I planted my palms against the frozen ground and pushed to my feet.
The Limmat stretched before me, black and glittering.
Across the water, Bern was dying.
Whole sections of the city had gone dark. The Order’s sabotage spread through the power grid, shutting down whole neighborhoods one by one. From where I stood, I could see the gaps in the lights spreading like plague.
I could just make out the bridge upstream. It was half a kilometer away, maybe less.
I could make it. I had to make it.
I staggered forward.
My legs didn’t want to cooperate. They’d gone stiff and clumsy, the muscles spasming with each step.
My shoulder was a wall of needles filled with wet, stabbing pain that told me the bleeding was worsening.
I was leaving a trail.
Blood on the snow and footprints in the frost.
Anyone following would find me easily.
So don’t let them follow,my mind insisted.
I moved faster and pushed through the pain.
The bridge grew closer with each agonizing step.
Two hundred meters.
One fifty.
Then I heard the car.
Engine noise, loud and enraged, somewhere above.
I threw myself flat before I’d consciously registered the threat.
It was all instinct and training, the kind of reflex that had kept me alive through a dozen missions that should’ve killed me.
I pressed into the frozen mud of the riverbank, making myself part of the landscape.
Above, headlights swept across the darkness.
A car moved slowly along the road that paralleled the river.
Then it stopped.
A door opened.
Then another.
“Spread out,” a man ordered in German, clipped and professional. “He’s somewhere along the river. Find him.”
Footsteps on gravel.
Three sets, fanning out, descending toward the bank.
