MirrorWorld

“Not anymore.” I stop ten feet from him, within the reach of his men but not his meaty hands.

“Why are you here?” he asks.

“I came for Maya.” I can see he’s about to argue, so I point her out. She’s two hundred feet away, between the two mammoths. “They took her to lure me in.”

His surprise becomes suspicion as he seems to forget his own daughter. “Lure you in?” He turns those hungry eyes back on me. “Why?”

The Dread never said they were luring me in. It’s entirely possible that she really is here as a human shield and to deter Lyons. When I was attacked earlier, I might have been seen as just another advance Dread Squad member. But when they caught me … the strategy changed. “To help me understand.”

He turns away from me, casually looking at the Dread all around us. “And do you? Understand?”

“They’re not what you think,” I tell him. “They don’t want a war. They—”

“Are monsters, Josef. Murderers. Of our family. Of countless others. They are little more than territorial bullies hiding in the shadows. They have nearly destroyed me. Twice.”

I take a step closer. Weapons follow my movement, trained on my head. “It’s more complicated than that.”

“They got to you,” he says.

“What?”

A smile forms on Lyons’s lips. His teeth … they’re black. “They got inside your head. Messed with your memories. Didn’t they? Made you their puppet.”

I say nothing because it could be true. Have I been manipulated? I suppose there is no real way to be sure. But Lyons quickly reinforces that he screwed with my mind first.

“You really are the perfect puppet, Josef. Your fearless nature made you quick to accept orders. You’re not afraid to believe what you’re told. You’re quick to obey and slow to question. It’s what made you the perfect assassin and the best man to handle the Dread. That’s not the case anymore, as you can see.” He motions to the men around us.

“The drugs will wear off.”

“We have time.”

Time … I look at my watch. “We have thirteen minutes.” He says nothing so I fill in the blanks. “In thirteen minutes, the president is going to attack Russia’s nuclear arsenal. When that happens, Russia will launch. We’ll launch. And just to put a cherry on top, everyone else will launch.”

“Then it’s time we get started,” he says. “Don’t you think?”

“What’s your goal, here? You kill the Dread, destroy a major colony, and then what? The Dread will—”

“Do nothing,” he hisses. “I know what you think. That they’ll push the president into some world-ending military action. That they’ve got their fingers on the button. And maybe they do, but there is a reason they haven’t already hit that button. No one, not even the Dread, wants to cook the entire planet.”

“They won’t have any other choice.”

“It’s a bluff. They drew first blood, and now they’re—”

“We drew first blood!” I shout. “You did. You destroyed their colony, cooked them alive. They have families, just like us. Children. And our family paid the—”

“You naive little boy.” He looks down at me, hatred in his eyes. “They’ve been—”

“Evolving. Like us. Trying to understand. But mostly hiding from men like you. And me. We’re as monstrous to them as they are to us.”

He stares at me, one eyebrow cocked slightly higher than the other. “I am far more monstrous than you know.”

A flicker of red illuminates his skin from the inside. He leans down so our faces are inches apart. “Everything you think you know is wrong. The Dread will not destroy both worlds. This will be a conventional war, and which side of the mirror do you think will win that fight?”

“You’re wrong. I’ve seen it.”

“When I destroy this colony, the control it exerts over the others will be severed. All of the Dread and colonies connected to this one will be lobotomized. You’ve seen it for yourself. How can the Dread hurt us then?”

“Preemptively,” I say. “How long do you think it will take the Dread to push the world into nuclear war. Minutes? My bet is on seconds. You haven’t seen what they can do. Not like I have.”

Lyons shakes his head. “You’re grasping. Weak. You shame yourself. The time for action has come.”

“Is that why Katzman has a microwave bomb strapped to his back?”

He pauses to glare at Katzman, but the man doesn’t notice. He’s too busy looking at the silent Dread surrounding us. Lyons turns back to me, black smile returning. “If the big one doesn’t come out to say hello, we’re going to burn it out. We are not simply here to destroy, Josef. Today is our D-day. We are here to invade. And the best way to start an invasion is to kill the leadership. You know that. Then I’m going to wipe out the resistance, capture the weak, and turn the young against their own kind. They started a war with humanity, and now they’re going to truly understand what that means. I’ll destroy this place if it comes to that, but you and our enemy have underestimated my true intentions.”