“One,” Shade whispered, and the meteorite hit the ground. There was no explosion, just a dull, flat sound, like someone dropping a big sandbag. A puff of gray dust rose, barely visible in the darkness, but just exactly where Shade expected it to land.
“Wow,” Cruz said.
“Mmmm,” Shade agreed. Her casual act was not even slightly believable.
They took a breath, then all at once piled out of the car. Cruz pulled a shovel from the back and raced to catch up to Shade who was galloping ahead.
The ground was plowed into furrows, which tripped Cruz repeatedly. And, too, there were the six-foot-tall stalks that snatched at her with Velcro talons and slapped her with heavy ears of corn. They come to a halt when they reached the first charred and broken cornstalks and advanced more slowly after that, as if sneaking up on someone. Then suddenly there it was, looking for all the world as if a rogue tractor had come through dragging a narrow plow. The rich black earth was gouged, with a mound of ejected clods marking the spot where the rock went subterranean.
“There! Dig there!” Shade ordered.
Cruz dug. And dug. She uncovered a narrow tunnel, like something a hefty gopher might have made. “Go that direction another ten feet,” Shade instructed, her voice ragged, in tenuous control of her emotions.
And then as Cruz slammed the blade into the ground, they heard the metallic impact of steel shovel on metallic rock.
They looked at each other, Shade and Cruz, and time seemed to stop.
“Okay,” Shade said at last, voice quavering. “Dig it up.”
It was metallic gray, the color of pencil lead, not much bigger than a softball, but more oval than round, with a pitted surface. To every appearance a regular, unimportant meteorite, like thousands that impact the Earth every day. Shade flicked the flashlight off and they were rewarded by a faint but vaguely sinister glow, slightly green. Shade reached for it.
“Don’t touch it!” Cruz cried. “It’s probably hot!”
“Actually, it’s more likely to be cold. It was a long, long time in absolute zero, and it spent just seconds in the atmosphere.”
Cruz shook her head in rueful amusement: of course Shade would have thought of that. Of course.
Shade touched the rock—touched it with the solemnity of a medieval Christian pilgrim touching a piece of the true cross. She ran her fingers over it, feeling its contours, gently exploring the pits and cracks, brushing dirt away almost tenderly.
“This is it,” she said. “I can’t believe . . .”
“We should probably get out of here,” Cruz said nervously. She carried the rock back on the shovel blade to the Subaru while Shade used cornstalks to obscure their tracks.
Cruz set the rock in the back of the car. Then, feeling transgressive, feeling that it wasn’t her right somehow, Cruz touched it, touched an object that had traveled an unimaginable distance. It was just a rock really, just a faintly glowing rock. But it had a power Cruz could feel, an attraction.
Frodo and the Ring, Cruz thought, and laughed nervously at the comparison, because the thought came with an extra question: Is Shade Frodo? Or is she Gollum?
“It won’t take Sixty-Six long to get here,” Shade said, brushing dirt from the knees of her jeans and kicking the clods from her shoes. “We can’t hide the fact we beat them to it, but we can confuse the scene a little, at least.”
“Not much we can do about the tire tracks, I guess.”
“No,” Shade agreed. “But as soon as we get back to the interstate we’re going to cut a divot into one of the tires. Just enough that if anyone ever checks it won’t be a perfect match.”
“Have you been watching CSI reruns?”
“I may be a criminal mastermind.”
Cruz said nothing.
Shade started the engine. And then they stopped for just a moment, staring at each other with solemn expressions.
“Wow. We did it,” Cruz said.
“Well,” Shade said, “we did the first part of it.”
| 4 | | | BAD START, WORSE FINISH |
THE SUBARU DRIVEN by Shade and Cruz pulled away and the young man climbed from the cabin of the parked green John Deere combine where he’d been waiting and watching.
Justin DeVeere turned to his girlfriend, Erin O’Day, and as he gave her his hand to help her climb down—not easy in the entirely inappropriate, skin-tight dress she was wearing—he said, “I wonder if I should have killed them and taken it.”
Justin DeVeere was nineteen and already in his junior year at Columbia where he studied art, but was not much of a student. He could paint or sculpt or assemble whatever he liked and so overawe his professors that they would hand him A’s merely for showing up. He was, people said, a prodigy. He was, people said, a young Picasso or Rothko. He was on the verge of becoming the Next Big Thing in the art world.
Justin DeVeere was brilliant and utterly devoid of a moral center. Extremely talented, sociopathic and maladjusted. A loner, an outsider, a predator awaiting the right prey.
Those were not the things Justin’s enemies said; it was what he knew about himself. Justin had taken IQ tests—152, which made him smarter than 99.9 percent of humanity. He had also taken the so-called ‘psychopath test’ and was unmistakably a member of that manipulative, ruthless, often charming tribe. A brilliant psychopath. A talented psychopath. A young monster.
That was how Justin DeVeere saw himself, how he knew himself to be: a brilliant, talented monster.
But he was no monster to look at, and he was quite aware of that as well. Justin always managed to look the part of the young artist, dressing in skin-tight black jeans and a series of T-shirts on which he silk screened bits of text in cuneiform or Sanskrit alphabets. Only he knew that the messages were either some version of “F— You” or a sexual reference.
He was not big, not as big as he’d have liked anyway, just five nine, white with straight black hair worn loose, down to his shoulders, pale gray eyes and, as another artist had once said while attempting unsuccessfully to seduce Justin: the face of God’s cruelest angel.
Justin’s partner-for-now, Erin O’Day, was twenty-eight, mother of a nine-year-old she had shipped off to the very best schools in Switzerland at age five and had not seen since. Justin was not supposed to know this about her, but he did—Justin was not a respecter of privacy. Erin was beautiful, sophisticated, fashionable, and sexy, but Justin had never had a problem attracting beautiful women and girls. What made Erin O’Day special was that she was the heir to a fortune estimated by Forbes magazine at three hundred million dollars.
Sexy women Justin could find any day. Three hundred million dollars? That was quite rare.
Erin was part of New York society, moving effortlessly through glittering events, including the endless charity balls where she promoted young Justin. It was at one of these balls that she met Professor Martin Darby, who had been drinking and talking more than he should have. He had told her about tracking the Anomalous Space Objects and hinted that his work was top secret.
It never ceased to amaze Justin just what Erin could get away with merely by being blonde, beautiful, and poured into a dress with