It was like climbing the wrong side of a ladder, each rung taking her further out above a deadly drop. She glimpsed Jarrod on the landing, saw him hesitate for a moment and then take aim with the pistol.
A bullet sparked off the dish right above her, so close that she could feel the heat of the impact against her skin. She kept climbing and before Jarrod could get another shot off, she heaved herself up onto the rim of the dish and slid into the bowl. She lay there on her back, motionless, willing Jarrod to just give up and leave. Then she noticed a buzzing sound that she’d become familiar with in the Everglades. Cort’s drone had come around for a second strike. She pictured it above, flying in circles, its electronic eyes searching for targets.
Jenna searched for an escape route, but found nothing.
“You haven’t accomplished anything,” a voice rasped — Jarrod, from just above. Jenna looked up and saw him, perched on the rim of the dish, staring down at her. His expression shifted through a spectrum of emotions — anger, pain, disappointment…and triumph.
Jenna faced him. “The rest will never know if the signal went out. World War III isn’t going to happen.”
“It won’t matter. All the pieces are in place. When they don’t hear from me, they’ll go ahead with the plan. You haven’t stopped us.”
Jenna felt a coal of anger and defiance grow hot within her. “I stopped you.”
Jarrod spat out a derisive laugh. “Not really.” He hooked his left elbow over the edge of the dish and then reached back to draw his pistol from its holster.
Jenna looked about for cover. There were plenty of places that might shield her, but for how long?
Run toward a gun…
The coal flared into a wildfire of determination. Jenna hurled herself at Jarrod.
She saw his eyes — eyes that were new, but identical to her own — go wide in disbelief. He pulled the trigger, nearly point blank, but the bullet pinged off the dish to the left, a ninety degree angle from the direction he’d fired.
The pistol fell from his fingers as he threw his arms out to brace himself against her charge. An impact stopped her attack midair and flung her backwards. She landed on the dish’s incline and slid to the bottom.
When she looked up to where Jarrod had been, he was gone. She found him above her. In the air. He jumped!
Jenna rolled to the side as Jarrod landed, punching down hard and pushing some kind of psychokinetic force in front of his fist. The metal panel bent inward, leaving a basketball-sized impact crater. Had she still been lying there when…
Reflexes overcame Jenna’s surprise. She kicked out hard, swiping Jarrod’s legs out from under him. While he toppled backwards, she got back to her feet — and ran.
Every other footfall sent pain through her leg and left a bloody splotch on the metal beneath her, but she charged up the dish’s incline.
“You can’t get away,” Jarrod said, his voice close behind her, exactly where she hoped he’d be.
Jenna pushed off the dish, spinning around backwards and kicking out hard. Her heel connected with the side of Jarrod’s head, sending him sprawling. It was her turn to leap. While she didn’t know how to punch the way he could, she could sure as hell knock him unconscious.
But he saw her coming, and in midflight, he reached out and swatted her from the air without ever touching her. She rolled across the dish, more angry than wounded. She wanted to curse at him, to call him a coward, but her training did its job, stepping in and calming her down.
As Jarrod got to his feet, she thought, I’m the same as him. No, I’m better than him. An old playground phrase, uttered by the girls in her class after the drama teacher had them perform Annie Get Your Gun, came to mind. “Whatever you can do, I can do better.”
Before Jarrod could fully understand, Jenna swept her hand toward him, imagining an invisible extension of herself sweeping through the air. She had no idea how psychokinesis worked, but like her desire to reach the VLA, she hoped the knowledge had been built into her DNA.
Things went wrong, even before the arc of her swing reached Jarrod. Two of the four support beams holding up the telescope’s Volkswagen Bug-sized receiver bent and snapped as her arm swung past. With a groan, the remaining supports bowed to the lopsided tug and fell, tearing free from their mounts.
Jenna was forced to abort her attack, and she dove away from the falling supports. The entire dish shook as the receiver and all four supports, weighing several tons, crumpled inward. The dish shook like a struck gong, but Jenna rolled to her knees and turned toward Jarrod’s last position.
He wasn’t there. Instead, he was closer. While she had dived away from him, he had lunged forward. Jarrod dove over the fallen support, wrapped his fingers around Jenna’s neck and fell atop her. His fingers grew tighter, stopping the flow of blood to her brain. She’d be unconscious in seconds. Moving instinctually, she didn’t try to repel him with a psychokinetic attack. Instead, she clasped her hands together and drove them up between his arms like a wedge. His arms separated. The pressure on her neck reduced, but he remained locked in place, crushing the life out of her.
Her mind registered the high pitched buzz of a drone turning and flying away. She knew what was coming, and remembered Noah’s instructions when the boat exploded. She lowered her fighting hands, let her body go slack, closed her eyes and opened her mouth.
The pressure on her neck reduced, Jarrod no doubt thinking he’d killed her, that is, until she brought her hands to the sides of her head and covered her ears.
If Jarrod had reacted to her strange behavior, she didn’t see it. The missile finished it’s silent approach just a second after she covered her ears. The violent upheaval flung Jarrod away from her, and shook her body from below, knocking the wind from her lungs. Despite the lack of air, her blood reached her brain once again and her thoughts became clearer, even as the world around her fell apart.
She rolled over and was surprised to find the dish intact. Smoke rolled up over the sides, collecting beneath the hanger’s high ceiling. With a groan of metal, the dish tilted a few degrees. Nine stories below, the concrete base, struck by a missile, succumbed to the weight of the hundred-ton dish. It heeled over, lazily at first, but gravity pulled it faster with each passing second.
When the dish reached a forty-five degree angle, Jenna slid to a stop against a fallen receiver support beam. A moment later, Jarrod rolled to a stop, just feet away. She steeled herself for an attack, but when he looked at her, he said, “We can stop it!”
The antenna continued to fall. She didn’t reply.
“I can’t do it alone!” he shouted.
“We could both die,” she suggested.
He stared at her, no doubt weighing her sincerity. “Without you, they don’t stand a chance.”
He was manipulating her. She knew it. He knew it. But he was also right. To stop the other clones and a third world war, she had to survive this mess, and that meant working with Jarrod…so that they could try killing each other again once they reached the ground.
“Tell me what to do,” she said.