Limerence: Book Three of The Cure (Omnibus Edition)

by Charlotte McConaghy

  “Aye aye, boss. Can I tell Josi what’s going on?”

  “She escaped.”

  His face splits into a grin.

  I laugh. “Try not to look too concerned about it.”

  “Oh, come on, you and I both know she’d never do anything to hurt us.”

  I nod but I’m not so sure, since technically she already did a massive thing to hurt us. I can’t stop thinking about how easily that gate broke, letting the Furies flood much, much closer to where the rest of my people are sleeping. And with all the best fighters away on this op, there’ll be no one there to protect the seventy odd left behind. If another breach happens, they’re all dead.

  “Stay safe, Teddy. Keep an eye on the watch rosters and make sure every single gate is being guarded at all times.”

  “You’re leaving me in charge of that? Why?”

  “’Cause I know I can trust you with it. Go on, hop to it. See you on the other side.”

  He starts the train and then hurries to jump off. As the giant metal contraption whirs quietly to life after a year and a half of slumber I walk back through its carriages, remembering each and every mission this train carried us to from the west. This journey will be much shorter. In no time at all we’ll be beneath the heart of the Blood stronghold.

  *

  Josephine

  It is decidedly not fun to ride a speeding motorbike through a narrow, pitch-black tunnel without a helmet and with a terrified teenager clinging painfully to your back and screaming in your ear. Just saying.

  We don’t dismount and take any of the number of exhaust hatches into the streets above. Instead we careen into a different set of tunnels – the subway tunnels – launch off the platform into the air and land heavily on the concrete between the tracks with a wild skid. I give a whoop of exhilaration while Zach screams bloody murder. Actually, maybe it is kinda fun.

  I gun the engine down the tunnel and pray like crazy that we don’t encounter a train. This is, after all, the working section of the city’s subway. I probably could have looked up the train timetables, but that would have been far too intelligent.

  We zoom past platforms filled with astonished passengers waiting for their train. I’m looking for a particular station – Ensfield – and when I see it approaching I gun the engine even harder.

  “What are you doing, you maniac?” Zach shouts hysterically. “Slow down!”

  But we’ll need speed if I’m to hop us up onto the concrete gutters running alongside.

  “Hold tight!” I shout.

  “Oh fuck you—”

  I rear us up on one wheel and angle my front to land on the gutter, using the engine’s momentum to carry us up and onto the platform. Terrified people launch out of the way as I gun the bike straight for the stairs. Zach has one consistent scream exploding from his mouth – his lung capacity is quite impressive. We hit the stairs and the bike bounces around, smashing our spines into pieces and nearly flinging us off. I manage to keep my hold on the handlebars and Zach manages to keep his hold on me as we clatter up and out of the subway.

  I turn us left and fly straight up the main street, whizz onto the highway and take that down a few miles before the exit to the supply depo.

  This is where it gets tricky.

  As it turns out, even soulless bloodsucking demons need food. Who knew? So if we can’t use the sewage tunnels or the prostitute route in, we use the food route. At the supply depo, trucks are filled, under heavy security, and then driven inside the Gates for delivery. I’ve done my homework (and by that I mean Teddy did my homework for me) and know that our best shot at not being detected at any of the security points along the way is to stow away on a freezer truck. We can’t cling to the bottom, as the Bloods use mirrors to look beneath the cabin. We can’t hide in the freezer, as they search that three times along the way. And we can’t just commandeer the truck for the obvious reasons: eyes and fingerprint scans.

  Which leaves us one rather squishy option, for which I thank the food gods – they nearly starved me to death in the north and gave me this skeletal-chic figure, while consistently filling the guts of the poor rich ministers. Zach’ll be fine – he’s a weedy little creep already. So we just have to get inside the depo without being spotted. I’ve got the guard shifts memorized, as well as the loading schedule. Over the wall we go, shimmying over the barbed wire and avoiding the swinging cameras. That makes it sound rather simple, but with Zach in tow, it is not. He’s as ungainly and uncoordinated as a baby elephant, and has a pain tolerance of minus five. You just have to touch him and the poor peach bruises. Which is curious to me, as he’s no stranger to pain. His father has made sure of that.

  We wait behind the building and I count the minutes. This is a dance. Know where the cameras are, know how they move and when. Know where the guards are, know how they move and when. Find a path between the two and dance it like crazy. While running left we duck low, pause three seconds and then twist out of view of the oncoming guard as the camera sweeps the other way. It takes a good ten minutes to reach the back of the parked truck. Zach keeps watch while I unpick the lock on the back – skill à la Luke – then scurry away to await the next guard sweep. We now have a thirty-second window to climb into the back with all our gear, not inside the freezer, but on top of it, squeezing into the very narrow space between the roof of the fridge and the top of the truck’s interior.

  It’s immediately hot from the freezer’s exhaust. I was hoping it wouldn’t be this hot because boarding the truck here means waiting for them to load, which will probably take at least another forty minutes, then the journey on top of that. But trying to board anywhere else was too time-tight.

  I’m already sweating by the time they start loading the frozen food into the freezer below us. They won’t spot us at this angle, and hopefully they won’t think to look up here. They sure take their sweet time about it.

  “Lazy bums,” Zach mutters.

  They won’t hear us over the exhaust engine but I tell him to shut up anyway.

  The truck finally takes off and we have to endure the tension of several security sweeps. They don’t find us, but it’s getting mighty hot up here, and this is one hell of a small space. Panic threatens the back of my mind but I focus on counting seconds and listening to the progress of the truck. As we stop for the third security point I know we must have reached the security gate. I can hear the guards checking the driver’s prints and doing yet another sweep of the truck. We take off and I breathe a sigh of relief, until there’s a shout and the truck slams to a sudden stop.

  The force sends me sliding along the top of the freezer straight into the exhaust pipes. My arm connects with it and the cold is so severe that it burns straight through my shirt. I slam my mouth shut so as not to scream. Zach slides to my side and tries to wrench my arm away, but the cold has fused both my skin and the shirt to the pipe, like a tongue getting stuck to the ice in winter. I grit my teeth and rip myself away, leaving material and a chunk of skin behind. I’m flooded with nausea as the pain does its work.

  There’s a guard inside the freezer, searching right up the back of it. He’s directly beneath us. Woozily, my mind goes to the last time I was hidden in a tiny space while guards searched below. The thought of mounting Zach and having my way with him like I did to Luke makes me nearly burst out laughing maniacally.

  Thankfully the overzealous guard deems the truck clean and lets us go through. We make our way to the back of the food storage building and are backed into the unloading bay. Zach and I then have to wait until all the food is unloaded. There’ll be a short window here, maybe. We slide to the edge and heave ourselves down from the cramped space. I land and peer around the storage hangar. I can hear footsteps returning to lock up the empty truck, and pull Zach around the truck just in time. We scurry into a space between looming boxes and hunker down. It’s immensely relieving not to be simultaneously burning, freezing and suffocating to death.

  The burn on my arm is bad – I can
see down through the layers of my skin, and all of them are pink and shiny. Ugh. Another burn.

  The truck leaves and we’re locked in. But that’s fine. I have a lot of experience crawling around in air vents. They really should start building them too small to fit inside. We climb up into the nearest and follow it through the kitchen building. Great thing about the Gates community is that apart from all the individual mansions, the rest of the buildings are all attached to each other. This is supposed to lower possible infiltration points, but it pretty much means that once you’re in one section, you’re in all.

  Soon, however, the vents run out.

  I’m prepared for this. Zach should be too. He doesn’t look any stronger than he did a month ago, though.

  “Did you do your exercises?”

  “Yes! You’ve asked me like fifty times.”

  “’Cause I don’t believe you.”

  “Guess we’ll see now, won’t we?”

  “Guess we will. When you fall and die I’ll make sure to say I told you so.”

  We make a childish face at each other and then start donning the climbing gloves and shoes. They have grip pads on each finger and palm, and all over the feet. But they’re not magic – the only way to keep from falling is to have excellent upper and core body strength. Which Zach, the liar, does not.

  The building we’re in right now is the antechamber of the “Great Hall”. They call it this to denote some fucking medieval power apex, no doubt. It is pretty “great” in size, I have to admit. And its roof is made of a spectacularly carved glass walkway. Beautiful, artistic glass. Glass that is going to pose the greatest challenge on this mission.

  This glass atrium is suspended over the lush gardens that line the hall’s interior. It’s meant to let the sun in, while casting glorious beams of light on the various flowers, and giving the people in the Gates a spectacular view as they cross the hall. It is truly a beautiful piece of design, but we have to follow it somehow in order to reach the parliamentary rooms – there’s no other point of access to them. Can’t just walk through it, as cameras cover every inch of it and motion sensors line the floor, alerting security any time someone is crossing it. But the cameras don’t point upwards, to the glass ceiling.

  I go first, lying flat and spreading my weight as wide as I can. I feel a bit like a spider as I extend my arms and legs right out, crawling along at a painstakingly slow pace. I have to keep my weight spread so as not to crack the glass. It’s tough work – the muscles in my arms and shoulders and all through my core scream for mercy. My knees and toes and palms hurt against the glass, and the blood has all rushed to my face. God, I think I’ve really bitten off more than I can chew here.

  I pick up the pace, wanting it to be over, trying to get some speed. Scurry goes my spider body, stretched and trembling. I can hear Zach behind me, cursing a storm. If someone happens to walk beneath us we’re fucked, but it’s unlikely, as the glass bridge is only used on special occasions.

  Unless you’re the Prime Minister, apparently.

  I freeze in absolute horror as none other than Falon Shay walks along the glass tunnel directly below us. Don’t look up, don’t look up, don’t you dare look up, you son of a bitch. He’s going to – he’ll cross beneath our shadows and that’ll be it. But he’s reading on his tablet, head down, striding along without a thought for the outside world. He notices nothing and soon is gone back the way we came.

  I sag in relief.

  Only to hear the glass give a soft, sinister crack.

  My head whips around to see that Zach has collapsed from his spread eagle position, too weak to hold it.

  “You lazy bastard,” I hiss. “You didn’t do them, did you?”

  “They were too hard!”

  “I’m leaving you behind. You deserve to be found.”

  “Josi! Don’t!”

  Another crack snakes out from under his hip.

  “Relax, idiot. Spread your weight right now. Move off that crack.”

  He starts to do so but the glass splinters in every direction. I think quickly. The glass will support far more weight if we’re hanging from beneath it. I inch back to Zach, making sure to remain on a different pane. His is about to go. He reaches for my hand but I’ll never get him off in time. So I brace myself to catch him, thinking with mild concern that every time I’ve had to do a mission that involves climbing in recent months it has turned out very poorly. The glass goes and I swing Zach to the edge of my pane, which he grabs hold of with his sticky gloves. It should hold him for a minute or two. I just hope nobody was watching the security cameras at that exact moment.

  “You’re gonna climb along the underside of the glass, upside down like a lizard, okay?”

  “Are you out of your damn mind? There’s no way in hell I can do that!”

  “It won’t crack from beneath, trust me.”

  “What kind of physics is that?” he hisses. “The fantasy kind?”

  “The glass is set into the underside of the frame which means that from that side, the frame will take more of the force of weight than the glass will, so—”

  “I don’t actually care! It was a rhetorical question! How am I going to stay attached?”

  “Was that another rhetorical question?”

  “NO!”

  “You hold on, dumbass.”

  “I will curse your name until my dying breath, Josephine Luquet.”

  “Then do it while you climb. The suction in your gloves and shoes will keep you on the glass, but your body will have to do a lot of work to move you along.”

  I realize pretty quickly that I’m going to have to do it too. The glass beneath me has started to crack, not to mention Zach requires examples of everything before he can even attempt to do it himself. I swing down and feel my pads suck onto the glass. Upside down, the blood is really rushing to my head.

  “How do I get the pads off again?”

  “Like we practiced. You roll your wrist and ankle to release the suction – slowly!”

  We make our slow way along the underside of the glass ceiling. It’s not even a little bit fun. By the time I’ve made it to the edge and swing down onto safe, uncensored floor, my body is jelly. Weak, trembling jelly. Zach is still halfway across, moving much more slowly.

  “The quicker you get here the quicker this is over,” I hiss.

  “I can’t do it,” I hear him mutter. “This is beyond me. I’m done.”

  “No you’re not, Zach,” I tell him fiercely. “If you fall the censor is triggered, camera picks you up and the alarm sounds. Plan is done. We’re dead. So just keep going. Ask of yourself more than what you’ve given before. You are capable of it.”

  He moans and keeps going. Inch by inch. Hand by hand until he gets to my side and falls straight to the ground. He hits hard on his back and the breath leaves his lungs in a whoosh. I drag him around the corner to where I’m hoping the cameras won’t spot us.

  “Get up. Come on. We haven’t even got to the hard bit yet.”

  “Oh for the love of god.”

  *

  Luke

  Drilling up is much harder than it sounds. The drill’s weight and gravitational pull want it to drop down constantly, so you need a very strong force to keep it moving up through the matter. A force stronger than five men standing at its base, trying to shove it up through sweat, tears and curses.

  I stand apart, watching, thinking how desperately I want to help them, knowing how much stronger I am than any one of them and also knowing how simply unable I am. My hand can’t hold the too-wide edge of the drill. Not with weight from above. It physically won’t grip on. So here I stand, thoroughly useless.

  I’ve got Teddy in my comms, letting me know the virus is ready to go. The rest of the team are lined up behind me, armed and ready. They know the instructions: fan out, ten of them to a level, infiltrate and shoot to wound every agent in sight. Legs, arms, shoulders, keep shooting until they’re down and they stay down. Ziplock their hands, keep mov
ing. There should be very few here at this time of day, so I’m not predicting large casualties on either side. It’ll be when the Bloods are recalled all at once that things will start getting interesting.

  We’re a little behind schedule because the train dropped us a couple of miles too far and we had to lug the huge drill back with us. But soon we break through the cement block of the basement floor, thankfully without bursting any pipes. The drill is switched off and discarded as we flow up into the building.

  “Basement clear, over.”

  “Approaching floor one now, over.”

  I hear gunshots as I mount the stairs to floor three.

  “Casualties on floor one, count three so far. East wing is cleared, over.”

  Shit. I should have known they wouldn’t be calm or skilled enough to shoot to wound. Their panic makes them shoot to kill.

  “Approaching second floor, over.”

  “Ah shit, targets on second floor in west corridor, four I think. Cover me.”

  More gunshots, a rain of them.

  “Targets down in west corridor, moving north, over.”

  I listen as the team’s stream of reports comes in. So far so good. I reach the third floor with my team in tow. Only Will, Shadow and Dave are with me – I’ve left the less experienced in much larger groups – but I figure the four of us can take a floor to ourselves. Well, three, really, since I’m basically just keeping Dave hidden behind the rest of us. The Bloods are ready for us by now, but there aren’t enough of them and they aren’t armed for combat. They go down quickly, one after another. I wound and ziplock mine but there are plenty of dead here too, far too many. It feels like a massacre, and it is, it’s a terrible thing.

  You have to know how far you’re willing to go.

  One of the teams reports a successful seizure of the armory, which pretty much means we’ve won the game. The first part of it, anyway.

  We clear all floors, check every room, every corridor and elevator, every cupboard and locker and nook and cranny that could hold a person. The tech team and any other staff are immediately zip-tied. They’re not combat soldiers so they don’t fight back. On this I’m strict – none of the staff die.