The Exodus Towers #1

After a few seconds of rattling back and forth, the branches settled back into their original positions and continued to grow. Sam felt like a diver, trapped below some kind of coral reef grown with time-lapse quickness.

Soon she and David were completely enveloped in a pocket within the strange structure, needle-sharp tips pointing at them from every direction except the ground. David crawled to the center of the cavity and sat there, glancing frantically around himself, waiting for the thorn that would puncture his suit and doom him. But the growth stopped, as if it wanted them trapped inside.

“We’re stuck in here,” Samantha said for Grillo’s benefit. “Some kind of plant, I don’t know. It’s surrounded us and the tips will cut David’s suit if he moves.”

“Try a grenade,” Grillo said.

Samantha filed that advice. She’d not yet reached that level of desperation. Kneeling, she wiped her right hand across her shirt to dry it, then reached out and tapped the side of one branch with her index finger, as gently as she could. The semi-transparent stick, which snaked off into the cloud in a line roughly parallel to the ground, swayed slightly from the pressure. Sam examined her finger and saw a dab of moisture there. Water? Some kind of secretion? She couldn’t be sure, but it tingled.

Leaning in close, she noticed fine wisps of mist coming from the microscopic thorns along the length of the branch. “I think this thing is creating the cloud,” she said, to no one in particular.

“Grenade?” David asked.

“Hold on,” Samantha said. “If it shatters and falls on us, you’ll be f*cked.”

He grunted. “Good point.”

Slinging her weapon again, Sam held out her hands to either side of the closest branch, twitched her fingers, then gripped it below a knuckle a half meter down its length.

Pinpricks of pain forced her to yank her hands away. “Son of a damn bitch” she barked, examining her palms. A hundred little dots of blood formed and welled. “Jesus H. f*cking Christ that hurts.” She unzipped her combat vest and gripped the white tank top beneath to put pressure on the wounds. Her hands began to feel cold and numb, as if she’d rubbed eucalyptus oil into them, and she gripped her shirt tighter, biting her tongue against the pain, until the sensation subsided.

Sam sat down next to David, aware of his measured breaths through the speaker on his suit.

“Sod this,” he growled. “Grenade.”

“No,” Samantha said. She let go of her shirt, leaving two dark red handprints on it, and flexed her fingers over and over until the numb feeling vanished entirely.

Knowing it futile, she searched the pockets of her vest and pants for a pair of gloves, and found none. She rarely carried them unless on a mission somewhere cold.

In another pocket she found a chrome Zippo lighter, dented and scuffed. She’d picked it up in Japan, she thought, but couldn’t recall for sure. Worth a try, she figured, and moved back to the edge of their pocket within the lattice.

She rolled the knobby igniter, swallowing a bit of pain from the still-raw needle pricks on her thumb. It failed to catch, and she had to thumb it four more times before the sparks finally lit. A meager yellow flame sprouted from the tip of the lighter and held.

Slowly she guided her hand underneath the same branch she’d tried to break. When the flame licked a portion of the crystalline stick, it turned beet red and shrank away. The red discoloration rippled along the length of the branch, fading into the cloud. Soon the thin arm of the alien structure absorbed the redness and returned to its original pale blue.

Sam jabbed the flame under it again, and once again the branch recoiled away, as if growing in reverse. She kept the flame under it, watching in fascination as the length receded and pulses of bright red coloration flowed along its length.

“It doesn’t like fire,” she said brightly. “We need to make a torch.”

It took a few minutes to improvise one. David’s assault rifle was modular and easily broken down. He removed the butt of it to serve as the handle of their torch. Sam pulled her vest off and set it on the ground, then hoisted her bloodied shirt over her head. David actually averted his eyes at her partial state of nudity, only refocusing on the torch when she pulled her vest back on. The thick nylon rubbed against her skin like sandpaper.

Then she took apart the Zippo while David kept a close vigil on the hundreds of needle-tipped branches around them. Sam dumped the lighter fluid onto the shirt, but only a few drops came out. “Shit,” she muttered. “Grillo, anything flammable in your vehicles? Liquor, a butane stove, anything?”

“We’re checking,” he said.

Sam quickly reassembled the lighter, before all the fumes vanished. She rolled the wheel and this time it produced a flame on the first try. Brow furrowed in concentration, she held it to the makeshift torch and watched with grim satisfaction as the torn, bloodied cloth took flame.

“We found some road flares,” Grillo said in her ear. “Would that work?”

“Worth a shot,” she said. “Faisal! You still there?”

“I’m here.” His voice sounded faint, and in a different place than before.

She told him to run back to the barricade and get the flares from Grillo. While he did that, Sam had David stand in the center of their cavity while she walked around him, waving the torch at the closest branches. They receded more violently from the bigger flame, making a sound like two shards of glass rubbing together when they moved. Gradually she managed to increase their space to something the size of a small car. A few new branches tried to snake their way in, so she kept at it until the bright red glow of a signal flare could be seen in the haze.

“I see your torch,” Faisal said.

“Meet you halfway. Be careful, they grow back in behind you pretty quick.”

A minute later the three were reunited. Faisal handed an extra flare to both her and David, and Sam saw he had one extra stuffed into his front pants pocket. She inspected hers and saw text on the side indicating it would last for one hour.

“All right, Grillo,” Sam said. “Your mystery fog is coming from some kind of bizarro plant. Or … reef. A strange f*cking alien tree. I don’t know what the hell it is, but if you want my opinion, it’s not ours. Are we done here?”

“Faisal described it to me,” Grillo said. “I think it’s worth exploring the crash site. The traitors dropped a farm platform here, and if there was something related to the Builders aboard, that would be very interesting to know. Especially if it has now been … unleashed.”

She grimaced. “The flares only last an hour.”

“Then you’d better get started,” Grillo replied.

Sam bit back a snide response and looked at her two companions. “You’re both wearing environment suits in a forest of knives. You can bug out if you want; I’ll handle this.”

In unison they shook their heads, and Sam understood. They had orders.

“Follow me, then,” she said for the second time.

With fire, traversing the nightmare forest became easy. Sam went first, swiping her makeshift torch in slow, wide arcs. The branches shrank away with their glassy crackling sound.

She glanced over her shoulder every few steps. The two soldiers waved their flares about as if they were trying to flag down an aircraft. Sparks dripped from the bright red fires, and thick smoke billowed off until it merged with the foggy soup around them.

Every ten steps or so Samantha dropped to a knee, listened for a moment, and then selected a few pieces of the rubble that littered the ground. She arranged these in an arrow pointing in the direction in which they walked.

After a few hundred meters of this, she began to see signs of the explosion that resulted when the farm platform came down. Blackened debris littered the ground, skittering away when kicked by their boots as they walked. The asphalt road, as worn as any in Darwin, had a web of cracks laced across it. In places entire chunks were gone, revealing the hardpan beneath.

The sky grew dark above them as they went. Sometimes the fog above Sam’s head would dissipate enough to see more than a few meters up. The lattice of crystalline branches extended far above their heads here, half as tall as the office buildings she knew loomed around them, hidden by the cloud and the darkness.

Then, as suddenly as it had enveloped them, the branches ended, and the cloud thinned dramatically, turning from a static, oppressive soup to a patchy, swirling, silent maelstrom. Lit by her torch and the men’s reddish flares, the wafts of fog looked like otherworldly ghosts.

Samantha called a halt and took a knee again.

She realized they’d come to the edge of a giant dome within the glassy lattice. Twenty meters high at least, and the same across, she thought, perfect in its shape. Distances were hard to ascertain as wafts of the thick fog still drifted through the area. These puffs rose from the center of the space, as if hot air pushed them from below. If she had a religious bone in her body, she might have said they looked like souls ascending.

“Heat,” she muttered. The tension of their situation, and the long walk, had masked it, but she now felt the oppressive heat of the place.

David and Faisal knelt behind her, taking in the dome in silence from behind the curved plastic masks of their environment suits. Their breaths fogged the clear material in rapid puffs that vanished a heartbeat later as processors pulled moisture from the sealed outfits. Faisal drew his towel-wrapped arm across his mask to wipe away a fine pattern of droplets. The towel looked soaked.

She glanced at each of their chests, noted the green light of containment on each, and turned back to the view.

The ground beneath the dome sloped downward. A crater, she realized, and they were perched on the lip. She followed the broken ground to the center and sucked in her breath.

Faisal gasped. He saw it at the same time she did.

The boot and leg of a yellow environment suit, protruding through the morass of swirling fog. Whether the human contents were still within she couldn’t see. More scraps of thick yellow material lay beyond the leg, forming a rough line toward the very center of the dome’s floor.

“This mission,” Samantha said, “just went off the ‘what the f*ck’ chart.”

“What are you seeing?” Grillo asked, his voice laced with static now.

Sam rattled off the important details quickly: bits of a suit, torn to pieces. Some weird dome around a crater, the swirling mists. “My tactical instincts are telling me to get the hell out of here,” she concluded. “But I’m guessing you feel otherwise.”

“I do.”

She grunted, annoyance brewing within. Skyler would have argued with her. He would have left room for argument, and no matter what harebrained scheme he’d cooked up, if Sam said “scuttle,” he’d almost always do just that. Grillo’s manner somehow made her feel guilty when she disagreed, and his commitment to the mission bordered on dangerous.

She wondered what would happen if she told him to get f*cked, and went back. Would he throw her back in jail? Threaten Kelly?

Would these two tagalongs even let her retreat? For the first time she saw them as escorts rather than helpers. Maybe they’d turn their guns on her, force her to proceed.

Best not to test it, she decided. The previous group Grillo had sent in was not combat trained, or so he’d implied. So far she hadn’t seen anything here she couldn’t handle.

“Fine,” she replied to Grillo, and then looked at her two companions. “Let’s keep moving.”

She stepped slowly toward the center of the crater, giving a wide berth around the severed pant leg. A dinner-plate-sized pool of blood surrounded the open end of the garment fragment. She decided not to check if a leg remained inside; the answer seemed obvious.

Breathing became a chore. The air stifling, like a sauna run amok. Sam watched as the improvised torch in her hand burned out, and she set it aside. David would want to get his rifle back together, but the stock would need to cool first.

She decided to save her flare for now and crept farther ahead, aware of her two companions following behind. They still held their flares aloft, more to light the strange alien cathedral than for any other reason.

Near the center of the impact crater, the ground ended at a jagged edge of earth and concrete. It was a circular opening to some kind of pit, descending down into blackness so choked with fog that the fiery light from the two flares could not illuminate much beyond the lip.

A twisted bundle of the glassy branches, thick as a tree trunk, rose up from the middle of the hole, stretching high above them before disappearing into the cloud. The fog wafted off this column in thick tendrils, rising swiftly toward whatever was above.

Sam looked at Faisal and jerked her head toward the hole. He took the hint and tossed his flare in. The beacon fell into the cloud, like an upside-down view of a firework launched into smoky skies. The light became a faint glowing orb and came to rest ten or fifteen meters below. The shape of the reddish glow resembled a crescent moon, and Samantha realized the flare was partially obscured by some giant boulder or object resting on the floor of the depression.

That’s what made the crater, she realized. And sprouted these vines.

“I don’t think they dropped a farm platform here,” she said for Grillo’s benefit.

“Explain,” he said.

“We found a pit, in the center of the crater. There’s something at the bottom, big as one of your trucks, and round. Roundish.”

A brief silence followed. David took advantage of the pause to put his rifle back together and wipe moisture from his helmet’s curved plastic mask.

“Could be some piece of machinery that survived reentry. A reactor, even.”

“Well, whatever it is, it’s what these goddamn branches are sprouting from.”

Faisal sucked in a breath. She glanced around, looking for what spooked him, but saw nothing. When she turned to him, he was staring at her with disgust. The expression vanished the instant their eyes met.

“Something wrong, Faisal?”

He looked down his nose at her and shook his head.

Grillo’s voice brought her back to the moment. “Can you climb down and get a closer look?”

Sam knew that no answer other than “Sure” would fly. She sent Faisal back to the truck to get a rope. When he left earshot, she turned her headset off and looked at David. “Why’s he so uptight all the sudden?”

David regarded her. “You should watch your tongue.”

“What the f*ck did I say?”

David narrowed his eyes. “I’m not as devout as them, so I can tell you. ‘Goddamn’ is like a punch in the gut. Show some respect. It doesn’t cost you anything.”

Samantha thought back to the little prayer circle she’d witnessed just before they climbed down the barricade. Them? Grillo is a f*cking Jacobite?

She thought up and promptly swallowed a half-dozen snide, disrespectful replies, and waited. In the silence she pondered the revelation. Grillo certainly did have a minister’s demeanor, but his reputation as a ruthless slumlord didn’t mesh. She thought it possible he was just pandering to the sect to earn their support, and anyway it didn’t really matter if he’d thrown in with the weirdos or not. Her situation had nothing to do with it.

Faisal returned ten uncomfortable minutes later with a bundle of nylon rope. The two men helped Samantha tie it around her waist, across her shoulders, and then through loops on her pants and vest.

In no time she found herself leaning backward over the vertical pit, holding the rope with two hands, her toes resting on the edge of the precipice. She leaned farther to put her full weight on the line, watching David and Faisal as they grunted with effort to hold her in place.

“Lower me down,” she told them. “One step at a time, yeah?”

The heat became unbearable. Sam could do nothing on the descent except focus on her footing and breathing. The walls of the pit were a cross section of hard-packed earth, layers of foundational concrete reinforced with iron rebar, and the odd bit of pipe or wiring conduit. None of this showed the charred, blackened evidence of a major explosion like the crater above.

Near the bottom she cleared the fog, and the floor of the pit came clearly into view. Sam unslung her rifle and flipped on its barrel-mounted LED, bathing the place in crisp white light.

“Stop!” she called out immediately. The rope tugged her in a rough snap, her progress halting.

The floor of the pit shimmered and rippled. Black water, how deep she couldn’t guess. This is a sinkhole, she thought. The object had impacted above, and in the violence of that, runoff water had begun to pool down here, eventually causing the ground above to collapse. The water moved in one direction, implying a drainage path that kept the hole from filling to the top.

“Sam? Report,” Grillo said, almost unintelligible with the static.

She ignored him.

In the center of the circular pit, partially submerged, lay an oblong shape that reminded her of pictures of the Builders’ shell that capped the space elevator, only much smaller in scale. The surface of it was so black it seemed to drink in the light when her beam swept across it. Flickering light from the partially submerged flare cast the walls of the pit behind it in a dance of bright red and deep shadow. Backlit so, the object took on a demonic quality that brought goose bumps to her arms despite the stifling heat.

From the object’s “tail” came the bundle of glassy, segmented branches. The tangle of alien limbs stretched up in a straight line into the fog above. Unlike the black alien object from which they came, the branches seemed to glow in the light from her gun, their pale blue coloring almost jewel-like without the fog surrounding them.

“You okay down there?” David called out.

“Yeah,” she whispered. Then louder, “Yes. Lower me a meter or so. There’s water.”

After a series of short drops and barked commands, David and Faisal managed to lower her slowly into the balmy water, warm as a bath. Her feet touched broken, uneven ground when the depth had submerged her to mid-thigh. “I’m down,” she called up.

Sam crept slowly around the perimeter of the pit, her gun trained on the alien mass that loomed just a few meters away. The heat, she realized, had a pulse to it, rising and falling a few degrees every second or two. The air smelled of tar and burned charcoal.

After three steps the “drain” through which the water escaped came into view: a wide concrete pipe, cracked in half by the collapse of the ground above it. The dark water rushed into it in sloshing gulps as the wake from her passage pushed waves into its wide maw.

Lapping against the pipe’s opening, a body listed gently in the water. Clad in the trademark yellow of an environment suit, the limp form bobbed with each ripple.

Samantha saw parallel cuts in the legs and back of the suit, as if claws had raked it. The sight filled her with sudden fear. She pressed herself against the wall and swept the beam of her rifle’s light across the entire space, looking for any sign of what had caused such damage.

But the place was quiet. Dead. She slowly exhaled and spoke into her headset. “Found another of your lost crew,” she said. “Something cut him to shreds, I don’t know what. Can you hear me?”

A garbled response came, full of scratchy hisses and deep clicks.

“Piece of shit,” she growled. Grillo could get the highlights later. She continued on her path around the object, stopping long enough to inspect the body. She rolled it over in the water and cringed at the face inside the suit. The mask had been shattered, as had the face. Bruises covered the nose, one cheek, and an eye.

Something must have given this poor bastard a haymaker of epic proportions, she thought. That, or he fell in. She flipped the corpse back over and turned to the alien shape in the center of the pit.

Three more steps into her route, Sam froze. The flickering red flare lay only a few meters away from her now, and its dancing light illuminated a gaping hole in the side of the object. She trained her own beam on the opening. Not a hole, she saw, but an actual entrance, square in shape.

Inside the shell was a cube-shaped cavity, roughly two meters on a side. The walls were laced with thin grooves, drawn in sharp, straight lines and perfect ninety-degree corners.

Thin arms jutted out from the corners of the cavity, converging near the center around a cube-shaped object, perhaps a half meter tall and wide. A channel three or four centimeters deep ran down one side. Sam knew somehow that the thin black arms were not connected to the object, but rather were holding it in place.

The cube had the same angular patterns of lines etched into its otherwise smooth black surface. But these lines were different. As Samantha watched, pale blue light rippled along their lengths, the same color as the thorny branches above. To Sam the cube’s surface almost looked like a circuit board, or city streets viewed from high above.

“Sam?” David called down from above.

“Here,” she called back. “I’ve found something.”

Wading through the warm water, Samantha approached the cube, unable to take her eyes off the fine patterns of blue-white light that rippled beneath the lines etched into its surface.

She reached the opening on the side of the shell and climbed up onto it, warm water dripping from her legs and sloshing in her boots. The liquid should have pooled around her feet, but instead the Builders’ material drank it in. For a moment she marveled at this before turning her attention back to the cube suspended in the center of the chamber.

Flexing her fingers, Samantha reached out for it. The blue laser light pulsing along its surface shifted, growing brighter where her hands were about to touch, and darker elsewhere, as if sensing her presence. She paused only for a second, gave a small shrug, and gripped the cube by two sides.

A pulse of light exploded from the cube, blinding her. The object hummed under her hands as if she’d gripped a live electrical wire, and she couldn’t let go.

Above her came an avalanche of noise, like a thousand butcher’s knives being sharpened at once, so loud it hurt to hear. Somewhere beneath that noise she thought she heard a scream, silenced abruptly. Something splashed in the water at the bottom of the pit. Something large. Sam turned but all she saw was the afterglow of blue light.

Her hands remained clasped to the cube, vibrating. She yanked, hard, and the cube came free. It weighed as much as a concrete block, and she stumbled, falling backward out of the shell and into the warm water.

The cube landed on her stomach and forced the air from her lungs. A mouthful of gritty water flooded into her mouth and nose and she tried to spit it out, but she had no air to do so.

Somehow she found her footing, rolled over, and stood up. The raking, calamitous sound of glass sliding against glass continued above her. Sam coughed and retched the water from her lungs. When she opened her eyes, she could see again.

The cube lay in the water at her feet, still pulsing with blue light. She turned and looked up. Above her, the bundle of glassy limbs that stretched from the top of the shell were writhing. They’d taken on the color of fire, and burned as bright. The glow faded the farther up the trunk she looked. Above the pit, she could see the latticework of branches flailing about violently. The segments no longer had a pale blue color. Now they were blood-red. She thought it must be like standing in a whirlwind of barbed wire up there. “David! Faisal!” she shouted. No response came.

The violent movement of the branches dispersed the fog, and Sam could see that the alien structure stretched at least fifty meters above her head.

She focused on the thick trunk of tangled branches that jutted from the tip of the shell. Gritting her teeth, Sam unslung her rifle, set it to fully automatic, and took aim.

Her bullets raked across the bundle, punching through the tendrils easily, and sparking as they ricocheted off the wall of the pit beyond. Each branch that she severed turned gray instantly. By the time she’d depleted her ammo, most of the trunk was gray, and the violent motion above had all but stopped. Two or three branches still swayed, so Sam reloaded and took care of those, too. Her ears rang from the sound of gunfire.

“Faisal?! David?!” she shouted again.

The rope they’d lowered her on still rested against the pit wall, a few meters away.

A shape in the water caught her eye. Another body in a yellow suit, the material sliced into tatters, tainted with fresh blood. She waded over to it and flipped the corpse over. David’s eyes stared back at her, glassy and wide with terror.

“F*ck,” she muttered, and pushed his body away.

Shaking, Sam climbed the rope, leaving the alien cube where it lay.

At the top of the pit she found Faisal’s body, or what was left of it. He’d been farther from the lip of the sinkhole, and sliced to pieces when the thorny branches went haywire. Bits of his flesh hung from the gray limbs, along with pieces of his environment suit. Yellow and red ornaments on a dead alien tree.

“Grillo,” she coughed into her headset. “Come in.”

The device had shorted out, she decided, from her fall into the water. She ripped it off her head and threw it angrily into the pit.

From a pocket on her vest she produced the flare Faisal had given her. Sam closed her eyes and wished for luck as she cracked it open. Even after being submerged when she fell, it crackled to life and soon a red fire blazed on its tip, dripping sparks.

Gingerly, Sam held it out to the nearest branch, wondering if the now-dead segment would recoil as it had before. Instead of shrinking away, the material blackened and disintegrated.

After what felt like an hour, Sam finally emerged from the alien forest and trudged back to the barricade at Aura’s Edge. The sight of Grillo standing there, waiting for her, was a strange comfort.

Sam sat in the back of the APC, wrapped in a blanket and nursing a bottle of water, when the cavalry arrived. Dozens of trucks filled with armed fighters encircled the area, securing it. Grillo’s private army.

She stared beyond them, at Darwin’s dirty skyline. Unable to focus, she had only a vague awareness of the activity around her. A dozen people gathered, clad in environment suits, armed with flares and torches. They walked out of her field of view toward the barricade.

They were talking about the space elevator. Something about a vibration along its length, and a surge of power, when she’d removed the cube from the crashed ship. They were laughing about it, like someone laughs after walking into a surprise birthday party, so her action must not have caused any damage. Still, it meant the object was connected, somehow, to the alien cord.

Numb and exhausted, Sam pulled her blanket tight and fought to stop shaking. Despite everything she’d seen, the only image that she seemed able to conjure was David’s dead eyes, staring at her, accusing her. Like Jake’s, in a way. She shuddered at the memory.

Sam hardly noticed when the group returned later. Four of them carried a cube-shaped bundle of blankets, and were moving with slow, deliberate steps. The people around them cleared the path, and soon the package disappeared into one of the newly arrived trucks.

The group began to remove their environment suits once the crate was secure. Dazed, Samantha hardly recognized their Jacobite garb before the rear door of her APC was thrown shut, blocking her view.

Seconds later she heard the vehicle’s caps begin to whine. She swayed in her seat as it lurched into movement. Sam leaned back, closed her eyes, and let the gentle rocking of the vehicle lull her to sleep.
Melville Station

5.MAY.2283

SHE WAS IN the cargo bay, helping unload a shipment of apples, when the station rattled. An alarm went off somewhere, one she hadn’t heard before.

“What the?” Tania said to no one in particular. The people working around her looked as worried as she felt.

“Collision?” someone asked.

Tania doubted it. The vibration seemed to come from the Elevator cord itself. “Excuse me,” she said, and pushed off for the intercom on the wall. Her mind raced as she flew across the room. She imagined Blackfield’s troopers swarming through the station like they had on Anchor.

At the wall she steadied herself with a handhold and tapped the activation switch. “Tania here. Someone talk to me. What’s going on?”

Tim’s voice came through a few seconds later. “Unknown. A vibration rippled up the cord. Black Level reported it first, then the farms a few seconds later. Now us.”

“It started at the shell ship? An explosion or …?”

“Some kind of electricity discharge, hence that overload alarm. Our draws on the cord went into emergency disconnect mode when the surge hit us.”

Tania frowned. The cord generated electricity due to friction with the atmosphere, something the stations tapped as a backup source. The climbers relied on the source exclusively to make their journeys. A change in that would be catastrophic.

“Everything’s fine now,” Tim said. “Greg says all systems are reading normal up there.”

Memories of Darwin’s Elevator malfunctions raced through Tania’s mind. Nothing like this, but still, if something similar was happening again … “Put all stations on maximum alert. All personnel should be required to check in. If the aura failed …”

“Already done. Commanders will report within the hour.”

“Thanks, Tim. Keep me posted.” Her hand shook as she switched the intercom off.

Tania sat cross-legged on the floor of Room 17, her chin resting on steepled fingers.

The room, which had been stocked to the brim with weaponry by Neil Platz, was all but empty now. A few crates remained here and there, mostly gear no one knew what to do with. That simple fact seemed to encapsulate for her everything about the state of the so-called colony. Gear and resources depleted, and no one who knew what the hell they were doing.

She sighed, exhausted from the mental effort it took to stop thinking, even in brief spans, about the fate of the aircraft she’d sent down to the planet below. Crew and craft lost, and they hadn’t even made it to the edge of Camp Exodus. By any measurement the entire endeavor had been a complete fiasco.

The bizarre fluctuation along the cord didn’t exactly help her nerves, but all personnel were accounted for and there’d been no repeats of the event.

Failings aside, what bothered Tania more was that she had no idea what to do next. The strike team had been her last-ditch effort. She glanced around the nearly empty room. “You’d know what to do, wouldn’t you?” she asked, her voice echoing from the walls. She wasn’t quite sure if she’d meant the question for Neil Platz, or for Skyler.

The soft sound of a key-card swipe came to her from outside, and the door behind her opened.

“There you are.” Tim, of course.

“Here I am.” She felt immediate guilt for the unappreciative tone in her words. He’d been trying, hard, to lift her from the melancholy she’d fallen into since the failed rescue. It seemed wholly unfair to treat him badly for the effort.

“I brought chai,” he said. “Can I sit with you?”

With a sigh she hoped she’d hid, Tania nodded and patted the floor next to her.

He handed her one of two mugs and mirrored her cross-legged position. “Spared no expense,” he said, gauging her reaction.

The cup had a twist-on lid and when Tania opened it the warmth and smells contained within hugged her like an old friend. “This is the good stuff, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Mm-hmm. You gave me two bags of it for an early simulation result, a few years ago.”

“I remember,” she said, lying.

“Been saving it,” he added, then sipped. Tim winced from the heat and set his cup down. “Oh, blimey but that’s hot. Might want to wait a minute.”

Tania followed his lead. In truth she was content just to let the complex, spicy scent drift up and around her. It smelled like her mother’s kitchen. “Thank you for the tea,” she said earnestly. “And the company.”

“No problem.” He shrugged, settled himself. “So what are we doing in here? Concocting a new plan?”

“I wish,” Tania said. “Unfortunately I don’t think we have many options left. I mean, look at this place. We’re overextended everywhere. No supplies are coming up. Who knows what the hell is going on in camp.…”

She let her voice trail off. Tim knew all this, and the last thing Tania wanted to do was rehash it all again.

Tim, mercifully, said nothing. He tried his tea again, hissed through clenched teeth, and set the cup back down. “You think you have problems—I can’t even boil water right.”

Tania elbowed him, laughed lightly at his mock show of pain. “Anything new to report on that vibration that the cord exhibited?” she asked.

“It was some kind of power surge, we know that much. Beyond that, nothing new. No damage reported, at least.”

“How’s Zane?” she asked, desperate to change the subject.

“He retired early. Between us, I think all this stress is getting to him. He’s always tired, and doesn’t eat enough.”

“Sounds like he’s the one who needs chai,” Tania said.

Tim grunted, and looked over at her. “If you’re saying I should leave …”

Tania turned and met his gaze. Even in the dark room, she could see the sparkle of intelligence and energy in his eyes. “I’m trying to find any excuse not to think about our dire situation.”

“A distraction,” he concluded. “Good. Did you, er, have something in mind?”

Tania searched his eyes. “Yes,” she said sternly. “Let’s make Zane some dinner.”

Tim readily agreed, and for the next hour they took over the mess kitchen. The meal had to be improvised, but Tania thought the result was a reasonable curry, something she knew Zane loved.

They called him down from his cabin and the three of them ate together, even shared a bottle of wine. To Tania’s delight, for that evening at least, no one mentioned the plight they faced. For the first time in a while, they were just three friends sharing the simple, sacred pleasure of a meal well prepared.
Belém, Brazil

5.MAY.2283

SKYLER AND DAVI lay side by side in the brush at the top of a small rise.

Ana worked in silence behind them, securing their excess gear. She’d become more and more withdrawn during the last stage of their trek. When Skyler asked, Davi had chalked it up to fatigue.

Skyler held a scavenged pair of binoculars to his eyes, scanning the shallow valley below while Davi used the scope on his hunting rifle. Skyler had found the weapon, too, and spent an hour each morning for the last few days teaching Davi how to use and clean it. The young man had none of Jake’s natural skill, but he could hit a target if he focused.

The lodge appeared intact. Beyond it stood a barn, doors closed and latched, the muddy ground in front churned and laced by tire tracks.

A dirt road, obscured by knee-high weeds, served as the primary way in and out of the complex.

“Fresh tire tracks,” Skyler said. He kept his voice low.

“I see them. This is the place.”

Over days of cat-and-mouse with Gabriel’s people through the streets of Belém, Skyler’s radio picked up the needed hint to find the hidden immunes: a call to help free a truck stuck in mud. From that they knew the road being used by Gabriel’s people to move back and forth between their base of operations and the colony at Belém’s Elevator. Tracing their exact path proved easy enough, as the heavy military vehicles Gabriel’s people used left plenty of evidence in their wake.

Skyler pulled the binoculars away from his face and took in the whole scene below him.

A shallow ravine lay below, carved by a thin stream that snaked down from lush foothills to the west. Morning fog obscured the eastern end of the valley, where the grassy field gave way to rainforest, and the stream met a stronger river.

Nestled in the center of the valley, in a wide clearing, was a lodge. A tourist hotel, Skyler judged, with maybe twenty rooms on two stories. A barn stood a short distance from the main building.

Two black personnel carriers were parked between the two structures. Neither had moved since dawn, nor had any signs of activity within the buildings been seen. The quiet made Skyler wonder if the location had already been abandoned, but the presence of the two vehicles threw doubt on that theory.

“Let’s go,” Davi said. “They’re probably all sleeping.”

Skyler caught movement through his binoculars. “Hold up.”

Three men marched along the ridgeline on the opposite side of the valley. Skyler put them at half a kilometer away. Only their heads were visible above the weeds.

“See ’em?”

“I see ’em,” Davi said. “Keep still.”

They watched the men for a tense few minutes as the trio worked their way toward the lodge.

Davi sucked in his breath as they came into full view. “What the hell?”

Through the binoculars, Skyler saw something that raised goose bumps on his arms.

An old man with a thick gray beard led the group. The other two each carried long metal poles, with loops of rope at the end.

The ropes were lashed around the neck and torso of a woman, or what was once a woman. The subhuman was nude, filthy, and very much alive. She bled openly from a number of lacerations on her belly and legs.

“Jesus,” Skyler said. “Davi.”

“I see it.”

“They captured a sub.”

“I f*cking see it,” he hissed. The young man glanced back at Ana.

Skyler looked, too. Twenty meters away, her back to a tree trunk, the girl worked methodically to load the new weapon he’d given her. The compact assault rifle fired small .22-caliber rounds, easy to handle but lacking punch. That shortcoming was made up for by the grenade launcher slung under the barrel.

Skyler broached the question he so desperately wanted to keep inside. “Are you sure you want her to come with us? She could guard our bags.”

“She comes,” Davi said. “Trust me, she gets very upset if you try to shelter her.”

“Okay then.”

“But,” Davi added, “if you could give her the least dangerous part in the plan …”

“I understand,” Skyler said. He meant it, even though he knew it would be impossible to do. There were too many unknowns. But it couldn’t hurt to give Davi a little reassurance.

He made a took-took sound through pursed lips. Ana glanced up and waved back. She finished loading the gun and jogged up the hillside to join them on the ridge, crawling the last few meters before lying next to Skyler. The corners of her lips were curled up in the hint of a smile. She was, Skyler realized, enjoying this. Her mirth drained when she saw the men below with their captive subhuman.

Davi fiddled with the scope on his sniper rifle and took a long, measured breath. “What’s the plan—”

The subhuman prisoner, now twenty meters from the lodge, clutched at the bar that held her torso and began to howl, her nose held high in the air.

“She smells something,” Skyler whispered. Us?

A response came from somewhere inside the lodge. Ten voices, maybe more, took up the same, wild, subhuman cry. Something rang different about it, though. Skyler had heard such cries all over the world, and they always sounded the same. These, from the building, sounded feeble. Weak.

Skyler swallowed hard and said, “I’ve got a really f*cking bad feeling about this.”

The two immunes who held the female captive in the valley below struggled to keep her under control. She began to buck violently, left and right and again. One of the men slipped. The leader, in front, turned and walked back to them. He was shouting something, impossible to make out against the wailing of those within the lodge.

“Here’s the plan,” Skyler said. “We’ll surround the lodge—”

Ana leapt to her feet and rushed down the hill. She ran hard, holding her rifle across her chest. Not even a glance back.

Skyler started to shout after her, but reason won out. The immunes were too busy with their prisoner to notice the woman racing toward them. She would cross the distance in no time at her adrenaline-fueled pace.

If she had some kind of death wish, Skyler hadn’t caught it before. Though in hindsight, her dancing alone in that courtyard had a suicidal aftertaste to it.

“Ana, Jesus!” Davi hissed through clenched teeth.

“Don’t panic,” Skyler said. “Take a shot before they spot her.”

Ana was less than fifty meters from the men now. Davi took a deep breath. He sighted downrange, and on an exhale let off a round.

The big leader’s head jerked wildly. He sank to his knees and toppled over.

The thunderous sound from the rifle brought a brief shocked silence from all around.

Davi wasted no time, unleashing two more bullets in rapid succession. Panic filled the valley. The second of the three men dove to the dirt, letting go of his metal pole in the process. The bullets meant for him did nothing more than generate two puffs of dust from the trail.

Skyler watched as Ana crouched down. She raised her rifle and began firing at the third enemy.

The man shoved the subhuman toward Ana, turned, and hustled away for the safety of a small mound. The subhuman spun in circles, poles still attached to her, moving like a frenzied animal.

Another deafening clap from the hunting rifle dropped the subhuman in a whoosh of dirt and outstretched limbs. She twitched on the ground only for a second, and then nothing.

Skyler heard the sound of breaking glass, coming from the lodge. He saw a shotgun barrel poke out of a window on the side of the building facing the valley. It was far enough away from all of them to be of no concern, but it meant the three immunes were not alone here.

Battle instinct took over.

“I’ll flank,” Skyler blurted. He was up and moving, keeping low behind the edge of the ridge.

As he ran, he heard the battle continue. Another salvo from Ana’s gun. Two shots from a gun he hadn’t heard yet, from somewhere in the valley. Davi answered those with another booming shot.

Skyler angled for a thin copse of trees that bookended one side of the lodge. He kept his machine gun angled low, at the ready. As he rounded the edge of the wooden house, the sounds behind him faded, until he heard nothing but his own labored breath. He paused to gather himself, just for a few seconds, then crouched below the window height and moved along the back wall of the structure.

At the far edge, he took a quick look around the building before bouncing back. Two more of the immunes stood next to an open door. One held a pipe wrench. The other’s hands were not visible, but from the way he stood, Skyler suspected he had a handgun.

Best not to take any chances.

Skyler jumped around the corner and lined up the holographic dot his gun provided on the second man’s back. He squeezed off a controlled burst, adjusted, and followed it with another. The two men were dead.

Surprise no longer on his side, Skyler moved up to the door the men had come through. He peeked quickly inside, but found it too dark to make much out.

Then the howling started again, from within. The sound was gut-wrenching. More pitiful than frightening.

There were, he realized, other shouts mixed in. Human cries for help.

Skyler flattened himself against the wall by the door. Off to his left, he saw nothing along the trail except dirt. The occasional echo of a gunshot rolled down the valley floor to him.

Then Ana appeared, running toward him, her gun pointed down as he’d shown her.

He motioned for her to stop and luckily she saw him. The girl crouched next to a shrub beside the trail.

Skyler pointed at his gun, then at her, then at the barn. Secure the barn, he mouthed.

She looked from her weapon to the large wooden structure and nodded.

Satisfied, Skyler renewed his focus on the door to the lodge. He readied himself to rush in when Ana’s movement caught his eye.

Or rather, her lack of movement. She wasn’t moving toward the barn—she was taking aim on it.

Realization hit him just as she fired the grenade launcher.

Skyler covered his ears as the massive rolling door on the front of the barn exploded into a million shards of thin wood.

Then a second, much bigger explosion hit. Skyler was slammed into the wall of the lodge by the force of it. He dropped to a fetal position and threw his arms over his face as shrapnel peppered the entire area. Even from here he could feel a flash of intense heat.

Every window on the lodge shattered. Bits of flaming debris smacked into the walls and roof.

More blasts followed. Skyler peeked between his elbows and saw nothing but a cloud of smoke where the barn had stood a moment earlier. Gabriel’s people must have been storing explosives inside, or fuel of some sort. Hopefully no one friendly was in there.

The worst of it over, Skyler leapt to his feet and ducked inside.

The main hall ran deep into the building, into darkness. On either side were empty door frames, every three meters. Anyone waiting inside would expect an intruder to enter the first room, so Skyler bolted right past the first two openings.

The tactic worked. Two gunshots, one from either side of him, both late. They shook the walls of the old building, nothing more. Skyler saw that the next door on his right was a bathroom. He ran into it, stopped abruptly, and pressed himself against the tiled wall.

He closed his eyes and counted to ten. When he opened them, his vision had adjusted to the darkness.

Skyler realized that the subhuman wailing came from below. A basement, then. Cries for help came from both below and above.

A creak from the floorboard in the hall focused him. Skyler half-spun out of the bathroom. He gave himself a split second to make sure Davi or Ana hadn’t followed him in. They hadn’t.

An older woman stood in the hallway, overweight, dressed only in a threadbare nightgown. She raised a shotgun, aiming from her waist—a clumsy motion. The weapon discharged into the wall a meter from Skyler.

He answered with two rounds. One took her in the gut, one in the chest. She gurgled as she slumped to the floor.

Eyes adjusted, Skyler now saw the interior of the main hall. He stalked toward the front of the house, stepping over the old hag’s corpse.

He’d heard two shots when he first entered. Someone was still there, he knew; he did a somersault across the entryway.

A shot rang out, hissing through the air above him, where his head would have been. He came up firing, a rat-tat that shook the very walls. The bullets hit the chest of a teenage boy, adding two red holes to his dingy shirt. The kid fell backward with the impact, lifeless, landing on an overturned milk crate, smashing it with his weight.

A damn kid! Skyler had no time for remorse and shoved the look on the boy’s face aside. The sound of footsteps drifted down from above. From the second floor.

“Skyler?”

He turned at Davi’s low voice, coming from the doorway. “In here,” he replied. “Two down, more upstairs. And subhumans in the basement.”

“I’ll take the basement,” Davi said, readying a pistol.

“No,” Skyler said, “I’ve got it.”

“You sure?”

Skyler nodded. “Where’s Ana?”

“Stunned from that explosion. I told her to guard the door in case we flushed anyone out.”

“Good,” Skyler said, genuinely. “Right. Shout an all-clear when you can, and exercise caution. We still don’t know where your friends are.”

Davi nodded and led the way down the main hall. They came to a narrow stairwell. To one side of it, an open door gave way to another set of steps leading down.

Skyler stopped only to take a brief look down the stairs. The steps looked aged: cracked wood nailed atop older rotten planks. He crept forward, leaving Davi to deal with the second floor.

The smell from below overpowered him—worse than the bathroom. A mixed scent of death and human waste. Skyler stopped halfway down and vomited. He could not hear his own retching above the agonizing cries from below. After a time, the nausea passed. Another four steps, taken slowly, and Skyler reached the basement.

When his feet hit the floor, the wailing stopped.

It felt markedly cooler in the subterranean room, enough to make him shiver. He placed an arm across his mouth and nose to quell the odor, and moved inside.

His shoes encountered a sticky, wet patch. Skyler thrust out a hand to brace himself, just preventing a slip and fall. He paused to gather himself, to let his heart rate slow.

The room spanned ten meters on each side, following the footprint of the building above. In the near darkness, Skyler could see poorly erected rooms—pens, or cages, he sensed—lining the other three walls. In the center of the space, an area three meters square was marked off by sections of chain-link fence.

Inside the center cage, a naked woman was crouched on hands and knees. Her head tilted slightly when Skyler’s eyes met hers. The movement reminded him of a cat. She had the wild eyes and unkempt hair of a subhuman, but not the starved leanness. Her hands and feet were held in place by metal braces. A section of fence behind her had been cut away, allowing … access.

Skyler swallowed, a knot of realization forming in his gut even before the thought came fully to mind. The restrained subhuman woman was filthy save the part of her pressed against the gap in the cage. A steel bucket sat on the ground just outside, a soiled towel hung carelessly over the lip.

He shot a glance at the cells along the far wall. A female subhuman form loomed within each, save one that was empty, the door slightly ajar.

The knot within him tightened. Skyler turned to the opposite wall. More cells, more prisoners, though these were different. He saw six naked men and women, all devoid of that animalistic glare. Immunes. Two slept or were, perhaps, dead. The others stared at him with hope in their eyes.

Skyler didn’t need to see any more. He’d heard enough about Gabriel and his followers to guess what was going on here: breeding.

The subhuman woman hissed at him. Within seconds, the shrieks and wails from the other cells began anew.

Time to end this.

He shot the subhuman woman in the cage at point-blank range, between the eyes. She made no effort to avoid it. Skyler had a vague sense that she wanted him to do it, the way she closed her eyes just before he fired.

With a methodical march along the far wall he found six more of the poor creatures. Skyler put a bullet in each, ending their misery. The anger in him morphed, became resolute, a white-hot coal. This was evil, pure and simple, and whatever else happened he would make sure Gabriel paid for it. The world had enough problems without this kind of shit.

Turning back toward where he’d entered, Skyler faced the immune prisoners.

“I’m here to help you,” he said.

Combination locks secured each cage. Skyler made a cursory search of the room for bolt cutters or anything of the sort, but found nothing. “Get back,” he said to the prisoners. The order registered for those awake and they hobbled toward the wall.

Four gunshots later the cages were open.

“Carry them,” he said, pointing to the sleepers. “Get outside and wait for us. I’ll try to find you some clothes.”

One mumbled thanks. Skyler ignored them and went back up the stairs.

Davi waited for him at the ground-floor landing, carrying a young girl in his arms, three or four years old. She hugged him fiercely, face buried in his shoulder, her chest heaving with sobs. At the door to the lodge Skyler saw a few other immunes, shuffling out into the bright sun.

“Find anyone?” Davi asked.

“Six,” Skyler said. “We’re burning this place when we leave. No debate.”

Davi held Skyler’s gaze for an instant. “Okay.”

The immunes shuffled up the stairs, carrying their brethren. Davi greeted the first one by name and a flicker of hope flashed on the man’s face. They embraced as well as they could.

“Take them outside. I’ll look for clothing and blankets,” Skyler said.

When the others cleared the front door, Skyler bounded up the stairs to the second floor and searched it again. Davi might have had little formal training, but he’d killed two armed men in the central hallway. Skyler stepped over the bodies and entered the first bedroom he found. In the closet he found black uniforms like those worn by Gabriel’s people in Belém. Skyler grabbed the garments and tossed them on the bed. He found one pair of hiking boots and some underwear, and threw that on the pile, too.

As he ransacked the place for useful supplies, the rage within him turned cold. It froze into a deep resolve. Whoever this Gabriel fellow was, he’d not just held these people against their will; he’d forced them to breed. And not just with each other, but also with subhumans. Try as he might, Skyler couldn’t keep his imagination from painting what this place must have been like an hour before they arrived, and what kind of sickness lived within the people who ran it on Gabriel’s behalf. He felt no remorse at killing those he’d encountered on the way in, and would feel none when he put a round through Gabriel’s brain, either.

Outside he found Ana cradling the young girl Davi had rescued. She wept openly, as did the child.

The two unconscious prisoners were being tended to by the rest. In all, a dozen immunes had been freed.

Skyler set the blanket in the dirt and unfolded it to reveal the items he’d scrounged, then walked away to let the group dress with a modicum of privacy.

Davi brushed the hair from Ana’s face. “Wait for us here, sis,” he said, and followed Skyler over to examine the wreckage of the barn.

Smoking debris littered the ground for hundreds of meters around the structure. Whatever explosive they stored in here was either very potent or in a large quantity. Skyler saw bits and pieces of food packaging, and signs of less critical things like toiletries and charred books.

Nothing remained of the barn itself. Skyler could only hope no one had been inside. No one friendly, that is. He sighed. Clearly Gabriel’s people had stored their reserve supplies here, and it might have been worth rummaging through. No point in worrying about it now.

“Your sister …,” Skyler said without looking at Davi.

“… takes risks,” Davi said, finishing. In tone and terseness, he said he didn’t want to talk about her actions.

Skyler let it go. He’d force the topic before they returned to Belém, but more pressing issues were on his mind. “The purpose of this place, Davi. Not just a prison.”

“I know,” he said.

“Did you know about this before we arrived? Is this what you two escaped from?”

Davi shook his head. “I …” He searched for the words. “Gabriel talked often about how just finding immunes wasn’t enough. We needed to create more. I thought he meant to force Ana …”

To breed. Breeding immunes. Skyler didn’t know if the trait even worked that way, but the presence of the young girl seemed evidence enough. She couldn’t be more than five, Skyler guessed, and that meant she’d been born after the disease ravaged the planet, beyond the aura.

Had there been others who didn’t have the protection? Dashed against a wall or drowned for their inferiority? Skyler shivered.

Together, Skyler and Davi walked the perimeter of the compound, and then through the field of wreckage that had been the barn. Other than a few cans of food, and a box of pain-relief pills, they found nothing salvageable.

“The two vehicles are a gift,” Skyler said. “We might be able to sneak up on the colony in them. There are a couple of uniforms, too.”

Davi said nothing and avoided Skyler’s gaze.

“Pack anything useful into the trucks. We’ll move back to the clearing tonight and head to Belém at dawn,” Skyler added. He watched the young man carefully and saw the distance in his eyes. “You do intend to come back with me, right? We had a deal.”

“Yes,” Davi said, his voice defensive. “At least give us some time to tend to our friends, after what they’ve been through. I can’t think about tomorrow right now. Even without … all this … Ana and I have been on the move for months.”

Skyler thought of Davi sitting in a hammock on the beach in Belém, but kept it to himself. “How long are you talking? A day? A week? My people are under Gabriel’s thumb back there, and those in orbit—”

“Just …” Davi swallowed whatever he intended to say, and then lowered his voice. “Can we just wait until morning to decide? Let my friends rest, and not have to ponder a rush into danger so quickly after they’ve been freed?”

That’s when their thirst for revenge will be strongest, though, Skyler thought. He kept it to himself, though. Davi feared the dangers ahead, too, he guessed. Maybe some time would help him remember the purpose of their plan.

Those who were able spent the rest of the day hoisting what supplies they could find onto the cargo racks on the tops of the two trucks. Ana sat atop one vehicle, organizing the meager goods and tying them down. Davi stood atop the other truck, rifle at the ready, scanning the surrounding countryside for any approaching subhumans.

When finished, Skyler told Ana and Davi to drive to the clearing where they’d camped the night before. “I’ll hike out there after I’ve had a good look around,” he said, and waved them off.

In the common room he found nothing except blood and furniture. The tables could be burned for firewood, but then so could the entire cursed building. He left everything where it lay and didn’t bother to search the corpses.

He moved on to the kitchen. In one pantry he found a box of packaged noodles with bouillon packets, a discovery that made him think of Woon, and Prumble, and the old airport. Skyler hadn’t thought about Darwin in a day at least, and the realization filled him with a mixture of guilt and sorrow. He may have had next to nothing left there, but he’d abandoned it all, and for what?

For Tania. For Tania, and the future.

She’d be desperate by now, he guessed. Air and water would be running short. He wondered if she knew anything about the situation on the ground. Maybe she’d taken the stations back to Darwin, for sheer purposes of survival. He couldn’t blame her if she had.

In a drawer Skyler found a bag of hot sauce packets. Past their expiration date, but if he’d learned anything in the last five years it was that expiration dates were grossly underestimated. The ubiquitous Preservall could keep most foods safe for many years, something food manufacturers must have found bad for sales, so they shaved months or years off the printed date. The hot sauce went into his bag with the freeze-dried noodles.

Out the back door he found a small garden, blissfully free of mango. Skyler left the plants untouched, deciding he could send someone else back here to pick anything edible. Next to the planters he found gardening tools, and a hefty axe that had been recently sharpened. This he kept in hand as he circled the building.

He went upstairs again. A methodical search of each bedroom produced a few additional items: ammunition, two modern handguns, and a suitcase full of women’s clothes. Skyler put the weapons and bullets inside with the clothing and tossed the whole thing out the window to the dirt below.

In the master bedroom he found a sleek black briefcase on the top shelf of the closet, pushed way to the back. The locks were in place and required both a combination and a thumb-print to open.

Or an axe.

Skyler set the thing in the middle of the hardwood floor. He brought the blade down with all his strength, aiming for the front edge just behind the locks. It took two such swings to sever the front of the case. Sweating, Skyler dumped the contents onto the bed.

A passport spilled out, along with a thick leather wallet, two stacks of crisp one-hundred-euro bills, and a bag of cocaine.

Skyler flipped open the passport and read the name. Gabriel Zagallo.

The passport had stamps from every drug-infested hellhole on pre-disease Earth, along with travel visas for China and India. Skyler studied the photograph. The worn passport was dated a decade earlier, so he couldn’t be sure how much the man in the picture had changed since then. The man he saw had well-groomed black hair, combed neatly to one side. His head was tilted down, giving his eyes an animal quality that chilled Skyler.

This man had been a gangster, before.

The contents of the wallet contradicted that conclusion. A credit slate, its screen dead due to a lack of spooling, had chipped corners and grime on the screen, implying heavy use. A stack of receipts for small meals, and a few small bills in the local currency. A driver’s license that confirmed the name on the passport. Most important, though, was the badge. The words across the top read POLíCIA FEDERAL.