“PKKAAAACCCH!” I COUGHED and spat as my eyes teared up from the dust.

      I was outside, on the ground. Alive. My back rested against Torquin’s rented car, which meant I was about thirty feet from the Massa entrance.

      I opened my mouth to call out, but instead I sucked in another lungful of sandy dirt. Spitting, I struggled to my feet. Everything hurt. My pants had been torn at the ankle. “Cass!” I finally called out. “Aly!”

      “Torquin,” a familiar voice rumbled behind me. “Forgot Torquin.”

      The big guy’s silhouette came out of the cloud, coated brown gray from head to toe, as if he’d been created from the dirt itself. With his right hand, he dragged Cass by the scruff of his neck. Cass’s face was blackened, his limbs slack. His floppy hat and glasses were gone.

      “What happened?” I slumped toward them as fast as my scraped-up legs could take me.

      In a moment, Aly was beside me, holding a grimy pair of glasses. “I found these. Is he …?”

      “Chest moving,” Torquin said, setting him on the ground. “Need to find help.”

      Aly and I dropped to our knees beside Cass. “Please, please, please, be okay …” I whispered, slapping his face gently. “Hey, Cass, come on. Don’t forget to be emosewa.”

      “This can’t be happening …” Aly said, yanking a canteen from her pack and spilling some water on Cass’s face.

      No reaction.

      A team of KI soldiers surrounded us now. “We’ve got EMTs coming,” one of the KI men called out.

      Aly pried Cass’s mouth open and dumped water in. “Come on, Cass,” she said. “Cass, you can do this!”

      Cass’s body jerked upward, clipping Aly on the jaw. “Do what?”

      “That!” Aly cried out in surprise, falling backward.

      Cass turned away, retching a glob of wet sand. “Ewww, that needed a little purys elpam.”

      Holding her jaw with one hand, Aly managed a huge smile. “I will buy you a gallon of it when this is all over.”

      As two KI operatives approached with a stretcher, Cass’s eyes were trained on the Massa headquarters. The entrance shack was a pile of twisted metal.

      Another muffled explosion shook the earth. The structure groaned loudly, tilted, and vanished into a widening black hole.

      Cass sprang to his feet. We ran for our cars, leaving the stretcher empty on the ground.

      * * *

      “Corrupt … gibberish … broken …” Aly muttered. She was in the copilot seat of Slippy, the KI retrofitted stealth jet, her fingers flying across the keyboard of the tablet that was built into the arm of her seat. Torquin was our pilot, and for once he wasn’t making the plane do barrel rolls. He just focused on flying us back to the KI while Aly tried to get some usable information off Cass’s flash drive.

      My eyes were fixed on the sea below. The water was silvery and bright on a cloudless day. I don’t know what I was looking for, maybe a big ship with a Massa flag blowing in the wind. I was kind of rattled, obsessed with only two thoughts:

      We’d gone to find Mom.

      We’d walked into a trap.

      No warning about the evacuation. No hint about the time bomb. What if I hadn’t noticed the readout? What if we hadn’t gotten that far into the headquarters? What if we’d been a few seconds late? Did Mom know we would be going back?

      How could she have let that happen?

      Aly massaged her forehead, sitting back from the tablet. “If only we’d gotten there a few minutes earlier. Those jerks managed to overwrite just about everything. Maybe I can take apart the remaining data packets, but I’ll need better equipment.”

      “You can do it,” I murmured. “You’re Aly.”

      Aly sighed, turning away from the tablet. “How’s Cass?”

      I turned toward the back of the compartment. Cass was lying against the bulkhead just behind my seat, on a narrow platform covered with layers of foam and blankets. He’d been asleep most of the way. Now he was blinking his eyes and grimacing. “What’s that smell?”

      “No smell,” Torquin said. His face turned a slightly deeper shade of its natural red, and he held his arms superclose to his sides.

      “Thank you for choosing KI Air,” Aly said. “Each seat is equipped with an oxygen mask for use in case of toxic Torquin armpit or fart odor.”

      “Oow!” Cass groaned.

      “What’s wrong?” I asked.

      “It hurts to laugh,” Cass said. “Where the heck are we? And don’t say anything funny.”

      “We’re over the Atlantic,” I said. “You survived an explosion with some cuts and maybe a mild concussion. We left mainland ops and now we’re headed back to the KI.”

      “Mainland who?” Cass said.

      “The KI has mobile operatives all over the Mediterranean,” Aly said. “Their job is to stay there and provide backup when necessary. Torquin has been telling us about them. See all the news you miss when