uge in the chamber of quasimedical horrors from which he had just escaped. The place his sister's dupe had failed to escape. Max wanted to walk toward the butcher's block where the corpse lay, to take his mother in his arms and reassure her that the carved piece of meat that lay there wasn't her daughter. Wasn't his sister. But he couldn't afford to split his concentration right now; if he was to let the force field slip even for an instant, none of them would likely survive for very long. Liz, he said wordlessly. Tell my mom. Gotcha, Max. She didn't need an explanation. Moments later, Max's force field was still holding strong. And Liz was doing the very thing Max longed to do: offering words of comfort and reassurance, but mostly repeating over and over that this wasn't Isabel, that Isabel was safe, safe with Jesse and Kyle and Maria. Meanwhile, Valenti and Duff found some surgical linen and discreetly covered up Lonnie's gore-spattered body. After helping Duff cover up the mutilated corpse that lay on the operating table, Valenti quickly took stock of the room. Several other still bodies lay strewn about in the awkward random postures of sudden death. From the singed white lab coats most of them wore, he concluded that these people were the ones responsible for the grotesquerie they had found on the table. All but one. Crumpled behind the operating table was a teenage girl who strongly resembled Tess Harding. It's Ava, Valenti realized, kneeling beside her. The other Tess, the one from New York. Valenti heard someone moaning nearby. He looked up and saw Langley, who was helping Max barricade the room with force fields. The alien protector's face was a mask of concentration and remorse. «I've failed them," he said, sobbing. «I was supposed to protect them, but instead I've failed them all.» Very gently, Valenti reached under Ava's blue hair to touch her neck. He felt a faint pulse. «Maybe not completely, you haven't," he said. The MiBs were smashing something heavy into the door, and Max kept his force field strong and steady. But he already felt exhausted, and pushed beyond his limits; he wondered how long he and Langley could keep this up. The chasm of despair yawned wide again. Rath's attack no doubt precipitated by his discovery of Lonnie's body had ruined Max's last chance to get out of this situation without getting more blood on his hands. He looked toward Langley, and they locked eyes significantly for a moment. What now? Max said/thought, using Kyle's still-open psychic channel. Most likely we Mil or we die, Max. Looks like we're gonna have to go ahead with the brain-blast after all. The thought of being the cause of more death today was making Max physically ill. No. There has to be another way. His mind replied with something Liz had said earlier: They won't give up as long as they even know about us. Langley, whose emotions felt jangled and confused in Max's head, had evidently overheard the thought. Ava's alive, he told Max. If we can get her mindwarp powers into the mix, we might be able to zap the MiBs with persuasion. Max suddenly understood. You and Isabel and Kyle can extend Ava's mindwarp power over a wide area, he thought. Use it to trick these guys into leaving us alone instead of just frying their brains. This is still pretty powerful stuff, Max, Langley thought in response. Doing this will pretty much burn all our alien bridges. After we do it, we won't be able to look up any of the other aliens living on Earth because all the ken-teefs on the planet will be so many paperweights. It's not the kind of solution you'd consider if you were still thinking about going home to Antar. Max replied: Right now, all I'm concerned about is getting all of us out of here alive. And keeping the Special Unit from coming after us again. I'm right with you, Maxie, Langley said/thought. Under the circumstances, this is probably the best choice with the support of the king of Antar, of course. And with your Isabel and Kyle and my Ava still in the game, we just might have enough resources to pull it off, tinfoil hats notwithstanding. Kyle seemed to be beside Max then though Max knew he was actually still outside either in or near the Microbus and assured Max that he felt very good about what they were about to do. The chasm of despair receded yet again from Max, replaced by the first real feeling of hope he had experienced since the day the Special Unit had forced him and his friends to flee Roswell. «Tess!» Liz said, then caught herself. Try as she might, she found it nearly impossible to set aside the intense, whitehot hatred she still felt for the late Tess Harding, the woman who had betrayed Max and murdered Alex Whitman without a shred of remorse. She had to keep reminding herself that this young woman wasn't Tess, despite the close resemblance. She thought she might be able to get past that one day, given enough time to grieve and heal. But putting those feelings aside in the here-and-now was quite another matter. «Ava," Liz said tightly, kneeling beside the semiconscious girl, «wake upi We need you. The Special Unit agents are pounding down the door, and Max and Langley can't keep their force fields up forever.» Ava blinked and shook her silvery-blue hair as she tried to sit up. Her eyes looked bleary and unfocused. «What? Where's Rath?» Liz hated having to answer questions like that, even for somebody who looked so much like Tess. «I'm sorry," she said, taking Ava's hand. «Rath… I'm afraid he didn't make it.» A look of intense grief and guilt crossed Ava's delicate features. Liz found it gratifying, and was immediately ashamed of herself. She reminded herself again that Ava wasn't Tess. «I tried to stop him from going after them alone," Ava said, looking a few yards away at Michael's unconscious form. Ava's tears began flowing freely. «But he wouldn't listen.» Liz gently patted Ava's hand. «We often have the same problem with our own Rath," was all she could think of to say as she watched the slow rise and fall of Michael's chest. She looked back at the sobbing girl. Here but for the grace of the Special Unit goes Maria, she thought sadly. Liz was startled by a loud thump as the agents out in the corridor apparently redoubled their efforts to knock down the door beyond Max's force field. «I'm sorry about what's happened to you," Liz told Ava. «But if you don't get into this fight, we're all dead.» Ava shook her head, looking defeated. «Did you notice those tinfoil beanies the MiBs are wearing? My power can't cut through those. It's a waste of time.» «We have a way to boost your mindwarp power to a much higher power level," Langley said aloud. «You just have to believe. Maybe you could even try clapping your hands, the way they did for Tinkerbell in Peter Pan.» «If we're going to do this," a sweating Max said, also speaking out loud, «we're going to have to do it now.» Liz suddenly realized that if both Max and Langley were getting too exhausted to communicate telepathically, then the collapse of their force fields couldn't be far off. Soon, they'd be overrun by MiBs. «Kyle says he's right outside in the van now, holding the alien communicator orbs in his hands, just the way you explained," Liz said, hoping to bolster their spirits. «I'm ready too," Langley said, sweating profusely as he struggled to maintain his own force field. Liz thought he looked just as worn out as Max did, and could easily see why; at the moment, someone was very noisily trying to smash down the door Langley was covering, and the balcony overhead was crawling with armed men who would be able to open fire the moment the force field there fell. As both force fields flickered and began to collapse, Liz helped an exhausted Max walk toward the operating table, which Ava and Langley were approaching from the opposite side. The parents were huddled against a wall, tending to the unconscious Michael. «The more power we pour into this, the better," Langley said as the four linked hands near Lonnie's body, making Liz think of seances and weird mystical rituals. Maybe that's what this is, she thought. Whatever. So long as it works. Liz closed her eyes. Once again, she saw a future-flash of a soft-focus white room, suffused with both terror and anger. Hoping she wasn't glimpsing a future that awaited anyone she cared about, she put it out of her mind. «Concentrate, kiddies," Langley said, his eyes tightly closed. Liz imagined it was as much to concentrate as to avoid seeing the table where Lonnie's corpse lay. «I can only do this little trick once.» Liz didn't like the sound of that. In fact, she wondered what the price would be for carrying out this plan, for focusing and channeling so much power. After all, in literature whenever anyone tampered with the forces of nature or made a bargain with the Devil, or with scheming Machiavellian types like Langley there was always a steep price to be paid, a painful sacrifice to be made. Putting her misgivings aside, Liz concentrated on placing whatever psionic energies she possessed into the channel Kyle and Isabel had established. If I'm to be the sacrifice, then so be it. They won't give up as long as they even know about us, someone's voice her own? was saying in her head. So we're targeting every one oj their people who knows about us. Every one oj their machines that knows about us. The pounding on the doors grew louder, more insistent. Mass-mindwarp amnesia, broadcast on a need-to-know basis over the Kyle-and-Isabel Channel, Liz thought, chuckling. With a little help from their psychic friends. One of the doors came crashing open. The room immediately filled with a cacophony of angry shouts, clacking rifle-bolts, and the harsh footfalls of booted feet. «Now," Langley said. Then, as though a silent bomb had detonated, the room abruptly filled with a blinding radiance. And Liz felt herself or perhaps only a part of herself being swept away. Margolin held his pistol at the ready as his men repeatedly struck the medical section's door with the military siegeram. Though the door was reinforced with structural steel, it should have given way minutes before it did. Those aliens beyond the door must have been propping it up somehow, using their bizarre psychokinetic abilities. Who can doubt now that those abilities represent a clear and present danger to the entire country? he thought, glancing back at the heap of charred meat that had been his second-in-command only minutes ago. «Door's coming loose," Henrickson said. A moment later, a bone-jarring crash signaled that he was right. The Special Unit troopers streamed through the opening like voracious soldier ants. Abruptly, the world turned white. Margolin shielded his dazzled eyes, but it did little good. Something was tugging insistently at his brain, his mind, his will. No! he thought, clutching madly at his protective cap. I'm insulated from this! I won't allow my mind to be bent by these alien freaks! Then the tsunami of white light and psychic noise rose to a crescendo around him, engulfing him as though he were a straw in a hurricane. But he stood his ground, refusing to bend, just as he always had. 18. Maria could feel that Langley's improvised «brain bomb» had just gone off. She thought something in the air felt different, but couldn't yet determine what it was. Dawn was breaking on the horizon, but hadn't yet chased the chill from the air. Her breath steaming in front of her, she looked to the east, just past the ancient factory building the Special Unit called home. Though she was technically doing something useful standing watch, studying the outside of the Unit's lair for any sign of reaction Maria felt distinctly left out. And this was even though Kyle and Isabel had made sure she'd been able to mentally «listen in» as the last-ditch counterattack against the Special Unit was carried out. Carried out by the jew, the proud, the superpowered, she ruminated glumly, thinking how weird it was to overhear the thoughts of Tess, or a pretty darned reasonable facsimile thereof, during the runup right before the attack. What she could see of the building's facade and crumbling loading docks still looked completely peaceful. It was impossible to tell whether the brain-bombing had worked according to the last-minute plan she'd gleaned over the Kyle-O-Phone. If it has, then everybody in the Special Unit is deep in alien hypno-sleep right now. And when they wake up, they won't be able to resist Tess's I mean Ava's Kyle-boosted, delayedaction mindwarp. Then they'll delete every file and shred every hard copy, just before forgetting all about Roswell, alien teenagers, and their ongoing X-Files obsession. And, as Brody might say, I had shag-all to do with making any of it happen. Maria had never felt so useless before in her life. Stretching her legs as she leaned against the front of the Microbus, she glanced eastward again. The ring of news vans had just begun to break up and drive away, as though the people inside them,the aliens inside them, she reminded herself had abruptly become satisfied that there was nothing to report here after all. No stories about aliens, or alien-hunters, or conspiracies to manage or spin. they must have been tuned into Radio-Free Kyle, too. So with any luck, it all adds up to two things: the Special Unit goes down today, and nobody «outs» the Pod Squad in the process. She wasn't quite sure whether she should feel freaked out or reassured by the heavy alien infiltration of the media. I guess it's better for Michael and the others to be spied on by Bug-Eyed Paparazzi from Outer Space than by badly dressed paranoid wackjobsfrom the FBI, she finally decided. Then another, even more chilling, thought suddenly occurred to her: What if the news vans are leaving because the Pod Squad's brain bomb didn't work as advertised? What if they're shoving off now because they know the Special Unit is still alive and kicking and about to come after them as well as us? It was only then that Maria noticed the unaccustomed silence that now reigned inside her head. The mental link that Kyle and Isabel had set up which had come to include her own, non-alien, non-superhuman brain as well as those of Max, Michael, Langley, and just about everydangedbody else who'd gotten swept up into this mess seemed to have just collapsed. Without realizing it, Maria had begun getting used to the constant low-level chatter of the ongoing psionic party-line. Kyle's Psychic Friends Network is off the air, she realized with mounting fear. «Kyle?» she said, and thought; she then paused to listen for his response. None came, either through the air or over her now-silent mental transom. She scrambled back inside the van as quickly as she could manage. She saw that Isabel was in the back, looking dazed by the brain bomb's immediate aftermath as Jesse cradled her in his arms. Shelby, her caffeine overdose now evidently history, snored quietly beside them, oblivious. Kyle lay sprawled across one of the bench seats, an alien communicator orb clutched in each hand. The orbs, which had glowed a fierce orange when Kyle and Isabel had touched them apparently using them as lenses or amplifiers for everyone's interconnected alien powers, possibly even including those possessed by the now-departing members of the press corps were now gray and dead. They looked like so many lumps of desiccated moon rock. The alien compass also lay nearby, looking as inert as the orbs.