by Kit Rocha
The parking lot suddenly seemed a lot bigger than it had before, and it was riddled with cracks that were just begging to trip her up. She supposed even rich, evil scientist outposts didn’t have the resources to keep asphalt in top repair.
Roads seemed like the last priority for most people these days, though the old-timers around Five Points insisted that the roads had been crap even before the Flares. Some swore they’d grown up watching sinkholes open up and swallow entire highways full of cars. The city had tried to keep up with maintenance, but road infrastructure had fallen by the wayside after solar flares had caused the whole damn country to collapse right in the middle of an unprecedented famine.
People who’d survived the dark days always had a certain look in their eyes. It had been almost fifty years since the lights had gone off and the world had changed, but some of them would still look at you like it had all happened yesterday, like time didn’t mean anything when the pain cut that deep. They remembered the panic, the fear. The brutal winters without access to heat. The sweltering summers when neighbors dropped dead of heatstroke.
They remembered the hunger. The Energy Wars had shaken the country, and the second Dust Bowl had brought it to its knees. The solar flares that swept the globe in ’42 might have struck the death blow to the faltering federal government, but they weren’t what killed people.
The famine had done that. It lasted for a decade, right up until the TechCorps and its corporate partners had established the Heartlands irrigation program. Food started to trickle back into Atlanta after that—but only through the TechCorps. Soon, they were the only reliable source of clean water. Electricity. Communication.
The TechCorps had demonstrated how easy it was to take over a region without fighting. All you had to do was own everything people needed to survive.
Well. That, and be heartless enough to withhold it until they fell in line.
“Fuckers,” Maya muttered, stepping over another fault in the asphalt before dragging the limp body after her.
“Almost there.” Nina’s quiet words drifted over the comms. “Couple of close calls, but we’re still undetected.”
Maya heaved again and imagined what was going down inside the building. The team would be slipping through the halls right now, expertly exploiting the razor-thin gaps between patrols, relying on Conall to shield their passage from the cameras and the algorithms that ran the security system. That was how Nina preferred to operate. In and out, like a ghost. Less attention meant less danger. Get the mission done and get home in one piece.
Knox would be in the lead. He would assess each tiny shift in their master plan and adjust their strategy accordingly, with Nina at his side, ready to crack any safe or lock. Rafe was the muscle, capable of ripping a door off its hinges—or a head off a body, if it came to that—while Dani ranged ahead of them like a ghost, her speed making her the perfect scout.
And, of course, Gray would be guarding their backs. He might be most comfortable with his sniper rifle, but give him a handgun and he became a protective wall. Chaos could be erupting all around him, and he’d quietly assess the situation, decide who needed to be shot, and swiftly and efficiently get it done.
Maya worried a lot less about everyone when Gray was around.
This is the one,” Knox said. “427-D.”
“Retinal scan paired with voice recognition. You’ll have to pop it.” Maya could hear the grin in Dani’s voice. “Seventeen seconds.”
“My record is nineteen,” Nina protested.
“Don’t care. I’ve got fifty on it. You in, Morales?”
“Any time, sugar pie. My money’s on twenty-three.”
“Sure,” Maya muttered into her comm. “You two just keep foreplaying while I’m dragging around a body twice my size.”
“Focus,” came Knox’s firm command. “We’re almost out.”
Sweat dripped down Maya’s spine. Her arms were starting to ache, and her face wasn’t feeling much better. The perimeter guard was actually getting heavier. She winced as his boots scraped across the gravel, even though she knew no one was close enough to hear.
Well, no one except Conall. But since he wasn’t leaping out of the van to help her now, she got a better hold on the guard and continued dragging. If she made it through this, she’d start lifting weights. That would probably make Nina happy. Rafe, too. Maya wouldn’t even bitch about the additional training time.
Next week. She’d start next week. For a few days, she was gonna eat ice cream and pout about her poor face.
She settled for running through a brief dissociation exercise until the ache in her muscles faded to a nagging buzz. Definitely not her favorite solution. Numbness was a bandage over a jagged wound—thin and temporary. Sensory input didn’t go away just because she tricked her brain into not noticing it, and reconnecting with the world tended to sting twice as bad.
But sometimes you needed to get a job done and pay the price later.
She finally reached the two cars parked at the edge of the lot. Three more shoulder-punishing heaves tucked the unconscious guard neatly between them, out of sight until shift change, by which point Maya and the rest of the team would be far, far away.
Good enough.
“I’m in,” Nina murmured.
“Sixteen point five two.” Dani’s voice vibrated with triumph. “You owe me fifty bucks, Morales.”
“Add it to my tab.”
A beep tickled Maya’s ears, followed by the whispering slide of a metal door opening. Then silence, heavy and loud, more than the mere absence of sound.
“This isn’t a vault,” Gray muttered. “It’s a fucking cell.”
“Over here.” All traces of victorious glee had bled from Dani’s tone. Now, she sounded breathless, almost …
Stricken?
Shit. Anything that could rattle Dani was bad. Apocalyptically bad.
“Grab and go,” Knox said tersely.
“But Cap—”
“Move.”
A scuffle of boots. Heavy breaths. They were falling back to a fast retreat, which wasn’t likely to be quiet or invisible.
Shit, shit, shit.
Maya bolted across the parking lot and slid open the van door. “Which exit?”
Shouts and the brash, hard sound of gunfire erupted through the earpiece. Conall swore and dove into the front seat of the van. Maya slid into his chair and cycled through the camera feeds until she caught Rafe’s back disappearing around a corner as Knox and Nina laid down cover fire.
The gunfire continued over comms, their team too busy to answer her question. But they didn’t need to. Knox had planned for a dizzying number of contingencies, and Maya knew which one he was enacting now.
“West side!” she shouted to Conall. “Get to the loading dock!”
“On it.”
The tires squealed as Conall rocketed the van into high gear. Everything that wasn’t bolted down slid across the table. Maya clutched at a handle welded to the frame as the van went up on two wheels and the speakers blared a choir chanting about the fires of hell.
She was going to have to rethink her entire musical methodology, because Mozart was entirely too stressful for a car chase.
They rounded the side of the building to the sight of the team spilling out of an open bay door in the loading area, pursued by a squad of security guards. Everyone was clustered around Rafe, who carried a blanket-wrapped bundle in his arms.
“Oh my fucking—”
Shock stole the rest of Maya’s words as Conall turned so hard that the van skidded across the asphalt. Her heart jumped into her throat, but she held on as they screeched to a stop.
They’d never had to leave a site hot before, but everyone knew their places. Knox and Gray piled into the front next to Conall, with Gray riding literal shotgun. Rafe clambered through the back doors, and Nina covered them by firing off three more shots.
Dani was suddenly there, gripping one of the handles on the ceiling of the van as she fired pa
st Nina’s head. Their leader dove into the van as Conall hit the gas, and Maya caught the back of Nina’s jacket and held her steady as they tore out of the parking lot, bullets pinging off the van’s reinforced siding.
Rafe curled himself protectively around the bundle, and the blanket slipped to reveal shorn, dark hair, a pale face, and huge, terrified eyes.
The package was a fucking kid.
TECHCORPS PROPRIETARY INTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS
Skovgaard: I must reiterate my concerns over clearing Dillon Walker so soon after his squad’s involvement in the Ration Day Massacre. The rest of his team is exhibiting signs of considerable post-traumatic stress.
Jenkins: 66–221 is a sniper. He wasn’t in the middle of it like the rest of them.
Skovgaard: Most accepted research acknowledges the paradoxical intimacy of a sniper’s job. Staring through a scope can inflict trauma every bit as profound as that experienced through hand-to-hand combat. His lack of reaction concerns me.
Jenkins: It should make you grateful. We’re short-staffed as it is, and the food riots aren’t going to stop until the Heartlands irrigation project gets going. We need every soldier in the streets.
Skovgaard: If I clear him, it will be with my strong reservations duly noted.
Jenkins: Whatever makes you happy, Birgitte.
Department of Behavior and Analysis
Server Log, Date: 2062–04–07
TWO
Gray really, really wanted a cigarette.
It didn’t matter that he hadn’t so much as touched one in months. He still reached for his empty pocket in stressful situations. And this most certainly qualified.
They’d gone in on a retrieval mission, expecting a weapons cache or maybe some black-market research or medical supplies. Instead, they’d busted in and found a kid, no more than seven or eight years old, cowering in a dark corner of a cell.
Gray had done a lot of terrible things in his career, and kidnapping was well-established on that list. But he’d thought he and the rest of the Silver Devils had left that life behind when they bailed on the Protectorate, the private police force-slash-army that functioned as the TechCorps’ enforcers.
Maybe this was some sort of cosmic lesson, a message from the universe. Run. Hide. But the Protectorate is part of you now. It always will be.
All the activity in the warehouse centered around the table in the middle of it—and the child seated on a high stool. In the hours since their return, she’d been bathed, changed, fed, and stared at in unrelenting horror.
Not exactly the most relaxing or reassuring situation for a kid.
Nina had slid a plate of cookies and a glass of milk in front of the girl, while Knox hovered over Conall like a storm cloud. The furrow between Conall’s eyes grew deeper and deeper as he ran the girl’s face through his facial recognition database.
Only Rafe seemed relaxed. He polished off a second cookie before holding one out to the girl, who studied it seriously, the way Gray might have analyzed a potential ambush point. Dani tucked a fresh blanket around the kid’s shoulders, even though the room was, if anything, too warm to be comfortable. Rafe just held out the cookie, his easy smile saying he had all the time in the world.
“Sweetheart, can you tell us your name?” Knox’s voice held a familiar gentleness. It was the voice he used to de-escalate a situation when it was about to spin out of control because of jumpy civilians. Calm, reassuring. It clashed with the simmering anger in his eyes, and the kid was smart enough to see it.
She hunched further in on herself. Rafe shot Knox a warning look before setting the cookie down on the plate. “Look, it’s here if you want it, pumpkin. Your call.”
Rafe pointedly looked away. So did Knox, bending down over Conall’s tablet. After a painful moment, the girl slipped a tiny hand from the blanket and seized her prize.
Next to him, Maya exhaled sharply and looked away.
Gray just managed not to flinch. A split second later, a wave of dizziness rocked him. He locked his knees, but he still might have stumbled if he hadn’t been leaning against the wall already. He clenched his teeth against the nausea that followed hard on its heels, burning up his throat like a line of accelerant that had been set aflame.
“Hey.” Maya lowered her voice and leaned closer. “You okay?”
If he turned his head too fast or opened his mouth, he’d puke. He managed a slight nod.
She vanished from his peripheral vision, only to return a moment later. The cool aluminum of one of their reusable water bottles brushed his fingers. “If you need it.”
He took the bottle and slowly turned to meet her gaze. She was gazing up at him, her brow furrowed with concern. He distracted himself from a fresh wave of nausea by cataloguing her features: smooth, dark skin, square jaw, full lips.
Then his gaze reached her eyes, and his body tightened with thwarted anger. A burgeoning bruise sat high on one cheekbone, courtesy of her encounter with the security patrol in the parking lot. It would turn into a full-fledged shiner soon. The rest of the team hadn’t needed him, not to extract one kid. He should have been out there, watching over Maya.
Or maybe not, not with the way his hands were shaking right now.
She stared at him, her frown deepening. Even with one eye swelling, she saw too much. If he didn’t say something soon, she’d start to freak out.
“Thanks,” he rasped, lifting the bottle to gesture toward the little girl. “Hell of a thing, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” Suspicion tinged her voice, but her frown smoothed a little.
Guilt gripped him. They were all so easy—to fool, to divert. To reassure.
Mace never would have stood for it. Their medic would have taken one look at the sweat beading on Gray’s upper lip and his dilated pupils and dragged him off to an exam room—by force, if necessary.
It had never been necessary. Every one of the Silver Devils had trusted Mace absolutely. They did as he asked, when he asked, and he rewarded that trust by literally preserving their lives.
But Mace was dead now. Gone. He wasn’t preserving anything, not anymore.
A strident buzz cut through Gray’s reverie, and Conall looked up from his tablet. “The Professor’s at the door.”
Nina nodded to Dani and Rafe. “Why don’t you two take our guest up to see Tia Ivonne? Go out through the front.”
Rafe swept up the plate of cookies and passed it to Dani. Then he held out a hand. After another tense moment, the small girl slipped her fingers into his. Rafe gave her a big grin and led her through the door to the main loft.
When they were out of earshot, Nina turned back to Conall. “It’s about time. Let him in.” The command given, she propped her hands on her hips and began pacing the width of the warehouse at the back of her building. “I’m going to kill him.”
“You’re going to kill him,” Gray’s captain—former captain—agreed readily.
“I mean it. I don’t care what we owe him, Knox. This is too much. Too far.”
Nina’s contact, the man they all simply called the Professor, had intervened when the TechCorps had been within days—hell, maybe even hours—of catching up to the Silver Devils and wiping them off the face of the fucking planet. That debt weighed heavy on her, so if she was ready to wash her hands of this guy …
The Professor had really screwed the pooch.
“I know, Nina.” Knox touched his lover’s arm, soothing rather than restraining. “After we find out about the girl.”
The man who walked in was dressed in clothes that had been old-fashioned even back when the Flares hit. His baggy, brown pants were topped with a sweater vest and a jacket with patches on the elbows. His collar was wrinkled, as if he’d been wearing a tie but had abandoned it.
“What took you so long?” Nina hissed. It had been hours since Nina had dashed off an angry but cryptic message to the man. The sun had come up and was nearing its zenith, and he’d left them all waiting. Stewing.
“It took me so
me time to get away. Where is she?” he demanded.
“Upstairs.” At least Nina had the mercy to answer the question. Gray would have made him squirm in retribution. “You should have told me, John. I won’t be a party to kidnapping.”
“I know,” the man answered mildly. “That’s exactly why I didn’t tell you.”
She sucked in a harsh breath and turned to Knox, who stood with his arms crossed over his chest. He’d schooled his expression into something unreadable—flat and aloof, revealing nothing of the anger seething beneath the surface.
And he was angry. Long association with Garrett Knox had taught Gray that the angrier he got, the more he tried to hide it. When he shut down completely like this? Rage wasn’t a strong enough word to cover it.
Professor John Smith—the absolute fakest goddamn name Gray had ever heard—was in for a world of hurt if he couldn’t answer Nina’s questions to her satisfaction.
Nina took another breath, this one deep and bracing. “Who is she?”
The Professor stared back, unblinking. “She’s me.”
A low rumble, like muted thunder, came from Knox. “Don’t be cute. Answer the fucking question.”
“I did.” For the first time, the man looked a little peevish. “Run a DNA comparison, if you like.”
Nina’s eyes widened. “She’s a clone?”
“Come now, Nina. Think.”
Knox’s hands twitched into fists, but before he had a chance to dive across the room, Maya started laughing.
“Oh my God.” She jabbed a finger in the Professor’s direction. “It has been driving me crazy, trying to figure out who the fuck you are, because I should know anyone who has access to the sort of shit you do. Except you’re not just a good little TechCorps employee with access to all the sweet IP, are you? You are the IP.”
“Intellectual property? Not quite. Not for a long time. And I am merely employed by the TechCorps.” He paused. “I should start at the beginning.”
“Yes,” Nina whispered. “You should.”
For several long moments, he just looked around the room, as if he had all the time in the world. But when his gaze lighted on Knox’s still-clenched fists, he cleared his throat and focused on Nina. “You’re … what? Sixteenth generation? Seventeenth? The Franklin Center has almost perfected its techniques.”