Hammer Down: Children of the Undying: Book 2 (13 page)

No, that’s why I’m sentimental and foolish.
“Remember that the next time you start bucking for a bigger share of the profits.”

“Well, I didn’t say I wasn’t the best too.”

He had his secrets, but he also had considerable skills. “Acknowledged.”

Tanner hopped off the truck, hitting the ground lightly. “Want me to look over the other truck?”

“No.” She wasn’t ready to go back to her room yet, back to the cold, empty bunk that waited. “No, I’ll do it.”

“You need company?”

Alone with her thoughts? That was the last thing she needed. “Yeah, actually. I think we might need to replace a few of the couplings on Juliet’s air lines. Either that, or she has an unholy reliance on jake braking for no good reason whatsoever.”

“Annoying you isn’t a reason?” But he grinned and held out a hand. “Hop down, boss. Let’s get these girls tiptop so we can get the hell out of here tomorrow.”

Devi grumbled as she accepted his hand because, if she didn’t, he’d expect her to smile. And she wasn’t sure she could.

Zel didn’t need a shower to wash the evidence of Devi off his skin. There was no evidence there to begin with, which made him pissy enough that he put himself through a brutal physical workout in the soldiers’ gym before retreating to the small private bath in his suite.

His rooms weren’t lavish. After Oliver’s death, his mother had offered him the comfortable and spacious area where she and her husband had spent the past four decades; rooms, she’d insisted, that were his now that he ruled Rochester in his stepfather’s place. Zel had considered it only long enough to ascertain she wasn’t offering because she needed a change of scenery, then politely declined. Continuing to live in the soldiers’ barracks would have sent the wrong message to people instinctively aware of rank, but he didn’t feel comfortable surrounded by too much luxury.

So he’d chosen his own apartment. In six months, he hadn’t done much to decorate the place. The cupboards in his kitchen were bare with the exception of a few cans of soup and the dishes his youngest sister had made for him in her pottery studio. Most of Rochester’s inhabitants ate in one of the two communal cafeterias, and more often than not he joined them. Oliver had done the same, proving that the settlement’s leader took few special privileges.

Rochester had been founded by dreamers, a Utopian commune in a broken world. It had worked in the first generation, with everyone still struggling to come to grips with the end of the lives they’d known, but Zel’s generation had been born into it. They had no common tragedy to hold them together, no dreams of reclaiming the safety of a lost society. Just the gritty, hard truth that had always existed for them—the weak falter and the strong survive.

Zel bypassed the empty, lonely kitchen in favor of the equally sparse bedroom. He pointedly ignored the bed as he reached into the closet, not needing the distraction of imagining Devi there, naked and waiting for him. Instead he dressed in a methodical, deliberate fashion, preparing himself for the battle to come.

Tonight, he’d be ruthless enough to create a new truth for their world. The weak didn’t have to falter if the strong would protect them.

By the time he reached his office, Lanna and Trip were already there. Lanna had her wild, curly hair pulled back tonight, the severe style emphasizing her sharp cheekbones and tilted eyes. Zel had never seen a man look at her and judge her to be a threat, which made most men fools.

She smiled at him as Lorenzo arrived, the smile vicious enough to dispel any illusion of harmlessness. “I have everything.”

Zel had to suppress a shiver. “How hard did he fight you?”

A graceful shrug. “He was trained to resist. I imagine he did not find the process enjoyable.”

Which meant Cyrus had suffered. Considering the glee he’d taken in threatening them, Zel had scant pity to spare. He glanced at Trip. “How’s it going over there?”

He didn’t look up. “Just going over the code one last time.”

Since what Trip was attempting sounded more like magic than code, it seemed best not to interrupt. Zel shifted his attention to Lorenzo. “I’m assuming you haven’t come up with any last-minute ideas that are less risky than this?”

“Not a damn thing.” Lorenzo wore an uncharacteristically grave expression. “We need to find out why Nicollet sent the spy. Is he a scout? Is he here for sabotage? Not knowing could kill us.”

Zel looked at Lanna next. “You’ve been going through his thoughts, I assume? Anything new?”

“No.” She shook her head, her hair bouncing in its springy ponytail. “He doesn’t know why he’s here. And it bothers him. He’s trying to tell himself that he’s important, invaluable—but he knows they didn’t assign him his specific mission before he was established because he’s expendable. They half-expected us to catch him, and they won’t do a thing to save him. His rationalizations are incredibly complex, but not very satisfying.”

Lorenzo snorted. “Typical self-aggrandizing behavior. He’s a grunt, but he needs power over us, even if he has to manufacture it.”

“Agreed. He has no value to the city, and trying to return him will gain us nothing. So…” Zel glanced from Lanna to Lorenzo, one eyebrow raised. “We have no other options.”

Trip spoke. “Even if we learn nothing, this could buy us enough time to try again. Maybe even give Graham a chance to gather more information.”

That was all their insane gamble was, when it came down to it. A chance to buy time. Nicollet had sent a spy in a clear show of aggression, and they didn’t want him back. If an attack followed…

Well, if an attack followed, they’d deal with it. Nicollet finding out that Rochester had dispatched their agent was less of a danger than Nicollet finding out the truth—that Zel and his people were more than prepared to defend against human attack. He had barracks full of highly trained halfbloods who might as well have been bred for violence, along with an array of magically gifted citizens. The humans couldn’t begin to defend themselves against that kind of power, but neither could they know about it.

If they did, they’d certainly try to eliminate the threat Rochester posed.

Zel curled his hand into a fist. “You almost ready, Trip?”

He nodded shortly. “I’ll echo the meeting into a private room. Worst-case scenario, they catch on quick and we abort, drop out of the network.”

“You’re sure you can do this?”

“I can dupe the code and signal. The rest is up to chance, I guess.”

It always was.

He wanted to say something else,
ask
something else, but it would be clear he was only stalling. They’d gone over the plan enough times to make it rote, now all they had to do was execute it, in all its mad glory. It was a risk, the sort Oliver Wetzel would never have taken. But Zel’s stepfather had ruled over a quiet community that had never attracted the attention or ire of the nearby human city.

Oliver Wetzel had never needed to consider outright war.

“All right.” Zel reached for his glasses and slipped them on. The dark lenses weren’t necessary—anyone with a chip could close his eyes and connect to the Global—but tonight he needed the signal boost and the lack of distraction. “Let’s do this.”

The drop into the network was as agonizing as always, a fast plummet off the edge of a cliff while his stomach followed at a more leisurely pace. His boots hit the ground in a perfectly square room with blank walls that trailed up into nothingness.

Lorenzo blinked in beside him, rubbing his temples. “I hate this place.”

“I love it,” Trip whispered fiercely. “I fucking
love
the network, everything it is. Endless possibility.”

Even with the pain humming in his veins, Zel couldn’t bring himself to disagree. That light in Trip’s eyes was what made him the best. Trip needed the network the way Lorenzo craved sex and Zel himself hungered for violence.

Lanna appeared last, her face serene. Whatever demon blood flowed through her, it was too insignificant for the anti-demon signal built into the network to view her as a threat. She folded her hands in front of her and tilted her head. “Is there a particular place we should stand?”

Trip closed his eyes. “I had to approximate the size of the meeting area as closely as possible, so just stay near the walls. You obviously can’t interact with what you see, but you can blur it if you interfere with the echo.”

Zel took a step back and shoved his hands into his pockets. “We’ll keep quiet unless they ask something Lanna needs to answer. Let’s get on with it.”

Lorenzo scrubbed his hands over his face. “It’s time anyway.”

Trip blinked, his image fritzing for a split second and then fading slightly, as if the signal supporting him had lost some of its intensity. Color washed across the room, pixels snapping into place to form a small, shadowy room.

Two men appeared, dressed in simple suits. One tugged at his tie. “You were almost late.”

“My target’s satisfaction has been time-intensive.” Trip’s words, but they held an odd sort of echo, and for a second Trip’s image blurred, the face of the spy they had trussed up in the makeshift prison replacing his own. Trip had spent days crafting the echo, a perfect replica of Elan Cyrus that would be indistinguishable from the actual person.

They hoped.

Zel studied the men, trying to ascertain if they suspected the deception, but their expressions were impossible to interpret. Two blandly unrecognizable men, so forgettable Zel wondered if their appearances had been hacked.

The one on the right pulled out a data pad and consulted it. “Katherine, was it? So your infiltration was successful.”

“Repeatedly successful.” His expression didn’t change, but Trip imbued the words with a hint of innuendo, and for a heartbeat Zel wanted to punch him. Kate had been heartbroken to find that the man who’d wooed her with such determination had been using her as a ticket into town.

The man with the data pad glanced at the man still fidgeting with his tie, and Tie arched an eyebrow. “We’ll be running the appropriate verification while we talk, of course. And we’ll need your passphrase.”

“I need a rose petal bath to soothe my aching head.”

Next to Zel, Lanna evidenced her odd sense of humor in a wholly inappropriate snicker, though she’d been the one to pluck the phrase from Cyrus’s head to begin with.

Data Pad nodded. “Initiating verification. As you may recall, before you left you were instructed to do everything possible to cultivate the attention and devotion of your target.”

“She likes to be called Katie. Not quite pretty, which makes her grateful.”

Lorenzo ground his teeth together.

“Her physical attributes, or lack thereof, are unimportant. She was not selected at random.”

A ping of warning shot through Zel, followed by fear so sharp it stung. Kate was a warm, caring woman, her occasional bouts of temper aside, but nothing made her stand out, except her job—helping Zel’s mother manage the nursery.

Trip held his tongue and waited for the man to continue, but Lorenzo fidgeted uneasily. “The man said they were initiating signal verification,” he whispered. “How long did Trip say a full scan would take?”

There was no need to whisper when the men weren’t really there, but Zel felt the same compulsion. “A few minutes, maybe?” Which could be why they were waiting to explain the
real
mission. Until they could be sure that the man they were meeting with was legitimate, it wouldn’t be worth the risk, not when there was nothing to keep the intruder from dropping out of the network with his newly acquired information.

It made perfect sense—until Data Pad spoke again. “Your target is intimately involved in the day-to-day care and upbringing of the children. Through her, we need you to gain access to information about the hybrid children and any unique skills they might possess. We have intelligence indicating that the colony has produced at least one healer of some power—”

Wherever Zel’s body was, blood must be roaring in his ears. The world seemed to narrow, until it was hard to breathe, hard to
think
.

The bastards were after their children. After his niece.

Lorenzo shoved away from the wall, circled the two men from Nicollet and peered down at the data tablet the shorter man held. “Still running.
Zel
. They haven’t finished the verification.”

The words penetrated the rage hazing his vision. “That’s impossible. Why would they tell him this before they verified?”

“They wouldn’t.” The data pad beeped, short blips that sounded like a warning, and Lorenzo swore savagely. “Drop out, Trip. Drop
now
—”

The man with the data pad looked directly at Trip and pressed a button on the side of the device.

Lanna screamed, and the room exploded.

Zel lunged for Lanna as she started to fall and tripped over a couch that hadn’t been there a second before. The walls twisted around them, flickering in a pulsing, hypnotic rhythm as a dark copy of his office super-imposed itself over the chaotic mess around them.

Next to him Lanna hit the floor and vanished. Before Zel could draw another breath she reappeared, three feet away and frantic. “He’s seizing! In the office, Trip’s seizing!”

She blinked out again, and Zel spun until he found Trip. He screamed silently, his eyes frantic and pleading. Lorenzo stood beside him, his eyes closed and shoulders rigid. His mouth moved, but no sound escaped.

Trip screamed again, and the sound echoed, reverberated through their network.

“Lorenzo, we need—”

Cache appeared before he could finish the sentence. Anger sparked in her eyes and vibrated in her entire body as she whirled on Lorenzo. When she caught sight of Trip, she stopped short and dropped beside him. Then she cupped his cheeks and swore. “Go get your healer, Zel. And Devi. Then get anyone you’ve got in this place who knows their way around a circuit board.
Now
.”

Out of his depth and more scared than he wanted to admit, Zel did the only thing he could—he obeyed.

Chapter Eleven

Devi wasn’t sure which was worse—the office where Rosa bent over Trip, trying to save his body, or the private network where Cache worked desperately to preserve his mind.