When Rachel first learned of the two-plane approach requiring the decoy to somehow make it all the way back to Hawaii, she had been terrified for the pilots. But both Benvides and Quentin assured her that they could not only make the trip, they would have a margin. “Your bird’s a Gulfstream,” Benvides said, “and it’s got a lot of range. But we’re driving a Dassault Falcon 9 with even more, and we’re packing extra fuel instead of passengers and cargo. Don’t worry about us.” He smiled. “Just make sure you kill all the Reivers.”

And now Benvides and Quentin were flying directly above them at the common altitude of ten thousand meters while Rachel’s Gulfstream had descended to two thousand and would go even lower.

Jo flashed a smile and a thumbs-up as she emerged from the lav on her way back to the cockpit.

And now Yahvi was up, seemingly cheerful. As she ate breakfast, she looked out the portside windows. “I keep thinking I see land, but I’m not sure.”

“It’s out there,” Rachel assured her. She patted her daughter, then worked her way to the rear of the plane, where Pav had gone to ground.

“Something up?” she said.

Pav wore his secretive face and used his quiet voice. “I didn’t want to tell the others, but about an hour ago we got a link to Keanu,” Pav said.

“What did you tell them?”

“That we didn’t have anything new, except that within three hours we expected to be . . . on station.”

Rachel smiled. “Have you heard from your father?”

Pav shook his head.

“Are you worried?”

He shrugged. “We’re only linked by cell phone, and that won’t work until we’re close to land.”

Rachel touched her husband’s hand. He seemed nervous. “There’s something else.”

Pav actually glanced over his shoulder, as if he had to worry about being overheard by Zeds and Xavier. “The Beehive is alive again.”

Among the many startling bits of news Rachel had heard in this past week, or, indeed, in her life, that was high on the list. “No shit.”

“Yes, shit,” he said.

“And?”

“They don’t know yet. I mean, nothing has come out of it. It’s just . . . active again. Glowing.” He made an eerie sound and waved his hands.

“Did they do anything to fire it up?” Pav shook his head. “Then what’s changed?”

“I’ve got to believe it has something to do with Dale Scott,” Pav said.

At that moment the cockpit door opened. Steve, the male pilot, stuck his head out. “We’re descending, making our turn. Everyone buckle in.” Unlike Jo, who, based on her accent, seemed to have been raised by Americans, Steve Liu’s English was halting and unfamiliar. He was a stocky, serious man in his thirties who reminded Rachel of Zhao, the quiet yet capable former spy who had eventually become one of the Keanu community’s leaders. Zhao gave the impression that he knew arts and possessed skills beyond ordinary humans, and Rachel saw a bit of this in Steve. Perhaps she was simply hoping.

As she and Pav took their seats and watched Edgely and Chang buckling in, Rachel felt that sudden, now-familiar rush of adrenaline. It had happened to her so often since leaving Keanu that it was becoming her natural state—and surely a bad sign. You could burn yourself out operating at that level.

She glanced at Pav across the aisle. He nodded an okay as he strapped in. She turned to Yahvi, in the seat next to her, who said, “Is this going to be dangerous?”

“No more dangerous than anything else we’ve done,” Rachel said. “A lot safer than landing Adventure.”

“That’s not saying much.” The girl was trying to act brave, but her voice and eyes gave her away. Rachel just squeezed her hand, noting, as she often did, that giving reassurance actually reassured her.

Why it did, she couldn’t say. It wasn’t as though the universe somehow looked more kindly on humans who offered comfort to others—the universe should, Rachel believed, but there was no evidence that it did.

She was, in fact, appalled at how little she knew of the universe, even though her experience of matters beyond Earth—beyond anything seven billion other humans could ever hope to know—should have given her some insight, some special sense.

Yes, she had proof that alien life existed; hard evidence of that sat within four meters of her. She was convinced that her home world was little more than a speck of sand on some cosmic beach. (And that for the past twenty years she had lived inside an even smaller speck.) She had seen the marvels of amazing alien technology, not just the ability to send an inhabited planetoid from one solar system to another, but to literally demonstrate the power of life and death.

She knew that there was an ancient conflict between at least two types of intelligences in the universe, organic versus machine—and that she and her family had somehow gotten in the middle of it.

To think they and their friends could win . . . could have more effect on the battle than a butterfly could affect a hurricane . . . was probably laughable. Her limited but valuable lessons suggested to her that in big games, the score was always going to be Universe: 1,000,000,000; Individual Human: 0.

Yet here she was . . . here they all were, stuck inside a metal tube, flying over an ocean toward a place they’d never seen, controlled and guarded by some of the most capable and hostile aliens imaginable.

Looked at one way, it was insane. Looked at another, it might have been hilarious.

Looked at as part of the human experience . . . maybe it was just fucking typical.

She could feel the plane diving now . . . quite steeply. If she tried she could almost hear the pilots talking on the other side of the cockpit door. No words, just evidence of communication—squawks, grunts, sounds that had the potential to be words.

Their voices were no longer calm.

That was understandable, right? They were executing a tricky maneuver, diving toward the Pacific, preparing to fly toward land at an altitude of less than five hundred meters. Rachel was not a pilot, but she had grown up with an astronaut for a father, and Zack Stewart had been required to fly in supersonic jets as an “operator.” She had heard the grim jokes and sardonic phrases about how “air is easier to fly through than mountain” and “don’t turn your plane into a boat.”

Looking out the window, she could see nothing but sea and sky—a beautiful sunny afternoon, with a few clouds way off to the north suggesting an approaching storm front. At this height, individual waves were visible . . . long broad rollers heading for the beaches of Mexico.

There were beeps from the cockpit.

Yahvi heard them, too. “Mom . . .”

Rachel had never been one to offer unthinking blanket reassurance. She hated the phrase It’s going to be all right with a passion, because she had ample evidence that very often things didn’t turn out all right.

“It’s going to be all right,” she said.

She glanced at Pav, who would have said the same thing—and who was incapable of hiding his alarm.

The plane began to maneuver. . . . “We’re making S turns,” Edgely said, as if he were a newly appointed aeronautical expert.

“Can you see land from your side?” Rachel said. Whatever the type of turns, she was still seeing only sea and sky.

The plane rolled to its right suddenly, making Rachel feel as though she were on a carnival ride. Every occupant of the cabin uttered a “whoa!” or the equivalent.

Then it felt as though they were diving, which could not be good, given that they were only a few hundred meters above the water to begin with.

Yahvi was paralyzed with fear. She clutched Rachel’s hand like a potential drowning victim.

The plane began to rise now, its motion pressing Rachel and the others into their seats. Like a rocket launch, she thought. As this went on and on, as the plane continued to climb steeply, the rocket-launch analogy seemed even more apt. The whine of the engines grew louder. Rachel thought she heard and felt the airframe shuddering.