by Kit Rocha
“Deal.”
Nina caught Maya’s gaze, then glanced at Conall. “Keep your comms open. We’re not being sneaky, but we still need to be quick. The second you get into their systems and find those kids, let us know.”
“We got this,” Maya promised.
“We know.”
Knox gestured with two fingers, pointing toward the back of the van, and everyone exploded into movement. Gray’s fingers tightened on hers for a brief moment before he followed Rafe out the open door. Mace and Ava followed, with Dani behind them, keeping an eye on both.
In a matter of moments, it was just Maya and Conall. She slid next to him at the mobile workstation and powered up the monitors as his fingers flew over the keyboard. “How bad is security?”
“Negligible,” he muttered, which for Conall meant actually pretty good. Conall cut through most systems like a blade honed to a killing edge, but there was a furrow between his brows now that Maya didn’t like.
“They got an upgrade since last time?” she asked.
“Probably fired the last asshole. Whoever set them up this time is not a complete idi—” He whooped suddenly. “Got you, fuckers. I’m in.”
Over the comms, Maya could hear the team advancing on the point of entry Knox had identified. The crunch of boots over gravel, the soft scratch of fabric against armor. The single external guard announced his presence with a startled intake of breath followed by a soft crack and a heavy thud. Nina and Knox’s whispered voices followed.
“Is the lock biometric?”
“Key code.”
“Can you crack it?”
“Fuck that. I’m cracking it.” That was Rafe, his voice a low rumble. Metal protested with a shriek, and Maya tried to conjure what was happening in her imagination. Rafe, literally weaponizing all those muscles this time, as he gave in to the rage at what had been done to Rainbow and tore the front door off the place.
“Got cameras,” Conall announced a second before video appeared on Maya’s screen. Conall slid the tablet he’d used to crack the system toward her, and Maya started to flip through the camera angles, comparing them to the shape of the building from above.
Gunfire erupted over comms as she tried to unfocus her eyes just enough to ignore the details and just absorb the shapes of hallways and the size of rooms, the angle of light falling through the rare windows and the intersections and gaps in coverage.
It was like assembling a giant puzzle of overlapping pieces, but her brain thrilled at the challenge. She felt that same giddy rush, and this time she didn’t fight it. She’d pay whatever price required when the crash came. When she flipped to a camera that showed seven kids with shaved heads staring into space with the glazed eyes of the heavily drugged, she knew she’d pay it a dozen times over.
As long as they could get the damn kids out.
“Got them,” she said, throwing the entire array of camera angles up onto the monitor with a flick of her fingers. Another flick gave her a blank screen and she started to sketch the layout she’d visualized, labeling each camera on her rough blueprint. “East side of the building, fourth floor. They’re all together in one room. You’re going to have to fight your way through.”
Another spatter of gunfire was followed by Ava’s crisp, “That won’t be an issue.”
“We’re on our way,” Knox confirmed, moments before Maya watched a guard back onto one camera, firing repeatedly at something off-screen. Ava stalked into view, swatting a bullet aside with one of her bracers like she was flicking away an annoying fly. A second later she’d turned the guard’s gun on him without even stripping it from his hand, blowing off the top of his head and letting the body fall aside without slowing her stride.
Conall snorted. “Guess this was a good mission to bring the murder clone on.”
The gunfire cut off abruptly. No cutting reply came from Ava. Maya frowned and tapped her comm, but everything had gone silent on the other end. “Conall?”
“I hear it,” he muttered, spinning to a second display. “Or rather I don’t hear it. Probably just interference…”
Dread slithered over Maya, an intense feeling that something was wrong. She skimmed the cameras again, looking for any external view, but every angle just showed the inside of the building.
That was weird.
“Con—”
“Fuck,” he hissed. “Someone’s jamming us.”
Dread coalesced into certainty. She compared the cameras to her sketched blueprints again, her eyes finding the blank spots—too many blank spots. So many places where all the people who weren’t showing up on those conveniently sporadic cameras could be hiding.
The van door creaked. Conall spun toward her, his eyes widening in shock. “Maya!”
Three bullets slammed into him before he could move. With her mind fully open, the sound of it sank into her bones. The thunder of each shot rolled forever before the terrible liquid thud of the bullet tearing through his clothing and slamming into his flesh. Conall exhaled in shock and rocked back, the velocity tipping him out of his flimsy makeshift seat.
Shock held her paralyzed for the eternity between heartbeats. Training kicked in, dragging her in two directions. Self-preservation lost to her terror for Conall. She dove for him, fingers scrambling to staunch the flow of blood.
She barely found the wounds before a fist closed around her braids and dragged her backward. She flailed instinctively, fingers closing around the handle of her stun stick.
Too late. It was all too late. Pain flared in her neck along with the familiar sound of a pressure injector. Another jerk to her hair toppled her over, and the sight of Tobias Richter’s pleased smile chased her down into terrifying oblivion.
TECHCORPS PROPRIETARY DATA, COMPANY-WIDE ANNOUNCEMENT
On the anniversary of her 25th year of service, please join us in congratulating Birgitte Skovgaard on her promotion to executive vice president of Behavior and Analysis.
January 3rd, 2067
TWENTY-TWO
Gray missed his rifle.
He missed the hurry-up-and-sit-on-your-ass quiet, the adrenaline-soaked solitude of setting up position as quickly as possible, followed by the pounding of his own pulse in his ears as he waited for his mark to show.
Being in the middle of an infiltration was different. When he was on his own, he could be still. It was tense, sure, listening to the other members of his team do their thing as he ran through the scenarios and contingencies in his head. But here, the tension pressed in on you from all sides, an external thing that had claws and teeth.
And when the firefights erupted … Those were messy. Raw chaos distilled into something so primal it almost wrapped around into looking like art. A dance. Nina pirouetting around Mace to squeeze off a succession of shots. Ava following through on a knife throw with an arabesque that dropped into a deep lunge.
Wait, where the hell had he even picked up all this dance terminology?
A laugh caught in his throat, and he narrowly avoided taking a bullet point-blank to the face. He whirled on his attacker, using his momentum to strike the butt of his pistol across the man’s face. He dropped like a rock sinking into an oily puddle, just in time for Dani to hop over him as she rushed past.
“Rafe, boost!” she yelled.
“Ready!” He held out both hands, catching her booted foot in midair. She launched herself up and grabbed hold of a light fixture. It swayed wildly with her forward momentum, and she knocked down three more men who had just run into the lobby.
The longer they stayed there, the more time the rest of these fuckers would have to fully entrench. They could be setting up ambushes already—hell, maybe even getting ready to blow the place. They had to advance, and Gray led the charge.
In the past, when he was in the thick of combat instead of set up in a sniper’s nest, he hadn’t minded taking point. There was a certain mindless inevitability in it. The only way to get past the paralyzing fear of death was to disregard it. He’d often thought t
hat if he had to go out, all in all, it wasn’t a bad way for it to happen. It would be quick, maybe even over so fast he wouldn’t even have time to realize it, and it would be useful. A good death.
He didn’t feel that way now. His thoughts refused to be pushed down, locked away in the numb haze of adrenaline. And they kept drifting back to Maya.
If he went down here, now, it wouldn’t be good. It would hurt her like all hell on fire.
He had to risk it anyway.
He hurtled down the darkened hallway with the rest of the team hard on his heels. They cleared each recessed doorway as they passed, with guns at the ready and little more than monosyllabic communication passing between them. More often, it was silent, a look or gesture that was immediately, exquisitely understood.
A door near the end of the hall slammed open, and a man stepped out only feet from Gray, his stance planted wide as he began to swing his rifle up. The narrow hallway effectively functioned as one long choke point, and all he would have to do to mow them all down was close his eyes and fire.
Gray kicked the rifle’s muzzle aside then followed it with a hard blow to the man’s sternum. His breath left him in a cracking whoosh, and he stumbled back, bouncing off the wall and flailing back toward the door he’d just exited. Gray caught the edge of it and swung it around hard, banging it into his opponent’s helmet hard enough to rattle his brains.
And that was it. End of the line.
“Where to now?” Mace muttered.
“Up.” Nina nodded toward a door indicating a stairwell.
“Stairwells are bad,” Dani protested, even as she was moving to haul open the door. “Easy for them to keep the high ground, and they can hear you coming a mile away.”
“Watch my back,” Ava ordered, striding past Dani. But Dani just stood there, dumbfounded, as she disappeared up the stairs, her boots silent.
Ten seconds later, a thud echoed down, followed by a hoarse scream. A body plummeted to the cement floor, the limbs splayed and eyes staring up, unseeing. Five seconds later a second followed, his screams echoing all the way down.
Dani sighed, a long-suffering, entirely put-upon sound. “At least she’s effective.”
“And not trying to kill us.” This time. Gray kept that last part to himself as he took the stairs two and three at a time.
The doors on the second and third landings weren’t just locked or chained, they were fully boarded up. Something about that rankled at Gray, like a sore spot on the roof of his mouth he couldn’t stop worrying with his tongue. Why go this far, this deep, into a derelict building if you didn’t have to? With abandoned buildings, lower wasn’t just quicker and more convenient, it was safer.
Then he reached the fourth-floor landing and didn’t have time to think about it anymore, because another security squad had already converged on their location. Ava fought viciously, holding one flailing man in front of her as a human shield as she fired on his comrades.
Nina’s favorite trick. He remembered that one well.
Dani broadsided one of the soldiers—that’s what they are, soldiers—and his submachine gun fired an arc of bullets in Nina’s general direction as he went down. She hit the floor, and Knox dove after her before catching her hand signal that she was fine.
As he straightened, he never saw the pistol aimed at the back of his head.
“Knox, down!” Gray shouted.
Knox dropped, and Gray fired, a dead shot to the heart. The man who’d drawn a bead on Knox went down, but he must have been armored, because he still struggled to roll to his knees.
Mace was on him, knife in hand, before he managed it.
Ava’s human shield went over the balcony with a weak scream that ended in a dull crash far below, and she stood in the doorway with a confiscated pistol pointed at the floor and her brow furrowed as she stared down at the sprawl of bodies.
“Something is off,” she said, rolling a body over with the toe of her boot. “You said the guards they had before were mediocre and poorly equipped. This is quality armor, custom fitted.”
“They were.” Gray slid a hand roughly through his hair. “Something is worse than off. They should have shut us down in the lobby, but instead they let us get all the way up here. Drew us up here, like—”
“Like rats in a maze.” Dani frowned.
Ava crouched next to the body, frowning at his wrist. She yanked the knife from the dead soldier’s boot and used it to slice the sleeve on his jacket, revealing a tattoo.
It had a distinctly military feel, reminding Gray vaguely of some of the unit and squad insignia he’d seen during his tenure with the Protectorate—a bleeding shield inscribed with what looked like Latin. But he didn’t recognize it.
Nina brushed Knox’s sleeve. “I think we have a problem.”
“No shit, we have a problem.” Dani shoved past Gray, yanked the dead man’s arm up, and waved it at them. “He’s Ex-Sec.”
“Are you sure?” Mace asked.
“Yeah, I’m sure. It’s not an official insignia, and they’re not supposed to mark themselves like this, but some of the real dedicated company fuckers get the ink anyway.”
Knox looked at Gray, who stared back at him in horror. He wanted nothing more than to blot out Knox’s words. “Executive Security deployed off the Hill means Tobias Richter is here.”
Then Nina made it worse. A thousand times worse. “I can’t raise Conall and Maya on comms.”
Richter. A couple of Ex-Sec squads. Blocked communications. Gray could see the vague outline of the trap now … but not who it was meant to ensnare. Only a few short days ago, he would have assumed Richter was after the Silver Devils, that he’d finally found the perfect bait to flush them out. But now there was Mace to consider, even Ava, for Christ’s sake.
And Maya.
He tried to calculate how long it would take them to get from here back to the van. Even at a dead run, with a clear path and no resistance, it was too long. Too fucking long.
“I’m going to the van,” he said flatly. “If Richter’s here…”
“Maya’s a target,” Knox finished. “Rafe, back him up.”
“Got it.” Rafe dropped the empty magazine from his pistol, loaded a full one, and shot Dani a look. “Watch his back.”
Dani regarded him mildly. “Nina might get jealous.”
He winked at her and swept up another discarded weapon from a fallen soldier on his way to Gray’s side. “Let’s do this.”
He and Rafe hurried down the stairs, the thump of their boots echoing loudly in the stairwell. It seemed to mimic the blood pounding in Gray’s ears, each thud spiking through him with painful possibility.
So many reasons Richter would come for them. And only one that could close his throat with sheer panic.
“We should have killed him before we left, Rafe. Even if it meant we wouldn’t all make it out.”
“Maybe.” Rafe shook his head. “And maybe this is the best chance anyone will ever have. He’s outside of his base of power. And he won’t see Nina and Dani coming. We sure as hell didn’t.”
“Maybe. But that’s—” Gray stopped short as he entered the long hallway they’d fought their way through before. It was deserted, exactly the way they’d left it … except for the heavy blast door closing off the far end. “Fuck.”
Gears ground behind them. Rafe spun, bolting back the way they’d come. He caught the blast door with six inches of clearance, the muscles in his arms straining as he fought the machinery with everything in him.
Running footsteps filled the narrow space as soldiers started to file out of the rooms, and Gray finally saw the whole trap.
Isolate. Divide.
Conquer.
He turned. The six inches of clearance had shrunk to four, the tendons standing out under Rafe’s skin in harsh relief. He wouldn’t be able to hold it for much longer, but that was okay.
This part of the trap was for Gray.
“Go,” he whispered. “Hurry. Find Conall.”
“Gray—”
“I got this, man.” It wasn’t even a lie.
Rafe roared his frustration and heaved a final time, driving the door open for the few precious seconds it took to dive through it. The soldiers fired after him, but he vanished as the blast doors slammed home.
Gray raised his hands and locked his fingers behind his head. It was the only way to still their shaking as he stared at the closed blast door.
Maybe he was wrong. Maybe fear had driven him to the wrong conclusion. Richter was after most of them, after all. He might not have realized what—who—he really had within his grasp.
But Gray hadn’t lived this long by lying to himself, and brutal honesty said otherwise. Expect the worst, it crooned, and you’ll never be wrong.
“On your knees!” someone bellowed.
He dropped, fingers still interlaced behind his head. “I won’t fight you. Richter and I have business.”
He had to get to Maya. And the only way to do that now was to go through Richter.
June 3rd, 2079
I suspect the relationship developing between Marjorie and Simon is inappropriate, at the very least. I should discourage it, for both of their sakes.
But he does seem to have distracted her from that troublesome friendship with DC-025.
The Recovered Journal of Birgitte Skovgaard
TWENTY-THREE
Maya couldn’t tell if she was awake.
So many of her nightmares started this way. The darkness, the disorientation. The zip ties digging into her wrists. The hard back of a chair digging into her shoulders every time she tried to move. If she struggled too much, the plastic binding her wrists to the chair would cut off circulation.
She’d done that, last time. Twisted until numbness claimed her hands, then focused on the painful prickling as they came back to life. Discomfort was a distraction. It was an escape, the only one she’d had. They couldn’t deliver her real physical pain—her brain would short out and shut down long before they broke her will. Though that reality never seemed to matter in her nightmares. In her nightmares, they hurt her.