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But now he was. They all were. And they didn’t have a clue what was happening.

Sasha pressed, pushing nearly his whole body weight down and into the opposite bulkhead. Jim’s chest almost came apart beneath his hands, a squishy, horrible, melting mass under his compressions. He didn’t feel a sternum, or ribs, or any solidity to Jim’s chest.

And then he felt something pop.

Jim bucked, and blood exploded from his mouth, the force of the projection pushing Phillipa and her ventilator bag across the module and drenching Rafael. Rafael gagged, spitting, and tried to clear his eyes of the splatter.

Crimson droplets hung in the air, quivering rubies suspended in the module lights like a gleaming aurora.

“Jesus Christ,” Rafael shouted. “Get me the ultrasound!”

Sarah tossed him the wand, stretching the corded cable out as she held on to the base unit. Rafael slammed the wand against Jim’s chest, right over where his heart should be.

“Houston… Are you seeing this?”

“We are,” Dr. Nguyen stuttered. “I… I don’t know what exactly I’m looking at, though—”

“That’s supposed to be his heart.”

Instead of a pleural cavity and a pericardium, instead of a heart and two lungs, an aorta, and a descending vena cava, all that was left was sludge. A pulsing, liquefied, formless mess, writhing inside Jim’s chest.

Once more, Jim began to seize, snarling and growling and thrashing against the board more violently than before. One wrist restraint snapped, and Jim reached for his face again, digging his fingers into his eye socket andyanking.

Michaela shrieked.

“Alpha! What’s happening?”

Jim went still, his arm slackening. His fist unclenched. His eyeball floated free of his hold, spinning through the curtain of blood droplets soakingUnity.

“Give me the epi!” Rafael roared. “We’re losing him!”

* * *

25

Listening stations at Menwith Hill,RAF Edzell, and Ayios Nikolaos Station had been parsing words out of the global ether for weeks.

General Sevastyanov.

Svobodny-18.

Satellite 21038.

Uchami.

Enucleation.

Hemorrhage.

When each keyword was flagged in a repeated sequence andEchelonjudged the syntax relevant,Echelon’sgiant mainframe condensed all of the intercepts it had marked as potentially related toTrickshot. Those intercepts were attached to the originalTrickshotfile, and, in accordance withTrickshot’sclassification rating, the data dump was sent to the designated officer with the necessary clearance to view the file.

Top Secret. Eyes Only: The President of the United States.

A summary copy was sent to the national security advisor.

Meredith Petersen, Jack’s national security advisor who’d stayed on when Elizabeth Wall became president, received a code word classified briefing at one a.m. in Washington DC, on her secure laptop. Her phone buzzed, alerting her to its arrival. Not yet asleep, Meredith flipped open her laptop as she brushed her teeth.

By 1:20 a.m., Meredith was on her way to the White House.