“Pulled,” I repeat, remembering them using that word back in the clearing. The lobby. Luka and Richelle used it in the context of getting pulled from our real lives.

“We get pulled through time and space,” Tyrone says, and he must have read the disbelief in my expression, because he laughs and says, “Just go with it.”

Advice I decide to take, mostly for lack of alternatives. “So we can get pulled anywhere, at any time?”

“Pretty much.” He shrugs. “When we finish the job, we get pulled back again.”

His explanation only makes me want to ask about a billion more questions, like who pulls us, and how. Every time they try to clarify something, I end up more confused. Maybe Jackson was right when he told me that explanations wouldn’t cut it, that I’d have to see things for myself.

“You’re not arguing in disbelief,” Luka observes.

“Finding myself on a crowded street in Vegas is definitely going a long way toward making me a believer.”

Tyrone snorts. “You a gamer?” he asks.

I frown at the non sequitur and shake my head. “I’ve played.” Sometimes. With Carly’s brothers. But I’m no expert.

“Being a gamer helps with being a believer,” he says. “Anyway, here’s the crash course. You get points for every hit. There’s a bonus for timeliness. It starts out as triple points and decays by increments of point five.”

“We’ve yet to earn the time bonus,” Richelle says. She nudges Tyrone’s side with her elbow. “Some of us talk too much, which slows everyone down.”

“That’d be Jackson. He’s all chatty-chat,” Tyrone says, and he and Richelle exchange an amused glance. Then he looks back at me and continues. “Target at least three Drau in less than two seconds and you get multi-hit bonus points. Get them in the head? Bonus points. Get a stealth hit? Bonus points. Penalty points for injuries. Cost points for weapons.” He glances at Luka. “That pretty much covers it, right?”

“Tyrone’s our resident expert,” Luka says unnecessarily.

“Yeah. I get that,” I say.

Richelle laughs. “If you can actually understand what he’s talking about.” She cuts him a sidelong look through her lashes. “He has this idea that someday he’s going to turn all of this into a game and sell it for the big bucks.” The way she says it tells me she doesn’t think that’s such a crazy plan. She sounds proud.

We keep moving. People flow around us like water, not looking at us, but parting to let us pass.

I follow Jackson right through the center of a group of women who are laughing and talking about girls’ night and some guy’s abs. We’ve cut through a few large groups, but this time it hits me. “They don’t see us,” I blurt.

He slows just long enough for me to catch up. “No, but somewhere in their subconscious, they sense our presence.”

“Wow. You strung more than ten words together and offered information voluntarily.” I don’t know why I say it. There’s just something that makes me want to needle him. Maybe because it distracts me from being afraid. But I regret the lost opportunity to ask more questions when he clips out, “I’m already regretting it.”

He doesn’t look at me when I mutter, “Dish it out but can’t take it.”

“Ten,” he says.

“What?”

“You said I strung more than ten words together. But I didn’t. I strung together precisely ten.”

My jaw goes slack and I can’t think of a single snappy comeback.

I jog in silence for a few seconds before I hear, “Give me a j.” I glance over to see Richelle beside me, doing a high V, moving her hands like she’s holding pom-poms. She repeats the movement and trills, “Give me a k.” Her brows lift. “I’ll let you fill in the two letters in between. Try e and r.”

I mentally add the letters and huff out a laugh.

“That’s our Jackson,” she says with a wink.

“You’re on the squad.”

“What gave it away?” She gestures at her outfit and grins. “My mom wanted me to be at the top like she was, but I’m a base. That means I’m the one on the bottom, lifting the flyer into her stunt. Which is actually fine with me. I wouldn’t want to be the one at the top. I’m scared of heights.” She looks me over, then asks, “You?”

I shake my head. “No squad for me. I run.”

There’s a surreal quality to this conversation. It’s so ordinary. And our situation . . . isn’t. We’re jogging along the Vegas strip on a mission to hunt aliens. It hits me then that I’ve accepted that fact. I know I’m not dreaming or fantasizing. This is real.

“Track team?” Richelle asks.

“No.” I shake my head. “I’m not much of a team player. That’s Luka’s thing. I run just for me.”

She laughs, but there’s an edge to it. “Good for you. Sometimes I think I’m so busy trying to make my mom proud, doing everything exactly as she wants me to do, I forget to do anything for me.”

“What would you want to do?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it? I guess I need to figure out where Mom’s ideas end and mine begin.”

We turn onto a quieter street. Richelle’s jogging along beside me, and I shock the hell out of myself when I say in a rush, “My mom’s dead. SCLC. Small cell lung cancer.” On my fourteenth birthday, she was laughing and chasing me into the waves at Atlantic Beach. We’d been going to North Carolina, renting the same oceanfront cottage my whole life. But that birthday everything changed. I remember the wave taking her under. I remember her coming up coughing. And coughing. I don’t think she ever stopped coughing after that. Four months later, she was dead. Four months. Chemo and radiation didn’t help worth shit. “I made my father put a pack of cigarettes and a lighter in her coffin along with the photos he chose of me and him and all of us together.” I pause, remembering that, remembering all the times my parents sat watching TV or reading the paper, a cloud of smoke hanging over them. “I was that angry.”