I was about to answer when my command line beeped—a sign that someone wanted the attention of one of the leaders. I switched channels hurriedly in case it was me.
“Thomas?” It was Ms. Dale speaking, her voice carefully neutral. “Those signs you told us to look out for that the Matrians are tampering with the water supply. Wasn’t one of them that the tunnels in the sewer would be flooded?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Well, I’m looking into one, and they are. This is going to slow Logan and me down a bit. We were counting on the sewers to get through a rough neighborhood.”
“It’s much worse than that,” said Thomas softly. “Flooded sewers means our timeline is cut in half. We’re now down to five hours until water that’s been tampered with makes its way into the city… possibly even less, with how quickly the Matrians have been working. We need to move the rendezvous times up by at least half an hour.”
“How are we supposed to do this when our best route has just been blocked?” Ms. Dale’s voice over the radio was testy.
“I’m looking for alternate routes for you now,” Thomas said, seeming to barely register her annoyance.
Henrik’s voice came on next. “All teams, we need to move up our timeline. This means that if you can find a shorter route that has a slightly higher risk, now is the time to try it. But don’t do anything excessively reckless—clear with me first.”
I turned my eyes toward Mags, who had clearly been listening as well, meeting her blue eyes as they came up to me wearing an expression that I recognized. I guessed she felt the sinking in the pit of her stomach, too. This meant I’d been right to attack the water treatment plant. But this time, being right was making me feel worse.
“Well,” I said slowly, “I guess we don’t have time to take a minute.”
“Let’s take a look at the map,” she said in response, already pulling her copy from a back pocket.
The area we’d been sent into was closer to the south side of Patrus City, an area I wasn’t as familiar with. When I’d been a warden, this area had been full of nice neighborhoods and high-end institutions. I’d been patrolling the city center, where some of the best shopping, entertainment, and bars existed—and also much higher rates of crime and gang-related activity. Now this area was literally a warzone, and I couldn’t even begin to imagine what the city center looked like. I was glad to be on the team with Mags, who knew it better than I did.
“We’re here,” she said, tapping on a small dead-end road eight blocks from the warehouse district. “We were going to go around, use Drew’s territory to cover us and then come up an adjacent street. It’s safer, but it’ll take us two hours, an hour and a half at a minimum.”
I shook my head. “With the accelerated timeline, we can’t spare the time.”
She nodded, her face grim. “I know, but the fastest route skirts dangerously close to Porteque territory. If they’ve expanded their turf or claimed another apartment building… we might get bogged down.”
“How much time would we save?”
She sighed and crossed her arms over her chest. “An hour,” she said. “Maybe more. Unless we get pinned down, in which case we could lose hours. It’s a gamble.”
“Henrik, we can get there in an hour, maybe less, but it’s dangerous,” I transmitted, turning away from the table and the map and looking around the room. The team had relaxed somewhat, seeing the torches disappear, but all of them were watching me and Mags closely, knowing something was going down. “And we’d be going close to Porteque territory, but I think it’s worth it. We can still make our rendezvous.”
“You sure you want to go that route?” There was no judgment in Henrik’s voice; he just wanted to make sure I was confident in the decision.
I was, though not for a lack of doubts. But since they’d confirmed something was happening at the plant, I knew every second mattered. It wasn’t enough to arrive at the water treatment plant on time. We still had to fight our way inside, and then input Thomas’ ridiculously long string of commands into the system to purge all of the water from the plant into the channels reserved for waste water. That had been our final decision—even if we had no idea what the Matrians were doing to the water, we could reverse it all, just in case.
“Time’s stealing other options away from us,” I said. “But if you’re asking whether my people can handle it, I know we can.”
“I’m not, but that is good to know. All right. Amber, Ms. Dale—what’s your ETA?”
Thomas answered. “Given their current rate of travel and the obstacles in their way, I’d say an hour and twenty minutes. Give or take. Viggo, soon I’m going to have to move Violet’s drone to Amber’s team for a while.”
Violet and I both acknowledged him, our voices coming through the line at the same time, sending a little surge of amusement through me—we were on the same wavelength, it seemed, even now. Then I was back in the moment.
We had an hour and twenty minutes, give or take. “All right, guys,” I called out to my team, looking around at the faces watching and listening to my transmission with serious expressions. “We’ve had a change in plans. We’ve just confirmed that the Matrians are tampering with the water treatment plant. So we’re going to have to take a rougher route than expected to get there before contaminated water can make its way out on the streets. This just got a lot more vital, but I trust you all to be able to handle it. If anybody wants to go back now, you have the chance. No judgment.”
I surveyed the room. A chorus of disgruntled voices greeted my announcement, a woman named April and some others saying, “We’re not giving up now!”
Nobody volunteered to leave, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
“Okay, great. Let’s get ready and get on the street. Gregory, I want you checking the street cameras for us. We’re moving more blindly now, so we need to play this smart. Take a small team back out to the main road and check it out. Everyone else… you have five minutes to move out. Let’s get ready to go.”
24
Viggo
The light from the handheld illuminated the angles of Mags’ face as she clicked through the video feeds. “Any movement?” I asked, turning back toward the street.
“No,” she whispered back. “But the cameras are only at the intersections, so I can’t tell if the streets are clear.”
I scanned the street. This one reminded me of the one we’d pushed through earlier, burnt or damaged cars scattered everywhere, windows on shopfronts broken, stores looted, trash and debris littering the sidewalks. The tall buildings that lined the road were bathed in shadows, but at an intersection a few buildings up, fires burned in barrels on every corner, creating a dome of red glow. “We’ve been through thirteen intersections just like this, Mags.”
“Yeah, well, right now we’re dangerously close to Porteque territory,” she replied. “We need to be ready to run like scared rabbits. Trust me, I know this area particularly well.”
“Rabbits freeze when they’re scared,” I replied, standing up and waving for everyone to move forward.
Offering a hand to Mags, I helped pull her up from where she had been seated against the building, ducked down behind an overturned newspaper stand. “Same old Viggo,” she said dryly as she tucked the handheld into her satchel. “Doesn’t change the fact that those barrels are lighting up the intersection like a beacon. Somebody really wants to see what’s going on down there.”
I shot her a look and began to move away, threading my way through the chaos of broken-down cars. My boots ground against shards of glass coating the street as I walked, but I managed to mitigate the sound, trying to keep our approach as silent as possible. Mags and Alejandro moved similarly to me—the trick was putting weight on the outside edge of your foot when you stepped, rolling your foot down rather than planting it. It had felt odd when I’d first started practicing it, but after a while it had become ingrained.
But the limited time we’d had to train with our refugees—and eve
n a few of Mags’ team—meant that many people were making more noise than necessary. I kept a sharp eye on the building windows on either side of us, but didn’t stop until we were a few feet from the intersection. I motioned with my hand, and we split into two teams, one on either side of the street. At least they were all fairly proficient at following my signals.
I glanced over to where Alejandro stood up front. He was peering down his scope at the building on the adjacent corner. I turned to Margot and nodded, and she slowly raised her rifle, scoping the building on the other side. Our practice was to stand at the corners and appraise the other team’s side of the intersection for better visibility.
“The building opposite you is four stories tall, set behind a small park,” said Alejandro on the team channel. “The park creates a wide-open space, which gives the building behind it a better view of the street.”
“The one on your side is two stories, and pressed right up against the street,” I replied. “It’s doubtful anyone’s holed up in there.”
“Which means if there is anybody watching, they will be in the building Alejandro has eyes on.” Mags’ voice sounded grim. I hesitated, and then pushed up closer to the intersection, heading for the sharp corner of the building. “What are you doing?” she asked as I crossed the threshold from darkness to light, the glow extending beyond the actual intersection.
“I want to see what we’re dealing with,” I said as I eased forward.
I kept my eyes on the building on Alejandro’s side, just in case, but there was no movement in any of the windows. As I reached the corner, I knelt down, and then slowly peeked around the side, staring at the building across the street. The gray concrete building Alejandro had noticed rose above the small park, the windows dark and eerie. I watched it for a long moment, knowing I was exposed from either side, and then moved back to the shadows.
“It’s too good an ambush spot,” I admitted to Mags. “We need to go around.”
Mags crossed to me with quick, silent steps, pulled out her map, and spread it open on the hood of one of the many broken cars nearby, using a penlight with a red glow to illuminate the large piece of paper. I bent over it to find our location while Mags pulled the handheld from her satchel, flicking it on and searching through camera feeds.
“Mulbury and Doxit?” I asked, tapping on the intersection back and to the north.
Mags began speaking into her radio on the other channel, asking Henrik about the camera numbers for the intersection, and I continued to examine the map, feeling more and more dejected as I studied it. If Mulbury and Doxit weren’t clear, then we’d either have to head four blocks back or two blocks to the east before we could start another trajectory, easily losing half an hour in the process.
“Viggo?” I turned and found Tim standing there.
“Hey, buddy. What’s up?”
The lanky young man looked over my shoulder at the intersection. “What problem?”
I frowned. “You’re not supposed to break rank, Tim,” I said. He gave me a sardonic look, and I sighed. “The fires in the intersection might be bait meant to draw people out, and there’s a building that has a good view of the street. If we move into the open, and there are people in there with guns, they could easily kill a lot of us.”
He frowned and tossed his hair. “Take out lights?”
I glanced down the road at where he was looking, studying the barrels. They weren’t secured by anything, but I didn’t see a good way of putting the fires out. They were too large, too spread out, and too likely to cause chaos if they tipped. Maybe someone could get one, but if there were shooters in the building, I doubted very much that whoever went in would be coming back out.
Opening my mouth to explain this all to Tim, I was interrupted by Mags snapping her fingers at me to get my attention. I followed the line of her arm up to her face. “Main channel,” she said, turning her handheld around and showing me a strangely dark screen.
Clicking over, I came in on the middle of Thomas saying, “—hacked. It’s only a matter of time before the Matrians—ninety percent chance it’s the Matrians—get into our system.”
“What’s getting hacked?” I asked, straightening in alarm.
“The cameras!” he practically shouted, and I could hear the stress in his voice. “I’m hacking her back, but she’s good, and she’s clearly got better equipment than I do.”
“How long do we have, Thomas?”
“A lot longer if you’d all stop bugging me,” he bristled. “So stop bugging me!”
I switched back over to our channel and moved over to Mags. “How did that other intersection look?” I asked.
“Not good,” she said as she turned the handheld around and held it out to me. Two of the cameras were out and a third was transmitting upside down—presumably having been torn from its mount—but it only showed a small fraction of the street, the remaining screen filled with the blank surface of a pole the lens was facing. The last camera was upright, but the angle was bad on that one, too.
In the view from that camera, two dark shadows were grappling with each other in the orange flicker of a fire burning just off screen. One man’s face was visible, and I could see wet blood coating half of it. They pushed against each other, the man’s mouth opening in a roar, and then something cut in from the side and tackled them both, pulling them down and off screen.
“I’ve seen at least four different people since Henrik gave me the numbers,” she said softly. “I think we gotta risk it.”
“Viggo, what’s going on?” Alejandro cut in over the team channel, and I turned to see his dark form still pressed against the building.
“The other route is a no-go,” I informed him and everyone who was listening. “People are rioting in the streets. We need a minute to decide how to get past this intersection without attracting any attention.”
“No, Viggo. I mean why is Tim heading into that intersection carrying all that stuff?”
I turned and gaped as I watched Tim enter that red-orange halo of light, holding several big, flat objects against his side, under his arm. He looked around the intersection for a moment, then moved over to the first barrel, his pace calm and confident.
“Everyone get guns on that building now!” I ordered into the link, taking quick steps toward the intersection. Clicking off the safety to my rifle, I jogged down the sidewalk and then knelt by the wall, using the corner for cover as I sighted down at the building. There was no movement that I could see.
I heard the sound of thin metal flexing, and turned to see Tim standing fifteen feet away, holding a piece of metal that looked like it might have come from the hood of a car at some point.
He lay the metal down over the rim of the barrel, his face going from orange to shadow. “Clever boy,” Alejandro praised him through the earpiece, but I found it hard to agree. Tim was out in the open, exposed to anybody who might be looking. While his idea to smother out the fires might have been clever, his execution was—
I would’ve missed the muzzle flash if I hadn’t been staring so intently at the suspicious building. The crack of the gunshot sounded loud in the quiet street, and I whirled back toward Tim with a cry. But he was still standing. In fact, he was nonchalantly approaching the next barrel, this one near Alejandro.
“Shooter—fourth floor, third window from the left!” I transmitted.
“How the hell did he do that?” Mags cut in, and I could hear the alarm in her voice—and maybe a touch of awe.
Another gunshot sounded, and this time I kept my eyes on Tim. If I hadn’t, I would never have believed it. One minute he was holding an undersized garbage lid out over the barrel, and the next moment, he had moved back a step, so quickly that it was hard to see—a ping sounding from behind him where a bullet bit into some trash near where he’d been standing.
Tim moved the step back and dropped the garbage lid into the can, covering most, if not all, of the flames. Then the gunfire began in earnest. Tim went low, leaping bac
k and forth in a zigzag as he raced for the third barrel. He made a graceful roll, holding his collection of firefighting objects tightly to his chest, and ended in a crouch behind the third barrel.
I recovered from my amazement, the feeling that I was watching some kind of scripted dance. “Give him covering fire, NOW!” I shouted at my team, and began to shoot at the windows where the muzzle flares had come from, randomly, just to put up some resistance, even though the chances of hitting someone blind like this were incredibly low. The gun kicked against my shoulder as I depressed the trigger, shells ejecting from the side and clinking against the pavement.
“Margot can’t see anything,” reported Cad. “The building isn’t lit inside, or if it is, it’s only giving enough light to benefit them.”
“Just keep firing—anything helps. Give Tim a chance to get those fires out!” I ordered, coming back around the corner to eject the magazine. My hands moved almost automatically, working the gun as they’d done hundreds of times before, as my eyes found their way back to Tim. He was still hiding behind the third barrel. Bullets bit into the pavement beside him, but he didn’t panic as he carefully lifted up a third flat object. I couldn’t tell what it was, but he slowly, almost leisurely, slid it over the rim of the barrel, pushing it with his fingertips.
A bullet pinged off the lid, and Tim yelped, dropping his head back down. In the orange light, I could see enough sweat on his skin that it glistened in the firelight, but he didn’t stop. He reached back up with one arm and finished pushing the object across. The flickering light cut off immediately.
Tim turned around slowly, placing his back to the barrel. “Tim, come back!” I shouted at him, knowing he was eyeing the last barrel. And while most of me was growling in a protective conniption fit… part of me wanted, somewhere deep down inside, to see him go for it—to see him win.