CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Green heard it first, stopping in midstep and raising his head to listen. The other Partials stopped an instant later, warned by the link that something was happening. Kira tried to listen as well, but when the Partial soldiers all dropped to the ground in unison, taking cover and pulling up their rifles, she realized that her ears weren’t nearly as finely tuned. She pulled up her own rifle, crawling to the snow toward Green.
“What happened?”
“Gunshot,” said Green, and pointed down the road to a wide-open parking lot. “Two so far. Long gun, medium caliber by the sound of it. Sniper, but he missed what he was shooting at.”
“How can you tell all that?”
“If it was a real gunfight, they wouldn’t have been single shots, and we would have heard more than one gun.” He looked at her. “And if the sniper had hit what he was aiming for, he wouldn’t have had to shoot a second time.”
They crept down the road toward the sound, until the residential street gave way to a four-lane road with a massive shopping center on the other side. The closest building was a restaurant with a silhouette of a lobster on its sign; the parking lot was mostly empty. Looks like everyone in Hicksville decided to die at home, thought Kira. Beyond the restaurant was a strip mall, with a few of the storefronts blackened from a decades-old fire. Well, thought Kira, everyone but the looters.
“It came from over there,” said Falin, pointing past the strip mall to a multistory shopping mall two parking lots away.
“That’s good open ground,” said Kira, “easy to defend. Someone in a top window could shoot anyone who gets too close.”
“The shot came from inside,” said Green. “Which means I don’t know what this means.”
“It means it’s easier to avoid,” said Falin. “Back up a block, and we go south with cover and forget it ever happened.”
“I’d like to know what it is,” said Green, watching the mall with sharp eyes. “But I don’t need to. On the very small chance whatever it is comes after us, we’re better off out there than approaching a sniper’s nest.”
“What if it’s someone who needs our help?” asked Kira.
“If I die before expiration,” said Green, “it’s going to be because you said somebody needed our help.”
“I know,” said Kira. She scanned the parking lot, looking for anything out of the ordinary. “If you both say it’s safer to turn back, we turn—” She stopped suddenly. “Wait.”
“I see it too,” said Green. “A body, in the snow by that stand of trees.”
“We have to check it out,” said Kira.
Green sat silently, deep in thought. “It should be safe,” he said at last. “We can advance under cover of that restaurant without anyone in the mall seeing a thing. Jansson can cover us from here in case of an ambush.” They conveyed their plan quickly and efficiently between them, the link doing most of the work, and then Green and Kira ran forward, feet kicking up thick tufts of snow. The trees and the body beside them were just beyond the cover of the restaurant—a small strip of dirt and grass that had once separated the parking lot into traffic lanes now served as home to a full line of young trees. They glanced back, got the okay from Falin, and ran forward again to sink down in the shadows of the miniature grove.
The body lay on its stomach, barely covered with snow; he had fallen recently. Kira reached for his neck to feel for a pulse and recoiled with a disgusted curse when her hand touched a cold, wet hole.
“What is it?” asked Green.
“Gills,” said Kira, recovering from the shock. She rubbed her fingers compulsively, as if she was trying to physically wipe away the memory of accidentally sticking her fingers inside them.
“Interesting,” said Green. “Apparently the Blood Man brought some of his toadies with him and one of them got snagged by that sniper.”
“So the sniper might be inside that mall,” said Kira. “Now we have to go in.”
“I know,” said Green, though the slight pause before he spoke showed how reluctant he was. “I told you you were going to get me killed.”
“I have three more weeks,” said Kira. “Give me a chance.”
Green signaled to the others, and they regrouped by the back wall of the restaurant, well out of sight of the mall. Green explained the situation and mapped out a plan to approach the mall safely. They ran slightly to the right, around a bank and through the strip mall to another residential street beyond; this gave them cars and fences and houses to hide behind, and when they reached the larger mall they were already behind it, running across a narrow loading zone to a windowless blue wall. One of the loading bays was open, and they climbed through to the darkened warehouse.
At this point their communication became entirely nonverbal, and even with her adrenaline pumping Kira had to concentrate as hard as she could not only to detect all the link data but to interpret it. Emotional cues as simple as SEE and SUPPORT seemed to have much deeper meanings, sending one Partial ahead and another to a flanking position. The team moved seamlessly through the aisles and shelves, and eventually to the mall and the storefronts beyond, and Kira simply followed Green, stopping when he stopped, hiding when he hid. The link data sounded an alarm in her nervous system, and Kira found herself raising her rifle before she even understood why, firing down a hallway as a figure she hadn’t even seen dove smoothly into cover. Falin took up a firing position by the base of an escalator, and Jansson did the same in some kind of café across the hall. Green and Kira and the final soldier, a man named Colin, raced down the hall toward the fleeing shape, only to dive to the floor and scramble for cover when the entire mall seemed to explode into gunfire, bullets flying in all directions at once. Kira crawled into a clothing store, past the racks of snarky T-shirts to the sturdier wood of the counter, and covered her head with her hands. The soldiers started firing back, and Kira was deafened by the noise, until suddenly the shooting stopped and she heard a voice echoing through the halls.
“Whoa! Whoa! Everybody stop shooting . . . everybody else. This was a carefully calibrated ambush that was not intended to catch what looks like . . . an entire squad of Partial soldiers? What? What are you even doing here?”
Kira raised her head. She recognized the voice.
“Look, fellas,” said the voice, “we are trying to engage in a deadly game of cat and mouse with a psychotic murderess right now, so if you’d all just keep your noses out of other people’s business, we could get back to the nightmarish hellscape that our lives have become. Or you could just help us find her. Unless you’re working with her, in which case I really ought to stop talking, and we can all get back to shooting each other—”
“Marcus?” Kira shouted, standing up and edging carefully into the hallway. Green and Colin were both there, in cover positions of their own, linking their confusion. “Marcus Valencio! Is that you?”
There was a long moment of silence, and then she heard him again, his voice shocked and uncertain.
“Kira?”