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Volga rushes to me as I try to stand. There’s a dent the size of a grapefruit in the center of my chest armor. Several broken ribs scream as Volga hauls me to my feet and drags me into the car.
“Torch the body. Get the girl…” I say through gritted teeth.
Volga stands over Dano’s body and holds down the trigger on her rifle. Concentrated energy melts through Dano’s corpse, leaving a steaming heap of crackling tissue and oozing bones. She rushes back to Lyria. The Red girl issues horrible moans from her paralyzed throat toward the big Gold man on the ground. Volga throws her in the trunk. She grabs my gun from the ground as I stare out the windshield as the Gold, impossibly, pushes himself up to his knees. The flesh of his right side melts off the bones, anacene pumps in his blood, but he’s still trying to stand. “Paxxx…” he roars. The room vibrates as ships try to pound their way in through the roof.
“Drive!” I shout at Volga. “Drive!”
She jumps into the driver’s seat and slams on the pedal. As we shoot away into the darkness of our escape route, we hear the door finally give and crash down into the garage. Volga drives at breakneck speeds through the half-constructed hospital, faster than Dano did in our practice runs. We weave between support beams and equipment as I stare out the back of the car, watching in terror for pursuing airborne knights.
I hold my chest and wheeze.
Like an egg. Dano’s head caved in like an egg.
After a kilometer of switchbacks and vertical elevator shafts leading to connecting buildings, we reach the staging ground in the abandoned canning warehouse and pull up in front of a makeshift clean room—metal frame pipes with plastic sheets enclosing it. I half-expected a dozen Syndicate thorns to be waiting for us
with heavy weapons and Gorgo at their head. But they want to stay as far away from this shitshow as possible. Our headlights illuminate Cyra standing nervously with the two needle-thin contractors I met two nights ago. They wear operating smocks, one a Violet, the other a Yellow.
“Where is Dano?” Cyra asks as she comes to greet us from her mobile station. A dozen holograms from cameras she placed fill the air around it. On the holos the hospital is swarming with soldiers come for the boy. The cameras inside the garage have gone black.
“Dead,” I say.
“How?”
“Gold.”
“Shit. Shit. Shit,” Cyra says under her breath as Volga drags the children out of the back of the vehicle straight into the clean room, where she loads each onto a table. Inside, the Syndicate technicians move with haste. They slice open the children’s clothing till they are naked. No. Not children. They’re killers in training. I know what they’ll become. Golds that pop heads like eggs.
Without even thinking, I pull out my dispenser and pop several zoladone in my mouth and crush them between my teeth. They fizz and I feel the cool fire spread against my tongue and the inside of my cheek, radiating into my blood vessels and carrying the warmth down into my body, sending chemicals to my brain to kill the fear and the pain in my ribs. I exhale a calm breath and look back at the car where Lyria lies inert.
I turn my attention to the technicians. We’re on schedule, but the schedule doesn’t feel fast enough anymore. I shouldn’t have wasted time in the ship getting Lyria. Dano’s neck breaks again. I grimace and glance at the holograms. A flight of armored soldiers is landing around the hospital just four buildings from where we stand.
“Hurry up!” Cyra says to the Syndicate men.
“Don’t distract them,” I say. “Recheck the detonators. Then get out of here.”
I don’t have to tell her twice. Cyra’s hoverbike whines as it departs through the escape tunnel. Only when I’m sure she’s gone do I go back to the junker. I haul Lyria out and move her into the backseat of our clean car, a ten-seat taxi that sits next to the other rides. I take out our bags and dump our changes of clothes onto the floor, then lean back in to speak with Lyria. Her big red eyes stare up at me.
“You’ve been drugged with anacene-17. It will last another hour.” I consider the Telemanus. He was four times her body weight. “Maybe less. We’re going to meet some very bad people. When the drug wears off, do not speak, do not move. If you do, they will kill you. Afterwards, if you behave, I will take you wherever you want to go and give you enough money to start a new life.” On the zoladone my voice sounds like a robot’s. It’s a lie I’m telling her; she’ll be hunted forever, but I’ll still give her a running start. She deserves that at least. “Do you understand?” She can’t blink or move. Hate is all she can manage. “Good.”
I stack a bag on her face and cover the rest of her body. Even beneath the zoladone, I know I will hate myself later. I know the look in her eyes is one I’ll never forget. Add it to the pile. I strip my gear and toss it into a metal barrel and dress in one of my black Kortaban suits.
“Volga, strip and burn,” I say when she emerges from the clean room. She dumps corrosive acid into the barrel after she’s stripped her gear.
“Found it,” the Yellow with a metal sniffer nose says inside the clean room. “Right shoulder blade.” The Violet, this one with multihued chimeras tattooed onto either side of his neck, finds the mark, and soon two wicked-looking drills whir to life. Metal burrows into skin. The children whimper through numb mouths as the Syndicate contractors dig out the imbed tracking devices with forceps. Tears tumble out of the children’s paralyzed ducts. The men toss the bloody little chips into a container.
“They’re babynaked and ready to roll,” the Violet says.
“Double-check for radiation stains,” I say, gingerly feeling my ribs. “Don’t be sloppy.” After they’ve finished, the two operators shove the children into plastic smocks and then drag them out of the clean room. The knights on the hologram jump into the garage through the hole punched by the ships. The operators leave the children with us and depart in their own vehicle, taking it through a subterranean tunnel that links with abandoned tramways. Volga takes both children and loads them into the back of the taxi, laying them parallel on the seats as gentle as a mum tucking her kids in for a nap. She lingers there looking down at them.
“Volga.”
She jerks her head up to glare at me and slams the taxi door hard enough to rattle the glass. “Fuck you too,” I say calmly. I leave her to go activate the timer on the explosive charges outside the clean room. Thirty seconds starts ticking down. I activate the charges in the junker car, toss another next to the barrel for good measure, and hop in the driver’s seat of the taxi as Volga tosses one of her charges into the clean room too. I follow the path of the Syndicate operators down into the tunnels.
“If you gotta leave the field, do it in style,” I mutter without heart. Soon as the old drill instructor’s words are out of my mouth, the concussion of the charges going off shakes the tunnel. A second set of charges goes off a minute later at the tunnel’s entrance, collapsing it behind us. We drive in silence, Volga pinched in the seat next to mine.
The high of the heist died with Dano. Neither Volga nor I expected to survive this. And now that we have, the weight of living comes crashing down on the big girl. She rolls down her window and closes her eyes, sticking her hand out into the wind like it’s a dolphin riding the waves. She sits six inches from me, but we might as well be worlds apart. Cold, fetid air from the tunnels rolls through the car. We pass ramps going down deeper into the undergrid of the city. The tension works its way out of my jaw, but the sight of Dano’s blood on the fists of the Gold oozes through my skull. Volga links her datapad with the taxi and turns on Ridoverchi.
As his piano plays a gentle melody and we carve our way through the darkness, tears stream from her eyes, but not from mine.
