The Lurkers aren’t picky.
They’ll snatch up any fresh meat, no matter if it’s mutton or lamb, and they’ve roamed these woods for almost a century. They’re human, but barely. Pale from lack of sunlight, they’re feral remnants of humanity who scavenge the woods for food, willing to kill anything that trespasses into their domain.
Lacking human language skills, after generations of wild breeding, they can only grunt and snort the most basic of vocalizations. Able to construct crude tools from shards of sharp rock and stripped branches, they’re armed and vicious—they’re natural born hunters.
Surveying the scene, Jax shrugs her shoulders. “Well, he’s dead. Let’s go.”
She tries to get back inside the truck, but Silver blocks her way.
“We don’t know that yet.”
Jax accidentally steps on the skeletal remains of a human newborn, and crushes the skull. Disgusted, she kicks it away into the undergrowth. “You see anything alive around here? This is an organic waste dump, not a social club.”
“Fair enough, but he might not be alone in there.” Silver conceals her fear. “Alice might be with him.”
“Then she’s just as dead as he is.”
“Maybe, but I still need to know. If this isn’t a rescue mission anymore, then I need to start thinking about payback.”
Alex doesn’t like the sound of that, but he says nothing.
“I don’t care.” Jax lights up a cigarette. “I’m not setting foot in there.”
“Your feet will go wherever I tell them to,” Silver snaps at her.
“Na-uh. Not this time.” Jax shakes her head. “I know you’ve been out of the game for a while, but come on. This has been a set up from the start!”
Returning from her inspection of a Fisher corpse, dangling by his legs from a tree branch, Red sighs. “It’s not often that I say this, but she’s probably right.”
Smug, Jax smirks at Silver. “Phaeden Rist turned the little pickle and planted him in our group to keep an eye on us.”
“Okay, then why kill him?” Alex challenges her theory. “If you’re right, then Phaeden must’ve double-crossed him. Why?”
“Bait.” Jax takes a puff. “Phaeden Rist is a cunt, but he’s not stupid. He knows you’ll go after the pickle as soon as you realize the theft, and he knows you’ll lead with anger and not with brains—as your track record suitably predicts.”
Silver plants her hands on her hips. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“When we first met, you were stuck up a tree surrounded by a pack of Chimera.”
“I climbed that tree on purpose.”
“You think that I’m a loose cannon, but you barge into everything without ever stopping to consider the consequences.”
“I was fifteen.”
“Nothing’s changed. Maydevine didn’t promote you to Commander because of your skill. It was pure nepotism, and everyone knows it.”
No sooner does she complete that sentence and she hits the ground, Silver’s punch almost knocking her unconscious. Unrelenting and unapologetic, Jax continues her tirade from the dirt, motioning toward the building. “It’s a trap, you crazy bitch. The whole building’s going to be rigged with C-4.”
“You’re full of shit.”
Jax retrieves her cigarette and picks herself up off the ground, giving the filter a cursory clean before putting it back to her lips. “Am I?” She points down at the ground by their feet.
A discarded blasting cap.
“There are military tire tracks all over this place.” Jax sucks on the cigarette. “At least one Hunter Division vehicle was here recently, and I’m pretty fucking sure they weren’t here to lay down flowers for the unfortunate deceased.”
“Rist does want you dead,” Red agrees. “He’s made no secret of that over the years. The only reason you’re in on this at all is because of Maydevine.”
“And now the Governor’s looking for a way out of the deal.” Alex nods his head. “It makes sense.”
“Does it?” Silver peaks an eyebrow at him. “Newsflash: we don’t have the killer yet. If that’s really his plan, don’t you think he’s being a little bit previous?”
Jax snorts, taking one last suck of the cigarette. “Be real. He’s known all along that responsibility for all this havoc lies at the hands of a Fusion.” Jax tosses her butt to the ground and obliterates it with the heel of her boot. “He doesn’t need you anymore.” She looks up at Silver. “He doesn’t need any of us.”
“You done?” Silver spits the words at her.
Jax shakes her head in annoyance. “We’re all done, sweetheart.”
Silver ignores her and heads for the entrance to the building.
“You know I’m right!” Jax shouts after her.
Ignored.
At the entrance, the runic code for ‘place not safe’ is scrawled onto the building’s face beneath the ivy, and Silver draws her gun. Inside, it reeks of urine and feces, and a large pile of human shit in the corner of the room is crawling with rats and bugs.
A voice startles her from behind.
“Looks like they’re potty trained.”
She turns to see Alex behind her, his gun, an HK .45 ACP, also drawn. Even though the Hunter Division uniform is absent, she finds a certain security in the familiarity of the situation.
The two of them working together again.
She suppresses a tummy flutter. “They must be close by.”
A noise echoes down the stairwell from the upper level.
Wood scraping against wood.
Lurkers.
“We need to check the whole building.” Silver calculates tactics. “You wanna split up?”
Alex shakes his head. “No way. That’s exactly what the primal little fuckers want—divide and conquer.”
Leading the way toward the staircase, Silver steps over a fresh Lurker corpse sprawled out on the floor.
Neither she nor Alex notices the mistake until it’s too late, and Silver’s struck in the side with something sharp. She smothers a squeal, looking down to find a jagged metal spear tip sticking out of her flesh, narrowly missing one of her kidneys.
Lurker’s know how to play dead.
Blocking their only exit, the filthy Lurker grunts and reaches for a mace, carved out from a dead tree. Lurkers have no shame, and he’s completely naked. Skinny but strong, he wields the weapon at them, ready to bash their brains out.
Mace versus gun.
No contest.
Silver raises her weapon to shoot him, but Alex has other ideas. He yanks the spear tip out of her side and hurls it back at the Lurker.
Bullseye.
It strikes him right between the eyes, killing him instantly.
Silver clutches at her side, smothering another squeal. “A little warning would’ve been nice.”
“Why? I thought you liked a little bit of spontaneity every now and again.”
“This isn’t foreplay, Alex. I was just impaled with a rusty piece of scrap metal.”
Alex pries her hand away and inspects the wound.
“You don’t even need a bandage. You’ll be fine.”
Thunk.
A Lurker jumps into the building through the hole in the roof, after waking up from a nap inside a treetop. His footsteps thud heavily on the floorboards above Alex and Silver, and Silver forgets all about her pain.
She must find Dylan.
Checking every room, they head upstairs. There are plenty of corpses, and many have been dumped in large, festering piles. Some are partially consumed, others aren’t. Some are decaying and oozing purge fluid out onto the floor. Some are fresh.
None are Dylan.
Or Alice.
After taking only a few steps on the top floor, a whirring noise becomes audible, and gets louder every second.
They stop and listen.
Recognition spills out across Alex’s face. “Uh-oh.”
“Uh-oh? What’s uh-oh?”
Alex
looks around the hallway. “We need to make ourselves scarce.”
“Why?”
Right on cue, a small, round robotic device, not unlike a Roomba, wheels itself into the hallway. It stops, turns to the left and beeps. As it begins to turn in their direction, Alex grabs Silver by the arm and pulls her through a doorway, slamming the door shut behind them.
Silver doesn’t understand. “Why are we running from a vacuum cleaner?”
Alex holsters his gun and peers out into the hallway through a small crack of wood in the door. “Clearly that’s not what it is.”
“It looks like one.”
“Trust me, it’s not. I designed it. I’m still contracted by Omega, remember? Last time I saw it, it was a drawing on a napkin.”
“What does it do?”
“It’s a motion detector, programmed to seek out a target and send a detonation signal to an explosive unit.”
“Fine.” Silver checks the clip in her gun. “Let me shoot it.”
“That’d be a supremely bad idea. If it’s breached in any way, it’ll revert back to a default setting.”
“Which is?”
Alex pantomimes a big ‘kaboom’ motion with his hands.
“Awesome.” Silver sighs.
Alex looks back out through the hole and watches the Roomba bump straight into a Lurker.
He holds his breath.
A green laser scans the Lurker up and down, while the Lurker backs away in fear.
Nothing happens.
The laser shuts off and the unit beeps, spinning around to check elsewhere.
The Lurker makes a run for it.
“They’re target specific.” Alex feels a small sense of relief. “Assuming that you’re the target, the bomb won’t go off unless it knows for sure that you’re in the building.”
“That’s comforting.”
“Avoidance and caution, and we’ll be fine. But where there’s one, there’ll be more.”
Silver’s not listening.
Crumpled on the floor in the room with them is her target: Dylan.
His ankles and wrists are bound with hemp rope, and his face is pressed up against the floor, right in a puddle of purge fluid.
Silver kneels to check for a pulse.
Remarkably, he still has one.
“He’s alive. Why didn’t the Lurkers get to him?”
“They’re scared of the robots. They must be keeping their distance.”
Silver looks around the room, just to be certain of something. “Alice isn’t here.”
“So?”
“I think she’s alive. I think Phaeden’s hoping to use her as some sort of leverage to get to the Fusion killer. He must be. It’s the only thing that makes any sense.”
“Explicate.”
“It’s like I said before: why now? I mean, if he knew all along that a Fusion was responsible for the murders, then why wait till now to cut me out of the deal? Or why make the deal with me in the first place?” Silver shakes her head, trying to understand it. “Something changed. He found something out that altered the dynamic of our agreement, and Alice has to be the key.”
As she rolls Dylan over, hoping to try and shake him into consciousness, something in the room beeps.
She freezes.
Beneath his limp body, a tiny trip plate is activated.
Shit.
A whirring noise.
Another explosive Roomba wakes up.
Alex panics internally, keeping his fear well hidden. “I hope you have a contingency plan.”
Silver holds a careful eye on the device while it backs up to her. At the right moment, she lifts her foot and brings it down on top of the thing, so gently. The device can’t move, and can’t turn around to check the rest of the room.
“How’s that?” She looks up at Alex. “Your device has some limitations. Go and fetch the rest of the group. I’ve got an idea.”
He obliges without question.
Waiting for Alex to return with the others, Dylan begins to regain consciousness. His brain working in overdrive, trying to comprehend what’s happening to him, he squints up at Silver—and she’s quick to congratulate him.
“We finally have something in common: we’ve both been fucked over by Phaeden Rist.”
Dylan looks frantically around the room. “Where’s Alice? Is she okay?”
“You tell me.”
A tear rolls down Dylan’s cheek. “They took her.”
He tries to concentrate on something other than his own fright and pain, but it doesn’t work. He collapses into unconsciousness again, his mouth open, drooling onto the floor.
At the arrival of the rest of the group, Silver orders Jax and Oz to untie Dylan—much to Red’s confusion.
“I thought you didn’t trust him? Why save his life if you think he was in on it with Rist?”
“His innocence is a theory I’m definitely going to test, but the truth is that Phaeden left him here for dead. Even if they were in on it together, it looks like Dylan got cut out of the deal. Just like me.”
Silver takes out a pocket knife, and before anyone can clue in to what she’s doing she slices her left wrist open, dripping blood all over the floor.
Alex rushes to her side and tears the knife from her hand. “What the fuck?!”
She holds out her wrist to him. “Take it out.”
“Have you lost your mind?!”
“Not yet,” she insists. “Do it. We don’t need it.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“Phaeden’s got too much power. He always knows exactly where we are, and he wants us dead.”
Red catches on. “You’re giving Phaeden what he wants?”
“Alex and I know how the murders have been committed without a tag, and without a trace. We don’t need these.” She digs the tag out of her own wrist. “We rip ourselves, ditch the tags, and let this fucking ruin burn.”
Alex cuts a piece of fabric from his own shirt and wraps it delicately around Silver’s bleeding wrist. “We fake our own deaths?”
“If Phaeden believes that we’re gone, he loses his power against us. More importantly, he won’t be able to plan a counter-attack.”
Alex takes his time with the bandage, prolonging their physical contact. “We’ll have to hurry. We have less than two minutes before your tag alerts Omega that it’s been ripped, and if the bomb doesn’t detonate before then, the scam will be blown.”
Silver nods. “Better make fast work of it, then.”
One by one, they rip themselves and toss their platinum tags onto the filthy floor. The pain almost shocks Dylan back into wakefulness, but it doesn’t last long. His head hits the floorboards with a hard smack, and he’s out cold again.
Silver gives the order for them all to get clear before she lets her foot off the little robotic device, but Alex doesn’t leave.
“You think I’m just going to leave you here alone?”
“We have no idea how long before detonation, or the point of origin,” she summarizes. “It could easily kill us both.”
“I lived with the alternative for six years. I’ll chance it.” He takes her hand. “We go on three.”
One.
Two.
Three.
Silver lifts her foot off the device, which isn’t half as daft as it looks. Recognizing that it was trapped, it immediately swings around and catches their movement as they disappear through the doorway.
First, it begins to beep. A small LCD screen on its face shows a timer, counting down from ten seconds. By the time it reaches zero, Silver and Alex are in the lobby of the building, just a few feet from the exit.
A few feet from safety.
The first explosion comes from the upper level, and the reverberations knock them both off their feet. A second explosion follows from the stairwell, and blows out some critical supporting joists. A parallel explosion blows the joists on the other side of the building, and the weight from the upper floor sends the ceiling crashing i
n onto the ground floor, pulling the remnants of the roof down with it.
Alex hauls Silver up off the floor as a flurry of dust and debris catches up with them. Two more successive explosions send the remaining walls tumbling down in a powerful crash of fire behind them.
Freedom.
But only just.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Head of Phaeden Rist
The bedraggled group enters the theater’s communal living area, Silver dragging a handcuffed—but now fully conscious—Dylan behind her. She throws him down on the floor, his head only narrowly missing the corner of the table.
Jax pulls off her steel toed boots and tosses them onto the tabletop. “What now?”
She takes a seat at the head of the table and pulls a cigarette from her pocket, rolling it between her fingers. Disgusted by her lack of etiquette, Silver brushes Jax’s boots off the table and onto the floor, crashing them down on the top of Dylan’s head.
“Don’t get too comfortable. We need to move fast.”
Alex twists the cap off a rare bottle of Sentinel District water with a refreshing ‘pop’. “We need to formulate a strategy.”
“Yes.” Silver nods. “We’re going to kill Phaeden Rist.”
Alex nearly chokes on his water. “Excuse me?”
Silver helps herself to his water and takes a sip, addressing the group. “Alex and I made a discovery last night.”
“Yeah, we heard. Remember?” Jax smirks, lighting up her cigarette.
Silver scowls at her. “I’m going to put that cigarette out on your face.”
Jax leans back in her chair and gives Silver a wink. Beside her, Dylan tries to get up off the floor, but Jax casually puts a hand on the top of his head and pushes him back down. He almost falls into Red.
“Okay, I’ll bite.” Red carefully sidesteps Dylan’s flapping arms. “What did you find last night?”
Ignoring Alex’s protests over her impromptu assassination idea, Silver sends him to retrieve his laptop while she fills in the rest of the group about their discovery.
“The ghost’s using tunnels underneath the city.”
“That’s basic.” Jax puffs.
“Omega’s abandoned service passages,” Silver explains. “It’s the Old World subway system that was used during the First Reclamation to get into the Fringe District, and the same one we used during the Second Reclamation to get into the Out District. It’s still intact, and now we’re going to use it to get to the Governor.”
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