The System That Hates Its Owner

Chapter 4: The Alarm

The alarm didn't stop.

Ethan had heard drills before … short bursts, three tones, done in under a minute. This one climbed and held, climbed and held, the kind of sound designed to mean exactly one thing to everyone who heard it: this isn't a drill.

He slowed without meaning to. Ahead, the street that had looked emptier than it should have was suddenly full … hunters sprinting out of side buildings in half-fastened gear, a containment officer waving both arms at a line of parked vehicles, shouting something Ethan couldn't make out over the siren.

His tablet buzzed. A city-wide alert, red border, all caps: EMERGENCY LOCKDOWN — ZONE 4. CIVILIANS EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY VIA DESIGNATED ROUTES.

"Perfect," Ethan muttered. "Perfect timing."

He was three blocks from the western checkpoint. Three blocks that had, in the space of ninety seconds, turned into the exact opposite of a straight line he could ride.

A hunter grabbed his handlebars before he'd finished the thought, yanking him half off the seat. "Off the bike. This street's closed."

"I've got a priority delivery for the checkpoint…"

"Every delivery's cancelled. Barrier's breached two blocks east. Get to the evacuation line or get out of my way."

"The case…"

"I don't care about the case." The hunter's grip tightened on the handlebars. "You care more about a package than your own neck, that's your problem, not mine. Move."

Ethan looked past him. Past the hunter's shoulder, past the crowd now spilling out of doorways, he could see it … not the monster itself, not yet, but the effect of it. A support pillar down. A section of street lit orange from something burning that shouldn't have been able to catch fire.

The case on his bike ticked again, harder this time, like it had noticed the alarm too.

"Move," the hunter said, already turning away to grab the next civilian in his path.

Ethan moved.

He let the crowd take him, the way you let a current take you when fighting it would only get you drowned faster. Bodies pressed in from every side … office workers still in uniform, a woman carrying a child on her hip, an old man being half-dragged by someone younger. Nobody was screaming yet. That was almost worse. Just the low, steady sound of people trying very hard not to run.

His tablet buzzed again. Danny.

*You seeing this? Zone 4's all over the emergency channels. Breach confirmed. Get out of there*.

*Working on it*, Ethan typed, one hand on the bars, letting the crowd carry him another twenty feet before he could even glance at the screen again.

*Ethan. I mean it. Whatever the job's paying, it's not worth this.*

He didn't answer that one. He didn't have an answer that wouldn't have sounded like a lie.

*Ethan?* Danny sent again, thirty seconds later, then, *If you don't answer in one minute I'm calling this in as a missing courier. I'm not joking.*

*Still here*, Ethan typed back. *Evacuating with everyone else. Talk after.*

He didn't send anything after that. There wasn't time.

The evacuation route funneled everyone toward a transit plaza two streets over, hunters stationed at every corner directing traffic with the kind of clipped, practiced urgency that told Ethan this wasn't their first breach, even if it was his. He let himself get funneled with everyone else, bike abandoned somewhere behind him in the crush, the case still somehow strapped to his back now instead of the handlebars … he didn't remember making that decision, only that his hands had done it without asking him first.

A woman ahead of him stumbled. He caught her elbow before she went down, steadied her, kept moving. She didn't thank him. Nobody had time to thank anyone tonight.

Then, over the crowd, over the siren, a new sound cut through … a child crying, high and frightened, coming from somewhere that wasn't part of the moving mass of people around him. Somewhere behind. Somewhere that should have already been empty.

Ethan stopped.

The crowd broke around him like water around a rock, shoulders and elbows and someone's shouted curse as he refused to keep moving with them. He turned, scanning the buildings lining the street they were being funneled away from … most of them dark, evacuated, windows blown open or boarded from some earlier incident nobody had gotten around to fixing.

One window, three floors up in a half-collapsed apartment block, had a light on.

And behind that light, small and pressed against the glass, was a child no older than seven, alone, watching the crowd leave without them.

"Hey!" Ethan shouted, but his voice vanished into the siren and the noise of a hundred other people moving in the opposite direction. Nobody around him had seen the window. Nobody around him was looking.

A hunter jogged past, close enough to grab. "There's a kid," Ethan said, grabbing his arm. "Third floor, that building, someone missed…"

"Building's cleared. Whole block's cleared." The hunter didn't even slow down. "Keep moving, we don't have time…"

"I'm telling you there's a kid in that window."

"Where?" The hunter's eyes followed Ethan's pointing hand, scanning three floors of dark glass. "I don't see…"

"Third floor. Left side. The light's on."

The hunter finally looked … really looked … and for one second his face went the same color as the smoke rising two blocks east.

"Command!" he shouted into his comm, already breaking into a run toward the evacuation line instead of the building. "I need eyes on a possible child left behind, apartment block, Zone 4, I need…"

His voice cut off as a fresh tremor rolled through the street, hard enough to knock two people off their feet, hard enough that the light in the third-floor window flickered once and went out.