Enactors, probably. They have Shadows on the brain.
“How can they be here?” the calm one rounds on the girl. “The building’s clean, we haven’t used it before. You told me it was clean.”
“You gave me five minutes to check,” she says.
He jerks a thumb at me. “I was hauling her ass around!”
“And I told you not to give the jitterbug the damn doser!”
“Shut up,” I say. “It’s hard enough to think already.”
I blink through the fog in my head and the bite in my gut, for all the good it does. The dark is almost thick enough to touch.
“You take her,” says the calm one. “Sans, with me.”
Like hell she will.
I spin on my heel and bolt.
Which sends my footfalls echoing all over the damn room.
“Who took off? That you, Tress?” asks Calm, becoming less calm by the second.
A soft curse and the echoes double. The girl’s following.
I close my eyes and feel the floor. Hard and slick, then harsh and grated, and back again. Every step feels like the next one won’t be there.
Beyond the dark—the space, the room—metal clangs, again, follow by softer thuds. Steps? Sparkguns?
My footsteps multiply by dozens.
They’re following. All of them. A pounding pulse my chest reiterates. I veer left or maybe right—just enough so the echoes shift behind me.
At some point, I’ll smack something. The room can’t go on forever. I stretch my arms in front of me, palms out.
This is going to hurt like hell.
I slam into the wall hands first—bones crunching into each other, ignore, ignore—and push off with the recoil. Their stomps fill the room, the world, my head.
I skid to the side, fingers scraping over metal—sound, too much sound—for a frame, window, door, anything.
A harsh smack. Someone else found the wall. “Ow! Ow ow ow.” High, male.
I don’t slow, palm picking up splinters and rust flakes.
There has to be a door. Has to. No one builds a room without a door.
My fingers catch and there it is, a frame. I skim the edge toward the low center. Over, left, down, handle.
I grab, twist, push through—then swing round behind to slam myself between it and the inside wall. Hold my breath.
Greg showed me this trick, ages ago. He’s going to wish he hadn’t.
The steps pound past and I count. They merge in an impossible din, echoes bouncing in all directions. Enough to cover the lack of mine. This room is bigger or has a higher ceiling.
The echoes grow tinny. Replaced by my heart, which wants to explode.
Not yet, you don’t. Not yet.
I slowly lean sideways and peek my head around the door. Pitch-black dark.
Whoever else is here may be in there, but at least I know for a fact the Brinkers aren’t.
I ease out from behind the door and slip my shoes off to maintain the quiet. Trail my hand over the scraped metal and reenter the room we started in. Continue my previous trajectory along the wall. I run on tiptoe, holding my shoes, ears straining. No new echoes. No sound apart from my breath.
Which would make sense of Enactors, especially Shadows. They’re trained to be silent and have all the latest gear. Like night-vision sensors. They could be tracking me from across the room. They could be sneaking up behind me now. I can just feel it, their breath on my neck— I bite my tongue and run faster.
My hand hits a corner and I slide round. Fifteen steps, twenty, twenty-five—my fingers hit a raised slat with rounded edges. Another door.
I slide my shoes back on and search for the handle. Grab hold and push.
The click rockets through the quiet, hinges creaking as light spills in. Not much—faint and dirty, but enough. Which means there are windows.
And a door.
I run.
I don’t know where I am.
Dark skytowers crowd the streets. The night is thick, the thoroughfares narrow, and the walkways clean but cracked.
I press deep into the shadows between an alley and an awning, and try to catch my breath. My lungs burn with my legs. I don’t know how many streets I’ve crossed, how many blocks I’ve come.
I don’t know anything.
The city has always been home. Even before Missa gave Yonni the suite, before Yonni came and got me, before Mom left—I always lived here, in the capital. Somewhere. Different districts—hell, once even a different continental sector—but always here. Home.
This doesn’t feel like home.
My feet have stopped, but my heart won’t. Doesn’t. Lungs churning on air that won’t stick. I bend over double. I’m going to throw up.
“You got out,” I say aloud, jarring my already jarred breath. “They had you, but you got out.”
I’m clear.
All I have to do is find a street sign, and if I don’t know it, walk to the next one.
This street is commercial. Dark shopfronts with pale, sloped awnings that flutter in the nonexistent breeze like ghosts. Above them, tower floors rise level after level in cycglass and crisscross steel, up into the night. It’s full dark, no moon.
We left the boarding tower early in the afternoon, me, Greg, and the power tech.
I need to find the power tech.
Greg, I need to kill.