Hard Reset (Relics Singularity Thrillers Book 2), page 23
He went down.
She stepped off his frame as he crumpled, landed cleanly, and spent approximately two seconds examining the tent floor around her feet. Then she walked back to Ravi.
She wasn't breathing hard. She wasn't breathing differently at all.
Ravi realized his mouth was open. He closed it. He was not certain when it had opened.
"You —" He stopped. Started again. "That just happened."
"It did." She reached forward and closed her hand around his arm just above the elbow, and the grip was — as he had occasion to note immediately — not the grip he'd been expecting from someone her size. The pressure was complete and confident and left no ambiguity about the direction they were going. "Come on."
She pulled him out through the tent entrance and to the side, moving immediately into the space between two adjacent tents, angling toward the back of the camp. The morning light hit them with the flat directness of full daylight, and Ravi squinted and adjusted and kept moving because the hand on his arm was not providing a meaningful alternative.
"Keep your head down," she said, barely above a whisper, her eyes already forward. "Keep moving. And when I say run, you run. No questions, no hesitation, no deciding whether to agree with the plan."
"Got it."
"This camp has SentinelCam coverage on the full perimeter. The moment we cross the marker, every security station inside the wire knows we've gone. That means we need to already be at a distance that makes pursuit complicated." She ducked between two more tent walls, changed direction by forty-five degrees, continued. "So when we cross, we don't stop. We don't look back. We cover ground."
He nodded, realized she couldn't see it, said "Yeah," quietly.
They moved through the camp in the spaces between things — between tents, between equipment, through the gaps that a well-organized camp created between its organized elements. Ary navigated it with the fluency of someone who had walked this space before, who had taken the time to learn which routes were monitored and which were incidentally unobserved, where the sight lines were and how to move through the ones that weren't.
He watched her back and thought about what she'd done in the tent, and thought about the training that produced that and what kind of life produced the training, and thought about what she'd said about her family and what she'd said about what she needed from him. He thought about Sol on his knees, looking up at his son with an expression that had been trying to understand something at the moment it should have had other priorities.
He thought about a lot of things in the forty seconds it took to reach the camp's back edge.
Ary stopped. One hand came back, palm flat — hold.
He stopped.
She looked at the perimeter markers — not visible to him, but visible to her, which was information in itself. She measured something he couldn't measure. Then she looked back at him over her shoulder, and her eyes were doing the thing they'd been doing since the boulder — clear, direct, giving him what they were giving him rather than what the situation might have recommended.
"Don't die," she said. Not a command. Not quite a request. Something between the two that didn't have a clean category.
"Working on it," he said.
She turned back to the perimeter.
"Run," she said.
And they ran.
PETER_
He arrived at the first security tent with his pace already slowing from the jog, the transition automatic, his body knowing the difference between moving through open terrain and moving through a camp where running communicated urgency he didn't want to broadcast.
Two men were waiting outside the entrance. One of them extended a hand.
"Sir," the man said.
Grouse frowned. Unders despised formality. The whole culture of the life he'd built was organized around a deliberate rejection of the hierarchical performance that the System's world required — titles, honorifics, the social choreography of rank. His people called him Grouse, or hey, or nothing at all when they needed his attention. Sir was the word of someone who hadn't been here long enough to understand what here was.
He filed it and entered the tent without taking the hand.
The interior was functional in the way of all his operational spaces — everything present had a purpose, nothing present didn't. A makeshift terminal sat on a table against one wall, its components an assembly of parts from three different original devices, held together by ingenuity and the kind of practical problem-solving that people developed when standard supply chains weren't available to them. One of the men inside was at the SentinelCam station, working the controls of a manually-operated flying camera that hovered above the camp on a direct feed, its angle adjustable from here in real time.
He did a quick read of the room's other occupants.
Ailis, the security detail leader for the large camp, stood near the terminal with the particular stillness of someone who was monitoring multiple things simultaneously and had learned to look still while doing it. She was pale, freckled, with red hair that extended down her back in long dreadlocks that had been worked through with small objects — trophies, mementos, the physical accumulation of a life that had moved through enough experiences to produce things worth keeping close. Her background was computers, specifically the underground hacking scene that had existed in the years before the Grid made that scene considerably more dangerous and considerably smaller. She was not a fighter in the primary sense, but Grouse had learned not to let that framing mislead him — Ailis could hold her own, and her value to his operation was in what she could do with a terminal and a network, which was considerable.
Beside her stood Raven. His second-in-command's real name was Ralph — Grouse knew this, had known it from their second conversation, and had never used it because Raven had chosen his name deliberately and Grouse respected deliberate choices. The tattoos covered both arms and most of his face in interconnected swirling patterns — the work of his former wife, applied over years, a record of a life that had been lived in a specific and particular way before it changed. They'd connected immediately when they met, Grouse and Raven, in the way that certain people connected when they recognized in each other the same relationship to loss and the same decision about what to do with it. They'd risen together.
Grouse gave Raven the slight nod that served in place of more.
"Is everything ready for the attack?" he asked.
"Finishing the weapons check now," Raven said, his voice carrying the low, resonant quality that had probably contributed to the name. "Waiting on the word to advance."
The chill moved through Grouse's bloodstream the way it always moved through him at this point in the sequence — not anxiety, which was a different kind of chill, but the specific biochemical response to proximity to action. He'd learned to read the difference between the two in his military years and had maintained the distinction since. Anxiety was about outcomes you couldn't control. This was about execution, which was something else entirely.
"Weapons situation," he said. "Numbers and types."
"Numbers and types?" Ailis asked.
"Yes."
She shifted slightly, the posture adjustment of someone pulling up an internal inventory. "Rifles, one per three men, all functional and staged. Eight Spiders total, seven confirmed operational. A few boxes of grenades — old ones we lifted from an ARU last week, untested, but —"
"A grenade's a grenade," Grouse said.
She smiled. "Exactly. We also have the Tracers. Two from your detachment, three from this camp."
"We won't use the Tracers."
Ailis and Raven both went slightly still, waiting.
"Reload time makes them targets the moment they fire their first round," Grouse said. "We don't need them for this engagement, and we can't risk losing them to the enemy. They're more valuable as extraction — last-ditch exit option if the situation deteriorates beyond recovery."
Nobody stated the obvious implication of last-ditch exit option — that it was an option for approximately thirty people, which was not the size of his force. The math was understood by everyone in the room and didn't require articulation.
"Their Tracer," Ailis said. "The one we intercepted near Umutsuz — it was brought back to the Relics settlement. Presumably still operational."
"Sitting duck once it's airborne and they've committed to a target. We'll be able to bring it down without significant resource expenditure."
"There are also reports," Raven said, "that they've commandeered a prototype ARU miniature defense system. Same tech that was used to pull in the Umutsuz Tracer."
"One locking mechanism," Grouse said. "It can't engage more than one target simultaneously. Manageable."
Raven nodded. "When are you initiating?"
"I need a few more things in place first." Grouse glanced at the SentinelCam feed on the terminal — the camp from above, everything arranged and quiet and ready in the way of things that had been prepared and were waiting for the word. "The boy. Ravi Patel. He's here?"
"Mess tent. Tied to a chair."
Grouse kept his expression neutral. The crude treatment of a potential intelligence asset was exactly the kind of operational mistake that happened when the people executing a task didn't understand the full value of what they were handling. Ravi Patel, tied to a chair in a mess tent, was Ravi Patel who might decide that whatever he knew was better kept to himself — or that whatever cooperation he might have offered wasn't worth the cost of offering it. You didn't get useful information from people by reminding them why they shouldn't trust you.
But he'd deal with the approach when he got there.
"I'll speak with him before we move," Grouse said. "He may know something about Myers Asher's current location."
"Asher's with the Relics, isn't he?" Raven asked.
"That's been the working assumption. Crane indicated a trade was possible." He paused. "I've heard nothing since, which suggests either the timeline has changed or Asher is no longer in Crane's possession." He left it there. He could have given them more — could have laid out the fuller structure of what he was working toward, the specific logic of why Myers Asher mattered beyond the Current on his head, the larger strategic play that the Relics attack was covering for — but there was no operational reason for them to have it, and there was a strategic reason for him to hold it. Information shared was information that could be shared again, and the value of this particular information was in its scarcity.
All in good time.
"What do you need from us?" Raven asked.
Grouse lowered his chin slightly — not quite a bow, more a subtle angle change that brought his forehead down and his eyes forward, a position that, if the light hit the tattoos on his face correctly, produced an effect that people tended to find memorable. He'd developed the habit without fully intending to and had kept it because it worked.
"Nothing," he said, dropping his voice to a near-whisper. "Watch the cams. I'll give the word when we're ready."
Raven nodded. Ailis had already turned back to the SentinelCam controls without waiting for the conversation to finish, which was the kind of thing Grouse liked in the people who worked for him — not insubordination, but efficiency. She was already doing the next useful thing.
He picked up the radio from the table before he left — a hacked-together assembly of components and salvaged antenna, the kind of device that should not have been able to do what it did and did it anyway, which described a lot of the equipment his people operated with. He held it to his mouth as he stepped out of the tent.
"Report."
Static, a crackle, and then a voice with a Southern drawl that confirmed he had the right person on the other end.
"— Good here — slight setback, but we're good here —"
He waited for the click of a closed transmission, then keyed his own. "Continue moving forward. We proceed on schedule."
He switched the radio off and increased his pace.
One more stop.
The war itself — the actual engagement with the Relics settlement, the thing his army had been building toward and was currently staged for — was planned and executable and would proceed with or without him at the front of it. That was what a functional force meant: the plan survived contact because the people executing it understood what they were doing and why. He'd built that. He could trust it.
But the war was also a cover. The most significant operational cover he'd ever constructed, and the most important thing he'd ever used a cover for. While every set of eyes — inside the System's monitoring apparatus, inside the ARU deployment that would inevitably respond, inside every faction currently operating in this region — was focused on the Unders attacking the Relics settlement, other things would be happening. Things that required the world's attention to be elsewhere.
The System itself would divert resources to the engagement. That diversion was the point. The ARUs sent to contain an Unders-Relics war in a remote valley were ARUs not deployed elsewhere, not monitoring elsewhere, not available for the things the System would otherwise use them for. Every resource the System committed to watching what Grouse was openly doing was a resource it wasn't spending watching what Grouse was quietly doing.
He'd been tightening the arrangement for months, pulling the threads together with the patient, incremental care of a man who understood that the most consequential things he'd ever done had been done slowly. When Myers Asher had appeared in Istanbul — had materialized out of whatever circumstances had kept him hidden for fifteen years and walked back into the world where people were looking for him — it had been the final element Grouse needed. The last piece of tension in a system he'd been winding for a long time.
He could feel the proximity of it.
The mess tent came into view ahead of him, and something was wrong before he'd consciously identified the specific wrongness. A cluster of people near the entrance — standing in the particular configuration of people who had arrived at a location where something had happened and were waiting for someone with authority to tell them what to do about it. The cluster split when they saw him coming, creating a channel through their center.
He moved through it and through the tent's entrance.
He saw the first body almost too late to stop his forward momentum, catching himself just short of stepping on the man. Face-down on the dirt floor, arms at wrong angles, the posture of someone who had not chosen the position. One of the guards who would have been assigned to the tent. Grouse read the body the way his training had taught him to read bodies — cause, timeline, what it said about what had happened and in what order — and moved his eyes to the second man.
Further into the tent, positioned differently, the manner of death different. Blood around the torso in a spreading pattern that indicated the damage had been immediate and significant.
He completed his read of the room.
Against the far tent wall, a chair. Ropes — cut, not broken — still draped over the chair's arms and pooled on the ground around its legs. The cuts were clean and single-stroke, the work of a sharp blade applied with confidence.
Grouse stood in the middle of the mess tent and looked at the empty chair and at the two dead men and at the cut ropes, and he said nothing for a moment.
Then he cursed, quietly, under his breath — the specific profanity of someone who has had a plan altered by a variable they should have accounted for and didn't.
Ravi Patel was gone.
RAND_
The buildings of Relica were poorly constructed by any standard that mattered in the old world — salvaged materials, improvised joinery, walls that had been stacked rather than built — but they were solid enough to hold two people moving carefully across their rooftops, and right now that was the only standard that applied.
They ran over the flat tops, stopping at each edge to look down into the streets below before committing to the next jump. The streets were not empty. Most of Relica's population had drifted back toward the square or dispersed into the city's interior lanes, but there were enough figures moving through the narrow passages between buildings to make the ground level feel unreliable. Rand thought they might be safe down there — no one seemed to be conducting any organized search, and the post-mob quality of the crowd suggested that whatever coherence Crane had built into his people was still in the process of dissipating. But after what had happened on the platform, after what he'd done and what had been done to them, he didn't have the appetite for taking chances with maybes.
They continued across the rooftops.
Three buildings behind them now, including the first one that had abutted the square. Rand stopped at the edge of the fourth and looked around — ahead, left, right, down. He was breathing hard in the way of someone who had been running on adrenaline and was beginning to feel the account come due.
"Which way?" he asked.
"My plan pretty much ended when we got to the buildings," Diane said, pulling up beside him. She took a moment — hands on her thighs, several deliberate breaths — and straightened. "Let's stay on the rooftops as long as we can."
"If we go straight, we hit the city's edge faster."
"We're not leaving. Not yet."
Rand turned and looked at her. The look lasted long enough to communicate that he'd heard what she said and was choosing how to respond to it.
"We're staying until we get Myers and —"
"You saw him back there," Rand said. "He's moving. He took out Red-hair with a rock, cut my ropes, handed me the knife. He's functional enough for right now."
"No one is safe here, Jonathan," Diane said. The steadiness in her voice was the kind that had been worked for rather than arrived at naturally. "They weren't focused on him in that moment. They will be. Crane knows who he is and what he's worth. When things settle, Myers becomes the primary target again."
Rand sat down on the rooftop, putting his profile below the parapet line, below the angle at which he could be spotted from street level. He pulled Diane's hand and she sat beside him, both of them cross-legged on the warm, uneven surface of the roof, the sounds of the city below them in a different register than the sounds of the open desert beyond.
