The team of doctors surrounding Laney on the lab table revived her with shock therapy.  

She bolted upright, panting, disturbed by the break in the psychic connection with Natty. 

"What about that thing they planted on her forehead?" Truman said to Vargo, the doctor in charge. 

"I don't dare mess with that," he said. "I could end up lobotomizing her." 

***

Quatrell and his men literally stumbled upon Laney doctoring the lizard-man that Jacko's men had dropped a net on earlier, his back against a tree.  

The area was a bit too clear of ground cover for them to hide their presence once it was felt. 

The lizard man stirred at the presence of the troop and cried out. The troop in turn raised their weapons defensively.  

Laney regarded Quatrell and his men, then rushed to calm the creature. To the others, she yelled, "Put your weapons down!" 

She returned to applying salves to the hybrid creature's bleeding hide. 

Quatrell eventually ordered the others to lower their weapons. 

It was then that Natty burst into the clearing, stumbling into Laney the same way the others did. 

When he saw her by the lizard-man, he raised his weapon at it, angry. Quatrell grabbed the gun away from him. Natty studied Quatrell with looks that could kill.  

DeWitt and Natty were the first to approach Laney, getting close to her and the beast. They examined the beast briefly, but seemed more intrigued by her. 

"You got some bio-enhancements, right?" Dewitt said to Laney. "Can talk to animals like Dr. Doolittle?" 

"You did this, right?" Natty said to her, eying the wounded creature. "Did your cyberpunk jujitsu on his ass and felled the mighty beast with your superior strength and fierceness?" 

She glanced at them, mildly amused, then was instantly wary. "No, it's just plain old me, looking after the living, same as always." Eying Natty specifically, she said, "God sent me to you so boys with toys would never have to grow up." 

"Oh," Dewitt said. 

"That's mildly disappointing," Natty said. 

"How then...?" Dewitt asked. 

"Natty didn't tell you I'm a zoologist?" Laney said. 

"It didn't seem pertinent to your being my wife-slave." Natty noticed she was looking at him differently, like maybe she didn't have to doctor him anymore.  

"Let's hope," she said, "this self-mocking humor is a sign you're getting some distance on what a child-monster you'd grown into." 

He averted his eyes from her. 

Laney stood up to admire her handiwork on the creature. As she did so, Natty reached for a grenade under his shirt, pulled the pin and shoved it into the creature's mouth. 

Quatrell gestured to DeWitt to pull Natty back, which he did. 

Quatrell stuck his hand in the creature's mouth, retrieved the grenade and hurled it. 

The grenade exploded off in the distance. 

Natty, fighting against DeWitt's restraining arms, said to Quatrell, "You weren't there to see what they did to your men!" 

Quatrell lowered his voice and slowed his speech. "You aren't the only one with an imagination." Quatrell's eyes went vacant briefly. Pointing to the hybrid, he said, "He's hope for an alliance. Right now I'm more interested in changing strategy than keeping score." Glaring at Natty, he added, "Maybe because I have been keeping score."  

The creature stirred, still agitated, then slipped into unconsciousness. 

As they all encircled the creature, pondering what to do about it, a voice to the back of them said, "We'll take it from here." 

They turned, weapons up, to see Panno, Jacko, and Truman in the clearing. But they were too late to get the advantage. 

They were outnumbered and Jacko's men had better positions. 

Panno stepped up to Quatrell, staring him down. "So, you're the one I've heard so much about." 

"Didn't know my reputation preceded me." 

"Well, we'll have our time, I suppose." 

"I was hoping to show off what I can do myself," Quatrell said, smiling. Then, he glanced at the lizard-man. "But sometimes events are just greater than you are." 

Panno grunted. "Yeah, I don't care much for being upstaged either." 

He nodded to his men to drag away the lizard. 

"What'll you do to it?" Laney said. 

Panno grunted. "Do I look like I give a frig about lizard men, lady?" 

Quatrell and his people watched as Panno and his group receded into the woods. 

Truman gave a mock salute to Natty and the boys. To Natty, he said, "How's life away from your blackboard treating you?" 

"Apparently there's more to life than being an asshole." 

Truman chuckled. "Small wins." He disappeared into the jungle with the rest. 

Laney watched the lizard man under her protection being dragged away. Quatrell shifted weight, repeatedly having to rein himself in, expending more energy to fight himself than he needed for them.  

They noticed the older shaman, Jacko, was the last to disappear, much as he did earlier, simply by becoming invisible. 

"You want to tell me some more about those invisibility cloaks?" Quatrell said to Natty. 

Natty gulped. "Yeah, sure." 

They examined each other's injuries. They weren't even conscious of them until now.

*** 

The group had remained in the sheltered clearing from which Lizard Man had been kidnapped by Truman and his people. Natty fussed with a device he was tweaking in his hands. He wouldn't sit still long enough for Laney to mend his wounds.  

She was showing exasperation with him that Quatrell picked up on even if Natty didn't because he was too absorbed in his new toy. 

Quatrell also noticed that his own wound was worse, and bleeding out, while Laney showed a clear preference for mending her unappreciative husband. 

Natty, just as annoyed at her pulling at his arm with her needle and thread which he needed to work on his device, glared at her impatiently. "You mind? I'm trying to save the world here." 

"You'll need this arm later to put around me. If I'm still in a generous mood." 

"Yeah, okay." He settled down, moving more slowly with the reparations to his device to give her a chance to stitch him up. 

To Quatrell, he said, "You need to generate a magnetic field, like so." He pulled out his bowie knife and let it levitate between the two plates. 

"What'll that do, besides impress little kids?" 

As Natty grew conscious of how mesmerized Quatrell was by the scientific trick, he said, "The invisibility cloaks refract light a hundred different ways, so it can't get a fix on their wearers. But to do that, they need energy from the sun, which they store in their solar cells. All that electricity will yield to a strong enough magnetic field." 

"How strong?" Quatrell said. 

"Depends on what they're trying to hide. To reveal the soldiers, not very." 

"My men can find them, invisibility cloaks or no. I'm concerned about their compound." 

Natty grunted. "Christ, I didn't even think about that." Distracted somewhat by Laney rubbing alcohol on his wound, now that she was finished with her stitching, he said, "Overkill for this jungle if you ask me. You can hide an armada in here, and no one'd ever find it." 

Quatrell thought about it, somewhat distracted by the testy manner in which Natty and Laney were eying one another, looking for a way to establish equilibrium between them again. "Maybe that's the missing piece." 

As Natty eyed Laney more like a man and less like a kid, Natty read the double entendre in his comment about "the missing piece."  

Natty broke eye contact with Laney to regard Quatrell.  

"You said it yourself," Quatrell said, "who needs an invisibility cloak in the jungle? Maybe their compound is someplace away from here where the land is sparse and arid." 

"That would make sense as a way to fend off the lizards. They're clearly genetically designed for the tropics." 

"I'm not so sure. They may not be at their best where the air is dry..." He regarded Laney, realizing how well she had adapted to her new situation away from home and her domestic bliss. "But they look like they'd be plenty formidable enough." 

Natty, reading Quatrell's mind as he followed his eyes to Laney, came to the same conclusion himself. "Yeah, I suppose. Some creatures can survive rather well outside their native environment." 

Laney turned to stitching Quatrell's back, behind his shoulder blade. It was Natty's turn to be jealous.  

Then it dawned on him... 

He retrieved the compass from his pocket, held it in front of Quatrell. "This was pointing to a mountain earlier. Bet it would be plenty high and dry up there." 

Quatrell took the compass. "You're right. It's not showing magnetic north, pulled by a far stronger magnetic field, would be my guess. Good work, kid. You've shown us the way." 

Natty eyed Laney, "No, I think we can thank Laney for showing us the way." He passed his thumb over the chip on her forehead, suddenly understanding how he saw her ghost earlier. "Let's not take that out just yet," he said. 

Laney realizes he was talking about the chip. "No, let's not."

*** 

Quatrell and Natty scoped the mountain before them, looking up towards its summit. "Yep, the air looks plenty dry up there," Quatrell said. 

"Hell, it could be snowing up there this time of year." 

Quatrell's men spent the next several hours making the vehicles they left behind serviceable for the climb up the mountain. 

The ones that didn't need refurbishing, and just needed to be reclaimed from hiding, tunneled out of the jungle like giant wood boring insects. They took to the narrow dirt road snaking up the mountain.

*** 

Inside Truman's secret research compound, the lizard man came to as they were operating on him. 

Barking so as to snap the anesthesiologist staring flabbergasted at the human hybrid coming to life out of his trance -  

Vargo barked, "More anesthesia, you fool!" 

But it was too late. The lizard man picked up the anesthesiologist in his tail and raised him high overhead. About to flick him against the wall, Truman interrupted him. "Don't," Truman said, "or we'll cut it off. You'll live through this if you behave. We just want the secrets locked in your DNA. After that, you can go out and make all the little lizard people you want." 

The lizard man calmed down, and lowered the anesthesiologist back to the ground. 

Vargo, the doctor in charge cowering against the wall, returned to his vivisection. The creature, in the absence of anesthesia, screamed in agony. 

*** 

As they were headed up the dirt road snaking up the mountain, an explosion triggered a landslide blocking the road to Quatrell's troops. 

Quatrell stepped outside his truck to survey the situation. He gave the "forward ho" sign to his men, whistling and waving them on. 

The multi-tired rigs redirected their hydraulics to use them as arms and legs to crawl over the boulders like land crabs. 

A short while later, the caravan had paused yet again, this time on their own recognizance. Quatrell sipped at his canteen, studying the rest of the road up the hill. "They'll keep slowing us down every chance they get." 

Natty regarded the steep slope of the mountain. "We keep driving up looking for cut-aways where you might logically site a compound. But what if it's sited where you wouldn't look for it?" 

Quatrell followed his eyes to the drop off in the distance. "Someplace where you couldn't possibly stick one. An invisibility cloak would be of considerably greater application there."  

Once back in the truck and headed up the mountain, he listened to the strange sounds the vehicles were making, like Acacia bugs, and noticed how they faded as they climbed the mountain, swallowed up by the cresting winds. "I don't suppose we can amplify those sound waves any higher to reach around the girth of this mountain? We could use their deflection to detect an invisible object of any mass." 

"You're dreaming," Natty said. "Not with veering off the road and with twice as many vehicles. 

"So we're back to needing a hope and a prayer. Lucky for you, that's my department." 

Moments later, running on instinct alone, Quatrell stopped the convoy. He and his men scoured the mountain hoping to stumble over the cloaked compound. 

Quatrell sensed danger, and signaled the others. The men stopped dead in their tracks, and raised their weapons. 

The lizard-men dropped down from the trees, encircling them, snarling. 

"No," Quatrell hissed at Natty, "they wouldn't like trees, just because they're lizard men. They'd like caves." 

"If I was right about everything I figured it'd give you a complex." 

They continued to flinch as the lizard men inched towards them. 

Laney boldly stepped between Quatrell's men and the Lizard people. The lizard people, just as curiously, backed away. 

"What the hell's going on?" Quatrell said to Natty. 

Natty thought about it. "They must be psychically connected. What you do to one, you do to them all." 

"Well, if you're right about this one, I promise not to take it personally." 

The lizard men turned away from the soldiers, and clawed their way to the drop off. 

Quatrell, curious, walked up to the cliff's edge, saw nothing but a sheer drop. "It's a dead end." He signaled his men to head the other way, then he regarded the lizard man beside him. "What, are you guys short sighted?" 

The lizard man next to him picked him up in one hand, and dangled him over the cliff. Quatrell's men raised their guns. 

Then, the lizard man threw Quatrell off the mountain. 

Quatrell's screaming carried as the rest of the team watched him drop into the bottomless abyss. Only... about a quarter of the way down he landed on something. An energy field of some kind? Quatrell was trying to make sense of it. Finally, he exclaimed, "The compound!" 

He looked up at the lizard men and his own crew gazing down at him. "So you don't rely entirely on visible light to see. That could come in useful." 

Quatrell signaled his troops to advance the off-road vehicles to the drop off point. 

Moments later, as the off-road vehicles backed up against the precipice, the strange noise they were making, courtesy of Natty's device, exposed the compound, neutralizing the invisible cloaking shield. 

The compound was vast, looking a bit like those medieval castles built by monks high up to ward off invaders. Only this one had a distinctly metal, not stone, character. 

Natty looked down at the complex. "What the fuck? They didn't even know they'd need a research facility until yesterday." 

He watched as the self-replicating robots continued to add to the compound. They made it bigger and built out its fortifications even as he talked. "Oh yeah, those self-replicating robots I designed. Forgot about those." 

DeWitt regarded Natty with a mixture of awe and anger. 

Natty responded to the look he was giving him. "Hey, my step-father was a historian. He just wanted to do civil war reenactments. I rebelled." 

"Don't look now, pal, but you're still playing war games." Returning his attention to the robots, he said, "You owe more to him than you care to admit." 

Natty squirmed at the revelation. 

Quatrell's men rappelled down from the cliff above to the compound below.  

Some of the 4 x 4 all-terrain vehicles drove themselves off the precipice at full speed to land on the roof of the compound, bouncing atop their giant all-terrain tires.  

Others of the all-terrain vehicles climbed down the drop-off like insects, using the same hydraulic-arm, robot-driven technology used to build the compound, and the same flexibility that had been demonstrated earlier on crawling over the boulders after the avalanche on the road. 

Once on the roof of the compound, Natty examined the self-replicating robots from up-close, where they were even more impressive.  

Dewitt grabbed Natty's hand. "Let's forget about shaping the future for a minute. And try and exercise some influence over the present." 

Natty shook off the trance of looking at one of his creations come to life and nodded. He regarded the rest of the sweeping vista and how the building contrasted with it. "This place is an eye sore. No wonder they threw an invisibility cloak over it." 

He gazed up to watch the lizard men jumping down on the compound. 

The self-replicating robots changed their own programming, building instead: self-governing, robotic Gatling guns, mortars, 50-caliber machine guns, rapid-fire laser canons. 

Quatrell and his men hit the deck as the blasting started.  

Realing he was not going to move in time, Quatrell dragged the still stunned Natty to the ground. "If you need to take one of your anti-paranoia meds, now'd be a good time." 

"Yeah, well, they say paranoia is born of a guilty conscience. My conscience is feeling a lot clearer these days." 

Grabbing one of Quatrell's pistols off him, he joined in with the shooting at the robots.  

As the robot weapons fired on the lizard men, the human hybrids used their tails to bat the weapons off the roof of the compound and over the precipice. 

As quickly as the weapons plummeted into the abyss they were remade by helper robots into jet fighters. They flew back up, just as armored and just as pissy as before, to take their potshots at the lizard-men. 

Quatrell and his men lent cover to the lizard men from their prone positions on the roof, shooting at anything firing on them or the lizard men. 

After having no luck with their gunplay, Quatrell changed ammo. He realized he was able to melt one of the robo-guns with a high-tech incendiary, which burned so hot the flames were blue-white. The rest of his men follow suit.  

Quatrell's men were able to do some damage with shells the size of small rockets, burning at high temperatures, melting the robots, and defying their ability to reshape themselves. 

But it was fast turning into a numbers game. And the numbers just weren't on their side.