“Police stations have parking lots. Parking lots have men. Men remain the galaxy’s most persistent design flaw.”
“I’m not taking a weapon into a precinct.”
“Then keep it until you get there.”
I take it because arguing will cost time.
Darlene grabs my sleeve before I can leave. Her grip is tight. “Listen to me. You get him out if you can. You bring him here if he’ll come. But you do not let that man’s guilt eat your whole life just because he looks at you like salvation baked him breakfast.”
My throat tightens. “I don’t know what he is to me.”
Her expression softens in a way that scares me worse than her sarcasm. “Yeah, you do. You’re just not ready to say it.”
I pull away gently. “Lock the door after me.”
“Look at you, stealing his lines.”
“Darlene.”
“I’ll lock it.”
I step into the rain.
Halo at night feels sharper after the attack, every alley mouth a threat, every flickering lamp a bad joke. Water splashes around my boots as I hurry toward the transit stop, one hand gripping the umbrella and the other buried in my pocket around the shock baton. My ribs ache. My bruised face pulses. The boarded bakery disappears behind me, but I carry its brokenness with me.
And beneath the fear, beneath the anger, beneath the panic churning with every step, one truth walks beside me.
Kauss came for me when I was hurt.
Now I am going for him.
CHAPTER 10
KAUSS
The abandoned Halo Zoological Park rots beneath the rain like a dead thing the city is too ashamed to bury.
Its front gate hangs crooked between two cracked concrete pillars, the old holo-sign above it flickering in sickly green and gold where a smiling animated marsupial used to welcome schoolchildren, tourists, and families with enough money to pretend Vedder City loved all its neighborhoods equally. Now the creature’s projected face glitches between cheer and static, its wide cartoon eyes blinking over rusted turnstiles, spray-painted gang marks, and puddles slick with oil. Wind pushes wet leaves across the cracked entry plaza. Somewhere inside, loose sheet metal bangs against a shuttered concession stand with a slow, hollow rhythm that sounds too much like a distant execution drum.
I stand across the street beneath the dead marquee of an old tram stop and breathe in the place.
Rain. Rust. Mold. Rotting vegetation from overgrown enclosures. Cheap stimulant vapor. Human sweat. Plasma residue. Blood, old and new.
Poison Memories.
They are inside.
I roll my shoulders once beneath my coat. The fabric is still damp from the walk through Halo, and the left sleeve pulls tight across my arm where it was never made for a body like mine. My hands are bare. That is intentional. Weapons complicate promises.
I promised Evie I would not kill them.
Her voice follows me through the rain. Haven’t you had enough fighting for one lifetime?
I close my eyes for one breath, and I see her in the wreckage of the bakery, trying to cry quietly because even grief had to behave itself in the place she worked so hard to keep warm. I see the broken display case, the boot print on her grandmother’s mural, the shattered pastries ground into the tile like something sacred made ridiculous beneath cheap shoes.
My eyes open.
I step into the zoo.
