"Keep your heads down and your mouths shut until we reach the canopy," Kael muttered, his boots squelching loudly as he hauled Rian through the thick, knee-deep sludge of the cratered access road. The air was a suffocating soup of gray fog, sulfurous smoke, and the sharp, coppery tang of unspent munitions. Every breath felt like inhaling a handful of hot ash, burning their throats and making their eyes water in the freezing dawn light. Rian stumbled, his boots catching on a twisted bundle of severed fiber-optic cables buried just beneath the surface of the mud. He went down hard on his good knee, letting out a sharp, ragged gasp as his dead cybernetic arm swung forward with the dead weight of a rusted iron anvil, nearly dragging him face-first into a puddle of oily water. "Damn it," Rian hissed, clutching at his shoulder where the severed neural jacks met raw, inflamed flesh. "My balance is completely shot, Kael. The dead weight of this meta

"If you move even an inch to the left, Sera, the wind is going to carry the sound of your breathing straight down the gorge into their forward bivouac," Kael whispered sharply, his jaw tight as he dropped flat onto the damp, needle-strewn slope beside her. Sera didn't look back at him, her knuckles white around the cold, scratched metal casing of the heavy military binoculars pressed tight against her eyes. "I’ve survived three corporate purges by knowing how to breathe without moving my ribs, Kael. Worry about whether Vance managed to hide those supply crates under the canvas before the frost sets in." "Vance knows what he’s doing," Kael muttered, pulling a battered flask from his coat pocket and taking a dry, burning swallow of raw grain alcohol before squinting down through the swirling gray fog toward the valley floor. "What I'm worried about is you sitting out here on this exposed shelf with zero radio telemetry to warn us i

"Quiet down, Jula. Breathe through your nose, not your mouth. If they're close enough to hear you hyperventilating, we're already dead," Kael hissed, his hand clamped hard over the girl’s shoulder as he shoved her down behind a broad, moss-covered boulder. The air in the ravine smelled intensely of iron, wet earth, and the biting chill of the knee-deep water flowing sluggishly over the smooth river stones. Vance crouched on the opposite bank, his knuckles white around the grip of his service pistol, his eyes darting between the dense wall of dripping ferns and the muddy game trail that wound down toward the creek crossing. "They're taking their sweet time," Vance muttered, his voice a low, raspy rumble that barely carried over the burble of the water. "Jula sure they were heading this way?" "She saw their scout markings and their boots, Vance. They're tracking the mud we kicked up leaving the ridge," Kael whispered

"Stop shivering, Jula, or you're going to drop that box straight into the gorge," Rian rasped, his voice tight with strain as his one good hand locked around the edge of a splintered wooden crate marked with faded medical red crosses. "I'm not shivering because I'm scared, Rian. I'm shivering because my boots are full of freezing mud and we've been running for three hours straight," Jula shot back, her teeth chattering audibly as she shifted her weight onto her left foot. The swollen right ankle throbbed with every heartbeat, sending white-hot spikes of pain shooting up her shin, but she swallowed the groan threatening to escape her lips. She wasn't about to slow down the column now, not when every living soul behind them depended on getting across that rotting gap before the corporate hounds picked up their trail again. "Just keep moving," Kael barked from the head of the line, his stride long and relentless despite the heavy rifle slung ac

"Keep that soldering iron steady, Sera, or you’re going to fuse my entire nervous system into a single useless lump of copper and dead tissue," Rian hissed, his teeth gritted so hard a fresh drop of cold sweat broke out across his soot-stained forehead. "If you don't stop whining, I’m going to use the soldering iron to staple your mouth shut, Rian, and trust me, you won't feel the heat over the current shock," Sera snapped back, her eyes narrowed in the flickering, jaundiced amber glow of a battery-powered work lamp resting on a flat limestone slab. The damp air of the cave system smelled heavily of wet limestone, stagnant water, and the sharp, bitter tang of burning flux. Around them, forty exhausted refugees huddled in small, shivering clusters against the dripping stone walls, sharing sips of tepid water from dented canteens and chewing on strips of salted venison. The faint, rhythmic dripping of groundwater echoed off the vau