Page 24 of Rebel
Her eyes narrow. For a second, I think she’ll tell me to get out. But then the screen flickers red. Three flashing dots converging on her firewall.
“Shit,” she mutters. “They’re fast.”
“Not faster than me.”
She hesitates, then shoves the auxiliary keyboard toward me. “Touch anything stupid and I’ll shoot you.”
“Fair.”
We work in silence, fingers flying. She counters their signal bursts while I reroute power between decoy nodes. The compound hums like a living thing, alive with electricity and warning klaxons. Sweat stings my eyes, my shoulder throbs under Rebel’s clean wrap, and I focus on the code because it’s easier than focusing on the girl whose name is threaded through all of this.
“Who the hell are these people?” she asks.
“The Vultures,” I tell her. “And they’re not people. They’re professionals.”
“Rebel’s not gonna like this.”
“She doesn’t like me already.”
“True.” Divine’s mouth curves faintly. “But she trusts her instincts. And right now, they’re the only thing keeping you breathing.”
We isolate the breach, trap the remaining packets in a closed loop, and reroute the signal into a dead node. The monitors stabilize.
“Locked,” she says. “For now.”
I sit back and exhale slowly. My shoulder’s screaming again, and the blood on my bandage’s gone dark.
Divine studies me for a long moment. “You’re bleeding through Rebel’s handiwork.”
“I’ll live.”
“You might not if you keep running solo ops in my city.”
Her voice softens, not quite sympathy, but something close. “You’ve been off-grid for a reason. So why crawl back now?”
I meet her gaze. “Because someone used Alex Slade’s name to wake up a network that should’ve died with him.”
Her expression flickers, curiosity breaking through the steel. “Then I guess we find out who just played necromancer.”
She stands, calling into her comm. “Allura, you’re gonna want to see this.”
As the compound settles into an uneasy quiet, I step out into the night air. The engines cool. The smell of oil and metal lingers. On Divine’s screen, a watermark Ihoped I’d never see flickers. A gear hugged by a vulture’s wing. Silver Talon invoices will be ash by morning, but the map they point to won’t be. Somewhere inside, Rebel’s probably pacing, furious that I came back.
You can’t outrun ghosts. You can only decide who bleeds when they catch up. She counts the money. I count the bodies. And if I miscalculate again, the next one on the list won’t be mine.
It’ll be hers.
8
REBEL
The air in the compound still smells like cordite and adrenaline. Divine’s sirens have gone quiet, but the walls still hum with residual tension, the kind that vibrates under your boots and settles in your lungs. The kind that seeps into your skin and doesn’t wash off.
After the breach, we locked it down like a fortress. The bar doors stayed shut; the tattoo lights blinked off. Calypso and a couple of prospects rescheduled clients. Hang arounds and employees were sent home. We sealed the shelter, bolted every door, and doubled the watches. The women and kids inside had enough blankets to sleep like it was winter and enough fear to keep them awake anyway.
Carter stands in the rec room like a statue carved out of muscle and quiet danger. Dried blood crusted at his collar, a confident bruise in his jawline. He smells faintlyof salt air and gun oil even from across the room. He looks calm enough for a man who just dragged the Vultures to our front gate, and that pisses me off more than it should.
Allura’s pacing in front of him, barefoot but lethal, arms crossed over her tank top, voice smooth as cut glass. “You’re telling me,” she says slowly, “that you were followed here after tripping our firewall by a kill team that knows the nameA. Slade Logistics?”
