She nods. “Twenty minutes. In and out.”
I drive too fast to be legal. The streets blur. The city becomes an abstract painting. We’re not out of danger. Danger has a way of hitching rides to things that move.
We pull up two blocks away, and the building Kiera lives in is a small, squat thing with laundry fluttering on a line like flags and a vendor selling steaming dumplings out front. A woman with a baby watches us from a doorway. The evening goes on like nothing in the world has shifted—except everything has shifted under our feet.
We move on foot for the last block. The alley to Kiera’s place smells of fried scallop and burnt wiring. The door is unlocked, the light on. I freeze.
Inside, the apartment is quiet. Too quiet. Papers on the table. A mug cold and empty. A compad open, screensaver blown to static.
“Kiera?” Rhea calls, voice thin.
The bedroom door is cracked. A smear of something dark runs along the threshold.
My warrior blood turns to ice. I step into the doorway and see the little things—the red hair clip on the pillow, the coffee ring on the desk, the backup case on a shelf with its latch open.
And a smear of blood that maps the path like a clue.
“She’s gone,” I say.
Rhea drops to her knees. “No. No—no, no, no.”
She scrambles to the backup case and tosses through it, fingers frantic, nails scraping plastic. Drives. Tokens. A lot of empty folders. One intact drive—green, labeled with a hand-written R:BACKUP:K. Her hands shake so hard she can’t plug it into the compad.
I help, steadying her hands with my own. Our palms meet against cold metal. For a second the world contracts to the small space of our touch.
“Got it,” she breathes.
She swallows and looks at me, eyes rimmed red. “We have something.”
“Yes,” I say. It’s a small victory, but a victory. “We move.”
Outside, a shadow moves across the alley mouth like a whisper. I smell it—that same unfamiliar DNA threaded with the bitter resin of a sleeping agent. Hunters.
Something small, heavy and metallic smashes through the window. I barely have time to wrap my body around Rhea, and no time to shout a warning.
CHAPTER 3
RHEA
Glass shatters. Flames lick the curtains. My ears ring so loud, it’s like someone shoved a horn in each one and let loose the entire Martian Philharmonic. One second I’m arguing with a seven-foot slab of red scales and secrets, and the next—I’m airborne. Valtron’s arm is clamped around my waist like a hydraulic brace, his body a wall of muscle and heat between me and whatever the hell just turned my apartment into a war zone.
“What the?—?!”
“Grenade,” he barks, already pivoting.
The impact rattled the floor hard enough to flip my compad across the room. It’s somewhere in the fire now, melting into expensive slag. The whole place is screaming—alarms, fire-suppression trying to kick in, my own pulse thudding in my throat like a war drum.
Valtron doesn’t wait for me to find my feet. He bodily lifts me, charges through the wreckage like we’re doing a stunt reel, and shoulder-slams the already cracked window frame. We explode onto the fire escape, metal groaning under the sudden weight.
That’s when I see it.
Clinging to the outside of the building like some kind of horror-movie wet dream is a thing with four legs, acid-spitting mandibles, and too many damn eyes.
“Oh sweet baby Nebula—whatisthat?!?”
“Contract-grade xeno-hunter. Class three.” Valtron doesn’t sound impressed. He launches us down two flights, gravity barely keeping pace with his speed. “They spit acid, track via thermal pheromones. Smart enough to climb, dumb enough to fight me.”
“THAT isnotcomforting!”
