Read Defenders for Free Online Page B

of the church, to a dirt- and leaf-covered black steel grate in the ground along the back wall.
    Open the grate. Drop four down.
    Drop
them. Why on Earth would he do that?
    Realization swept over him with an icy chill. It was down there. Hiding. Probably hurt.
    I’m in trouble, just like you. I’m alone and afraid, just like you.
    It was difficult for Kai to imagine one of those big, ugly monsters being afraid, and lonely. “Why are you lonely? I thought you could talk to other Luyten in your head.”
    They’re all too far away.
    They had an eight-mile range. Kai remembered hearing that.
    That’s right.
    As Kai knocked on the door, he told himself he had no choice but to do what the Luyten told him. It hadn’t made any threats, but it was huge, and powerful, and he was just a kid.
    A woman answered the door. She was Asian like him, a streak of gray running through her long hair. More important, the aroma of fish and rice wafted through the door from a nearby kitchen.
    Her name is Mrs. Boey. Tell her you have a message from her daughter. Valerie.
    “Mrs. Boey? My name is Kai. I have a message from your daughter Valerie.”
    The woman’s expression transformed. “You heard from my baby?” She opened the door, put a hand on Kai’s shoulder, and led him inside.
    Valerie is outside Richmond, alive. She helped you escape. She asked you to tell her mother she’s sorry about the argument they had before she left.
    Is Valerie alive, Kai thought.
    Probably not.
    With a crippling knot of guilt in his stomach, Kai told Mrs. Boey her daughter was alive and well, as a dozen people sitting elbow to elbow around a kitchen table looked on. Food was already on the table, and after Kai delivered his news the woman had little choice but to invite him to share their meal. The food was delicious; Kai ate voraciously, every chopstick-full sticking in his throat on the way down as he watched Mrs. Boey across the table, smiling, probably eating more easily than she had at any time since her sixteen-year-old daughter left to battle the Luyten four months earlier.
    He should tell them, he thought. He should blurt out that there was a Luyten hiding under the church. Once it was out, there was nothing it could do. It was the enemy. It and its kind wanted to wipe out everyone on Earth, and they were
succeeding
—
    If you tell her, you’ll go back to being cold and hungry.
    Kai didn’t want to be hungry again. More than that, he didn’t want to be alone in the dark, stumbling through places where there might be dead bodies.
    “Do you have family nearby?” an old, bent woman asked Kai.
    “No. I have an aunt and uncle in Connecticut, but it’s too far.”
    I’m not a soldier. I haven’t killed anyone.
    It was not the first time the Luyten had told him this.
    It claimed it had been shot out of the sky, part of a small contingent of Luyten on a night reconnaissance mission over D.C. The military knew a Luyten had been shot down in the area and they were hunting for it. For
Five
, he reminded himself. It had asked Kai to call it Five. It must have been injured in the crash, but it wouldn’t say.
    After the meal, Mrs. Boey said, “I’d ask you to stay, but as you can see, there’s just no room.” She gestured toward her relatives, most of them young or very old.
    Kai told her he understood, and followed her to the door carrying the leftover food she had given him.
    As he headed toward the back of the church, Kai wondered if Five had purposely chosen a house where Kai was likely to get food, but not a place to sleep. If someone took Kai in, he would have less incentive to protect Five’s secret.
    Yes
, Five said.
I don’t want to die. I’m just as afraid to die as you are.
    “Why are you doing this to us?” Kai whispered, although there was no one to hear him—the street was cold and empty, the orange glowlights along the sidewalk his only guide in the darkness. “Can’t we share the world? Why do you have to have it all to