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The computer room door opened, and Otto rushed inside. “Margaret, there’s a chopper coming in. Pilot radioed down, says he’s here to take us to Detroit. He’s landing now.”

“Get Gitsh and Marcus,” she said. “Let’s go.”

Otto vanished.

Margaret turned to Dew. Her eyes burned with anger, intensity.

“If this thing is really contagious,” she said, “we’re in a whole different world of s.h.i.+t. The country needs to know. The world needs to know.”

Christ on a crutch. As if Dew didn’t have enough problems. The New & Improved Margaret Montoya wanted to go public. Trouble was, if it actually was contagious, she was 100 percent right. Murray’s skulduggery had its place, but the time for that was almost up.

“Examine it first,” Dew said. “Before you do something silly, can you give it twenty-four hours?”

“Why the f.u.c.k should I?”

“Just do your job,” Dew said. “Evaluate, like Murray says. This time tomorrow, you still think going public is the right thing to do, I’ll do it with you.”

She stared at him, her expression a mixture of hatred and disbelief. “Why would you throw away your career like that?”

“Because Murray has more people like me,” Dew said. “And if you try to go public against Murray’s will, one of them might just pay you a visit.”

EXPENDABLE

Chelsea’s knowledge grew and grew.

She now understood why Chauncey had been sent. He wasn’t a person. Organic material, like people or plants or puppies, couldn’t survive the trip, not the way Chauncey had traveled.

Organic material could survive a trip through a gate, but there was a catch—the gate was biological. Like a plant. That meant they couldn’t send a gate the same way they’d sent Chauncey.

Such a funny problem, and it grew more complicated from there. Each of the hatchlings had a . . . a . . . a template. What a neat word, although she still didn’t understand what that meant, exactly. Some kind of a template to make material for the gate. The templates had been s.h.i.+pped with Chauncey. They were a part of each triangle seed. Their number was finite (another neat word!), which meant that the hatchlings could not replicate themselves like the crawlers could.

And the little crawlers that spread through people’s bodies, converting them? What wonderful creatures! But they weren’t creatures at all, not like snails or bugs or kitties. They were just collections of pieces. Like Legos. You could put the pieces together in different ways. You could make the pieces do different things. Way cooler toys than Legos, actually.