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Her unease was at full force now, like an icy hand pressed against her spine. Where was everyone?
“His lab’s got to be through there,” Viktis said, gesturing at the final door.
“There could be anything waiting for us behind there,” Finn said softly. “Whoever did this could still be here.”
“I hope they are,” Viktis growled.
Renna ordered her implant to scan for heat signatures. “There’s nothing alive behind that door,” she said with the shake of her head.
Finn’s hand tightened on his blaster. “Still doesn’t mean there can’t be danger. Are you both ready?”
Renna and Viktis nodded.
“Let’s do this,” Viktis said. He kicked the door open, and Renna and Finn burst into the room, guns sweeping the space. She froze at the utter destruction that had turned Wall’s neat lab into an apocalyptic scene. The space was cavernous, built of steel and cement. Fluorescent lights glowed overhead, casting stark shadows over the rows of smoking machinery Wall had used to produce the black market drug, clay. The drug that had destroyed Renna’s childhood
Its burnt-sugar scent mingled with the copper stench of blood. It clogged Renna’s throat and made her stomach convulse. And then she saw them.
Six of Wall’s men hung from the steel rafters by their ankles.
Blood dripped from where their heads used to be, and the floor beneath their bodies was a crimson lake that had already started to coagulate.
Acid burned her throat, and Renna swallowed it back as she turned away from the grisly scene. Viktis and Finn had already moved farther into the room, their guns at the ready.
Renna pulled her shirt over her nose and followed them toward the other end of the room where a wall of flickering holo monitors loomed.
As they cleared the last stack of destroyed crates, Finn flung out his arm. “Stay back.” His voice went hoarse, and dread curled tightly in Renna’s chest.
Viktis pushed past her, only to stop dead.
Oh, gods.
There was nothing Renna could do but step forward as well. And then she wished she hadn’t.
It was Wall. Or had been before whoever’d killed him had split him open from neck to navel. He lay prostrate, arms and legs extended in a grotesque mockery of how they’d found Myka back in Navang’s lab.
His face had been sliced off, leaving only a bloody skull behind. His insides spilled onto the floor beside him in a pile of pink, slimy mush. A single holoscreen had been inserted into the cavity to take the place of his heart and lungs.
The iron-rich scent of his blood mingled with the odor of decay already rising from his body. Renna pressed a hand to her lips, revulsion making her unable to look away. As she stared, the holoscreen in Wall’s chest cavity flickered on. Light glowed behind the streaks of Wall’s blood that dripped down the corner of the monitor, but it wasn’t enough to hide the horror of what played there.
It was Renna.
Lips parted, she watched herself hack into the MYTH computers and copy files to her optical drive. Oh, gods. Someone had recorded this the day Dallas had gotten her access to the MYTH files.
“I had permission to be there,” she protested. “Major Dallas knew about this.”
The scene continued with a list of files scrolling across the screen. Finn’s eyebrows drew together. “He knew you were accessing those?”
“I was searching for Pallas’s information. Of course he didn’t know. He thought I was searching for clues to find the Athena.”
On the screen, she furtively copied over more information, then bent down beneath the bank of computers before finally leaving the room.
The scene fast-forwarded several hours according to the time stamp across the bottom of the screen. And then the images slowed again. A spark of something burst from below the computer bank, creating a small puff of black smoke.
As they watched, the whole room exploded.
Renna gasped and stepped back. “I was picking up the holodisk that I dropped,” she protested. “I didn’t plant that bomb!” Her mind spun with everything that had happened in the last few days. Wall’s horrible death, Samil’s trap on Tartarus, the explosion in the MYTH facility that took down the defenses.
Dr. Samil had played them all.
Her gaze focused on the body holding the holomonitor, and a cry tore from Renna’s lips. She turned away from the man’s desecrated corpse, from the image of herself doing the unthinkable, from the questions in Finn’s eyes, from Viktis’s sick expression.
Finn grabbed her, pulling her face against his chest. “Shhh. It’s okay, Renna. It’s going to be okay.”
She sobbed against his shoulder. “It’s never going to be okay.”
Viktis gingerly removed the disk from the holodevice, then turned back to them. “Pull it together, Ren,” he said. “You need to get into Wall’s safe and see if your drugs are still here.”
Finn stroked her back. “You can do this. And then we can get the hell out of here and kick Samil’s ass.”
She took a shaky breath, still breathing through her mouth to avoid the scent of death, and tried to push away the horrors around her. She had a job to do. She’d seen things as bad as this before. They just hadn’t hit quite so close.
Renna nodded into Finn’s shoulder. “All right. I can do it. I’ll be okay.” Without looking around, she headed directly for Wall’s safe.
Her heart sank when she saw it was a state-of-the-art model, like all of Wall’s tech, but she squared her shoulders and crouched in front of it, concentrating as hard as she could on the keypad and electronics. Not the eerily silent warehouse of the dead around her.
Two minutes later, the safe cracked open. With a stifled scream of both anger and disgust, she kicked the door shut so hard it sprang back open.
Wall’s severed hand lay palm up on the bottom of the safe, an empty vial clutched between his cold, stiff fingers. Renna’s drug was gone.
“I’m going to kill that bitch if it’s the last thing I do.” Her voice shook, but this time it was fury, not horror.
Finn wrapped an arm around Renna and pulled her back toward the door. Viktis surveyed the warehouse one last time, letting his gaze drop to his former friend’s body. “When you do, I want to be there to watch.”
TWENTY-THREE
Renna crawled into the speeder, not protesting when Finn took the driver’s seat. As they drove off, she stared out the window, unseeing. Her skin crawled, and all she wanted was a hot shower and a stiff drink.
