming skeleton?” her mom asked.

“The creature I chased into the woods after the fire. I’m not the only one who’s been—whatever I’ve been. Converted? Someone ran out of my house when it was on fire, and it looked like a burning corpse. Most of the flesh was singed off, and I could see its organs flaming inside an intact rib cage. That’s all he was left with.”