“Somebody just flooded the airwaves with a scrambling signal.” He tries to hide the panic in his voice. “There’s nothing I can do to override it.” Studying the laptop monitor closely, he watches another GPS dot appear on the screen. “What the … ?”
Looking around the room, he confirms his suspicions.
Red’s gone.
He gets up to look out through the small window in the door, and considers stepping outside … until a Chimera leaps out of nowhere at the glass. He jumps back, quickly locks the door, and jams the desk chair under the handle.
Internal panic.
Another Chimera leaps against the back window with such force that the centuries old reinforced glass cracks. There’s more thumping, and a third Chimera paces on the roof.
They’re surrounded.
“This can’t be good.” He gulps.
Outside the safe house, Red makes her way swiftly across the street, using her cane for guidance. Out in the open, she stops and listens, sensing that a Chimera is stalking her from the top of an outhouse structure on her close left.
It picks its moment before leaping down toward her, and she waits until the absolute last second before she swings around and delivers a roundhouse kick to the Chimera’s chest, sending it to the ground, stunned. This buys her enough time to reach for her gun, and to aim in the creature’s general direction.
Again, she waits.
The Chimera makes a sound, and, her aim secured, she fires a kill shot. Satisfied of her accuracy, she turns toward the safe house. About to raise her gun, she freezes, listening to the buzzing and whirring of CCTV cameras all along the street.
“That’s interesting.”
In the safe house, Dylan yammers quietly to himself. Watching a Chimera push its face up against the window and stare in at him, its breath misting on the glass, he’s flooded with panic.
“There was nothing I could’ve done.” He flinches as the Chimera paws at the window. “I couldn’t stop her.”
A gunshot tears through the skull of the Chimera at the window, sending it to the ground. Another round sends the Chimera on the roof falling to the ground on the other side of the safe house.
“Hell, yeah!” Dylan jumps up from his chair. “Boo-yah!”
His moment of excitement is cut short by the sudden appearance of another face outside the safe house window, and the face is looking straight at him. It’s a distinctly human face, but with bright violet eyes …
Fusion.
And angry.
“Oh, poo …” Dylan’s words die on his lips.
Gunshots echo from the street outside, and Red dispatches more Chimera. The gunshots can also be heard by Silver, Alex, Jax and Oz, who come to a grinding halt as they approach the entrance of the supply store.
Realizing that the headsets are down, Silver removes hers and tosses it to the ground. “I guess we’re going dark.”
Forging onward, the front door falls off its hinges when Silver nudges it open, and the inside is just how she expected it to be: trashed.
Most of the shelves are on the floor, but a lot of the stock still appears to be intact. It seems that metal items were the target of the raids, and everything else was left for garbage.
Silver sits Alex down on a chair behind the counter and busies herself finding the supplies she needs. Focused on their own primary objective, Oz and Jax search amongst the Old World debris for cigarette papers to roll another joint, while Alex takes off his shirt and admires his wound.
In moments, Silver reappears and kneels down beside him. “I think you need stitches.”
“Oh, sure. I’ll get right on that.”
He lights up another cigarette, trying to take his mind off the discomfort as she does her best to bandage him. Making the most out of what she could find, she manages to get a wad of restaurant napkins taped crudely to his skin with electrical tape.
It’s a temporary fix, but it’s definitely better than nothing.
Suddenly, a noise cuts through the silence.
It’s the low rumble of a truck engine, and it startles them all.
“Is there any chance that Red got her sight back, dug the truck out, and learned how to drive?” Oz wonders, pocketing a freshly rolled joint.
Silver draws one of her guns in preparation. “I think the locals are finally coming to say hi.”
A heavily armed truck pulls up outside, and a voice booms out over a loudspeaker. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
Silver takes a step toward the door, but Alex holds her back.
“Are you serious? You can’t go out there.”
“Isn’t this what we came here for?” She shakes her arm free. “Besides, you need medical attention, and that’s all I care about right now.”
Jax leans in to Oz, passing him back his little zip-lock bag. “Hide your weed,” she whispers.
Silver takes a step out into the street, the sun temporarily blinding her. Alex scrambles to follow her, his weapon drawn, just in case. Oz and Jax bring up the rear of the group, hovering near the doorway.
The figure behind the loudspeaker on the roof of the truck hops down onto the street, poring over the trespassers.
He begins to circle them.
“You don’t look like Omega.” He sniffs them. “You don’t smell like them either.”
“What does Omega smell like?” Silver asks.
He steps up close to her, looking her straight in the eyes. “Shit.” His violet eyes shine back at her. “Self-righteous bullshit.”
He spits on the ground, narrowly missing Silver’s feet. He has scars on his face and his teeth are in bad shape. He wears old, ill-fitting clothes and he doesn’t have any shoes. From inside the truck, other faces are watching them.
He begins to focus in on Silver, looking her up and down. “Get in the truck.”
“Eat me.”
He laughs, turning to his friends in the truck. “Guess what we’re having for dinner tonight?”
Those other faces join in his laughter.
Drawn to protect her, Alex comes to Silver’s side, his knight in shining armor mode instantly reactivated. “Not tonight, buddy.”
The Fusion’s focus switches to Alex, the laughter fading, and he lifts Alex’s jacket to reveal the seeping wound below. “Ooh, nasty.”
“Look,” Silver interrupts him, “we need to see the one you work for.”
The Fusion’s head snaps back to her. “The one I work for?” He stands face to face with her. “I don’t work for anybody, darling.”
“Okay, then I want to see the one who’s been killing innocent Amaranthian humans.”
The grin disappears completely from his face. “You hear that?” He calls to the other faces in the truck. “She wants to see Arcadian.” He turns back to her, a fresh look of contempt on his face. “He’ll kill you where you stand, human.” He motions to the rest of her team. “He’ll kill all of you.”
“Let’s find out,” Silver challenges him.
The Fusion brings out a Striker 12 semi-automatic shotgun and aims it at her head.
“Get in the fucking truck. Now.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Arcadian
Silver wakes up on top of a small hospital bed with thin sheets and a damp pillow, stained with drool and sweat and tears—none of it hers. Rubbing sleep away from her eyes, she begins to realize that she’s not alone. There’s a face staring back at her, mere inches away.
The face belongs to a young woman with violet eyes, and as Silver pulls back in surprise, the woman leaps up in excitement.
“This one’s awake!” she declares.
Silver tries to sit up, but the world’s spinning. “What did you give me?”
A man with violet eyes and a bloodstained apron answers her, approaching the bed with calm authority. “Just a little ketamine concoction.”
Silver tries to steady herself and to keep the world in focus, but she’s too groggy.
“Feeling a little woozy
?” the man enquires. “Don’t worry, that’ll pass.”
He tries to feel her forehead to check her temperature, but she brushes his clammy hand away.
“Where am I?” She winces, looking around the room. “Where are my friends?”
Giving her no chance to protest about it, the man spreads her eyelids between his thumb and forefinger and shines a tiny flashlight in her eye, checking her pupil’s dilatory response.
“Sleeping.”
Silver’s eyes adjust enough to spy a stethoscope around his neck. “You’re a doctor?”
The man nods, ticking job titles off on his fingers. “Surgeon, pathologist, coroner, and gynecologist. When was your last pelvic exam?”
Suddenly feeling much less confident, Silver checks herself for weapons.
Shit.
Unarmed.
Unarmed and drugged.
“It’s purely precautionary,” the doctor explains, sensing her mistrust. “Nobody gets in to see Arcadian without a full inspection.”
Silver looks around, her eyes finally beginning to take in the finer details of her surroundings. The room is filled with beds. Some empty, some not. Can she make out the figures of Alex and the rest of her team? She swears she’d recognize the sonance of Alex’s snoring anywhere, but even that sounds distorted in this strange place.
She has to ask, “What is this?”
“Phase one.”
She looks up at him, not liking the prospect of that.
“Then what the fuck is phase two?”
*************************
Moments later, Silver’s being hauled into another room. Still groggy from the drug cocktail, her hands are tied tightly behind her back with coarse hemp rope, and she struggles to regain her balance when she’s thrown roughly to the floor.
This room is small and dark and empty. While she’s on her knees, a male Fusion kicks her in the stomach and sends her back to the floor, knocking the wind right out of her. His assault continues by trying to stomp on her ribs, but she rolls out of his way and manages to get to her feet.
Assessing the threat, Silver detects the shape of a handgun tucked into the back of his pants, somewhat concealed by his shirt. She tries to wriggle her wrists out of her binds, but there’s no give.
“Kind of an unfair fight, don’t you think?”
He doesn’t care. He strides over to her, grabs her by the throat and pushes her up against the wall. Poor dental hygiene leaves this morning’s breakfast and a dozen different dinners lingering in the air between them, and his bleeding gums are a testament to the dismal state of his oral health.
“Why are you here?” he snarls at her.
Silver tries hard not to breathe through her nose. “Not for the five star hospitality, that’s for sure.”
He punches her across the face, still holding her against the wall. “Don’t make me ask you twice.”
He pulls his hidden gun on her and aims it at her temple. Glancing at the gun, she’s outraged—not afraid—when she recognizes it as one of her own: her custom HK USP.
“Are you fucking kidding me? You’re a bully and a thief. The pride of your parents, I’m sure. You really think you’re going to shoot me with my own damn gun?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
He hits her with the butt of her gun and sends her to the floor for a third time. The theft was the last straw, though, and Silver’s not about to let him get away with that so easily.
While he tries to figure out how to take the safety off, Silver rolls onto her back and kicks at his left knee. Striking him at an angle, she dislocates his patella and he drops to the floor like an unmanned marionette.
He struggles to get to his feet again, but can’t: his out-of-place kneecap won’t let him. Silver finally pulls one of her hands free and releases herself from the rope, her wrists sore and bleeding. She stands up and towers over him as he writhes on the floor, trying to put some distance between them.
He fails.
Silver recovers her gun from the floor and checks the clip: fully loaded.
“Let’s get things back on track here, shall we?” She aims her gun at him as he backs himself up against the wall. “Let’s start with: what the fuck is this? And if you say ‘phase two’, I’m gonna shoot you in the face.”
He makes another attempt to get up. Again, he fails, and slumps back down with resignation. “An interrogation.” He sighs, aware of his failure.
Silver allows a small laugh to escape from her lips. “I hate to break it to you like this, but it’s not going well.”
“Not as well as I’d planned.”
“Why the big show?”
“It’s procedure. No need to take it personally. We interrogate everyone.”
“This happens a lot, does it?”
“What? Me getting beaten up by a girl?”
“No, but I expect that pretty much sums up every date you’ve ever been on.”
The Fusion finally manages to get vertical, leaning himself against the wall for support. “Look, we see more new faces around here than you’d think. Many are just outcasts, and we take them in. If we didn’t, they’d die. And that was never a problem until the Governor got wind of our come one, come all citizenship policy and started sending in his spooks.”
“Spies, you mean?”
“After a couple of mistakes in the past, we prefer to err on the side of caution.”
“And you think I’m one of them, is that it?”
“Until proven otherwise.”
“Does this help?” Her gun still trained on his head, she flashes him the inside of her left wrist.
The bandage has been displaced by the rope, and the wound is irritated and bleeding. Still, her Fusion captor appears doubtful.
“You ripped yourself? Why would you do that?”
“Because that’s not my world. It’s not the world I fought for, and it’s not any kind of world I want to be a part of.”
Fought for? Her word choice troubles him, and he looks down at her boots.
Hunter Division.
Omega.
“You do work for them.”
Silver shakes her head. “Not anymore.”
“Then who?”
“You can consider me a freelance problem solver. And believe it or not, we have things in common.”
The Fusion regards her closely, suspicion oozing from his expression and a sliver of rotting meat clinging to his teeth. “Is that right?”
Assured that she has control of the situation, Silver holsters her gun. “We both want Phaeden Rist dead.”
The Fusion laughs, just a little, not quite certain how to process his unease. “You want to kill your own kind?”
“He’s not my kind. He’s an asshole.”
“A human asshole. Doesn’t offing the Governor go against some kind of Hunter code or whatever?”
Silver’s chest tightens, and she holds back a gush of self-loathing. “It’s too late for that.”
Silence.
Somehow, he knows better than to press her on the subject.
Finally, “What do you want from us?”
Silver messes with the bandage on her sliced wrist, trying to make the burning sensation stop. “We need to see Arcadian.”
“The doctor isn’t done with your friends yet.”
“Well, he’ll have to make do. And if you think you’re going to subject anyone else to phase two, I’ll bust your other knee. Do we understand each other?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The Dude
Back in the room with the doctor and the bloodstained apron, and all the dirty beds, Silver is reunited with Alex just in time to see him wake up.
For having been the recipient of medical treatment by an unlicensed, untrained, possibly mentally unstable non-human, his wound has been rather professionally stitched and bandaged.
Silver supports his efforts to sit up and reaches slowly for his shirt, letting her eyes wander. “Feeling better? You don’t appear to
be leaking anymore, so that’s one good thing at least.”
Alex pulls on his shirt, trying to ignore his screaming muscles and a shooting pain in his side. Though Silver tries to keep her face angled away, he catches sight of a nice purple bruise forming on her cheek.
“What happened to you?”
He reaches out to touch it, but she sweeps his hand away.
“It’s nothing. You should’ve seen the other guy.”
The Fusion who interrogated Silver hops into the room on homemade crutches.
“Oh, there he is.” She smirks, winking at Alex.
He tries to get up off the bed, and she helps to steady him.
“You sure you’re ready to go vertical? It’s a pretty big commitment.”
He uses her shoulder to help him balance. “I think I can make it work.”
Across the room, the interrogator receives some brisk medical treatment from the doctor, whose name Silver can now make out scrawled across his apron.
Trieste.
He pops the interrogator’s patella back into place, noticing that Silver and Alex are on the move. “I’m not finished with you yet.”
Alex, his arm draped over Silver’s shoulders for support, begs to differ. “I’m sore in places I haven’t thought about since I was a teenager. I think you’ve done enough.”
At the back of the room, Oz checks desperately through all of his pockets. Everything he was carrying with him is gone, including the cannabis, his lighter, some condoms, and a cock ring.
Jax strolls over to him, taps him on the shoulder and directs his eyes to a pair of cute, punk female Fusion twins sharing an armchair in the corner. One is the face Silver woke up to, although she’d never be able to tell you which one. Both are smoking a joint.
“Fuck,” Oz whines.
Silver watches the interrogator wiggle his injured leg around.
“All better?” she enquires.
The man shrugs.
That’ll do, Silver thinks. “Let’s go.”
Trieste doesn’t even try to hide his outrage. “You’re taking them to Arcadian?!” he screeches at the crippled interrogator. “You can’t! She assaulted you!”
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