by Kyla Stone
She held her finger to her lips. He nodded, immediately falling silent, just like she’d taught him. She strained for sounds outside the tent. The wind in the trees. The creak and snap of the deep woods. Snow falling. Nothing unusual.
But something had caused adrenaline to spike through her veins, to set her heart jackhammering against her ribs.
She checked her Smartflex. 3:14 a.m. She crawled across her sleeping bag and peeked her head out the tent flap.
They were camped in a small clearing. A swirl of smoke drifted from the banked campfire ten feet directly in front of her, the coals still shimmering red. Her gaze tracked from the fire to the large log they’d used for seating, Finn’s walking stick leaning against it.
Finn sat a few yards away, leaning against his backpack, facing the woods, a hunting knife gripped in his left hand, his right arm cradled uselessly in its sling.
The moon shone down from a circle of night sky directly above them. The stars were sharp crystal shards. The trees stood silent as sentinels all around them. Everything was still, everything was—
A branch cracked. The sound was loud as a gunshot in the stillness. A shuffling noise came from the woods to the west. Something large crashed through dense foliage.
Willow froze. “What is it?” she whispered. “What’s out there?”
“I think,” Finn said softly, “that we are being hunted.”
The shuffling noises grew louder. Leaves and pine needles crackled. More twigs snapped. Something grunted.
Fear slid a blade between her ribs. Out here in the wild, they were no longer the apex predators. They were the prey.
“Get inside the tent!” she hissed.
Finn scrambled backward, as quietly as he could, but not quietly enough. Willow held the tent flap open while he scooted inside. His bulk nearly filled up the entire tent, especially with his pack still strapped to his back.
Carefully, Willow zipped up the tent, wincing at the scraping noise the zipper made, but it couldn’t be helped. She and Finn crouched inside the tent, Benjie huddled between them.
She held her finger to her lips again. Benjie nodded mutely. The whites of his eyes gleamed.
Willow checked that her handgun was still in its holster. It was. She picked up the rifle she always kept beside her as she slept. Her pulse thundered so loud in her ears it was a wonder she could hear anything at all.
They waited in silence.
The creature shambled into the clearing. It was close. She could hear its huffing breath. A bear, from the sound of it. A big one.
She and Finn exchanged frightened glances. Hopefully, it would just shuffle on past, bypassing the tent for more intriguing pastures.
A large shadow fell across the tent wall. Dark and huge, with a heavy, thick torso and a massive head and jaws. The head turned toward them, its snout snuffling the tent.
Benjie let out a terrified gasp. Willow clapped her hand over his mouth. Don’t move. Don’t breathe, she commanded with her eyes, praying he would understand.
He was just a kid, but she needed him to be brave. He trembled beneath her fingers, but she didn’t dare move her hand.
She couldn’t get enough air. Her chest burned. She longed to suck in huge, ragged breaths, but that would make noise. She focused on barely breathing, on not making a sound.
The bear lifted one enormous paw and batted the tent. The sound of the bear’s claws sliding across the nylon raised every hair on Willow’s arms.
The tent wall pushed inward toward Finn. He eased back, barely breathing.
One claw punctured the fabric.
Willow didn’t dare close her eyes, not even to blink. Go away, go away, go away. She chanted the words over and over in her mind, even as she scrambled for a plan, any plan her desperate, panic-stricken brain could come up with.
She longed to shoot the creature, but she couldn’t. Not without the ability to see the thing and aim. Injuring the bear would just infuriate it. As long as there was the slimmest chance it would just amble away, she couldn’t risk it.
For now, she could do nothing but hope, pray, and wait.
The bear jerked his paw free of the fabric with a bewildered snort. It took a few heavy steps and pawed the tent again lightly, batting at it the way a cat batted a toy.
If the bear attacked the tent, she’d unzip the door and tell Finn to take Benjie and make a run for it. A bear could outrun them easily. But she could stay and fight it, try to shoot it down before it got to her.
It was the only thing that might give Finn and Benjie a chance.
It wasn’t a plan at all. But it was all she had.
How many shots would it take to kill it? Judging by its shadow and the noises it was making, it was massive. It would take more than one shot, she knew that for sure.
Unless she could hit it directly between the eyes. But for that, she’d have to see it.
Silently, she rose to her knees. She released Benjie’s mouth with one finger to her lips. He nodded frantically. Finn wrapped an arm around him and pulled him close. She pointed to the small window flap a foot above her head and to the left.
Finn shook his head. He didn’t want her to do anything dangerous. She shook her head back. The danger was already here.
Willow eased her handgun out of the holster. The rifle would be too hard to aim and shoot in such tight quarters. She barely had room to move an inch as it was.
Breathing shallowly through her nose, her lungs burning and her pulse a roar in her ears, she eased toward the window flap, the gun in front of her face. She peered through the mesh screen.
The beast was huge. Her gaze was level with its mid-back. She glimpsed thick black fur, could almost make out each individual hair. A sour, earthy scent filled her nostrils.
The bear lifted its great head, alerted by some noise deeper in the forest. She had to look up to see its eyes. They were small and dull, almost lifeless.
Her stomach unclenched, her tense shoulders relaxing. She exhaled slowly.
Other than their larger size and listless, docile behavior, it was their eyes that set them apart. Their eyes weren’t alive with hunger or craving or anger or fear. They were alive. But at the same time, they were different, strange, unnatural.
The bear was a mod.
It was engineered not to kill for anything: not to eat, not to save its own life. Mods survived by scavenging. And now they had millions of corpses to choose from. No mod would attack a human. They were safe.
The creature huffed, shaking its great head, and ambled off into the forest in the opposite direction from which it had come.
Willow sank back on her heels, trembling in relief. She inhaled several deep, shuddering breaths. She was alive. They were alive.
She holstered her gun and wiped her sweaty palms on her thighs. “It’s gone.”
None of them wanted to stay inside the tent. They needed to stretch their cramped limbs. They needed air. Finn and Benjie scrambled out of the tent. Willow followed them with her rifle. There was no way she was leaving it behind, not after that scare.
“Did you see how huge he was?” Benjie gasped, stretching his arms as wide as they could go. “He could’ve squished us just by sitting on us!”
“No joke, Sir Benjie,” Finn said, his voice shaky. “He could have squashed us flat.”
“Like an ant!”
“Like a mosquito.”
“Like a cockroach!”
“Speak for yourself,” Finn said.
Willow was about to join in the conversation when she glimpsed movement in the trees behind Finn and Benjie.
Before she could react or even open her mouth to speak, something huge crashed through the underbrush, lunging into the clearing not twenty yards from their tent.
A second bear.
It swung its huge head from side to side, scenting its prey. Scenting them. It was massive but emaciated, ribs jutting from matted brown fur. Its eyes were black as carved onyx and glittering with malice.
&nbs
p; A grizzly bear, and no mod. It was every inch a predator.
Two bears? It made no sense.
Understanding struck Willow like a sledgehammer. The grizzly had been hunting the modded bear.
Until it had scented them.
33
Micah
“We’re here,” Theo said.
From the backseat, Micah watched as Theo inserted a thumbnail-sized electronic device into a tiny slot in their transport’s interface. Electric blue gauge lights floated over the bottom and right side of the windshield—a destination code, GPS location, power and battery usage, environment controls, time.
Theo swiped in several passcodes before withdrawing the device. “Logs erased.”
The transport had brought them within five blocks of BioGen headquarters. Theo, Micah, Silas, Fiona, and Kadek exited the transport into the cold, dark night. The transport powered down on the side of the street, waiting for its next passenger.
This part of the Sanctuary was deserted. It wasn’t yet curfew, but it might as well have been. Everyone was ensconced safely inside their homes, the warm light of electricity glowing from the windows. The street lamps were dark until their sensors detected movement within a specified radius, then they flickered on.
Three blocks to the east, two patrolling soldiers turned onto a perpendicular side street. Fiona gestured to Micah and Silas. They moved off the sidewalks and slipped into the shadows between apartments.
They crossed several empty back alleys in the darkness, following Theo. It was snowing softly, fat wet flakes drifting down from the sky. The cloud cover was so thick that no stars were visible. Even the moon only let off a glimmer, edging the buildings they passed in hues of faintest silver. The snow gave everything a quiet, muted feeling, like they were the only people left in the world.
A drone whirred almost silently behind them.
Micah flinched, ducking instinctively. It was a surveillance drone, small and H-shaped, not like the large nighthawks bristling with gun turrets. But still.
Fiona laughed softly. She bent and punched Micah’s shoulder. “Relax. It’s on our side.”
Micah hardly dared to straighten. “What? How?”
Theo wheeled to face him, his eyes dancing with pride. “We’ve managed to snare and hack a bunch of them. We entered our own ghost protocol and released them back into the wild. Even a few nighthawks, too. How do you catch a drone, you may be wondering? The answer? With another drone. Kadek constructed a drone of our own, with a built-in net propulsion feature. It shoots out a twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot carbon-nanotube fiber net. The fibers are stronger than steel; they’re unbreakable. And coupled with the propulsion force of—”
“Theo,” Fiona chided gently. “Let’s not get carried away.”
Theo shrugged. “You can see the results for yourself.”
Micah watched the surveillance drone whir along above them, both wary and impressed.
Silas looked equally skeptical. “So, you can control these hijacked drones whenever you want to? It’s not going to suddenly spazz out and alert every drone within the Sanctuary of our presence?”
Theo grinned. “Of course not. They’re completely under our control for as long as we desire. We’ve commandeered one for tonight to stay with us. The surveillance drones aren’t too bright. They’re basically programmed to collect and send data and roam pre-gridded zones. They automatically remain a certain distance from other drones to minimize overlapped territory. Which works in our favor. They’ll detect our drone and stay away.”
“Camera twenty yards to the northeast,” Kadek warned as the six-inch long wand-like object he held blinked red. It was a wireless camera finder. “On both eaves of that condo’s entrance. Turn your heads forty-five degrees right to avoid the facial-recognition detectors.”
Micah’s heart rate spiked. He wiped his damp palms on the pants of the blue technician uniforms Kadek had stolen for them.
“But don’t look too suspicious,” Fiona added. She struck a nonchalant pose and grinned impishly at him. She was dressed like a boy again, her mass of fiery curls stuffed into a gray knit cap. One tiny curl, damp from the falling snow, clung to her cheek.
“As long as we aren’t flagged by the surveillance network’s system and elevated to a live agent for a risk assessment response, we’ll be fine,” Theo said. “Don’t hunch your shoulders. Don’t look at or away from the cameras. For those of us who are chipped, maintain your vital stats at normal levels—heart rate, breathing, perspiration, cortisol levels.”
“Easy-peasy,” Kadek mumbled.
Micah straightened his shoulders, tried to look normal while still avoiding the cameras, tried to look like his pulse wasn’t thudding in his throat, like every muscle in his body wasn’t knotted with tension.
Several alleys later, they finally reached their destination—city hall, a tall, gleaming white spire less than a hundred yards from BioGen’s headquarters and the capitol. LED security lights bathed the area in crisscrossing patterns of harsh white light and deep shadows. The enormous Unity Square stretched before them--an enormous rectangle of engineered grass rimmed with sidewalks, topiary bushes, and the fanciest residential buildings Micah had seen yet.
Kadek and Fiona took cover behind a chest-high row of manicured hedges across from city hall. A dusting of snow filmed the too-green, perfectly pruned leaves. Theo rolled in after them, with Micah and Silas taking up the rear.
“What happens if we trip an alarm?” Silas asked quietly.
“In case of a security breach, all external doors immediately lock,” Theo explained. “The level three security and higher doors require two independent biometric scans to get inside. That’s not one but two people. Twice the work, quadruple the danger. Plus, the alarm will alert at least twenty human guards and a few dozen of the nearest drones.”
“Not a pretty picture,” Kadek said. “So don’t trip an alarm.”
Micah and Silas exchanged cautious, wary glances. Micah gave a helpless shrug. He fought down his own anxiety. He didn’t like it either, but they had to trust that these people knew what they were doing.
They had to trust, period.
They crouched behind the hedges as two guards crossed the grounds in front of the entrance. They strolled around the west corner.
Kadek swiped a timer on his Smartflex. He to his feet and gestured for them to follow. “Now.”
Micah and the others strode quickly to the front entrance. He noted the heated concrete with relief. They wouldn’t leave snowy footprints.
Theo stretched and pressed his hand against the biometric scanner installed to the left of the revolving glass doors. The scanner beeped and released the lock with a hiss.
They entered the building. The lobby was decorated in shades of peach and cream, with luxurious dove-gray velvet lounge chairs and gilded sconces affixed to the walls. The balconied walls rose several stories on all sides. A hint of moonlight shimmered through a transparent roof at least five stories above them.
“Wait,” Fiona hissed. She pulled several items out of her duffle bag and passed them around. They looked like pairs of socks until Micah realized they were microfiber foot covers made to cover the soles of their shoes and muffle their footsteps. Micah yanked them over his wet boots and drew his gun. Silas did the same.
Kadek eyed the guns warily. “You won’t need those.”
“We’ll see,” Silas said. “But I’m bringing it anyway.”
They strode silently through the empty lobby, paused at the security checkpoint where Theo passed them through with another biometric read of his palm. They entered the elevator.
Fiona selected the third floor. “Our dear Harold has fourth floor access but works on the third level in Logistics and Supplies. He should be in his office.”
Micah bit the inside of his cheek. His mouth was dry. It felt like his tongue was caked with sand. He could have drunk an entire bucket of water and still been thirsty. He’d engaged in his fair share of gun battles,
but never a sneaky, covert operation like this.
His stomach twisted in knots. Every hair on his neck stood on end.
“There’s an emergency button beneath his desk,” Fiona said. “He can also alert the room’s AI. We have to stick him before that happens.”
They crept along a wide hallway, a balcony overlooking the lobby atrium to their left, a bunch of offices, doors all closed, on their right.
Three offices down, a light shone beneath the door. Micah tensed and tightened his grip on his gun. Fiona angled her chin, indicating that this was the guy they were seeking.
Kadek and Theo hung back out of the doorway’s line of sight. Micah and Silas pressed against the wall on either side of the door. Fiona dropped her duffle bag in Theo’s lap, removed her knit cap, and shook out her hair. She took a small tube of gloss out of her pocket and daubed it across her lips.
She grinned at Silas as she knocked gently on the door. “Technical support,” she said sweetly, pitching her voice higher to sound both more feminine and unthreatening.
“Uh…” came the confused reply from behind the door. “I didn’t put in a request for—”
“It’s right here on my holopad.” Fiona turned the handle and burst through the door with a radiant smile. “My report says your network connection is corrupted. That’s why your Net speed has been so slow.”
“Oh, well, that makes sense. I have been thinking it hasn’t been as efficient lately.”
“We’ll take care of that for you right now. Just let me have a look at your desk terminal.”
“Okay, um, sure thing.”
“Great! Thanks so much.”
There was a shuffling noise. “Hey!” Herald said in pained surprise. She must have pricked him as she moved to his side of the desk. “What did you just do to me?”
“Nothing to worry yourself about,” Fiona purred. “Looks like I can’t do anything from here. But I can fix it from the Network Command Center. We can go take care of this right now, if you’d like. I heard you’ve just been promoted. Congratulations! I always knew you deserved it. You work harder than anyone around here.”
