E STILL HAVE no sightings of the girl Maximum Ride,” reported one scout.

The team leader glanced up from the radar images on his desk. “What about the others?”

“We’ve been tracking them for three days,” his subordinate confirmed. “We’ve triangulated their origination point to within a half mile.”

The team leader looked up, but his frown was lost on the combat robot, who hadn’t been upgraded to recognize emotion.

“What’s the fastest they were clocked at?” he asked.

“The large dark one can achieve speeds of more than two hundred fifty miles per hour,” said the scout. “When they are aiming downward, they have been recorded at more than three hundred fifty miles per

hour.”

The team leader nodded, wondering why the upgrade also apparently hadn’t been programmed to use metric. He sighed. The history of these genetic mistakes was a litany of embarrassing failures. Even Itexicon—with its massive, global resources, the years of research, the trillions of dollars spent—had ended up a shattered shell, unable to stop six children. And the Erasers! People were still making jokes about them.

When he’d first heard about the Erasers, he’d thought they were simply an amusing experiment. Despite their speed, relative intelligence, and overwhelming bloodlust, they’d proved quite ineffective. So they’d decided to dispense with the biological base and went to robots covered with flesh—inexplicably designed to look like Erasers. Then they’d made Flyboys—basically, Erasers with wings. All of which the mutant kids had already defeated.

Since then, it had been basically the same old, same old—one generation of enhanced individual tracking and killing machines after the next. Given all kinds of fancy names, tweaked this way and that. None of them seemed up to the task.

The team leader was truly surprised that Devin had failed. Truly, truly surprised. Devin had never failed at a job for as long as the team leader had known him. He’d lost a hundred dollars on that bet.

However, there did seem to be a sufficient quantity of version 5.0 to perhaps stall or contain the mutated kids until someone better, smarter, more experienced, more focused came along.

Someone like him.

“Should we pinpoint their location and destroy them?” the robot asked.

The team leader shook his head. “No. Just surveillance at this point.”

He’d lost a bunch of good men in Mexico City, and he wanted payback.

So did Mr. Chu.