by Kit Rocha
There was no reliably nonlethal place to shoot a man, but Cruz jammed the barrel of his pistol against Ashwin's thigh and fired, praying he missed the femoral artery.
Ashwin staggered back with a grunt of surprise, and Cruz's boots thumped hard on the pavement. He allowed himself one painful breath before launching off the wall. Ashwin's wounded leg gave way with the impact, and they slammed to the ground.
Before Ashwin could recover from the shock, Cruz had him pinned on his stomach, his arms twisted up behind his back. "If I owed you a little less," he croaked, "I'd hand her over to you and let you run. My family and my sector would be safe. All I have to do is sacrifice a woman who doesn't deserve it."
Ashwin snarled, still past reason. "I wouldn't hurt her."
"Right now you would."
"No." Ashwin hissed and twisted in Cruz's grip, and Christ the man was strong. It took all of his considerable weight to keep him pinned down, even with Ashwin bleeding from the leg. "I would never hurt Kora."
"Then why did you ask me to hide her?"
Silence. Cruz listened to the man's unsteady breaths and groped for a way to end this that didn't involve another bullet—this one in the back of Ashwin's head.
According to Base guidelines, a Makhai soldier who developed a fixation on a person was damaged goods. He was a danger to everyone around him, especially the person in question. Official policy prescribed immediate, brutal recalibration—months of dangerous drugs meant to purge emotion and association and every trace of humanity left in the soldier. If that failed—and it was expected to fail—termination swiftly followed.
That was the official word, but the soldiers talked. Whispers traveled between workers and staff. And the one rumor that wouldn't die was that Ashwin would now be a danger to everyone around him except Kora.
A feeble hope. A grasped straw based on gossip and old stories. Cruz still reached for it. "You would hurt her, even if you didn't mean to, because I've known you most of my life and you're scaring the shit out of me. Fear hurts, Ashwin. It can break a person. If you try to take her somewhere right now, you'll terrify her. You'll hurt her. You can't keep her safe, not until you get yourself under control."
Ashwin went utterly still beneath him, as if processing the words. Maybe considering fear for the first time. Cruz wasn't sure how the man experienced emotion. If Ashwin could comprehend something as basic as giving in to terror, or if whatever they'd done to him on a cellular level had rewired his basest instincts too much.
The silence echoed. Cruz raised his pistol, silently apologizing to the man who'd saved him all those years ago, the man who might not even exist anymore.
"All right," Ashwin said quietly. "I'll stay away from her until I get myself under control."
Cruz didn't release the gun. He eased up, giving Ashwin the chance to try to overpower him. But Ashwin didn't move until Cruz was on his feet, and even then he only rolled to his back and sat up slowly.
Ashwin examined the bleeding hole in his leg for a moment before dismissing it with the same disregard he'd had for the violence in Sector Two. "Keep her safe until the war is over. Promise me."
"I already promised."
"And...after. If I can't…"
It was the first time Cruz had ever seen the man hesitate. He couldn't fathom how Ashwin viewed the world, but he recognized this on a gut level—the agony of knowing you couldn't protect someone who mattered. At least with Kora safely tucked away in Gideon Rios's household—and practically adopted into the royal family—Cruz could allay Ashwin's fears with honesty. "She'll be taken care of. During the war and after. I promise."
Ashwin nodded and rose without flinching. He strode past Cruz, but stopped at the edge of the alley. "This quiet's about to break. Dallas should see to his intel sources."
Cruz opened his mouth to ask for more details, but Ashwin vanished around the corner. He briefly considered trying to chase the other man down, but it would be pointless. Even with a gunshot wound to the leg, if Ashwin wanted to disappear, he would. And if he'd been willing—or able—to be more precise, he would have been.
Willing or able. Cruz didn't know how to define either word when it came to a destabilized super-soldier on the brink of emotional collapse. But he had the answer to one question that had been plaguing Dallas.
Unless the objective at hand pertained directly to Kora Bellamy's safety, the O'Kanes couldn't trust Ashwin to be on their side.
Chapter Twelve
The vibe in Dallas's command center had grown decidedly grim, and it was starting to make the back of Ryder's neck itch.
Half the monitors along the back wall were blank now, devoid of the constant stream of updates that had once flashed across their flat surfaces. A quick scan of the remaining screens revealed nothing new—which, considering the influx of information that usually cascaded across them, was almost as scary as nothing at all.
Around the table, things were just as dire. Tension etched new lines in Coop's already craggy face. Lex frowned down at a sheaf of papers in her hand, and even Zeke, the pretty-boy hacker from One, was unusually subdued.
Dallas refilled his coffee from the pot sitting between him and Ryder and scanned the table. "All right, Coop. The suspense is killing me. What's so ugly it's got you looking like that?"
Coop exhaled and slowly stood. "I caught the latest from a couple of my kids. Eden must be running low on troops, because they've started recruiting civilian soldiers."
"Fuck." Dallas thumped his mug down so hard coffee sloshed over the sides. "Fuck. Cannon fodder, that's all they'll be. Are they recruiting or conscripting?"
"Oh, these folks are joining up." Coop shook his head. "No force necessary."
Zeke's fingers hovered over the surface of his tablet. "My friends got this out to me. It's been on all the networks, every hour on the hour. Make sure you're not eating anything when you watch it."
He touched the tablet, and the screens went dark for a moment before blazing up again, every one showing part of the video Zeke had queued up. Underscored with slow music, including a deep, almost militaristic drumbeat, it played a vast, familiar scene of carnage—the aftermath of Ashwin Malhotra's massacre in Sector Two. At first, the images flashed in black-and-white, then they slowly bled to color, revealing the full, gruesome extent of the death and destruction.
Whoever was in charge of the city's propaganda was a goddamn, hell-bound genius.
"Motherfucker—" Dallas bit off the curse and braced his hands on the table, half rising from his chair. "Eden and their damn surveillance drones. I should have thought of this."
Lex gripped his forearm. "Settle down. If they hadn't had this footage, they would have manufactured something."
He sank back into the chair, his jaw clenched, as the image faded into Eden's skyline, superimposed with a nearly transparent, waving flag. A smooth, perfect female voice began to extol the virtues of the city, and Coop muttered a vicious curse.
"So this is how they'll con them." Dallas glared at the screen as if he could incinerate it with a thought. "And why the hell not? It's worked for the last forty years, hasn't it? Do what we say or the evil sector gangs will kidnap you from your beds and send you straight to hell."
"It gets better. Or worse, if you're us." Coop ran a gnarled hand through his hair. "They're lining up at recruitment offices, ready to do their duty. In return for faithful service—" he spat the words, "—the Council is promising them homes and land."
"In the sectors," Lex finished. "Kill those of us who won't fall in line, and the sectors will be half-deserted. They'll have plenty of space for people loyal to the city to rebuild."
It shouldn't have worked. The folks so eager to sign up should have realized that trading their lives for a slim chance to settle the war-torn sectors—and become their brand-new line of defense against outside attack—was a deal so far in Eden's favor that it should have been laughable. But they weren't laughing. They were singing patriotic anthems, kissing their wives and
kids goodbye, and signing away their lives.
And he and Dallas were the ones who would have to kill them.
Ryder clenched his hands on his knees—under the table, out of sight. "How many recruited so far?"
"Rough estimate? At least two thousand." Zeke's face was grim. "Best guess is that they have at least five hundred MPs left, on top of that. We can't find anything on Special Tasks."
"There were a hundred and seventeen under Ashwin's command when he left the city," Dallas said quietly. "We've probably taken down a couple dozen since the bombing in Two."
But not enough. "How long have they been showing this?" Ryder asked.
"And how the hell did we not see it before now?" Dallas demanded, trading his disbelieving look between Zeke and Noah.
Noah was the one who answered. "That goddamn security girl, Penelope. If Zeke's friends hadn't sent me the code, I wouldn't have fucking believed it, but she mapped the network somehow. All of it—even the access points my grandfather removed from Eden's documentation. She has a list of the IDs of every computer, tablet, and fucking coffee maker that's ever connected to a sector WAP. She's combined that with geolocation—"
"In English, someone," Dallas snarled.
"All of the broadcasts out of Eden are locked down," Zeke said. "If you try to open them outside of Eden, the file corrupts itself. If you try to tamper with the file without knowing what you're doing, it dumps all your data, transmits it back to Security, and trashes your system." The corner of his mouth tilted up. "That's the English version. It's a little more complicated than that."
"It's also a pain in my ass." Noah blew out a breath and waved a hand at the tech powering the screens. "But not impossible to work around, thanks to Dallas's hoarding tendencies. I set up virgin tablets and spoofed the—"
"I swear to Christ, Noah—" Dallas warned.
Noah held up both hands. "English. I protected us, for now. But I'm going to assume she's got a whole room of hackers working around the clock to come up with new ways to screw us. We may need to lean more heavily on Zeke's contacts."
"They're up for it." Zeke braced his elbows on the table. "They've already made contact with Coop's friends and Liam Riley. The whole Riley family has gone underground, and they're not the only ones. These propaganda vids might sway the people who are used to feeling comfortable, but there are plenty who still know who the real bad guys are."
Lex turned to Dallas. "We don't have a choice now. We have to use Markovic. He's the only one with a hope in hell of countering this bullshit."
Dallas looked back at the screen, where the final image of the video sat, still and chilling. "We can't match this sleek, shiny stuff. It'll have to be raw. Real. And he'll have to be ready to pull it off."
She nodded absently, her fingers steepled under her chin. "Get me a copy of this video, and I'll make it work."
"Done."
Noah glanced at Zeke again, who cleared his throat and met Ryder's gaze. "Dallas asked me to keep my eyes open for intel on Cerys."
Ryder managed not to flinch. "Yeah?"
"With Penelope's focus on us, one of my friends was able to slip past her. Three days before the bombing in Two, there was an order logged. The Council sent a Special Tasks squad to bring her in for questioning. After that, she just vanished."
Across the table, Lex had gone pale. "Could they be holding her?"
Coop crossed his arms over his chest and shook his head. "Can't say. I got a good look at the Council's prisoner roll when I busted Markovic and your friends out, but half the people in custody weren't on it. Strictly off the books."
If there was even a remote possibility that Eden's leaders were holding Cerys, Ryder needed to know. For Jim's sake. "How do we find out?"
Zeke shrugged, though his eyes held sympathy. "Check every cell, one by one?"
"So...win the war," Dallas rumbled. "It's already on the itinerary."
It would have to be soon. The advantages that the sector rebellion had fought hard to earn over the city were dwindling by the second—and Eden was growing stronger, or at least more desperate.
Ryder rose. "We may have to consider that thing you wanted to avoid, after all."
"I know." Dallas sighed and picked up his cold coffee. "Lex?"
She looked up from the note she was writing, pausing in mid-word. "Mm-hmm?"
"Tell Bren we might need to make a new door in those walls."
"Oh, I think he's already prepared for that." She laid down her pen. "Are we?"
"Hell if I know." He waved a hand toward the monitors. "But we'll be a lot closer if we can counter this shit. Noah? Figure out how you're gonna get us onto every TV, tablet, and flat surface in that city."
Ryder still didn't think it mattered what Markovic had to say. The chances of winning over the people of Eden, of rallying them to rebellion, were slim to none. But Dallas and Lex were right—they had to counter the brutal picture the city leaders were painting of the sectors. They had to instill enough doubt to make people question the party line, stay out of the army. Stay out of the fight.
If not, more people would die, and their blood would be on his hands.
Chapter Thirteen
People didn't usually knock on Nessa's door.
Unlike most of the O'Kanes, Nessa had never chosen a suite in the building that housed the more comfortable living quarters. As soon as they'd claimed the new warehouse as their own, she'd staked out a giant second-floor meeting room with an adjacent bathroom as her personal domain.
Over the years, she'd softened the stark space with scavenged area rugs and art from all over the world. Her bed was vast and buried in enough pillows to make it feel less lonely at night—when she slept in it. More nights than not, she sacked out on the couch in her snug downstairs office, and that was where the O'Kanes went to look for her.
Which made finding Ryder standing outside her bedroom, holding a bottle of wine, a sight unusual enough to momentarily scatter her wits. "Hi."
The smile that curved his lips and lit his eyes didn't do anything for her wits. Or her ability to breathe. "Hi."
"Hi," she echoed again. He made her so stupid that it took a second for the flush of embarrassment to hit her, and she covered it by pulling the door wide in invitation. "I was going to come find you eventually, but I figured you guys would be doing war stuff until late."
"It is late." He brushed past her and stopped, surveying her room.
If she'd known he might show up, she would have cleaned—or at least shoved everything into the storage room that passed for a closet. Her table was cluttered with half her nail polish collection and a fresh batch of hair dye Tatiana had put together for her. T-shirts and jeans were strewn over every close-to-flat surface, and she had two baskets of clean clothes stacked near the door, where she'd dropped them after the couple who did laundry for the O'Kanes had delivered them.
And that was just the clutter. Her life was on the rows of metal shelves lining the walls, a history that any man with Ryder's super-spy observation skills was no doubt piecing together. The remnants of a dozen abandoned hobbies crowded those shelves—an expensive stash of yarn from the month she became obsessed with knitting, along with the quilt top she'd painstakingly pieced together but forgot to finish. The leather-working tools, stacked next to smaller tools for piecing together jewelry. Three pots she'd thrown on a potter's wheel, only one glazed.
Every single thing she tried, she loved obsessively—until the shine of learning wore off. Then she flitted on to the next thing, because nothing ever managed to hold her interest for long. Nothing but the liquor.
"Sorry for the mess," she said, hurrying to the table. She swept two dozen bottles of nail polish into a basket with her arm, clearing some space. "People don't come up here much."
"And I came unannounced. The apology is mine to offer."
"It's fine." The rest of the bottles clinked into the basket, and she nudged a chair out from the table with a smile, feeling oddly shy, considering
she'd had her hand around the man's dick. But that was sex. This was...her space. "I'm glad you're here, really."
"Thanks." He held out the wine bottle with a wink. "For you, from the last shipment out of One before Dallas and Gideon halted transport. I figured you might want to enjoy the fruits of someone else's labor for a while."
She accepted the bottle and studied the label. "Rios. Does Mad's family make this?"
"Mmm, his cousin, Isabela, has a vineyard near the river." Ryder reached out and brushed his thumb over the curve of her cheek. "Have you been busy? I haven't seen you since the other night."
"A little busy." Warmth crept over her at his gentle touch, and she leaned into his hand. "I oversaw the last batch of raw liquor and then shut down production. First time in eight years all the stills have been quiet."
"Not for long," he soothed.
She gripped the bottle tighter, because there was something under his words, something that made her heart beat faster—and not with excitement. "Is shit going down? I saw Lex but I didn't even want to ask—she looks so tired."
It took him a moment to answer, and he turned to sit at the chair she'd pulled out for him as he did. "Things can't stay this way forever. Strategically speaking, we wouldn't want them to."
She didn't have wineglasses, but she found two clean tumblers and brought them back to the table. "I want it to be over. But…" Fighting meant bleeding, and hurting, and more people dying.
He held out his arms, his expression full of understanding—and recognition. "Come here."
Nessa eased into his lap, sitting sideways so she could lean against his chest. He cradled her there, not quite holding or trapping her, simply letting her use his strength.
Then he began to speak, his voice low and deep with emotion. "It's not going to be easy, and I wish I could promise you that everyone you love is going to make it through this war. But we all know what the city leaders in Eden are capable of. If we didn't, we wouldn't be at war in the first place."
"I know, but—"