Forsaken By Shadow (13 page)

As he rolled to the top, working for an arm bar, Gage caught sight of Mackey’s face. The sergeant looked grimly satisfied, arms crossed over his broad chest, his eyes holding a gleam of bloodlust that Gage recognized from people who came to fights only to feed on the violence. Mackey wanted Adan brutalized or dead. He wasn’t going to blow the whistle.

Taking advantage of his distraction, Adan got loose. Gage felt his leg a hairsbreadth away from a leg bar and rolled to mitigate the hold. They couldn’t keep this up forever. He couldn’t actually hurt Adan, and whatever orders he may have been given, Adan wasn’t about to really hurt him.
Maybe if one of us feigned unconsciousness
 . . . 

An alarm rang out, shrill and repetitive in a tone that Gage fully expected to be echoed by the metallic
thunk
of mechanized bunker doors sealing shut. He froze.

Embry.

Above him Adan stilled, blood dripping down from his temple onto Gage’s chest. Abruptly he was snatched back by a couple of soldiers who’d climbed into the ring. Another pair roughly jerked Gage up by his arms.

“
What the fuck, man? We weren’t finished,” he complained, eyes searching the room.

The crack of a fist on flesh drew his attention to Mackey. Another soldier reeled back from where he’d been struck, and Gage recognized Embry’s escort to the bathroom. Had he just discovered her missing? Or had they actually found her elsewhere in the base?

“
Find her,” growled Mackey at a nearby group.

Well that answers that.

The sergeant gestured and the pair of meatheads trying to cut off circulation in his arms hauled him out of the ring and forced him to his knees before Mackey. “Who are you?” he demanded.

Gage put on his best outraged celebrity face. “I’m Cade Shepherd. What the fuck is this about? Let me go.” He jerked experimentally against the hold on his arms. He could shove to his feet, get loose, but he wouldn’t get far.

“
Your little… manager has disappeared.”

“
So what?” Gage asked, trying to interject boredom in his voice. “She probably just got lost on the way back from the bathroom. This whole fucking place is a maze.”
Please, dear God, don’t let them find her.
He nodded at her escort. “I thought he was supposed to bring her back.”

As Mackey’s reddened face turned toward him again, the soldier took another step in retreat. “I… I was. But she was mighty sick. Throwing up. Said she’d be a while and didn’t want me to miss the fight.” His cheeks reddened as he realized he’d been taken.

“
Fucking idiot!” snapped Mackey. “Take them to the detention level. Pattenson, Rictor. Take your teams and make a sweep. Find that woman.”

Gage was hauled to his feet and marched toward the same doors through which Adan had entered. “What the hell, man!? I’m a U.S. citizen! You can’t do this to me! I have rights!”

Nobody paid a bit of attention to him. Their contingent had eight guards. Gage noted that they hadn’t taken the time to put Adan back in his shackles and chains, and clearly they weren’t worried about him personally. He cataloged the route as they marched. Down the corridor, into a large elevator. Down more than ten floors below.

How the hell were they going to get out of this?

* * *

Embry’s heart slammed into triple time as the alarm blared.
Fuck.
Clearly her absence had been discovered. But she didn’t slow the fingers that flew over the keyboard. She checked the video feed of the security camera just outside the lab. No one yet. She’d made it through the first three firewalls and was beating her head against the fourth.

“
C’mon. C’mon,” she chanted.

She was almost there. She’d almost cracked the security around the information on Level 36. It was an awful risk she was taking, banking that this was where her father was being held. But there wasn’t time to search the entire system, certainly not now that the soldiers had been alerted. It was a calculated risk.

Her eyes went to the video feed again. Still nothing.

Just another few minutes… 

There!
She was in.

She accessed a separate video feed for Level 36, and the widescreen monitor was swallowed by a grid of cameras. Each one focused on a different room. No, not rooms, Embry realized. Cells. It was a detention level. Even from the tiny images, she could tell the walls were iron. There were narrow cots in some of the rooms. A metal toilet. And prisoners. So many prisoners. “Oh my God.”

Conscious that she could be found any minute, Embry scanned each cell, searching for a familiar broad shouldered figure. And though she saw many Mirus species represented—Christ, they even had a banshee— her father was not among them.

“
Damn it!
” Her fisted hands struck the table and rattled a rack of test tubes further down.

She didn’t have any more time. There was no telling how they’d reacted when the alarm was triggered. No telling what they were doing to Gage. Her heart clenched at that, terror for his safety weakening her limbs. She needed to move to get that power grid down.

Resolved, she closed out of the cellblock video feed, intending to upload the virus and get out. Then she saw the folder labeled Project Prometheus.
What have we here?
She opened the folder and clicked on an icon.

Of course the files were encrypted. That could wait for later. She dragged the lot of them onto a portable hard drive, fidgeting impatiently as they transferred at a snail’s pace.
You’d think the government would have something faster than USB 2.0.

She checked the video feed to the hall again and thought about killing the lights. But here, a dark room would be more suspicious than one with every light burning. As the files continued to transfer, she went over the schematics she’d pulled up for the rest of the base. A main power generator was one floor up. If she could take it out, they might have a shot. Assuming none of the bunker doors sealed as a result. Blowing through iron would take more time than they could steal. And there was the tiny matter of not knowing where either Gage or her father were at this moment.

The files finished transferring. She dragged the virus file onto the desktop. Taking one last look at the hall on the monitor—still empty—she snagged the hard drive, stuffing it into one of the pockets of her cargo pants, and double clicked the virus. The entire network would crash in minutes.

She raced into the hall, making for the stairwell. Just as she reached it, the elevator doors slid open. Bolting inside, she heard the shouts behind her as she ran up to Level 32. Footsteps pounded from above and below, a staccato beat punctuated by the panicked thrum of her heart.
Fuck, fuck, fuck. Of course nothing here burns.
She dove through the door for SL-32, no longer trying to hide, just to make it to the generator. Taking precious seconds, she heated the knob to molten, praying that the lock would fuse. Then she ran.

There were soldiers on this level. She could hear them down the hallway, doing a sweep of the rooms. Closing in.

She wasn’t going to make it out. Not from this far down, this deep in the belly of the beast. The realization of it bled through her. But she had no time to mourn. She had to take out that generator. She had to give her father and Gage a chance.

The door was locked. Every damn thing in this base was locked. Riding on temper and desperation, she blew the lock apart, the door flying back on its hinges, warped and blackened. If they didn’t know exactly where she was before, they did now.

Embry raced through, following the conduit pipes down another hall and to the right. And there they were. Not one generator, but a series of five. The drone of them echoed off the concrete walls of the big room. She wouldn’t be able to hear anybody coming. But there was only one way in, one way out.

Positioning herself halfway between the generators and the hallway, Embry dropped her shields and released the fire. Flames spun out from her hands in each direction, flowing like water exactly where she directed it. With one stream she blocked the entrance. Hopefully it would be too hot for the soldiers to approach, and hot enough to melt any bullets before they got to her. The other stream she let build and swell, stretching to encompass all five generators.

The steel began to creak and groan as it expanded. Faintly, beneath the roar of flame, Embry could hear shouting. They’d found her.

Her limbs began to shake as she cranked up the heat. Pain pulsed through her brain from the effort of controlling both streams at differing levels of intensity. Sweat trickled down her brow, evaporating before it reached her chin.

Something popped. At first, Embry thought her fire wall wasn’t keeping the bullets at bay. Then she realized with a series of successive snaps that the rivets on the generators were flying loose and bouncing off the concrete walls. Steam began to billow.
Almost there… 

With a scream of metal, the first generator blew. She dove to the floor as shrapnel flew through the air. A second and third explosion rocked the base as the next ones exploded. Debris rained down, burning her clothes, slicing her flesh. The wall of flames blocking the hallway was extinguished, but she managed to maintain the line to the generators. There were people in the hall, hesitating to cross the superheated threshold. Unable to re-establish the fire wall, she shot a succession of fire balls to hold them at bay until she could demolish the last two sources of power.

Thinking of Gage and drawing deep on her fire, she threw one last burst toward the remaining generators. With an explosion that left her deaf and half blind, she succeeded. Then everything went dark.

Chapter 10

“
W
here
are you taking me?” Gage demanded.

The question, like all the others he’d tossed out, went unanswered. Christ, he needed intel. Embry was somewhere in this bunker with hundreds of highly armed soldiers seeking her out. She needed backup. She needed an entire goddamned team of functional Shadow Walkers, not a has been and a Walker that had been beaten, tortured and who knew what else. But they were all she had.

She and Adan were all he had.

A radio squawked. “Breach on Level 32! Breach! Get a goddamned fire crew down here!” A volley of gunfire punctuated the transmission.

Fear fisted around his heart.

“
Bravo team, we need backup!” Static was interrupted by more gunfire and screaming. “The generator—”

When the elevator lurched to a halt, Gage was ready. Taking advantage of their imbalance, he drove an elbow into one of his captors’ ribs and broke the knee of the other. Amid chaos and shouting, the lights went out. Instinct had him intercepting the nearest man and slamming his head into the wall. Behind him, he heard the sound of fists on flesh, the crunch of bone, and the telltale thud of bodies. Someone slammed the butt of a gun into his shoulder. He spun, driving a knife hand into the pressure point under his opponent’s arm, following with open-handed strikes to his ears. His body had barely hit the floor before Gage was feeling around the roof of the car. “Where the hell is the trap door?” Urgency was a frantic drumbeat in his blood.
Embry. Have to get to Embry.

Gage could sense Adan a few feet away, but couldn’t see him in the thick black that should’ve been clear as day. So much for Shadow Walker skills coming back under duress.

“
I’d ask how you came back from the dead, but I figure that’s a story that’ll have to wait until we get out of here. Why can’t you see?”

“
Lost my mojo. Flying blind here.”

There was a click and a creak as Adan found and opened the top hatch. “You don’t have your Walker skills. How the hell did you think you were going to get out of here?”

“
This was supposed to be a recon mission. Embry didn’t think that far ahead.”

Adan’s hand clamped around his arm. “Embry’s here?”

“
Who do you think blew up the generator? We’ve got to get to Level 32.”

“
Where are the backup teams?” he demanded.

“
There
are
no backup teams. The Council refused to mount a rescue mission. Embry would be here on her own if Matthias hadn’t told her where to find me.” Putting an end to the discussion, Gage boosted himself through the hatch and clambered onto the roof of the elevator car.