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The guards around her fidgeted, and the barrels of their guns dipped slightly. Here and there, the men took their eyes off her, too engrossed in silent conversations with one another to watch her carefully.
The sergeant frowned at Lila. “This isn’t a test, madam. We already had one—”
“Yes, this summer. You’ve done little better since my last visit, boy.”
One of the men whistled at the jab.
The sergeant’s lip curled. He clasped her wrists and shoved her back across the street, slamming her into the stone wall around the compound. “I take my reprimands from Chief Shaw, not a hireling thief he may or may not have hired to poke at our defenses.”
Lila wiggled in the sergeant’s grasp.
The man cursed as his handcuffs clattered at his feet. He shoved his body against hers, pressing her into the wall.
The beer bottle in her pocket pressed into her ribs. She worried it might shatter.
“Be still, you filthy workborn, else you might get hurt.”
“I’m—”
“A very good liar,” he finished for her, shoving her into the wall even harder.
The men circled around them, mouths open wide. Lila had riled their sergeant too much for him to keep his anger in check. Only the lowest workborn displayed such violence. It reflected poorly on his men and all of Bullstow that his temper broke now.
“So you’re a pervert, after all? Do you have mommy issues? Is that why you took offense when I called you boy?”
The sergeant trapped her wrists with his right hand. With his left, he removed a pen from his lapel. He dug the tip into her neck, and she felt a needle pierce her skin.
Lila yipped at the bite. With that one little prick, she knew that everything was over. In less than ten minutes, the pen would transmit her DNA profile across the Bullstow network, directly into Chief Shaw’s office. Within the hour, the sample would be run against the public database, matched, and saved to her government file. She might have altered the shape of her nose and chin with a bit of rubber prosthetics, she might have changed the color of her eyes with contacts and modified the sound of her voice, but she couldn’t change the truth in her blood.
Given the sergeant’s disposition, he might not even wait until she was arrested before he dosed her with truth serum and began an interrogation. She would confess everything and break the encryption on her star drive, and she would do it with a drunken smile on her face.
The media vans would line up outside Bullstow, the journalists frothing at the faintest whisper of a treason charge, long before Chief Shaw even stumbled into work. She’d be on the news and plastered all over the net before the citizens of New Bristol sat down to breakfast.
Why hadn’t Tristan come to her aid?
Had he set her up?
“My cuffs.” The sergeant snapped his fingers.
The guard holding her possessions retrieved the handcuffs from the sidewalk and handed them over, sliding back before the sergeant’s temper could pass to him.
Lila stopped struggling against the officer’s body. There was really no point anymore. She leaned her
forehead against the cool stone of the wall. Things were about to get complicated enough without her panicking or wasting her energy.
That was the last thought Lila had before the ground shook under her feet. The sergeant slammed into her once more, pinning her against the stone, crushing her ribs into the bottle of Saveur. But it wasn’t just her chest this time that threatened to break. Her fingers and toes and forehead all pressed into the wall as well.
A terrible boom erupted behind her, slapping against her eardrums as though the sergeant had driven a DNA pen into both her ears.
The world muted. She no longer heard the blackcoats’ radios, the fire truck’s wailing siren, the still-screaming alarm. Even the crickets and frogs on the other side of the wall went silent.
The night erupted into yellow and orange flames behind her. The air smelled of gasoline and smoke. The worst of it retreated so quickly that nothing caught fire, like a welder who turned his blowtorch on and off for a lark. Lila slid her fingers to her side as chunks of stone and wood and plaster hurtled through space, battering the wall around her in one last, rumbling barrage.
Dust and soot covered the wall, her clothes, and even her tongue.
Through the grit, Lila tasted blood.
Chapter 2
