by K. M. Ruiz
“We good to go?” Kerr asked as he climbed into the driver’s seat and started the engine.
The other two Strykers got into the SUV, Threnody in the back and Quinton riding shotgun. The side windows were all long-since broken and the windshield was cracked. It didn’t seem to bother Kerr and it wouldn’t impede Quinton’s cover fire.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Threnody said. “Quinton, you got our way in?”
Quinton held up the datapad Matron had given him. “Just start driving. I’ll navigate.”
“Fine.” Kerr revved the engine and shifted the SUV out of park and into drive, gunning it forward.
They drove out onto the dusty, barren road for Buffalo. They’d been inside for so long that they hadn’t seen the change in the weather. They couldn’t see the sun where they knew it was positioned in the western sky. Dark thunderclouds stretched from the city they were driving to all the way to the black line on the horizon that was steadily sweeping over the earth.
The wind picked up, sending dirt flying through the open windows of the SUV. Threnody blinked grit out of her eyes and reached up to tie back her hair as the first tiny drops of acid rain began to fall.
[TWENTY-FIVE]
AUGUST 2379
BUFFALO, USA
The landscape of Buffalo reminded Samantha of broken teeth—worn down, jagged, badly cared for—when they teleported into an empty street of the city. The wind seemed to find every open point of her uniform and blow through it to chill her skin with the damp. As they ran for the blast doors that led to the underground bunkers most of the unregistered humans called home, Samantha looked up at the world that surrounded them.
Broken buildings, broken lives, broken promises. It was the only thing every surviving city had in common.
The acid rain was coming down in sheets, soaking her in seconds as she dragged Kristen after her into the relative dryness of the small receiving building. Samantha swiped at her eyes beneath the dark glasses she wore, ignoring the burn. She tugged Kristen out of the way of the entrance to the far wall.
This entry point was minimally guarded, not meant to handle a huge influx of people going into the bunkers. The quads who had manned this post were already dead, bodies stacked against the other wall. A Warhound electrokinetic in the first wave had fried the security feed, and a hacker was busy writing it back into the main system on a different signal. They needed a place to act as their ground base for communications. The warehouse wasn’t viable, not anymore. Lucas had already hit it once; he’d hit it again given half the chance. This would have to do.
“Tastes like fire,” Kristen muttered as she licked at her wet lips, watching through half-lidded eyes as the other Warhounds in their squadron came hurrying inside.
“Shut up,” Samantha said.
Kristen hummed against her side, and while she didn’t open her mouth again, Samantha highly doubted that her order would be obeyed for long.
A tall figure broke free from the crowd and jogged over to them. Jin Li offered Samantha a casual two-fingered salute and a sharp smile. “Every other team’s in position. We’re the last. Ready to move out?”
“Been ready,” Samantha said. “Let’s go.”
Jin Li gave her a sarcastic little bow. “Lead the way.”
The blast doors rolled shut after the last Warhound came through. A skeleton team would remain behind to cover for them. This entry point wasn’t going to be accessible to anyone but Warhounds from here on out. The humans still rushing around outside after curfew in this section of the city were going to have one hell of a hard time getting below before the quads discovered their presence.
The long stairs leading down were new, replaced every decade or so after countless feet had trod upon them until they cracked. The stairs led deep into the ground, to a metal tunnel that was big enough to house a maglev train, except it didn’t. A quarter of the space that made up Buffalo were tunnels for straight foot traffic, or ground vehicles where it was viable. Another quarter were tunnels for the maglev trains that serviced only a handful of spots in the city, both below- and aboveground. The other half wasn’t tunnels at all, but huge bunkers carved deep into the ground, the heart and soul of a city that had died centuries ago.
That’s where they were heading, into Bunker East, along with hundreds of humans who had finally heeded the curfew call in the face of an approaching acid storm, late though they were getting down below. The storm above was just the leading front, a supercell that churned above them, a mere precursor for the derecho spine that hadn’t yet hit.
Samantha tucked a wet piece of hair behind her ear as she stretched out her telepathy to sink into the human minds all around them. She let the humans believe that the people in the black uniforms were just as human as they were, strangers with faces they would never remember.
Are we hacked into the security feed yet? Samantha wanted to know.
We’ve got hackers working on it from the city towers, Jin Li said. They’re coordinating with the ones in the field. We won’t be recognized by the government, if that’s what you’re worried about.
That’s only if the Strykers don’t interfere.
Here’s hoping they do.
Jin Li would want a challenge. Samantha only wanted this mission to be over.
The lights that lined the tunnels were at half-power, the dimness difficult to see through with her glasses on. She didn’t have the option of taking them off. Samantha risked being identified without them, and Kristen wasn’t even in the Registry, but only a blind person would miss the color of her eyes and not know what family she belonged to. They couldn’t be made because that would break all of Nathan’s carefully laid plans more thoroughly than anything the Strykers could come up with.
Warhounds peeled away at every cross-tunnel intersection they came to, telepaths pairing up with various other psions as they spread out for the hunt. Samantha, Kristen and Jin Li continued on through the main tunnel, followed by two telekinetics. Samantha didn’t have Gideon with her down here, and they needed psions with telekinesis to counter what Lucas could throw at them.
Glancing down at the bioscanner in her hand, she couldn’t find Lucas on it, but she could place the Strykers if she narrowed down the search. Strykers were incapable of hiding completely on the mental grid, and the government always had them tagged into the system. Government dogs needed to be watched over in case they turned rabid.
It took them an hour to circumvent the Strykers, all the while marching through the tunnels for Bunker East. Just because Lucas wasn’t showing up on the bioscanner didn’t mean he wasn’t flickering on the mental grid. He wanted to be found, Samantha could read that in the way he stayed in one place. Whatever trap he was building, it wasn’t going to be pretty, not for him, not for the Warhounds, and certainly not for the Strykers drawn to his mental presence.
Lucas was definitely Nathan’s son, and Nathan never did anything by halves.
The Warhounds came out of the main tunnel into a wide underground space that was like a minicity, all steel-gray metal and walled-off habitation, the whine of generators cutting through the sounds of human life. Straight down the center of that huge space, the size of an old stadium, was an empty maglev platform, the line of it lit brighter than anywhere else.
The unregistered humans with the most corrupted genetics called Bunker East home. It was closest to the deadzone that took up half of New York State. Even with shielding against radiation, the people here were never going to scrape their DNA clean. They were never going to escape what their ancestors had left for them.
Kristen moved away from Samantha to the railing that separated the crowd from a short fall to certain death on the maglev tracks below. She leaned over that point of separation to look down at the maglev platform, the tracks and the humans waiting there for a train that wasn’t going to arrive anytime soon.
“Bet they’d all taste so good,” she said around her smile.
Jin Li clamped a hand on h
er shoulder and pulled her back into the group. “Start walking, girl. You’ve got a bigger target to find.”
The bioware that lined her skinsuit flickered a warning, which she ignored. Kristen didn’t care about the prison she wore, just about her chance at survival that she could taste beyond her shields.
Samantha curled her fingers around the back of Kristen’s neck and squeezed down warningly. “We’re not here for them.”
“Of course not, Sammy-girl,” Kristen drawled as she reached up and squeezed Samantha’s fingers tighter around her own throat.
Even down here, the world wasn’t much different from the one above: still a mess of people, of poverty, of the dying looking to forget. Hologrids rolled adverts over every conceivable surface, interrupted here and there by the government’s curfew reminder. They weren’t enough of a distraction.
Samantha felt it when Kristen started to engage her empathy, Kristen’s power bleeding through her shields. It weighed down the mental grid in a way few other powers could, because a mental dysfunction was hard to correct and even harder to hide. Samantha had her own shields wrapped around Kristen’s mind, forcing the other girl to work beneath a veneer of human static, but the shields just barely held and their cover didn’t last.
They made it to one of the lower levels of Bunker East at the same moment as the Strykers. It didn’t really matter to Samantha how they were found out as a telekinetic blow leveled everyone flat between the Warhounds and the team of Strykers coming at them, just that they were.
The attack hit hard against the telekinetic shield that surrounded the Warhounds, and Samantha reached out to pull Kristen up against the wall, trying to make them less of a target. Grabbing her gun, Samantha fired on the Strykers, the two Warhound telekinetics letting her attack get through. The bullets never hit their target. She didn’t expect them to.
Kristen, go, Samantha ordered even as she dropped her shields.
A hole opened up on the mental grid, pulling everyone into the manic swirl of insanity that was Kristen. The mental grid buckled beneath the Class III strength made all the more dangerous by her insanity. It washed over human and psion minds alike. The only reason that her power didn’t begin to eat through everyone immediately was the solid telepathic shield that slid between Kristen and her next meal.
“Not fair,” Kristen spat out, dragging herself to her feet to glare at her oldest brother, where he leaned up against the railing, standing between them and the Strykers and the quickly scattering humans.
The security feed, Samantha sent out on a broad ’path. Shut it down!
Whether or not their hackers obeyed her in time, she would never know. Lucas wasn’t bothering to hide his identity. She could have killed him for that callous thoughtlessness.
“I hear you’ve been looking for me,” Lucas said, his voice barely audible above the screaming and the sharp, shrill sound of the alarm as people ran for a safety that couldn’t be guaranteed.
Tension snaked through everyone on both sides of the fight, Lucas the line no one could cross. He knew it, they knew it, and the smile he gave his sisters was both condescending and cruel.
Kristen offered her own in return as she slid her power up against his shields. “Oh, I’ve missed your games. Nathan’s not happy, but come play with me anyway.”
“What else is new?” Lucas said as he raised a hand at the Strykers.
The Strykers amassing behind him were bowled over by a line of telekinesis that cut through their defenses hard enough to break bones. Lucas wasn’t there for the Strykers. He was there for the Warhounds, for his sisters. The Strykers were just a complication he had dragged here because he needed the distraction. He’d had two years to perfect how to play the role of bait, and getting people to follow him had never been difficult. Digging into three of the Strykers’ minds, he broke their shielding and altered their way of thinking, a quick and dirty mindwipe that would leave them unable to differentiate between their teammates and the enemy.
Then he let them go, let them attack humans and psions alike, because even Lucas needed backup sometimes. The results were bloody, but he couldn’t regret the deaths of civilians down here, not when the rest of the world needed saving.
Samantha fell into merge with the two telekinetics, their strength together enough to counteract most of what Lucas could possibly throw at them. Maybe. She briefly regretted leaving Gideon behind, so used to her twin fighting alongside her.
The roar of energy darts rained down from above with sudden brutality, smashing into telekinetic shields and ricocheting every which way without finding a single target. Quads, military soldiers. They’d drawn the attention of the government, and that was never a good thing.
Don’t worry, Lucas said into her mind. The humans here won’t remember us at all.
Liar, Samantha said.
His laughter echoed in her mind, the psi link thin enough and precise enough that she knew they were the only two tied together in it. I never lied about saving you.
The world shifted, crumbling at the edges of her vision as Lucas’s telepathy roared through the mental grid, slicing through everyone’s thoughts with a ferocity Samantha could barely counter. She dug in with her own telepathy, slamming her shields up high and tight around her mind, around Jin Li’s, around the two telekinetics who lashed out with their combined power at where Lucas stood. She left Kristen alone. Kristen was more than capable of taking care of herself.
The railing Lucas was leaning on cracked, the metal shearing off in large chunks. He lurched backward, catching himself before the spot he’d been resting against fell off onto the maglev platform below.
Fire exploded in the air around him, around the Warhounds, an inferno that scorched the area they were standing in. A Stryker pyrokinetic, because they didn’t have a Warhound with that particular power in their current group. Samantha grabbed Kristen by the collar of her skinsuit and dragged her in close when she would have run forward. The girl never did care about her own skin. The telekinetics strengthened their shields and stood their ground. Jin Li took a few steps forward, eyeing Lucas with a feral look on his face.
“Nathan wants you dead,” Jin Li said.
Lucas spread his arms wide; offered up a slick smile. “Go ahead. Try. I’ll even let you get close enough to touch me.”
Jin Li wasn’t stupid enough to agree to something like that, at least, not alone. Linked to the telekinetics by Samantha’s telepathy, Jin Li was teleported within striking range of Lucas, shielded down tight except for his hands as he reached for Lucas’s throat. Lucas reacted like any well-trained Warhound would—with exponential force.
The ground he was standing on cracked, the air burned as his telekinetic blow slammed Jin Li into and through the support wall of the building they were fighting next to. Jin Li survived only because the Warhound telekinetics with them were well-trained in their power. They managed to cushion Jin Li’s landing as best they could. Jin Li fell to the ground across from Kristen, half-conscious and bleeding from his nose and mouth, but mostly whole and alive.
Kristen turned her face in Lucas’s direction, the smile she gave him stretched to its limits. “Try,” she echoed, then wrapped her power around his mind in ways that not even Nathan could achieve.
The solid, mentally corrosive barrier she erected around her brother skewered his attention for only a few seconds, long enough for Samantha to dig her telepathy into his shields, to scorch her power over his. It was followed, incongruously enough, by two telepathic strikes from the Strykers.
It wasn’t a merge. The Strykers didn’t know how to merge, and Samantha was alone in her attack because no one merged with Kristen and walked away alive. But a Class I, for all his or her strength, still had limits. Every psion did. Lucas, forced to battle on three separate fronts, remembered that when his top shield cracked beneath the onslaught, crumbling away.
He could sense Kristen’s glee, Samantha’s determination, and the Strykers’ desire to see them all dead. He
could also sense the minds clustered in the maglev train that was kilometers away and getting closer, running on the last dregs of power that could safely be siphoned off the generators as it struggled to make a stop on its schedule. He reached for the Stryker telepath he had altered, giving her a different set of orders this time, letting the woman target the soldiers in that approaching maglev train and the quads already here for him now that most of the Strykers nearby were either dead or incapacitated. The effort of fighting against his orders would probably break her mind. Lucas didn’t care, so long as the Stryker had a target that wasn’t him.
With a wrench that left his ears ringing, Lucas slid his mind away from the psions who wanted so badly to break him and teleported down to the maglev platform. Quads were rapidly surrounding the area, having long since shoved their way through the fleeing crowd for a better position from which to shoot and kill the enemy. They lined the second platform with only one intent, but Lucas knocked the group of soldiers down and out with a telepathic blow that left half of them catatonic and the other half bleeding their brains out their ears and noses.
Left behind on the walkway, Samantha holstered her gun and shoved herself to her feet. Cover me, she snarled at the pair of telekinetics, even as she launched herself over the railing.
It was a three-story drop to the platform below; she landed with telekinetic help. Still shielded, her movements jerky from running in step with someone else’s power, Samantha raced toward her brother where he waited on the maglev platform.
Why now? she sent at him, layering her shields as Nathan had taught her when she was a child, creating a canyon between herself and her older brother on the mental grid. It wouldn’t be enough, but she still had to try. Why ruin everything when we’re so close to being free of this place?
What if I said this was all just meant to be? Lucas told her from where he stood, tense and waiting before her. That it was inevitable?