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“That’s not possible,” Dante says, jumping up and knocking his chair over in the process.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, unease creeping, unwanted, into my chest.
“It’s a perimeter alert. We’ve had a breech in one of the entrances.” He’s already starting down the hall, and we have to race to catch up.
“Remnants?” I ask.
Dante doesn’t respond. He’s busy sliding through screens on a companel. It’s Guild tech, much more advanced than anything we’ve seen on Earth so far.
How flexible are the Sunrunners in their alliances?
He lands on the security stream that sho
ws the point of access. The feed glows green and white, so we can see the movement in the darkness outside. A handful of humans are tearing at Dumpsters in an alley.
“Is that here?” I ask.
“In the back,” Dante murmurs.
Jost thinks to ask a more useful question. “Is this normal?”
“That, maybe,” he says, pointing to the Rems leaping out from the garbage bins, but then he swipes the image to the next feed. “This isn’t.”
The stream shows a crumpled steel door lying on its hinges in the alley. One of the Rems is caught underneath it. It’s a woman from the look of her long hair, but I can’t see her face and she isn’t moving. The feed shifts to show Remnants inside a concrete holding area, much like the sally port we entered through.
“The Guild must have given them some fancy explosives to get through our doors,” Dante says. “They’re not here to blow us up, they’re trying to reap us.”
“Can they get in?”
“Doubtful. The holding areas are triple reinforced—two layers of concrete and steel supports in between. Anything they used to get through that would kill them, and we have our own booby trap that will be triggered if they try to take out the other door.”
The camera feeding us the stream of the holding area circles to the next corner of the room, and I feel my heart thumping hard in my chest. I’ve barely glimpsed the footage before the stream changes again, but the last image is all I can process.
They have Erik.
SIX
THE ALARM DOESN’T FADE AND ITS WAIL pierces the air, pounding in my ears. Thoughts and ideas tumble through my head as quickly as they evaporate. How did this happen? How did they know to bring Erik here? Has the Guild found us?
Are we being watched?
Dante wastes no time pulling rifles from a storage unit in the safe house. He starts to hand me one but hesitates, and I understand what he’s thinking. He doesn’t want me to go. Maybe Sunrunners don’t think much of girls, but I have my own tricks. I refuse the rifle, reaching for a short knife with a serrated blade.
“Jost and I can handle this,” Dante says.
“He’s right. Those things are after something,” Jost says. It’s a warning. Jost thinks they’ve come for me, but there’s no reason to believe that. Except that they chose this safe house to attack. And that they took Erik as a prisoner. So actually there are several reasons to think that.
“Maybe,” I grant him, “but they aren’t going to get it.”
The security stream doesn’t show anyone near the main entrance, so we head there.
“Don’t you have more men?” I ask Dante as we slip into the darkness outside.
“They’re around. Some aren’t in yet, others are probably already sleeping before they take the early patrol shift,” Dante says.
“Should we—I don’t know—wake them up?” I suggest.
Dante grabs my arm to stop me, and his eyes look black in the night as he peers down at me. “It’s for your own good that I’m not getting anyone involved yet. Once Kincaid knows about you, he’ll expect an audience with you—and probably a whole lot more than that. And I won’t bring anyone else in until you explain things to me.”
