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  She spun around, meaning to cut Yin and be on her way; but the dust was already clearing, and Avalon would be on her if she waited any longer. The open window was her only option. If she didn’t take it immediately, there would be no second chance.

  Lea jumped.

  Yin quickly recovered. He forced himself to his feet, cradling his wounded head and feeling the blood trickle out of his ears. He had to shout to hear himself, but also to cover up his fear.

  “Status!”

  Yin didn’t know who answered him, nor did he care. He only heard what he already knew, from the crackle of pulse fire that ripped into the core.

  “Weapons discharge,” one of the ronin yelled. “High confidence, attack dispersal. Coming right up through the main gate.”

  “Identify!”

  There was a hit on one of the support pylons below the booth. Half of the nodes erupted in sparks, while the floor lurched downward. Yin grabbed the nearest console and held on, like a captain on the deck of a foundering vessel. Banks of equipment broke away from their mounts, crashing past him as the booth settled at an extreme angle. Somehow, the pylon held—but only as a gnarled mass, dangling on the verge of collapse.

  Everyone was gone. Out through the broken windows, buried under piles of wreckage—all of them had disappeared. Yin struggled toward the only working node he could find, and bashed his hands against the interface until a flicker appeared on the display. All he could get was an audiograph, showing the spectrum of tactical frequencies utilized by Corporate Special Services. To Yin’s horror, the image came alive with chatter. From Point Eiffel all the way down into the catacombs, their readings were everywhere.

  Yin lost the image when another explosion blew the rest of his power. He dragged himself to the window, teetering over the side—and that was when he saw them. Dozens of them, outfitted in full combat gear and with enough weaponry to fight a small war. They poured in through the hole where the vault door once stood, the advance teams laying down a constant barrage of fire while the rear echelon prepared to occupy the space.

  “Avalon!”

  He shrieked her name. The free agent did not reply, and still Yin called out to her. Over and over again, until his throat burned and his voice cracked—the word came back to mock him and his ruined empire.

  “Answer me!”

  The floor beneath him folded. What was left of the support pylons gave way, and the booth plunged with them. Yin felt the walls compressing him, pushed on by the bellow of twisting steel—a primordial sound, not unlike the rage contained in the remains of his soul. It was all he could think about.

  Alden . . .

  In the midst of that torture, Yin could hear him laughing.

  Lea flew.

  She rode the adrenaline, her intellect displaced by chemical reactions and a need for flight. It translated to a kind of animal grace, strength, and momentum, which propelled her through the air as the heat of weapons fire carved up the atmosphere around her. Lea pivoted herself downward, going headfirst into a dive while her arms reached out for anything that could arrest her fall. Through a haze of dust, she found it—and wrapped her body around the jutting shaft like it was her only tether to life.

  Lea slid.

  Along one of the support pylons, away from the control booth, she hit the ground hard enough to crush bones—though in her jazzed state, that would not have stopped her. Lea just went on reflex, rolling with the impact and working out the pain after she got to her feet. She remained in a crouch, her eyes narrowing as she searched the chamber for the source of the attack that had saved her. Outside of Zone agents, there was only one kind of breed that hit this hard. When Lea spotted the line of troops moving in her direction, those fears were all but confirmed.

  Special Services, she seethed. They sent a fucking hit squad.

  The point man fired—though in the commotion, Lea doubted they even saw her. They were aiming with sensors, pulverizing anything that moved as they advanced on the core. Two of Yin’s mercs were cut down where they stood, while the others scattered into the swelling Inru horde for protection. It did them no good. The troops unleashed pulse fire on widest dispersal, tearing into the crowd without discrimination.

  It became a tangle of limbs and confusion. People fell to the left and to the right, with bright bolts of energy fusing flesh and oxygen into ozone. Lea tried to push her way out, but got slapped by a beam that passed only centimeters in front of her face. Another burst followed, which struck one of the spires and bounced off its surface—a ricochet that headed straight up into the base of the control booth. At that very moment, Lea looked up into a bloom of cinders that showered on her like hot hail.

  Blinded, she got up and ran.

  Pulse fire dogged Lea’s every step. She went on instinct, urged by the crush of metal and the screams of those she left behind. She somehow made it to the bank of computers just outside the core and flopped behind one of them to take cover.

  Lea wiped the soot from her eyes. Her vision turned liquid and surreal, putting distance between her and the surrounding chaos. She was the only person still inside the core, insulated from the weapons fire by waves of neural energy, everything around her taking on the shades of illusion. She watched the control booth, already in a violent plunge, ejecting bodies and machinery like it was trying to shake them out; but there was also the procession of Inru, drawn to the crumbling structure, who just stood there and watched, oblivious to the dangers above them and behind. A crossbeam fell on one and crushed him, after he made no move to save himself. Others became easy targets for CSS snipers, who picked them off one after the other.

  The control booth pancaked as it struck the ground in front of them.

  The crash consumed the dissonance of noise echoing throughout the chamber, then bled away into a disturbing silence. All the pulse fire stopped—but beneath the stillness emerged something far more ominous, in the way it gathered strength and synchronicity. It was slow and deliberate, the pace of a funeral march, but with a steady, military precision that made Lea assume the worst. She peeked out from her hiding place, waiting on the dust to clear and expecting to find columns of CSS advancing on her. She wanted to see if there was anywhere left to run—but then the marching passed right by her, away from the wreckage on its way to the cathedral tunnel.

  Inru.

  More than Lea had seen. More than Lea had imagined. As many of them had fallen, more had come in to take their place. They formed themselves along perfect lines, like pieces on a chessboard, moving forward in perfect unison. They stepped over their own dead, stopping only to pick up a stone or a brick or any other loose piece of debris that could be used as a weapon, and headed directly toward the CSS flank.

  Their faces were vacant, distant—not the zombies they had been before. Those people had craved flesh. These were just a blank.

  What the hell is this?

  The CSS troops stood their ground as the crowd approached. They prepared to lay down a battery of fire that would turn the ground between them into a killing zone, but the Inru kept on coming. Any self-awareness they might have had was gone, replaced by a relentless push—like some unseen hand moving pawns across a chessboard.

  Cray . . .

  The thought grabbed Lea and spun her around. There, she found the sarcophagus alight with power. Not from the umbilicals, which had been severed at Yin’s command, but from a perpetual source contained within. It was Cray, very much alive and very much aware. He had jacked the entire complex, and was playing the Inru to buy her time.

  Get out of here, Lea.

  His voice was an addiction, his words opiate. They summoned an escape tube, which sprouted from the ground near the center of the core. The door slid open and revealed a space big enough for a single person. Designed to accommodate the sarcophagus in the event of a disaster, it had become an escape route for Lea. Cray was showing her the way out.

  While you still have the chance.

  “Stop where you are!” the Spe
cial Services command officer shouted at the Inru. “Stop, or we will open fire!”

  Lea turned toward them. They showed no signs of slowing down. Cray wouldn’t allow them. She turned back.

  “Don’t do this, Cray.”

  No choice. This is the way Yin wants it, the way it has to be.

  “You’re better than that.”

  No, I’m not. But you are.

  Lea felt a collective electricity, the energizing of heavy pulse cannons. It was beginning.

  Survive, Lea. It’s all you can do.

  “The hell with it,” she muttered, and made the run.

  The first shot split the air and propagated outward, sonics shattering anything that still had a live electronic circuit. Lea ignored the ripple of explosions that followed in its wake, as she ignored the detached screams of the Inru. She also bypassed the escape tube, though a splinter of rational thought kept her eyes wandering back toward it. Cray read her thoughts and kept the pressure on. His barrage became so intense that it bordered on painful.

  You can’t help me, Lea. I’m past that now.

  “They’ve already taken everything else,” Lea said, fighting him off. She planted her hands on the smooth surface of the sarcophagus, brushing aside the frost that had caked on the glass. Cray was still in there, a vibrant apparition in the cold—both powerful and vulnerable as he cashed in the remains of his life. “They’re not getting the rest of you.”

  Shots landed outside the core. Lea couldn’t count how many—maybe a dozen, maybe more, small-arms fire combined with a volley of tactical artillery. CSS was taking the chamber apart. It wouldn’t be long before they were through with the Inru and came for her.

  Please, Lea.

  “God knows what they’ll do if I leave you here.” Lea scanned the racks of equipment, trying to figure out how to reverse the cryogenic process. “We go, we go together.”

  None of that matters anymore.

  “The hell it doesn’t.” A stray blast plowed into one of the computer banks. It exploded and fell over, knocking down the rest like a chain of dominoes. Lea struggled to keep her focus on Cray, but it was getting to be impossible. “Just tell me how to shut this damned thing off, will you? All this talk is making me jumpy.”

  One of the spires took a hit. Lea threw herself over the sarcophagus, as a surge of glittering particles settled over her like gold dust. Both matter and energy, they lighted on her only for a second before rising back into the air. Lea followed them, into a whirlpool that drew them around the other spires and formed a conduit that led straight into Point Eiffel. It was only visible for a moment, but Lea understood the significance. The fading ebb of Cray’s neural pulse proved it.

  He was pushing himself into the transmitter.

  “No!” Lea shouted, beating her hands against the glass. She glared at the still life of Cray’s visage, while a ghostly flood of St. Elmo’s fire crawled in reflection along the surface of the spires. “Cray, the translink is down. You have no viable link to the Axis. If you don’t stop, you’ll project yourself into empty space.”

  Taking myself out of the equation, love.

  “Don’t you run out on me, Cray. Not like this.”

  Only way . . . to get . . . you to go.

  He was only coming through in fragments, his manifestation weakening. Lea leaned in closer, trying to maintain her hold on him, but he was slipping. Too much of his mind had already passed, and what remained was locked on a single concept assembled out of incomplete data. Cray gathered the pieces and packed them into a tight stream, then broadcast them as he would utter words with his last breath.

  —she’s here she’s here she’s here she’s here—

  It was a warning. Lea read his intent, while a shock of adrenaline arced her system in a cold current. In the glass, she caught a hint of motion parting the fog behind her, a danger made all the more critical because she could not see it. Lea relaxed every muscle in her body and fell away from the sarcophagus—just ahead of a ferocious blow that split the window into a thousand spidering cracks.

  Lea rolled away, into the exchange of fire between the Inru and Special Services. She jumped to her feet regardless, not caring about the pulse beams that seared the space between her and the core. In front of her there was only the enemy, which floated out of the mist like an angry revenant—more dead than living, eyes burning and fixed.

  “Hello again,” Avalon said.

  Noises, out from the deep.

  Collected and focused, down at the dark end of a tunnel—just beneath the surface, he could hear them: an amalgam of human voices passing back and forth, punctuated by the drumbeat of heavy-arms fire. The constant pounding awoke him and oriented him, plucking his senses out of the wreckage and giving him a place to reach. It fell into focus through broken slats of light, which he clawed at greedily. A connection with the above, he determined to seize it before it disappeared.

  He broke the air, blinded by brightness and choking on dust. Pain displaced his awareness, and with it the flood of memories of what had happened. But his eyes remained open, and the images that rushed back in to fill the vacuum showed him a disaster far worse than he could have imagined.

  The entire chamber lay in ruins. Smoke and flames obscured most of the destruction, but where the veil thinned he could see CSS troops finishing off what was left. The waves of Inru who had thrown themselves in front of the attack lay dead, scattered across the floor in bits and pieces, fresh bones to join the others in the catacombs. The few who survived seemed without direction and wandered about aimlessly until they were overrun. It was surreal, to watch them walk into their own deaths without any concern—but as he drank it all in, he realized he was no different. Buried in the debris of the control booth, he could do nothing but wait for the soldiers to come for him.

  Out of sheer despair, he searched the chamber for any recognizable feature. He quickly settled on the core, where the seven spires remained intact. He thought it impossible that they should be untouched, and even more impossible that they were still active; yet there they were, conducting rhythms of light, a distinct bionucleic signature bound to a vortex of its own making. At first, the sight of it was beautiful and hypnotic. Then, slowly, he began to recognize latent patterns in the energy flow—a downcycle that was repeating itself at shorter and shorter intervals, heading toward an inevitable shutdown.

  A full-scale memory dump was in progress. The core was wiping itself clean.

  He reached out and willed for it to stop. When that didn’t work, he reached even farther. One hand out in front, he pulled himself out of the wreckage. He didn’t know how much of his body was still left, or if he even had the strength to make it to the core; his only thought was of Alden, of how he was the one responsible. With hatred pushing him, and fury shielding him, he snaked his way across the floor—one body amongst the many, writhing for every inch.

  Phao Yin would not permit Alden the luxury of suicide. He would see him suffer an eternity first.

  Lea barely saw it coming—a disconnected phase of precise motion, cause and effect. With dazzling speed, an approach so covert, the free agent’s wake engulfed Lea just ahead of her hands. They stabbed out at her, fingers tearing flesh like talons, before retracting and spinning away. It was just a glancing blow, but the damage was done. Lea felt her blood spill before she felt any pain, and her legs collapsed beneath her.

  Down on her knees, she pawed at her neck for the gash she knew was there. Instead, she found a slice running down the side of her left cheek. It bled profusely, but it was nowhere near a fatal wound. Avalon had missed her throat, by accident or by design—but none of that mattered. It was only a preview of things to come.

  Shaking off her dizziness, Lea got up again. She raised her hands in a defensive posture, and looked up to find Avalon standing several meters off. The free agent had been waiting for her to recover, before she tried a second pass. To Avalon, it was nothing more than a game. That the chamber was falling down around them
only made it more exhilarating.

  “Strike one,” the free agent said.

  Lea looked over Avalon’s shoulder, and saw the firefight winding down. Several squads of CSS fanned out to secure the rest of the complex, including one that headed straight for the core.

  “Don’t worry,” Avalon told her. “I’ll deal with them as soon as I’m finished with you.”

  Lea believed it. Hand to hand, she was doomed. Her only chance was the quicksilver—but only if she got Avalon close enough.

  “Sure you’re up to it?” Lea fired back. Her tone was mocking, meant to provoke the free agent. “You couldn’t even get it up hard enough to do Cray.”

  Avalon grinned. Her right hand dripped with Lea’s blood. Licking her fingertips clean, she locked them into a claw.

  “Let’s try that again,” she said.

  Then the free agent was gone, a pirouette shooting straight into the air. The force that propelled her was unimaginable, as were the physics behind her descent. Swooping back down, she curled herself into a ball and bounced off the floor, converting her downward trajectory into a forward rush. She then flipped over in midair, inverted as she made a grab for Lea’s head.

  Lea ducked. She was quick enough to avoid getting her neck snapped, but too slow to beat Avalon’s punch. Agony penetrated her skull like a drill, compressing her vision into a tunnel filled with stars. When it cleared, Lea found herself stumbling back toward the core. One hand feebly clutched the quicksilver; the other capped the new wound on her forehead, stemming fresh blood that trickled down the front of her face.

  Avalon stood where Lea had been only a moment before. She had yet to break a sweat.

  “Strike two,” she said.

  Lea steadied herself against one of the fallen computer banks. The world around her wobbled, with only the pain keeping her conscious. Avalon wasn’t playing anymore. Still, Lea eased her hand away from the quicksilver and kept it hidden. She wasn’t ready to give up.