“A shack in the woods?” I asked.

I could just make out a small building hidden behind a line of trees. It was off the beaten track, that was for sure. It looked a bit like an old small church, with flaking white paint on the walls. Light shone through a couple of the shutters that did not sit properly. Even with my senses and the small light from the cracks around the windows, I do not think I would have found this place without the Seers.

August looked back at me and shrugged. “Yes, that seems to be it. All of our premonitions pointed us here.” He glanced back at his map, and then back into the darkness, “Though I have to say I thought it would be a bit more… well, just more really.”

“Why are we doing this at night? Shouldn’t we come back in the morning?” I asked.

August shrugged. “It would be preferable, but we need to move quickly. The sooner we get to them, the better. I’m prepared to take a calculated risk. Besides, if they have friends or family in town, they may well have an idea we are here, civilian vehicles or not.”

I couldn’t disagree with that concern, but I still hated it.

After the Seer’s performed their meditations, we’d spent the last hour and a half driving through the darkness looking for this place. It was about 20 miles outside of Bluff Falls down a twisting dirt road. A half-moon gave us some light, but that was it. Though the building was off the side of the road by about a hundred meters, I imagined that anyone inside it had heard us by now. Five vehicles are not exactly quiet. This was not a stealth mission, technically, so everyone behaved accordingly.

“What’s the word, Specialist?” Stone asked me. If he was upset about our sudden equality, he didn’t show it.

“Where’s Marcus and Kemi?” I asked.

He thumbed back towards the way he’d just come, near the parked vehicles. “They told me to ask you.”

Thanks, guys. Glancing over at August, I said, “Well if they have manifested, there is no point in trying to sneak up on them.”

Stone looked at me, his face questioning.

“You know the tingling thing? They’ll feel us coming. Assuming they haven’t felt us already.”

I could not feel anything, but I looked at August for some backup. Seers typically had a greater range than the rest of us.

“What? Oh, yes, they are in there,” he said.

“I don’t like this,” I said.

“What’s wrong?” Stone asked.

I glanced around the dirt track and the hidden building. It was obvious to me that this group of people did not want to be found, at least not by accident. The added benefit of meeting in a church also made me a bit more suspicious. “Well,” I said, “This is kind of ‘militia country’, know what I mean? I’d be surprised if we didn’t see some ‘Trespassers will be shot’ signs once we get closer. If I’m right, they are not going to like soldiers snooping around where they live. Even if some of them might be interested in what we have to say, we are going to have to approach this delicately.”

Stone nodded. “Makes sense,” he said. “Who do you want on point?”

Thinking about it, I said, “We’ll take point, Kemi, Marcus, and I. We can see better in the dark and react more quickly. We’ll escort the Seers down. You guys get a tight lookout on the building and give us support if need be.”

“Understood.”

As I started to walk away, I stopped and turned back to Stone. “If you have to take a shot, try to disable if possible.”

He shrugged. “I’m good, but I can’t promise I’ll be that good.”

“Just try to avoid headshots, ok?”

“Yes ma’am.”

I found Kemi and Marcus, getting ready and checking their weapons. “Left me to do the heavy thinking I see,” I said as I walked over to them.

Kemi shrugged. “Figured you know Stone and August better than us. Is it a problem?”

“What’s a problem is that we don’t have a clear chain of command on this mission,” I growled.

Marcus narrowed his eyes. “Yeah, that’s a good point. I hadn’t thought of that. Do we take orders from August?”

I shook my head. “No, he’s civilian and even if we are acting like his guards on this it’s not up to him to tell us how to do it. That’s for us to make the call. I’d rather we do that as a team than it falls to me alone.”

They shrugged then nodded. “So what do you want to do, Delaney?” Kemi asked.

Taking off my helmet, I ran my fingers through my hair. “We need a strategy and we need to be on the same page.”

Marcus nodded, then nudged Kemi when she didn’t respond. Raising her hands, she said, “Sure, okay, let’s hear one.”

I sighed. She wasn’t going to like it. “You should take point.”

“What? Why me?”

“Because you are the fastest one of us. If there is a problem, you can react faster than either of us.”

“Why don’t we approach abreast?”

“Kemi, that would make us all easy targets,” Marcus said gently. She shot him a cold glare. He wasn’t wrong, but I didn’t want to be the one to force the point.

She crossed her arms over her chest. “Fine. What are you two going to do?”

“Flanking guard?” Marcus asked.

I nodded. “That’s what I was thinking. We cover the sides, like a triangle. We’ll put the regular troopers in the rear for support and to just not stick out so much.”

Kemi seemed to mull it over, as though trying to come up with an alternative. Eventually, she gave up and said, “Fine, all right, we’ll do your plan.”

As plans went, it was not great, but it was the best we had considering the limited Intel.

Deep down, I knew it was all going to go pear-shaped.

After I explained the plan to everyone the men moved to the tree line, taking up positions that gave them clear fields of fire on the house, at least as good as they could hope for in the dark.

Now the only thing I had to worry about was the people inside the building.

We picked our way through the trees. They were thin, spindly things, with boney branches reaching for the sky. Not auspicious, I thought as we approached. Kemi was silent as she moved up ahead of us. If I’d not been watching her slink into the woods, I would not have known she was even there. Marcus and I were pretty good too. Our charges, on the other hand, were a bit more obvious, though they tried to be as quiet as possible.

I felt the other Changed as we got closer, like chills across my skin, an anxious awareness that I now recognized for what it was. I knew they were feeling it too. After you were around a Changed for a while the sensation died down, like the feel of clothes on your skin: until they rubbed you somehow, you forgot they were there. When a new one of us approached the feeling was fresh and intense.

I wondered what they would make of it, a group of unknown people approaching them in the dark.

When we were at the porch, Kemi was flat against the wall next to the door and before the window. I started towards the door, but August laid his hand on my shoulder, stopping me.

“Let me do this,” he said. “It’ll be fine.”

He raised his hand to knock on the door.

The quiet metallic click of a gun cocking behind the door was the loudest sound I’d ever heard

I was moving as his knuckles hit the door. The gun boomed on the other side. Why was someone shooting? We were falling from the porch. Kemi’s eyes were so white in the darkness, her teeth so straight as her mouth opened in an ‘O’ of terror.

August hit the porch first and then I landed on top of him, covering him with my body. His face was frozen in a look of shock. Bullets whizzed through the air above us; Marcus was putting rounds through the door and Kemi was firing point-blank around the doorframe through the hole they had made. Rebecca and Jessica were running back the way we came.

“Cease fire!” I screamed, again and again, trying to be heard over the sound of the weapons. Windows broke as people in the house aimed at the world outside. Marcus dove behind some anorexic trees, while Kemi dropped into a crouch, a second pistol in her other hand, aimed at the window closest to her. I looked up, back towards the road, where I knew Stone and the other men were drawing a bead on muzzle flashes and backlit targets.

This was amateur hour and I was the biggest noob out here. He’d warned me; I’d not done enough. Now everyone was about to start killing each other.