Ray refused to think.He unclipped his harness, pushed the side door open against the wind and grabbed the frame with one hand. The cold hit him immediately, two hundred feet of open air beneath him, the forest below looking flat and dark in the failing light."Ray!" Priya grabbed him from behind."Hold the controls," Ray told Zoe, who was in the co-pilot seat. "Keep it level and don't let it drift."Zoe grabbed the controls without argument.Ray swung out onto the skid.The wind at this height was serious, pulling at his jacket, his hair, his grip on the door frame, and beneath his boots the metal skid vibrated with the weight of something that shouldn't be there. He looked down and saw it properly for the first time.It was large. Larger than it had looked from inside. The hands locked around the skid were not appropriate in the way enhanced zombie hands were wrong.The joints thickened, the grip strength visible in the way the metal itself had bent slightly under it. It had cl

Yen came earlier that morning.Ray opened the hotel room door and Yen stood in the corridor with no jacket and both his hands visible.It was the specific body language of a man who understood that trust worked in both directions and was making the first move.Ray let him in.The room was already arranged. Priya sat at the small desk with the facility documents spread in front of her.Charlie stood near the window while Saul was on the far bed with his eyes doing the half-focus thing that meant he was listening to the building around them. Ada sat cross-legged on the floor and Zoe stood near the bathroom door with her arms loose at her sides.Yen walked in, looked at the documents on the desk and looked at the people in the room, and said nothing for a moment."Sit down," Ray said.Yen sat.Ray laid it out properly this time. It was the full version. Project X from the beginning, Anna, the consent form, the operation, the outbreak. The facility in Kansas and Zed and Bleach and th

Ray picked up the phone.He looked at the live stream screen for two seconds. The view count was at four hundred and was climbing fast. Four hundred people on a dark web platform who had just watched Ada kill the lights in a tunnel and Zoe throw four armed men into a wall without touching them.He handed the phone to Priya."Get this to Mara," he said. "Locate the IP address of whoever is hosting the stream. Whoever is watching it, all of it."Priya already had her own phone out, photographing the screen before the stream could be taken down.Ray turned to the man on the floor.He was young in his mid-twenties, the youngest of Yen's three, which was probably why he had been put in the corner with the phone instead of at the front with the weapons. Ray crouched and grabbed the front of his jacket and pulled him upright against the tunnel wall."Talk," Ray said.The man looked at the zip-tied Drogo, then at the unconscious Yen and Park and Doss, then at Ray.He spoke.*******The way

Ray pulled the chain apart with both hands.The metal snapped at the anchor point with a sharp crack and his arms came free and he was moving before the nearest masked guard processed what had happened.He hit the guard once. The man went down and stayed there."Now," Ray said.Zoe pulled her chain free from the wall behind her, the anchor tearing out of the concrete in a shower of dust, and the blue light was already building in her hands before she fully stood up.Ada pressed both palms flat against the floor.The lights in the hall flickered once. Then the cameras flickered and half the screens around the walls went dark as Ada pulled the power selectively, cutting the feeds that covered the group's position and leaving the rest running.It actually bought them a blind spot in the middle of the most watched room any of them had ever stood in.Charlie broke his chain by looping it around a support bar and dropping his full body weight against it. The bar bent and the chain came fr

Ray looked at the blinking red light under Priya's skin and understood immediately what it was.It was not a location tracker.It was a trigger."Everyone stop moving," he said.The room went still."Ada," Ray said. "Can you feel all six of them right now."Ada had both palms flat on the nearest wall, her eyes closed, the blue light running along her fingers in the slow diagnostic pulse she used when she was reading a system rather than controlling it."Yes," she said. "All six are active. The red pulse is a secondary function running underneath the location signal. It's not transmitting location." She opened her eyes. "It's waiting for a command signal.""A detonator," Saul said."Yes," Ada said.Charlie put his hand to his neck and pulled it away quickly like the tracker had burned him. "Ghost told us in the arena. He said detonator tracker and he said it directly.""He wanted us to know," Priya said. She was still at the desk, completely calm, the canister still in her hand. "It'