Chapter 73 Seventy three
The rain in Chapter One had been a backdrop for fear. It was cold, confusing, and overwhelming.
The rain in Chapter Seventy-Eight was just weather. And weather was a variable we knew how to calculate.
I watched from the shadows of the garage bay as three black SUVs screeched to a halt on the wet gravel. In the original timeline, I had been cowering behind a tool chest, clutching a wrench like a lifeline, terrified that these men were coming to kill me for a debt I didn't owe. Dax had been bleeding, desperate, and defensive.
Now? Dax was standing in the center of the driveway, his arms crossed, looking at his watch.
"Three minutes early," Dax muttered, his voice barely audible over the storm. "Their pathfinding AI must have been upgraded in the patch."
The doors of the lead SUV flew open. Four men stepped out. They wore the grey urban-camo of the Grey-Claws, the low-level mercenary gang that the Board used for dirty work before they sent in the heavy hitters.
The leader, a man with a shaved head and a cybernetic eye patch, racked the slide of a submachine gun. I recognized him. Rook. He was the mini-boss who had chased us through the sewers in Chapter Four. He had broken Dax’s ribs. He had made us run.
"Daximus Steele!" Rook shouted, trying to look menacing in the downpour. "The Board sends its regards. Hand over the drive, and we make this quick. Resist, and we "
" and you peel my skin off and wear it as a jacket," Dax finished for him, looking bored. "Yeah, yeah. I heard the speech. It was derivative the first time."
Rook blinked, his single organic eye widening. "What?"
"You're skipping the dialogue tree," I whispered to myself, grinning.
I didn't wait for the fight to start. I knew their loadout. The SUV on the left had a heavy gunner in the back seat. The SUV on the right had a driver who panicked if his tires were blown.
I raised the heavy wrench I had grabbed from the bench. I didn't throw it. I threw a spark-plug.
I tossed the small ceramic piece with terrifying precision at the driver’s side window of the right SUV. It shattered the glass instantly. The driver flinched, jerking the wheel. His foot slammed onto the gas pedal.
The SUV lurched forward, crashing into the rear bumper of the lead car.
CRUNCH.
"Ambush!" Rook screamed, spinning around. "He's got a sniper!"
"No sniper," Dax said, stepping forward. "Just a mechanic."
Rook raised his SMG.
Dax didn't dodge. He knew the firing pattern. He knew Rook always pulled up and to the left when he squeezed the trigger. Dax stepped casually to the right, the bullets chewing up the gravel where he had been standing a microsecond ago.
Dax closed the distance. He didn't use a fancy martial arts move. He used the brutal efficiency of a man who had fought anti-matter ghosts in a void-ship.
He grabbed the barrel of the SMG, forcing it down. With his other hand, he drove his combat knife into the gap of Rook’s tactical vest a weak point we hadn't discovered until Chapter Twelve.
Rook gasped, dropping the gun. Dax spun him around, using him as a human shield as the other Grey-Claws opened fire.
"Mia, the gunner!" Dax shouted.
I was already moving. I sprinted out of the garage, sliding across the wet asphalt like I was on ice. I didn't run away from the gunfire; I ran toward the crashed SUV.
The heavy gunner was struggling to get his door open, the frame bent from the collision. I didn't help him. I jammed the heavy iron wrench into the door handle, locking it shut. Then, I pulled the pin on a grenade I had lifted from Rook’s belt when I slid past Dax.
I dropped the grenade through the shattered window.
"Fire in the hole!" I yelled, diving behind the concrete barrier of the gas pump.
BOOM.
The SUV rocked violently, smoke pouring from the windows. One threat down.
Dax was a blur of motion. He threw Rook’s body into the two advancing soldiers, knocking them over like bowling pins. He picked up the dropped SMG. He didn't spray and pray. Two shots. Two headshots.
Clean. Efficient. Terrifying.
The last Grey-Claw, the driver of the lead SUV, scrambled out of the vehicle, terrified. He looked at his dead squad, then at the demon in the leather vest who had just dismantled a hit team in under thirty seconds.
He dropped his weapon and raised his hands. "I surrender! Don't kill me!"
Dax walked over to him, the rain washing the blood from his knife. He looked at the man a kid, really, probably no older than nineteen. In the first timeline, we had let him go. He had run back to the Board and told them where we were hiding.
"Rule number one of the New Game," Dax said softly, looking the kid in the eye. "No witnesses."
"Dax, wait," I called out, stepping into the light.
Dax paused, the knife hovering an inch from the kid’s throat. He looked at me. "He talks, Mia. He brings the Tribunal."
"I know," I said, walking over to them. I looked at the terrified kid. "But we need his clearance codes. The Interceptor is low on fuel, and my truck has a bad alternator. We need their ride."
Dax considered this. He nodded.
He grabbed the kid by the collar and slammed him against the hood of the SUV. "Codes. Now. Or I upload your consciousness to a toaster."
The kid sobbed, rattling off a string of numbers. Dax typed them into the SUV’s keypad. The engine purred to life, unlocking the biometric controls.
"Get out of here," Dax growled, shoving the kid away. "Run to the border. If I see you in the city, I delete you."
The kid didn't need to be told twice. He sprinted into the dark, vanishing into the storm.
"He'll still talk," Dax said, wiping his knife.
"Let him," I replied, checking the loadout in the back of the SUV. "By the time he finds a phone, we’ll be ghost. Besides... we're not hiding this time, are we?"
Dax looked at the carnage the burning SUV, the unconscious bodies, the rain slick with oil and blood. He looked down at his hands, then at me.
"In the first run," Dax said, his voice quiet, "we spent twenty chapters running. We hid in motels. We scrounged for food. We were reactive."
"And people died because we were too slow," I added. "Tank. My dad."
I looked at the garage. In this timeline, my father, Chen Wei, was still "missing." But I knew where he was now. He wasn't missing; he was being held in a black-site facility under the Old Metro Station, forced to code for the Board.
In the original timeline, we didn't find him until Chapter Forty. By then, his mind was broken.
"We can save him," I whispered. "Tonight."
Dax followed my gaze. He understood.
"We have a fully fueled armored SUV," Dax listed, checking the vehicle. "We have military-grade weapons. We have the element of surprise. And we have the map of the entire enemy network in our heads."
He walked over to me, grabbing my face in his hands. He kissed me hard, desperate, and full of the fire that had carried us through the stars.
"We're not going to the safe house," Dax said, his eyes burning gold. "We're going to the Metro Station."
"We're going to break the sequence," I agreed, a fierce smile spreading across my face.
I walked back into the garage, not to hide, but to grab my gear. I took the laptop the one with the backdoor algorithms I hadn't written yet in this time, but remembered perfectly. I grabbed my tools. I grabbed the photo of my dad from the workbench.
"Hey, Pres?" I called out as I walked back to the SUV.
Dax was loading magazines from the dead Grey-Claws into the truck. "Yeah, Ghost?"
"If we save my dad tonight... that changes the whole timeline. No Ghost Wolf project. No Red-Queen. No Nullity."
"Exactly," Dax said, climbing into the driver’s seat. "We fix the bug before it crashes the system."
I climbed into the passenger seat. The leather was new, stiff. The smell of the car was sterile. It felt like a fresh save file.
Dax revved the engine. He looked at me, his hand resting on the gear shift.
"Ready for the speedrun?"
"Floor it," I said.
We peeled out of the driveway, leaving the garage and the old story behind. We weren't following the script anymore. We were rewriting it in real-time.
The Board thought they were playing chess against a mechanic and a biker. They didn't know they were playing against the Architects of the End Game.
\[SEQUENCE BREAK INITIATED\]