Next week. She’d start next week. For a few days, she was gonna eat ice cream and pout about her poor face.
She settled for running through a brief dissociation exercise until the ache in her muscles faded to a nagging buzz. Definitely not her favorite solution. Numbness was a bandage over a jagged wound—thin and temporary. Sensory input didn’t go away just because she tricked her brain into not noticing it, and reconnecting with the world tended to sting twice as bad.
But sometimes you needed to get a job done and pay the price later.
She finally reached the two cars parked at the edge of the lot. Three more shoulder-punishing heaves tucked the unconscious guard neatly between them, out of sight until shift change, by which point Maya and the rest of the team would be far, far away.
Good enough.
“I’m in,” Nina murmured.
“Sixteen point five two.” Dani’s voice vibrated with triumph. “You owe me fifty bucks, Morales.”
“Add it to my tab.”
A beep tickled Maya’s ears, followed by the whispering slide of a metal door opening. Then silence, heavy and loud, more than the mere absence of sound.
“This isn’t a vault,” Gray muttered. “It’s a fucking cell.”
“Over here.” All traces of victorious glee had bled from Dani’s tone. Now, she sounded breathless, almost …
Stricken?
Shit. Anything that could rattle Dani was bad. Apocalyptically bad.
“Grab and go,” Knox said tersely.
“But Cap—”
“Move.”
A scuffle of boots. Heavy breaths. They were falling back to a fast retreat, which wasn’t likely to be quiet or invisible.
Shit, shit, shit.
Maya bolted across the parking lot and slid open the van door. “Which exit?”
Shouts and the brash, hard sound of gunfire erupted through the earpiece. Conall swore and dove into the front seat of the van. Maya slid into his chair and cycled through the camera feeds until she caught Rafe’s back disappearing around a corner as Knox and Nina laid down cover fire.
The gunfire continued over comms, their team too busy to answer her question. But they didn’t need to. Knox had planned for a dizzying number of contingencies, and Maya knew which one he was enacting now.
“West side!” she shouted to Conall. “Get to the loading dock!”
“On it.”
The tires squealed as Conall rocketed the van into high gear. Everything that wasn’t bolted down slid across the table. Maya clutched at a handle welded to the frame as the van went up on two wheels and the speakers blared a choir chanting about the fires of hell.
She was going to have to rethink her entire musical methodology, because Mozart was entirely too stressful for a car chase.
They rounded the side of the building to the sight of the team spilling out of an open bay door in the loading area, pursued by a squad of security guards. Everyone was clustered around Rafe, who carried a blanket-wrapped bundle in his arms.
“Oh my fucking—”
Shock stole the rest of Maya’s words as Conall turned so hard that the van skidded across the asphalt. Her heart jumped into her throat, but she held on as they screeched to a stop.
They’d never had to leave a site hot before, but everyone knew their places. Knox and Gray piled into the front next to Conall, with Gray riding literal shotgun. Rafe clambered through the back doors, and Nina covered them by firing off three more shots.
Dani was suddenly there, gripping one of the handles on the ceiling of the van as she fired past Nina’s head. Their leader dove into the van as Conall hit the gas, and Maya caught the back of Nina’s jacket and held her steady as they tore out of the parking lot, bullets pinging off the van’s reinforced siding.
Rafe curled himself protectively around the bundle, and the blanket slipped to reveal shorn, dark hair, a pale face, and huge, terrified eyes.
The package was a fucking kid.
TECHCORPS PROPRIETARY INTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS
Skovgaard: I must reiterate my concerns over clearing Dillon Walker so soon after his squad’s involvement in the Ration Day Massacre. The rest of his team is exhibiting signs of considerable post-traumatic stress.
Jenkins: 66–221 is a sniper. He wasn’t in the middle of it like the rest of them.
Skovgaard: Most accepted research acknowledges the paradoxical intimacy of a sniper’s job. Staring through a scope can inflict trauma every bit as profound as that experienced through hand-to-hand combat. His lack of reaction concerns me.
Jenkins: It should make you grateful. We’re short-staffed as it is, and the food riots aren’t going to stop until the Heartlands irrigation project gets going. We need every soldier in the streets.
Skovgaard: If I clear him, it will be with my strong reservations duly noted.
Jenkins: Whatever makes you happy, Birgitte.
Department of Behavior and Analysis
Server Log, Date: 2062–04–07
TWO
Gray really, really wanted a cigarette.
It didn’t matter that he hadn’t so much as touched one in months. He still reached for his empty pocket in stressful situations. And this most certainly qualified.
They’d gone in on a retrieval mission, expecting a weapons cache or maybe some black-market research or medical supplies. Instead, they’d busted in and found a kid, no more than seven or eight years old, cowering in a dark corner of a cell.
Gray had done a lot of terrible things in his career, and kidnapping was well-established on that list. But he’d thought he and the rest of the Silver Devils had left that life behind when they bailed on the Protectorate, the private police force-slash-army that functioned as the TechCorps’ enforcers.
Maybe this was some sort of cosmic lesson, a message from the universe. Run. Hide. But the Protectorate is part of you now. It always will be.
All the activity in the warehouse centered around the table in the middle of it—and the child seated on a high stool. In the hours since their return, she’d been bathed, changed, fed, and stared at in unrelenting horror.
Not exactly the most relaxing or reassuring situation for a kid.
Nina had slid a plate of cookies and a glass of milk in front of the girl, while Knox hovered over Conall like a storm cloud. The furrow between Conall’s eyes grew deeper and deeper as he ran the girl’s face through his facial recognition database.
Only Rafe seemed relaxed. He polished off a second cookie before holding one out to the girl, who studied it seriously, the way Gray might have analyzed a potential ambush point. Dani tucked a fresh blanket around the kid’s shoulders, even though the room was, if anything, too warm to be comfortable. Rafe just held out the cookie, his easy smile saying he had all the time in the world.
“Sweetheart, can you tell us your name?” Knox’s voice held a familiar gentleness. It was the voice he used to de-escalate a situation when it was about to spin out of control because of jumpy civilians. Calm, reassuring. It clashed with the simmering anger in his eyes, and the kid was smart enough to see it.
She hunched further in on herself. Rafe shot Knox a warning look before setting the cookie down on the plate. “Look, it’s here if you want it, pumpkin. Your call.”
Rafe pointedly looked away. So did Knox, bending down over Conall’s tablet. After a painful moment, the girl slipped a tiny hand from the blanket and seized her prize.