Electric.
Dense.
I meet his gaze.
“You were planning without me again,” I say flatly.
“Yes,” he admits.
“I don’t accept that.”
“I know.”
We stare at each other across the humming archives room, ash and zoning law and syndicate threats and buried secrets hanging between us. We don’t speak.
Yet, this just got a lot bigger than either of us alone.
CHAPTER 12
TUR
The supplier warehouse squats at the edge of the lower freight district like a concrete ulcer, all corrugated steel and flickering sodium lights and loading bays that haven’t seen legitimate inventory in years. The air smells like diesel exhaust, hot rubber, and spoiled produce dumped illegally behind the building by people who don’t want to pay disposal fees.
It’s almost midnight.
Traffic thins to a skeletal trickle, just long-haul haulers and courier bikes ghosting past on magnetized lanes, and the alleys between buildings lie in long, shadowed ribbons that swallow sound the way a mouth swallows prayer.
I crouch on the roof of a decommissioned tram station across the street, the concrete still warm under my palms from a long, hot day, my eyes tracking the mouth of the alley three blocks south where the Nine’s transport is supposed to roll through.
Kimberly is two levels below me, tucked into the broken shell of a parking structure with a clear sightline down the cross street, her comm feed a soft whisper in my ear.
“You’re breathing too slow,” she murmurs.
I huff quietly.
“You’re breathing too fast.”
“Yeah, well,” she mutters back, “my date tonight is a syndicate hit team and my backup is a traumatized murder cryptid with control issues, so I think I’m allowed a little tachycardia.”
Despite myself, my mouth twitches.
“Vehicle inbound,” I say.
Headlights slice through the darkness at the far end of the alley, pale and ugly and wrong in the sodium haze. The transport glides forward, low-profile and armored, matte-black body swallowing reflections instead of throwing them back.
I reach into my jacket and pull the EMP spike from a padded pocket, its casing cold and smooth against my palm.
“On your mark,” I murmur.
Kimberly exhales audibly through the comm.
“Do it.”
I toss the spike.
It arcs cleanly through the air and clatters against the roof of the transport a half second before it detonates in a silent, invisible pulse.
Every light on the vehicle dies at once.
