Nara notices and presses two fingers to my wrist. “Breathe slowly.”
“I am breathing.”
“You are impersonating breathing.”
Darlene leans forward from the front seat. “You pass out before we get there, I’m telling Kauss you said his reading glasses make him look like a sexy tax auditor.”
My eyes water from pain and almost laughter. “That is private.”
“Nothing is private when people keep almost dying.”
The abandoned zoo emerges through rain and fog like a nightmare remembering its favorite shape.
The old holo-sign flickers green-gold over the entrance, its cartoon animal mascot stuttering between welcome and static. Rusted turnstiles lean broken where Kauss tore one out weeks ago. Floodwater pools in cracked pavement, reflecting emergency red from old lights someone has powered again. The exhibits beyond sit in darkness, overgrown, graffitied, and waiting. The place smells like wet leaves, rust, mold, old animal musk, plasma discharge, and fear.
Renn lands two blocks away.
“No closer,” Darlene says. “He’ll hear the engine.”
“He?” Renn asks.
“Pick one.”
I climb out before anyone can stop me.
My legs nearly fail. Nara grabs me under my good arm and hisses something medically obscene. Darlene takes my other side carefully, avoiding the immobilized shoulder.
“You cannot run,” Nara says.
“I can walk.”
“Barely.”
“Then barely is what we’ve got.”
We move through the broken gate.
Sounds reach us in pieces. Men shouting. Metal scraping. Rain striking sheet metal. A low, terrible roar that does not sound like an animal and does not sound entirely like a man.
Kauss.
My heart tries to leave my body.
We follow the sound toward the primate house.
The place is worse than before. Purple skull-blooms mark every surface. Floodwater from the storm runs down broken steps. Old holo-vines flicker across cracked walls, projecting fake jungle over real blood. Men lie scattered across the plaza outside, groaning, unconscious, restrained with their own jackets or weapons bent around their wrists. Not dead. Kauss kept that promise again until this point.
Inside the primate house, the air is hot with violence.
Old lamps throw red and purple light across the ruined enclosure. Rain pours through the broken roof. The floor is slick with puddles, blood, and shattered glass from old displays. Half a dozen gang members kneel near the far wall with their hands behind their heads. Arturo and two of Lenrog’s surviving people stand nearby, armed but not aiming.
And Kauss stands in the center of the room with a heavy pistol in his hand, pointed at Ron Sanchez.
Ron is on his knees.
The left side of his face is a burned ruin. My shot did that. The sight should make me sick, and it does, but not enough to erase the memory of him raising a gun in my bedroom. He is shaking, bleeding from his mouth, one arm hanging wrong at his side, hatred still bright in his remaining eye.
Kauss looks like war made flesh.
