The Society (A Broken World Book 1) (29 page)

I stepped to the side and pulled my door open as he fell inward towards my room. I couldn't directly oppose someone with as much inertia as he had, so I didn't even try. Instead, I cupped my hand behind his neck and gave him a strong tug just before I blew past him.

I heard the redhead's rifle hit the ground a second before he ran face first into the door jamb I'd just pulled him towards, but I didn't have time to finish him off yet. I shot across the hallway as the second guard struggled to get his weapon up, but adrenaline was pouring into my system and my nanites had turned me into something superhuman.

I grabbed the barrel of the smaller guard's gun and slammed the butt of his rifle back into him with enough force to snap his collarbone. He opened his mouth to scream out in pain, but I slammed my fist into the base of his neck and he went down in a boneless heap as I spun around and went back to deal with the redhead.

The bigger guard was nearly as tough as he thought he was, but even he needed a second to adjust from a collision like the one he'd just experienced. My job was to make sure that he didn't get that second.

I hit him with a palm strike to the stomach, knocking the wind out of him, and then launched a rising elbow into his chin as he doubled over from the pain of the first strike. I purposefully pulled the blow—he'd been a jerk, but I didn't actually want to kill him. Even so, the shock transmitted up through his teeth into his brain put his lights out.

I grabbed one of the rifles and then loaded my vest up with all of the ammunition the pair had been carrying before liberating a double-edged knife that slid nicely into the top of my boot. The easy part of my mission was over—things were only going to get more risky with every passing second, but there was no other way to know for sure where Brennan was being held.

I hadn't been in the compound for very long, but I'd seen a few female guards. None of them had been assigned to guard Brennan directly, but so far I'd counted two who guarded the headquarters building and therefore lived down on the secure level. One of them was even roughly my height and coloring. It wasn't much to work with, but it would just have to be enough.

I approached the guard post just inside the doors with my head down, rifle pointed at the ground, but fidgeting with it as though troubleshooting a problem with my sling. The adrenaline cursing through my system had my nanites on high alert. It was the only thing that gave me even a sliver of a chance of success, but it meant that my approach to the two guards seemed to take forever.

The closer guard, a skinny blond guy only a few years older than me, challenged me when I was still five steps away from the two of them. I sprang into action without hesitation and slammed the butt of my rifle into his temple a split second before he would've been able to get a shot off.

My rifle was out of position to deal with the second guard, so I spun around and slammed my heel into his ribs with enough force that I heard his ribs crack. He collided with the wall hard enough that he bounced back in my direction as I stepped forward and slammed my forearm into the side of his neck.

He dropped to the ground a split-second later, unconscious but still breathing despite the damage to his ribs. I slipped out the door fully aware that I had only minutes—possibly even just seconds—before someone would find the guards I'd taken out and raise an alarm.

Every instinct in my body screamed at me to head directly toward the compound wall, but escaping wouldn't be enough to save Brennan. I needed intelligence, intelligence that I could only get from one place. I headed straight towards the bore.

I was moving at something only slightly less than a dead run—as fast as I felt like I could get away with if I didn't want to draw attention to myself—but it still seemed to take forever to get down to where I'd left my transmitter. I was desperately worried that it wouldn't be there when I arrived, but as soon as I saw it that fear was replaced by worries that the frequency wasn't being monitored anymore.

I turned the transmitter on and felt my knees go weak when I saw the green light that indicated the transmitter was working as it was supposed to.

"This is Skinwalker calling Home Base, come in, Home Base."

"This is Home Base, you're a go, Skinwalker. What's your report?"

"There's no time for that. I need you to pull up satellite feeds for the last twenty-four hours—give me everything we've got from anything sitting above the city right now."

The bored voice on the other end of the transmission suddenly sounded worried. I'd just gone completely off script.

"That's not something authorized by your mission profile. I'm going to have to get approval from someone higher up before I can do that, over."

The girl who'd been convinced that the Society was the highest good in the world would have simply waited patiently regardless of the danger involved in doing so. The fact that I wasn't willing to do so was a clear sign—to me at least—of just how far I'd traveled since jumping out of that plane.

"No! There isn't time for that. The Citizen-President told me my mission was the most important operation being undertaken by our Society. That means I have authorization to ask for any resources that I think might improve my chances of success.

"I have only minutes to get back to the surface or my cover is blown. Get me the damn satellite feeds right now or you'll be answering to the Citizen-President for having sabotaged my mission."

There were a couple of seconds of shocked silence and then the guy on the other end of the line cleared his throat. "I've got them up now, but if you're wrong it's your head—not mine. What do you need?"

"Approximately forty-four hours ago a group of four individuals were attacked along the southern edge of Brennan's compound. One of the four was abducted by the group and presumably taken back inside the building. I'm betting that they traveled underground for some distance before surfacing, and it is vitally important that you figure out where they went."

I could hear keys clicking as the technician input search parameters. "Okay, I've found the attack. Are you sure you don't have anything else for me to go on?"

"Just that they had to have gone underground, and that they wouldn't be staying down there for long. They'll be headed to one of the neighboring territories to meet back up with their boss."

At least I hoped that was the case. It was always possible that they were from a territory even further away, but that didn't feel like the right fit for the situation. If someone from further away had grabbed Brennan, the odds were that they wouldn't have said anything to Piter or the rest of the warlords who shared a border with us.

"Okay, I've got the computers looking for appearances of the same number of individuals where some of them are injured and being carried by the others, but you're asking for it to search a big area. The computer can do it—and quickly—but it's going to take me some time to run through the false positives and make sure that they aren't the ones you're looking for."

I wanted to swear, but instead I closed my eyes and tried to think. "Tell it to prioritize matches outside of Brennan's compound, but still inside of his territory, and start with the infrared data from just after the sun started to go down. If they've got a tunnel all of the way from their territory into the compound then they probably wouldn't have settled for a simple grab—not when they could have easily used it to move an army inside the compound. That would have let them kill everyone inside here before we…before Brennan could muster any kind of effective response. My bet is that they came up in his territory and had to hoof it over to whatever hole they used to get inside of Brennan's territory."

I was praying that the analyst on the other end of the transmission hadn't heard my slip. I was playing the role of an operative of the Society, someone fully committed to her mission. The person I needed him to believe I was would never identify with Brennan and the others inside of the compound. I didn't know what I was any more—not for sure—but I was no longer the kind of person anyone from the Society would be helping if they really understood what I'd become.

If I had been, I wouldn't be risking everything to save Brennan.

"Okay, I've got the parameters input and have started running through the possible matches. It's still going to take some time though if I have to look at all of them before finding your group…"

With each second that passed I felt like I could sense Jax's men closing in around me. I considered grabbing the transmitter and making a run for it. If I could get out of the compound then there was a good chance that I could reattach the transmitter to the structural steel inside one of the aging buildings and reestablish contact with my analyst. Getting out of the compound could be tricky though. The only way it was even going to be possible was if Jax had really drawn down the normal guard contingent in preparation for his attack on the Muertos.

If the worst came to pass and I got caught on my way out, there would be no reestablishing contact with the Society, which would mean that I'd lose the one resource that had a chance of finding Brennan in time to save the people in his territory.

That wasn't acceptable. I was going to do everything I could to survive the next few hours, but if I got caught, I wanted to be able to tell Jax exactly where Brennan was being held.

Rather than yelling at the analyst, I took a deep breath. "Understood—just hurry. I don't know how much longer I have before someone will find me down here."

Several seconds of painful, dragging silence passed and then he cleared his throat. "I think I've got them. A similar group appeared halfway between Brennan's compound and his southern border. They worked their way two blocks south and then entered another building. The computer is confident that they haven't left the building in the last twelve hours."

My knees went weak, but I managed to keep my voice level. "Okay, assuming that's the grab team, how long will it take you to find where they exit on the other side of the barricade? It's probably safe to assume that they are headed into the territory directly south of this one."

The satisfaction in the guy's voice was unmistakable. "I'll do you one better. I used their trip across the surface from the first tunnel to the second to establish movement rates for them, and then had the computer run a search algorithm in an expanding ring."

"You've got them?"

"Yep, they popped up right on schedule—the same number of people with the same number of injured. This is our group."

I wanted to cheer. If the analyst had been sitting in a room with me I probably would have kissed him.

"Do you have them? Can you tell where they ended up? I need a location where the prisoner is being held."

"I'm advancing the feed right now. The computer has them locked in and is moving things forward at high speed. The algorithms aren't perfect, but once you give the computer a specific enough target to follow it usually does a pretty good job. Worst case I'll have to go back and run it manually…nope, it worked. I can see them walking into a big building at what looks like the center of the territory to your south. From the top it's shaped like a triangle, so it should be easy for you to identify."

"And they don't come out afterwards?"

"Not in that same group—the computer would have caught that. That's not to say that they didn't all come out singly over the next couple of hours, but it's a good bet that the injured individuals at least are still there in that building."

I grabbed onto the pipe to steady my shaking body. "How long would it take you to run it forward and make sure that nobody was carried back out of the building?"

"Maybe twenty minutes—you want to stay on the line while I do that?"

I did, but I knew I didn't have that kind of time to waste. It had been Piter all along, but Jax and Tyrell had dismissed him as a possibility because he'd been so easy to work with up until now. The odds were very good that the triangular building was his headquarters, and if that was the case it was almost guaranteed that Brennan was still there.

I wanted to have the analyst confirm that he hadn't been carried away, but in the end it didn't matter if Brennan was still there or not. I had proof that Piter had been involved and that was all I needed to pick up Brennan's trail if he wasn't still there.

"No, there's no time. Thank you though—you've been a real champ. I'd like to buy you a drink the next time I'm back home, Analyst…"

"Craft, ma'am. Analyst Craft. I'll take you up on that just so I can hear all about your mission. Twelve-hour shifts are better than wasting my time the way everyone else around here does, but they can still drag on from time to time."

"It's a plan then. Over and out."

I cut the transmission and headed back towards the surface at a fast walk, expecting each time I rounded a corner to be faced with Jax and a dozen other guards with their weapons leveled at me. My pulse was thundering in my ears by the time I made it to the top of the bore, but everything looked surprisingly normal topside.

I'd expected someone to at least stumble upon the guards I'd left unconscious at the secure entrance, but apparently Jax had everyone working two jobs to fill in the holes left when he raided all nonessential functions to put together his strike force. That was a good sign. I pulled my hat down low over my eyes and forced myself not to break into a full-on run.

A short time later I was approaching the gate on the south end of the compound. The normal detachment was down to just one guy and his attention was focused on the area outside of the gate rather than anything happening on our side of the wall. He gave me only a cursory visual inspection before pulling the bolt on the gate back.

"You got any news?"

I shook my head, barely slowing as I walked past. "Just that they're still stripping all of the guard posts down to the bone. I'd stay and chat, but if I don't get this dispatch delivered I'll be on punishment detail for a month."

"I hear you. Be careful out there—the people on that side of the wall have clued into the fact that something is going on. I'm surprised that you got sent out by yourself. Every time I open up this gate I'm half convinced that someone is going to pop up out of the darkness and try to rush me."