Chapter 10 Chapter 10

Chapter 10 Chapter 10
They found water forty minutes later.

Not clean water. Not by any reasonable definition. But Jake spotted the collection point from a distance. Someone had rigged a tarpaulin between two pieces of rebar sticking up from a collapsed section of roof, letting the rainwater run down into a series of plastic containers lined up beneath it.

He stopped and studied it.

No trip wire that he could see. No raised gravel. No sight lines that suggested a guard post. But the setup was too deliberate to be abandoned. Someone had built this recently and someone was likely coming back to it.

"We don't touch the containers," he said.

Sarah looked at him. "I wasn't going to."

"I know. I was reminding myself."

He found a section of exposed pipe nearby, the kind that used to feed into a building's water system. The end was cracked open and the rain was running through it in a thin, steady stream. Not stored. Not owned. Just physics doing its job.

He let the water run over his hands first, washing the dried blood and grime off his palms while he watched the street. Then he cupped his hands and drank. It tasted metallic and faintly of minerals from the shattered concrete, but it was cold and it was real.

Sarah did the same beside him, methodical and efficient, not drinking greedily. Controlled intake. He noticed that. She was managing herself like a machine even with a shrapnel wound and a night of sitting in the cold.

He had written about psychological compartmentalization in a crisis. He had called it a critical survival skill. Watching it in person, up close, in someone he used to know well enough to fight with over where to put the couch, felt strange.

They moved on.

The rain began to ease as they went deeper into the northeast quadrant. The ruins here were quieter in a different way than the southern section. In the south, the quiet came from emptiness, buildings stripped of everything useful, passed through and discarded. Here, the quiet felt more like avoidance. Like the ruins themselves had been decided against by whoever was moving through the city.

"Aegis runs patrols in this quadrant," Sarah said, her first words in almost thirty minutes. "Different pattern than the standard grid. They sweep in a spiral from an outer perimeter inward."

"How often?"

"Every four hours when I last had access to the schedule. That was two days ago."

"So the schedule may have changed."

"Everything changes when you drop their drone fleet and blow up one of their primary test subjects." She paused. "By which I mean Silas."

"I know what you meant."

They were moving along the base of a long, collapsed pedestrian bridge. The bridge had fallen sideways rather than straight down, creating a kind of leaning wall of concrete and rebar that ran for nearly a hundred meters. It was good cover from above. Bad if something came at them from either end.

He picked up the pace.

"In the drone files," Jake said, keeping his voice low, "I saw a folder. Anomalies. My file was in it."

"I know about the anomaly files," Sarah said.

"Was your file in there?"

A pause. "Yes."

He glanced at her. Her face was forward-facing and completely neutral.

"What did it say?"

"It said I was a managed asset with acceptable deviation parameters." She said it the way you read something off a receipt. Flat. Informational. "Which means they expected me to occasionally act outside direct orders as long as the overall trajectory served the experiment."

"Like letting me go last night."

"They would have flagged that as acceptable deviation. I was maintaining the asset." She looked at him briefly. "You. You were the asset."

"And now?"

"Now I dropped off their tracking grid when the transport was hit. As far as their system knows, I'm either dead or compromised." A pause. "Either classification gets me shot on sight."

Jake nodded slowly. "So you're an anomaly now too."

"Apparently."

They reached the end of the leaning bridge and stopped. The street ahead opened up into what had been a large civic plaza. Office towers on three sides, a dry fountain in the center that was now full of ash and debris, and open ground in every direction.

Open ground was the enemy of people who needed to not be seen.

Jake studied the buildings. He was looking for the spiral logic Sarah had described. If they swept inward from an outer perimeter, the eastern tower was the most likely approach vector. Which meant the safest crossing was along the western edge, using the fountain as a reference midpoint.

"Western edge," he said. "Fast. Don't stop at the fountain."

"I wasn't going to stop at the fountain, Jake."

"I know."

They went. He moved fast, his footsteps as quiet as wet boots on cracked paving allowed, and she matched him stride for stride despite the shoulder, her jaw set and her eyes moving constantly. They cleared the plaza and pushed into the shadow of a narrow service road on the far side.

No shouts. No movement. No static charge in the air that suggested surveillance.

Jake let himself breathe.

He checked his rough mental bearing. The coordinates pointed to a location that should be roughly four or five blocks further northeast. Below ground level, his father had suggested. Which meant a basement or a subway infrastructure.

He filed that thought. Underground. Which meant one or two access points. Which meant Aegis would know exactly where the doors were.

"I need to think about the approach," he said.

"Think while we move," Sarah said. "Standing still is how you get found."

He didn't argue. She was right. He started walking and let his mind run ahead.