I ASKED the cab to drop me at an address several blocks from the geocoordinates. It wasn’t the greatest part of town, a lot of the shops around me were closed up with FOR RENT or old CLOSING SALE signs hanging in the grimy front windows.
As I strode along the sidewalk, careful to keep my head down, I watched for other activity on the street, but no one much seemed to come out this way. Even in the few stores that remained open, I didn’t spot any customers.
None of that detracted from my mission necessarily. The factory where we’d found the first match for the symbol had been rundown and abandoned too. But the quiet felt a little eerie. I wasn’t sure I’d been in any part of the city before where there hadn’t been at least a little more traffic just passing through.
The coordinates led me to a massive storage facility surrounded by a chain-link fence. I studied it from off to the side, not spotting any guards standing watch near the gate and only a few dingy looking cameras mounted on obvious posts. Several of the garage-style doors I could see had padlocks on them. Shouldn’t there have been more security here if this facility was still active?
Maybe the owners were too lazy and their customers not concerned enough to hassle them about it, but I didn’t like that either.
I obviously wasn’t going to break open the gate and waltz in within full view of the main camera. Instead, I scaled the fence where it veered closest to one of the rows of storage lockers. In a matter of moments, I’d scrambled over the edge and was crouched on the building’s flat, corrugated-metal rooftop.
I scanned the area again, taking in the aisles of matching buildings with their rows of doors and the utter stillness of the scene. In the middle of the day, no one was monitoring the gate in person, and no one was bringing stuff to or from their unit. I had no idea how normal that was, though.
Checking my phone, I determined that the exact geolocation from the image must be one of the units a few rows over at the dead end of the aisle. If I dropped down to the pavement below and walked over, I’d be boxed in once I reached it, with no easy avenue to climb to a better vantage point. Thankfully, I should be able to make my way over there across the rooftops. Most of them were connected, and those that weren’t had only a narrow walkway separating them, which would make for an easy leap.
I started over, walking around one aisle and making my way along the far end of the facility toward the one I needed. The whole time, I kept searching my surroundings for other security measures.
As I came up on the one camera at the back of the facility, I slowed, preparing to figure out a way to avoid it. It was hard to tell from this distance, but it might have captured an angle that would show the unit I needed to get to.
I eased closer, careful to stay out of range for now. If I blocked the view, there was always the chance that would alert an off-site security force that something was wrong—not that it looked as if the storage company cared enough to have hired someone for constant surveillance. I might be able to duck under the camera’s view with a quick roll and stay out of its sights the rest of the time…
As I drew closer, my forehead furrowed. I paused, studying the camera—and in particular its lens—more intently. There was something odd about the glass. It looked… smudged, or wet?
I edged even closer, and my pulse kicked up a notch with a surge of apprehension. Someone had sprayed a liquid on the camera’s lens that’d left behind a thick film. It would be blurring the view and making any recording taken useless for identifying the figures it captured.
Normally, that would have worked in my favor. I could sashay right by and no one would be the wiser. But the film had clearly been purposefully added. And…
I knelt down and touched a droplet I’d noticed on the roof beneath it. My finger smudged the damp spot. Still wet. The substance had been sprayed on the camera recently.
Why would someone else have been here, in this desolate area of town, wanting to obscure the cameras on this exact afternoon? Where were they now?
None of this felt right to me. Every aspect of it was starting to scream setup. Someone had ensured there’d be no staff on site and obscured the camera lenses so they could get away with something awful.
After the way we’d been attacked at the meat factory, I couldn’t help suspecting it was something awful they wanted to do to me.
This was a trap. I didn’t know why the teardrop symbol was here, but the people responsible must have known about it too and realized we’d come here soon. Maybe I’d slipped up somewhere along my journey and they’d figured out I was headed this way right now.
It didn’t matter which was true. The only important thing was getting out of here before that trap was sprung on me.
I turned, intent on marching to the closest spot where I could easily leap to the fence and vanish without a trace, but at the same moment, the thump of several footfalls reached my ears from the direction of the front gate. With a hitch of my heart, I ducked as close to the roof as I could get.
There was a rattling sound by the gate and a murmur of low voices. I flattened myself, braced to make a run for it as soon as I was sure I had a good opening. Then the gate swung open, and it wasn’t enemies but the men I’d left back at the apartment who strode into the storage facility.
They didn’t throw caution to the wind. I saw Blaze make a gesture toward the nearest camera and them all adjust their course to avoid it, and their heads swiveled to watch for any threat around them. But they marched quickly toward the aisle with the unit I’d already determined the geocoordinates pointed to with less stealth and wariness than I wished they’d used. They didn’t notice me where I was crouched on the roof a few aisles away.
I straightened up and waved my arms, but they didn’t glance my way again, already finished with their scan of the rooftops. They were focused on the environment at their eye level now. My chest itched with the urge to yell, but if this was a trap, that would only alert whoever was waiting to spring it that I was on to them. Shit.
Continuing to gesture in the hopes of getting the crew’s attention, I darted along the roof with feet set as silently as I could manage. If I could just get in front of them instead of off to the side, they’d have to notice me. My pulse thudded through my veins.
Maybe I was wrong about the trap. Maybe there was a normal explanation for everything that’d unnerved me. I desperately hoped that was true—but I couldn’t stake their lives and mine on that hope.
Why weren’t they picking up on the same clues? I guessed I couldn’t blame them for missing the cameras, since I hadn’t spotted the oddity with them until I was up here. But coming through the front gate had been a bold move. It was as if they were in so much of a hurry that they’d set aside caution for haste. What was so urgent about this investigation?
Me, I realized with a jolt of shock. That was the only conceivable explanation. They’d obviously realized I’d come here following the alert on Blaze’s computer, and they’d rushed after me. The bigger question was why exactly it’d mattered so much to them, but I could ask them that after we were all out of here safely.
They veered down the aisle they needed. I dashed faster. I was just coming up on that same aisle, preparing to start flinging pebbles at them if need be to shake them out of their intense focus on the unit ahead and judging the distance to where they were now halfway down the aisle, when a horrible screeching sound shattered my own attention.
Locker doors were flying open at the opening to the aisle—and at the far end, where we’d expected to find the symbol. At least two dozen men charged out, all of them with guns in their hands, surrounding the Chaos Crew in an instant.
In the same instant, my mind blanked with panic. I couldn’t do anything but muffle a rising scream as the attackers fired. The guys threw themselves toward the nearest locked doors, ducking to the ground and rolling into the small indents of the entrances to avoid being hit. Then my instincts kicked in and launched me into action.
No one had noticed me still—my friends or their attackers. I snatched up the gun I’d brought in a concealed holster under my arm and took aim at the larger group closing in on the crew from the only direction they could make their escape.
As I fired my first shots, dropping one and then another man in quick succession with bullets to the head, someone in the crew tossed a small round object into the middle of the aisle. I braced for an explosion, but instead, smoke billowed out of it with a quavering hiss. In a matter of seconds, most of the aisle was clouded with a thick gray fog. Even from above, I could only make out the slightest impressions of the figures within it.
The men were flattening themselves into the alcoves of the locker doorways, which provided only a tiny bit more cover on top of the smoke. I couldn’t tell whether they’d noticed my shooting amid what was coming from their attackers.
The attackers had halted on either edge of the expanding cloud. Several of them glanced my way and took aim, and I leapt behind a low protrusion on the roof. Bullets battered its metal surface.
More shots rang out below. Some must have been from the crew and some from their attackers aiming at them, but any sense of their direction was lost in the general blare of sound.
I scooted out from behind the protrusion with my own pistol at the ready. From that awkward angle, it was hard to aim well, but I managed to pick off a few more of the enemy before they disappeared into the edges of the fog. Apparently they’d decided it was better to tackle the crew in the midst of that than risk losing them altogether, although where they thought the men might escape to, I had no clue.
Since I could barely see them, I knew they couldn’t make me out either. I eased out and scuttled over to the edge of the roof, still keeping low just in case. I had a vague sense of where the crew had been holding their ground before, but I wasn’t totally sure they hadn’t moved. The smoke had thickened around the spot where the bomb had burst to the point that I couldn’t make them out at all.
I did catch glimpses of other forms at the edges of the fray. Whenever I got a clear enough view to be confident it wasn’t one of my men, I took the shots I could. When I ran out of bullets, I swapped cartridges with a flick of my wrist. Gunfire continued to blare on the ground below me.
A gust of wind washed over me and cast some of the smoke even farther, thinning it on the ground. The smoke bomb must have finished spewing out the stuff, because no more rose up to thicken the cover in its place.
Now I could just make out the crew near their original positions. Garrison and Talon stood on one side, shooting relentlessly at the crowd pressing in on them. Julius crouched nearby, still pressed against the wall as he shot into the other side of the fray, and Blaze aimed his own bullets over the other man’s shoulder.
They couldn’t keep up their fire constantly. As I watched, Julius paused to reload, and Blaze increased his fire to stop any attackers who’d drawn too close. But then they both had to dodge back against the locker door when a hail of bullets careened toward them.
Squinting through the fog, I pointed my pistol at each attacker who got close enough to the crew to target them. I took shot after shot, counting down my bullets as I made the rest of that clip count, only taking the shots when the men got close enough to the guys. We’d only held them off this long because of the smoke, and I only had one clip left. We were still way too outnumbered.
I reloaded once more and then lost a few bullets when someone aimed their shots at me again. My own went wild as I flung myself down on the roof. I picked off that bastard, but I only managed to take down a couple more and partly injure one or two others before I was totally out. Gritting my teeth, I shoved the temporarily useless gun back into its holster.
A few of the attackers had pushed close enough to the crew to tackle them hand to hand. Talon engaged first, swinging his knife, as Garrison continued firing at the more distant people to keep them at bay. Talon wove between the two attackers unlike anyone else, but they were good, and they managed to land a few minor blows through his defenses.
It said a lot about their training, but Talon didn’t even flinch. He dispatched one and then the other with well-placed stabs, taking a third man on when he charged in.
Julius gave a shout as several more attackers converged on him and Blaze. He shot one and punched another. Talon and Garrison swung around, both preparing to defend their comrades, and I spotted one last man from the group who’d come from the far end of the aisle slinking toward Talon’s back through the lingering smoke.
He was already raising his knife. The boom of several more gunshots drowned out any noise his footfalls might have made.
“Talon!” I hollered, but my voice was lost in the cacophony too. The man sprinted forward with a final burst of speed, and I did the only thing I could: I lunged off the roof straight at the prick.
No one was going to get away with hurting my men.
I soared through the hazy air and smacked right into the guy, my momentum and my well-positioned tackle knocking him to the ground. I moved on instinct, relying on my years of training to guide my hands as I deflected his defensive blows and yanked the blade from his grasp.
He caught my wrists, holding the blade at bay for a long moment with shaking limbs. The flex of his arms, twice as broad as mine, nearly forced the knife into my own chest. But I put my body weight into my thrust, forcing the blade down inch-by-inch until it plunged into his throat.
He gasped and gurgled, his body going slack beneath me. I hunched down, scanning the smoke-laced air around me for more attackers. In the midst of my own struggle, the gunfire had faded away.
A few more shots rang out as the crew took on the final attackers. Those men collapsed, and for a second, relief rushed through me.
It was over. We’d taken them all down.
Then I noticed that Blaze had dropped down onto his belly. He still had his gun braced in his hands, his eyes intent on the men he’d just helped stop, but a crimson pool was spreading from beneath his stomach.
A cry of dismay broke from my mouth. As I dashed over, his head lolled to the side, and he sagged against the pavement.
