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For a while, Lila could only see bodies and limbs. Her heart hammered under shallow breath as time slowly unfolded. Terrence had kicked the trigger from Christopher’s possession maybe twenty or thirty seconds ago, yet it felt like an eternity gone.

Dan reached. Christopher lashed out. Terrence punched Christopher hard on the side, but then Christopher took a page from Lila’s book and kneed him hard in the jimmies.
 

The tablet skidded across the living room’s glassy floor and came to rest against a pair of white-soled sneakers.
 

Trevor stooped and picked up the tablet. Nobody moved.

He turned the tablet over, and Lila could see that the front, made of unbreakable sapphire crystal, was undamaged. The on-screen trigger controls were still active.

Beside Lila, Heather exhaled heavily, sounding relieved that her team had the ball. She looked about to step forward when Trevor said the least likely thing anyone expected.
 

“Where is she?”
 

Heather stopped. Then, sounding out of breath despite having barely moved, she said, “Where’s who, Trev?”
 

Trevor ignored his mother and turned to look at Raj, the tablet held firmly in his hands.
 

“Where is she, Raj?”
 

It took Raj a moment to understand. Then he blinked, looked over his shoulder, and said, “East. Looks like one of the cameras strapped to a low tree. She’s talking right into the mic, which is the only reason we heard her.”
 

“What’s she saying?”
 

“‘Let me in.’” Raj recited. He swallowed then added, “‘Please.’”
 

“Let her in.”
 

Raj looked helplessly at Terrence, who was still on the floor, then back up at Trevor.
 

“Me?”

“Let her in, Raj.”
 

“I can’t let her in.”
 

“Do it. Now.”
 

Raj didn’t seem to know what to think, but Lila could only hear her father: Meyer Dempsey in Trevor Dempsey’s words.
 

“I … I can’t. Only Terrence can … ”
 

Heather took another step, reaching out. Trevor turned away.
 

“Get back. Everyone just stay where you are.”
 

“Trevor, honey. Why don’t you give that to me?”
 

Trevor shook his head, looking past Raj and into the control room.
 

“For safekeeping, Trevor. We did it. We stopped them.”
 

Christopher was getting to his feet. He moved to stand beside Lila, limping. The same confused, betrayed expression returned to Raj’s dark features as he watched their reunion.

“Trev,” said Christopher.
 

“Shut up.”
 

“I need your help, buddy. We both do.”
 

“Quiet, Christopher.”
 

“That’s right.” Heather touched Trevor’s arm. “Shut your fucking mouth, Christopher.”
 

Trevor ripped his arm away and took a step back. Heather looked momentarily wounded, then hard and jaded.
 

“Everyone stay away from me. Give me a minute.”
 

Distant and small, Piper’s voice cut the silence. Trevor looked toward the control room, but Lila couldn’t make out the words.
 

“We’re going to get her.”

“Trevor,” Heather said, “the bombs.”
 

“I’ve got it under control.”
 

“Then give that to me.”
 

“No.”
 

Lila met her brother’s dark eyes. “I told you about this. Remember? About what I was seeing and hearing?”
 

“And I told you I hadn’t seen or heard shit.”
 

“But you understood. You understood about what I said, about Dad and — ”

“
I
’
m
the one who’s talked to your father,” Heather said, casting daggers at Lila.
 

“Terrence,” Trevor said.
 

Terrence looked over.

“Open the front door.”
 

“Can’t do that, Trevor.”
 

Trevor raised the tablet. “Do it, or I set off some fireworks.”
 

“Careful, Trevor. You press that, and we’re all — ”

“Dead?” Trevor laughed. “Maybe. Maybe Lila’s right, and we’re supposed to stop something. Or maybe Mom’s right, and we’re supposed to protect it. I wouldn’t know. I’m just a dumb kid who’s spent half a year living in a hole — something we’re clearly not going to be able to just ‘go back to’ after this little fight. One way or another, I think we’re done here. At least some of us are.” He looked up, shaking his head. “There are aliens in the sky, and they’ve surrounded us with big rocks. A bunch of people are camping above us, not even caring that the ships keep coming back and frying a few here and there. I don’t know that I want to be in here anymore, and I
know
I want to go outside.” He stared directly at Terrence. “Maybe we’re already dead, and we just don’t know it yet.”
 

His finger shook above the tablet. Lila felt her breath catch, waiting.
 

“I’m not asking everyone to run out there. Just me. I’ll go alone.” Trevor moved one hand from the tablet and touched the pistol he’d taken to wearing on his hip in order to, Lila thought, look like a big shot. This time, it had worked out. Terrence and Dan, not cavalier enough to arm themselves indoors, had missed their opportunity to seize control.
 

“I’m tired of being down here, doing nothing,” Trevor said. “
I
’
m going out there to get her.
I want to do some good for once.”
 

“If I open the door,” said Terrence, raising his hands, “all those people up there will come in. They’ll see you walk out, and they’ll swarm.”

Lila flinched as Trevor’s finger touched the tablet’s screen once, twice, three times.
 

The entire bunker shook with the force of an explosion. She felt tremors climb the walls, radiate through the floors, run up her legs as if to convey news. Dust sifted down, and she felt her ears assailed, assaulted with concussive noise. Her eyes closed.

Lila was still alive when she opened them. Screaming turmoil erupted above.

Raj’s attention seemed split between the group and the control room behind him — where something terrible had happened at the home’s garage end, where a single brick of directional explosive had laid buried for three months.

“There’s our distraction.” Trevor nodded to Terrence. “Now open the door, before time’s up.”
 

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

Raj turned back to the surveillance screens, staring at the explosion’s smoking aftermath as the door again clanged shut at the top of the spiral staircase.
 

He was looking for bodies, sifting feeds from the still working cameras. Trevor’s temper tantrum had leveled the entire garage. And while the so-called directional explosives had been true to Terrence’s description and gone into the surface structure rather than the bunker, they’d decimated what was above.
 

Raj zoomed in, centering on something that seemed to be a severed leg beside a blown-open head.
 

Of course. The hippies kept coming, drawn by something that Lila and Heather claimed they could feel but that Raj — and everyone else; maybe it was a guy/girl thing — couldn’t. So they’d filled both the ground and the house. That’s why they’d smoked them out the first time, clearing the home with smoke alarms in order to sneak away. But this time they hadn’t made a delicate distraction. This had been a blitzkrieg, equivalent to hitting someone’s hand with a hammer to draw attention from pain in their foot. Sure, they’d look away from the kitchen when the garage blew. They’d be plenty distracted searching for gory bits and pieces of widowed wives and orphaned children.
 

But what Raj had taken for a leg and a head were in reality a rolled-up mat of some kind and the crumpled shade from a shattered lamp.
 

Lila appeared over his shoulder. She watched the second screen, following the exodus: Trevor in the lead, of course, followed at a respectful distance by Terrence and Christopher. Behind the latter was Lila’s mother, surely ranting and shouting about Trevor doing wrong if Raj cranked the volume.
 

“Where is Piper?”
 

Raj pointed at one of the minimized thumbnails.

“Is that where they’re headed? Toward her?”
 

Raj spun. He’d been angry, but hearing Lila’s voice — the dismissive, by-the-way questions — made him boil.
 

“This was smart, Lila,” he spat.
 

“What?”
 

“What the hell is wrong with you? You have a problem, something’s bothering you, but instead of talking to me, you wire the fucking place with explosives. Now what are we going to do?” He pointed at the screen. “You ask me, your brother is losing his shit, and he’s got the trigger tucked into his belt. We might not even have to wait for him to get stupid. He’s being stupid now. The thing has a touchscreen. It’s going to rub against his skin and press the wrong button, and then it’ll be sayonara to us all.”
 

Lila’s face changed. For a fraction of a second, he felt sorry for her. She looked more lost than awful, confused not vindictive. Just like over the past few months she’d seemed more distant than unfaithful, even though sometimes his gut prickled with paranoid instinct. But those were his issues. He knew she’d never cheat, especially now.

“It felt like the only way.”

Raj shook his head. “The only way. Great.”
 

“Really, Raj. I don’t know how to explain it, but — ”

“Then don’t try.”
 

Lila seemed to consider apologizing but then wisely decided not to bother. You could say sorry for using someone’s toothbrush or forgetting an appointment, sure. But attempting to blow up the house was the kind of thing most couples didn’t need to face in even the most tumultuous relationships.
 

After Lila was silent over his shoulder for a while and he’d pinched in and out looking for bodies in the rubble, he said, “Can you disarm it?”

Raj looked up at Lila. Her lips pressed together.
 

“Oh, I see. You won’t.”
 

“I doubt I could if I wanted. I might blow it trying. Christopher set it up.”
 

Christopher.

“Nice fucking mess. But that’s not even the issue, is it? You don’t want to disarm it.”
 

“There’s something under the bunker, Raj. Something they want. If we let them get it—”

“Save it.”
 

There was another moment of silence. In the background, Raj could hear Dan, the only other person left in the bunker, rattling around.
 

Lila broke the quiet. “What are you doing?”
 

“Trying to figure out how many people your brother just killed.”
 

“Oh.” A pause. “How many?”
 

Raj didn’t want to admit he hadn’t found any yet. Doing so felt like a concession.
 

“I don’t see any bodies,” Lila said.
 

“Maybe it vaporized them.”
 

“It didn’t vaporize that end table.”
 

Raj said nothing. Lila’s hand extended in his peripheral vision. Without asking, she touched one of the thumbnails to enlarge it. A view of the lake swallowed the screen. A mass of people filled the space in front of the water. Maybe
all
the people, including those who should have been shredded in the explosion with their belongings. The explosion that by all appearances they hadn’t even noticed. The group appeared almost hypnotized, staring off into the distance.
 

“What are they looking at?”
 

Raj shrugged. The screen didn’t show. He only knew that they were looking upward. Probably at another kill-shuttle come to fry whomever Trevor’s blast had missed.

“Dunno.”

“Look. They’re almost to Piper. Why isn’t she coming toward the bunker?”
 

“Probably wants to stay by the camera. She can’t know we’ve even noticed her out there.”

They watched her for a second. Raj had turned her volume down. She wasn’t saying anything new. Just repeating the same lines over and over, like a robot.
 

They watched the other thumbnail, showing Trevor’s approach.
 

Raj sat back in the chair and looked up at Lila. She was standing; he was sitting. It hardly felt courteous, seeing as she was pregnant. But then again, she’d also tried to blow them all up without asking his opinion.
The father of her baby.
Talk about a lack of courtesy.