The garden gnome by the Kellers’ front porch winked at us saucily as we mounted the steps. It was a lone piece of tackiness in the otherwise elegant landscaping, but when I’d asked Harriet about it, she’d just laughed and said it was a private joke between her and Harry and wouldn’t elaborate. I guessed it was something more than just where they hid their spare key—well, that was true, the spare key was on top of the door frame. But it always made me wonder.
Harry let us in. “Glad to see you,” he said. “Dinner’s almost ready. Come sit with me. Harriet says I’m just in the way in the kitchen.”
“Because you are, dear,” Harriet called out. “I hope everyone likes fried chicken.”
I loved Harriet’s fried chicken, served with baked potatoes drenched in butter and sour cream and baked beans whose recipe I had yet to master. The smells emanating from the kitchen made my stomach growl.
Harry chuckled. “We love having guests who appreciate Harriet’s cooking so much,” he said. “And I’m glad that thing at Kalgoorlie went off without a hitch. Hate to think of you still there, Malcolm.”
“If I were still there, it would be a disaster the likes of which the Wardens have never seen,” Malcolm said, the smile falling away from his lips. “I can’t imagine even our glass magi being able to maintain illusions for so long. And there would certainly be civilian casualties.”
“The custodian at the Morgan Node, Rafe Wheelwright, is an old friend of ours,” Harry said. “He said the fighting never came close.”
“It was almost anticlimactic,” Malcolm agreed. “We knew almost exactly where the intelligent invaders would come through, thanks to the Pattern, and took them out before they could fully implement their plan. So we never did have to fight waves of the small ones.”
“Now, both of you know there’s no talking shop over dinner,” Harriet said. She’d removed her apron and held it balled up in front of her. “Let’s eat, and talk of pleasanter things. I haven’t seen Judy in weeks, Helena, is she doing well?”
I stuffed myself full of good food to the point that I almost didn’t have room for Harriet’s rich cheesecake topped with raspberry compote. Almost. I was full, not stupid. Then I rolled myself into the living room, accepted a cup of coffee in the tiny cups Harriet had brought back from Belgium in her fighting days, and settled into a corner of the sofa next to Malcolm.
“But the invaders will change their tactics now they know what we can do,” Harry said, exactly as if the conversation hadn’t been interrupted by food. “We can’t count on it being that easy again.”
“No, but that’s typical of warfare,” Malcolm said. “In an ordinary war, we would go on the attack, but since we have no way of reaching the invaders’ reality, we can only try to guess their next strategy and thwart it before they can enact it.”
“Why can’t we reach them?” I asked. “Is it just that humans can’t survive there?”
“That, and we’re in the same position the intelligent invaders are when it comes to finding a place big enough to slip through,” Harriet said. “They can use nodes, but that would be deadly to us. And no one’s ever discovered what we can use. If that ever happened, I’m sure some clever Warden would come up with a way to protect a human in the invaders’ reality.”
“But even if we could get through and survive, what could we do that would be useful?” Harry said. “It’s tempting to think of planting a bomb, or a flamethrower, but we don’t know enough about their reality to know what would do us the most good.”
“It would serve them right if we could send through a thermonuclear device,” I muttered.
Malcolm laughed. “That is tempting.”
“Well, with the Pattern recalibrated, we should have no trouble tracking the incursion again,” Harriet said. “The report on Berryton confirms what we saw in Barga and Kalgoorlie. The Pattern just wasn’t set up to account for the intelligent invaders.”
“It should have been,” Harry said. “It’s not like there weren’t intelligent ones in the world before this.”
“Well-hidden,” Harriet said, “and not taking an active role in attacks. Though I’m sure they directed their mindless cousins often enough.”
I remembered the creature that had dragged itself out of my friend Kevin’s lifeless body, remembered it wrapping its tentacles around me and biting my shoulder, and I closed my eyes tightly against those memories. When I opened them, the others were looking at me in concern.
Malcolm took my free hand in his. “Are you all right?”
“Just remembering. They’re utterly terrifying. Not because they’re strong and aggressive, but because they don’t think we’re worth any consideration. We’re just like bugs to them, something to stomp or crush and sweep out of their way.”
“We are bugs who have stopped them advancing for over seven hundred years,” Malcolm said. “That attitude of theirs is pure bluff. The invader you faced in the Gunther Node wanted you to feel despair.”
“It sort of worked. I only survived because they didn’t feel like killing me.” And because Jun had sacrificed her life to spare mine. More memories that tore at my heart.
“We destroyed three of them at Kalgoorlie,” Malcolm said, squeezing my hand gently. “They are as vulnerable as any invader.”
I was sure the fighting had been more difficult than he was letting on, but I didn’t want to challenge him in front of our hosts. So instead, I said, “I stabbed one of them in the eye. It knows we’re not helpless.”
“No, but we are dependent on wards,” Harry said, “and it sounds like, from Michelle Suzuhara’s report on Berryton, that’s become a weakness. If we can’t figure out how they’re warping the wards, any warded location is vulnerable.”
Nobody had a response to that. I didn’t know what Ms. Suzuhara’s report said, because I’d been busy and Lucia hadn’t called me, but it was that lack of a phone call that told me it must contain more or less what the custodians and I had guessed: warping the wards enough to take advantage of the gap, or whatever it was, and then killing the node’s custodian horribly and thereby destroying the node.
“What’s special about the node in Kalgoorlie?” I asked.
Everyone shifted as if coming out of a private reverie. “The Morgan Node is the biggest in Australia,” Malcolm said. “In fact, it’s one of only two Neutralities in all of Australia. The other nodes are all small and under Nicollien or Ambrosite control.”
“Only two that we know about,” Harry pointed out. “Much of Australia is hostile to human life. It’s like the Himalayas and the Alps—could be nodes the size of Neutralities all over the place, but nobody’s in a position to discover or use them.”
“I hope there aren’t any secret Neutralities in Australia,” Harriet said. “The invaders would certainly make use of them. Desert conditions don’t bother them.”
“You’re wondering why that node was attacked,” Malcolm said. “Lucia sent out an update this morning addressing that question. It seems there’s nothing all three nodes—four nodes, if you count the failed attack on Abernathy’s—had in common. Berryton, Morgan, and Abernathy’s are large, but the Cracchiolo Node is relatively small as Neutralities go. Berryton and Cracchiolo were isolated, small communities. Cracchiolo and Kalgoorlie were inland. The Fountain of Youth in Berryton and Abernathy’s are named Neutralities, and so forth. So there’s no common factor that would help us in identifying the next target.”