The beam on his chest began to lift. He managed to get a lungful of air in, but it ached to breathe and nearly set off a coughing fit he barely kept under control.

  A light snapped on, blinding him as the beam dropped just past his feet. He gripped the knife tighter, glaring into the light attached to an Apex rifle. “Don’t you dare move!” the agent ordered. “Sir, we’ve got a survivor.”

  “Put him down,” the CO said.

  The light shifted as the soldier took aim at Caleb’s head.

  “I can help you,” Caleb rasped, letting the knife go. There was no point fighting in the state he was in. He had to change tack, and now might be the only chance any of them had to try to get negotiation started. The man shooting had some kind of uplink still active. One of the SUVs on the road had stopped before it hit the EMP zone. “Don’t shoot. Don’t shoot, I can help!”

  “Hold fire,” the CO said.

  The light dropped slightly.

  Caleb allowed his eyes to close briefly in relief.

  “Get him up,” the CO growled.

  The light left Caleb’s face, and a moment later two Apex soldiers hauled him to his feet. He finally got a look at his arm, and saw a shard of wood about a foot long lodged there. From the feel of it, it went all the way through. Seeing it was a bad idea—pain began to radiate more intensely through his arm and up to his neck.

  He barely managed to get his feet under him before he was hauled out of the wreckage. One of the soldiers gave him a shove, and he nearly fell over as dizziness and nausea swirled in his head. He reached automatically up to his stitches.

  “Hands down,” one of the soldiers barked.

  Caleb let his hand drop and tried to focus on the man walking toward him. He was about Caleb’s height, broad-shouldered, and old enough to have mostly gray in his trimmed beard. Some kind of eye piece was lowered over his right eye, and gave off the faintest glow; some kind of heads-up display?

  “You so much as breathe at me funny and you’re dead. What kind of ‘help’ do you think you can give me, hm?”

  Caleb met the man’s eyes. “You’re never going to take Springfield. But not because we have the resources to beat you.”

  The officer snorted softly. “What, then, because you’ve all got the power of friendship and gumption? Screw you—”

  “Because the crops and the livestock pens are rigged. If it looks like we’re losing… a signal goes out. The crops, the animals, everything—it all burns.”

  Above them, a white flare shot into the sky from just beyond the wall. It hung in the sky, falling slowly, bright enough to cast deep shadows across the CO’s face. He looked skeptical. “Bullshit,” he muttered. “Get rid of him.”

  The lights of the rifles behind him moved, throwing Caleb’s shadow onto the CO as he started to turn away. Caleb stiffened, steeled himself for the shots, and spoke up again. There was nothing left to lose, after all.

  “If you don’t listen to me,” he said quickly, “you’re going to lose the best source of food in the region, and I’d lay money that your boss sets off your kill switch about sixty seconds after you tell him you lost this place. If you think we wouldn’t do it, you overestimate the appeal of joining Apex. We took a vote. It was unanimous. Everyone here is willing to burn this place to the ground if it means we’re free.”

  The soldiers behind him didn’t fire, though their CO didn’t withdraw his order. He’d stopped walking, though. He turned around slowly, his right hand on his chest as if trying to scratch something there.

  “Sir?” one of the men behind Caleb questioned.

  The CO eyed Caleb for a long moment, as if weighing whether he believed him or not. But, not about the thing Caleb guessed. “What do you mean about my ‘kill switch’?”

  Caleb frowned slightly, his eyes moving to the raised hand. “You’ve got an implant or a chip, right? Maybe in your chest?”

  The man’s hand dropped. “What if I do?”

  “There was a team that came in before the assault,” Caleb said, measuring his words carefully. He’d just assumed before that if there was a kill switch, it had been voluntary. A price of admission deal, like spies and cyanide tablets. “We captured three of them. Then they just… dropped dead. We don’t know how, or why, but we already know Apex chips people like animals. If you do have an implant, a tracker… we think it has more than one use.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I’m not,” Caleb said. “Look… what’s your name?”

  For several seconds the man searched Caleb’s face, eyes twitching slightly as the muscles of his jaw hardened. “Field Commander Gabriel Warner,” he said finally.

  “Caleb Machert. We still have the three bodies, but we don’t know where the implants are. Pull your people back, we’ll all stand down, and I can take you to the bodies. You can check for yourself. Either way, though, I’m not lying about the rigged crops. There’s only one way Trusk gets anything out of Springfield, and it won’t be by force.”

  Behind the field commander, a group of agents appeared from further into Springfield. Four of them all together, two facing the gate and two facing back down the main road. They were already pulling back. “Even if you burn the food,” Warner said, glancing back at the soldiers, “the land will still be usable. The climate’s still more stable here. We’ll just clear the wreckage and set up shop anyway.”

  “You could,” Caleb agreed. “But it’ll be a long time to do that, and longer before this place pays out. Food is getting scarce, and Trusk wouldn’t want this place unless that was as true for him as it is for the rest of us. Do you really think you’re going to be in his good graces if we torch Springfield? And if not… Do you believe he’ll make sure you’re taken care of anyway?”

  Warner’s expression darkened with doubt, then broke with fury.

  Caleb tensed.

  “Don’t anyone freakin’ move!” Lana shouted from behind Caleb, and the soldiers on his back. “Lower your weapons, now, or we fire.”

  A rush of gratitude swept away Caleb’s pain for a moment, dulling the ache of his arm and other injuries as he turned to see the two soldiers letting go of their rifles and raising their hands in surrender. Lana stood behind them with Derek and what looked like most of her unit, all of them aiming Apex weapons.

  Lana’s eyes widened slightly, and she raised her head from the short rifle’s scope. “Dad?”

  He raised his right arm halfway before his shoulder caught. He winced at the fresh burst of pain. “I’m alright,” he called. “Beat up but… alive.”

  “Are we taking prisoners, Sarge?” Derek asked.

  Caleb turned slightly, looking to Warner for the answer to that. “I’d say this narrows your options,” he warned him. “Give us a chance to show you. One way or the other, this operation fails. It’s just a question of how you come out of it, Field Commander. Alive or dead. Starving or fed.”

  The field commander’s jaw worked, but he raised a hand to his chest again and his brow knit. More doubt, this time stronger. He looked away from Caleb and lifted a hand to his helmet. He pushed it up, and pulled his HUD device free, then turned it over and pulled something that might have been a battery out of the back of it before handing it to Caleb. “Fine,” he muttered, raising his hands as some of the rifles aimed at the two soldiers shifted to him instead. “Show me.”

  “Order your people to stand down,” Caleb told him. “They’re already withdrawing. Lay down arms, and I’ll show you what you signed up for.”

  Warner’s nostril twitched to a snarl, but his eyes tracked the weapons leveled at him. He looked like he might spit. “Fine. I’ll give the order as my people pull back. But if you’re wrong, or you’re lying to me—you’ve got to know Trusk will send more people here. Maybe have the military join the operation. You can’t last here on your own forever.”

  “We don’t intend to,” Caleb said.

  If Warner had anything to say to that, he kept it to himself. A moment later, half of Lana’s team marched him out to the gate, and as promised, the Field Commander gave the order to stand down and surrender as more Apex forces came to regroup.

  Another two took posts to cover, in case any of Warner’s people decided to spring him, and the others helped shift more of the tower debris until they found Jacob unconscious but alive beneath it.

  Only then did Caleb finally allow himself a moment to close his eyes and drink in the relief.

  It wasn’t over yet. But it would be, soon.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CALEB

  Springfield, CO

  Tuesday July 31st, 11:17 pm MST

  It took a very tense half-hour before Warner’s troops were disarmed and under guard. Samuels stood beside Caleb, watching the process and looking like he was about to drop. “That’s all of them. Put up a better fight than I expected. Lost a lot of good people, too.”

  “They lost more,” Lana muttered from Caleb’s other side. She was carefully wrapping his arm where she’d pulled the slender spear of wood from his triceps. “You need stitches and antibiotics, at least. But that should hold for now.”

  Near the wreckage of the gate, Field Commander Warner turned to one of Samuels’ people, and was escorted toward them. Caleb stood slowly from the collapsed beam he’d had to sit down on while Lana worked on his arm.

  “I held up my end,” Warner said as he neared them. “Now you hold up yours.”

  Samuels snorted and turned to spit on the road. “Way I see it—” he started.

  Caleb cleared his throat and raised a hand to forestall whatever threat the man was about to make. “We’ll hold up our end,” he assured Warner. “Lana, radio in. We’re escorting the Apex field commander to the hospital and don’t want trouble.”

  Lana did that, and Caleb turned to let Warner’s detail usher him toward the center of town. When they were a little way ahead and Samuels peeled off to follow them, Caleb watched for a moment before looking at Lana again. “Any word from your mother? Or the other evac teams?”

  Her lips thinned. “I sent some people out about ten minutes ago. Haven’t heard yet, but… I’m sure she’s okay, Dad.”

  Caleb wished he believed that. There was no reason Elizabeth should have been in harm’s way, but the way Apex had swarmed over everything there was no certainty that they hadn’t reached the evacuation routes. Samuels’ people had made a tight inner perimeter, but there had only been so many of them, and it only took one hole either overlooked or punched through for the route to be compromised.

  Still, Lana sounded as much like she was trying to convince herself as she was him. “I’m sure you’re right. Just… stay on the radio. If I don’t hear first, tell me as soon as you hear anything.”

  “I will,” she promised.

  He hugged her tight with one arm, and then made himself leave to join Warner and Samuels, resisting the urge to go hunting for his wife. Safety was just within reach, and he didn’t want to leave it in Samuels’ hands alone in case the old man lost his patience and decided to execute Warner on the spot.

  And if he went looking and found Elizabeth dead…

  Chances are he’d screw up the negotiation all on his own.

  Armed citizens of Springfield lined the road on the way to the hospital, but the order to stand down had been radioed out and gotten around quickly. No one took a shot at Warner, which Caleb thought spoke to the civility of the people here. A lot of them had lost friends, family, neighbors. It would be understandable to be blind with rage and want revenge.

  But the walk was without incident, and easier once the blackout order was lifted. They reached the hospital in about twenty minutes. Inside, the bodies of the captured agents had been moved to a storage room to make way for injured civilians. There were a lot of them, packed into the smallish building, being tended by inexperienced trainees who’d been under Doctor Herndon’s instruction. Herndon was conscious again, at least, but in no state to care for anyone.

  “We just didn’t have time to look,” one of the trainees explained after one of the bodies was moved from the storage room and put on a doctor’s table. He held a scalpel over the red-haired agent whose pallid chest was exposed, and looked to Warner. “Where… uh, where is it?”

  Warner moved in and tapped a spot on the right side of the body’s chest, not far from the shoulder. “Between the muscles here. It’ll be deep, underneath, near the first rib.”

  Close to an artery, and not that far from the heart. Caleb shook his head slowly, trying to imagine what kind of leader would do something like this to their people. “Why did you accept the implant to begin with?” he asked, mystified that anyone would allow that kind of invasion. “What is it for?”

  The field commander’s expression turned stony as he watched the trainee begin to cut into the dead agent. “They track location, but that’s just one function. They’re used for identification and security points inside Apex hubs. Some places you can only get into if you’re an appropriate class or higher. S-class have pretty much free access to everything under the executive level. They link up to TARA—the Apex AI—and keep track of work credits, debts; everything. I took it for the same reason everyone else did. It was a condition of employment.”

  Cold settled into Caleb’s bones at that. “Wait, so it’s not just the security forces that get the implants?”

  Warner shook his head. “Everyone placed at a hub gets it, or they get turned away.”

  That was mixed news. On the one hand, there had to be thousands of people out there with these implants in their bodies. Did they all have kill switches?

  On the other, that put Lana firmly in the clear. Whatever Victoria Steen had jabbed her with, put in her shoulder, it wasn’t one of these things. Wrong location, wrong circumstances. That was good to know, but it didn’t make him feel that much better knowing that Trusk might have the power to kill off any or all of the people who’d joined Apex. Most of them had to have done so just to survive.

  The trainee made a quiet noise of surprise, one finger buried in the cadaver’s chest muscle. He turned and collected forceps from the tray beside him, and inserted them into the incision carefully. A moment later he pulled out a tiny thing, a little thinner and longer than a tic-tac maybe, and held it up to the light.

  Warner held his hand out, and with a grimace the trainee dropped it into his palm. Apparently unconcerned by the congealed blood on it, Warner rubbed at the implant, clearing the surface and turning it over until he saw something that caught his interest. “Son of a…”

  Caleb leaned in and saw that some part of the outer casing sported a small hole. Tiny metal fibers barely visible in the lamp light poked out, as long as the last knuckle of his finger. The implant itself almost looked burned. “What is that?”

  “Not sure,” Warner admitted. “It’s not supposed to be there, though.” He looked to the Trainee and nodded at the incision. “Can you see… I don’t know. Anything? A burn, or… poison?”

  The trainee spread his hands helplessly. “I’m… not a doctor,” he admitted. “I wouldn’t have taken that out of a live person, even. I don’t know what I’d be looking for.”

  Warner turned away slightly, angling his hand to get a closer look. “Could be anything,” he said. “Electrical impulse, some kind of projectile.”

  He looked up, and then began unstrapping his body armor. “Take mine out. Do it quick.”

  The trainee’s eyes widened. “Oh, I—I can’t, I don’t have anesthetic, and it’s really close to an artery and—”

  “Just do it,” Warner snapped as he dropped the body armor and slipped his shirt off.

  It was a bloody affair, and looked painful as hell, but the trainee managed to get the implant out without killing the field commander. When it was done and he was stitched up, he sat for a long time staring at the implant, as if waiting for it to explode. It didn’t, and after a while he stood slowly from the stool he’d sat on as it was removed, and looked around at Caleb, Samuels, and the two security team members with them. “You have my heads-up?”

  Caleb slipped it and the battery out of his pocket. When Warner reached for it, he gave it over. Warner took it and slid the battery into place, then pressed it to his ear and appeared to wait.

  “Sure that’s a good idea?” Samuels asked darkly.

  “No,” Caleb admitted. “But we can’t fight Apex indefinitely. At some point, we have to start talking.”

  “It’s Warner. Get me on the line. Priority one.”

  Another few moments of tense silence passed before he spoke again. “Sir, you asked for updates. I’ve got new intel.” His eyes met Caleb’s briefly, then unfocused slightly as he spoke to, Caleb suspected, Trusk himself. “We were unable to secure Springfield. They’ve rigged the food supply to blow. I ordered my men to withdraw and regroup. Sir? Yes, I… I’m in the settlement now. I have representatives from Springfield with me. They want to negotiate… an arrangement. Yes, sir.”

  He frowned slightly, maybe listening to something Caleb couldn’t hear.

  Behind him, on the tray, the implant gave a quiet pop. The scent of ozone drifted into the air, and Warner turned as Caleb and the others crowded in to see the implant leaking a thin trail of smoke. A hole was at one end, just like the other from the fallen agent.

  Warner swallowed hard and took the HUD away from his ear. Face pale and expressionless, he held the device out to Caleb.

  Caleb took it, and after a moment pressed it to his own ear. “This is Caleb Machert. With the Springfield refugee settlement. Mr. Trusk?”

  There was a long silence, to the point that Caleb wasn’t certain anyone was on the other end. Then, “Sergeant Machert,” a man’s oil-slick voice replied. “How interesting to speak with you. I take it my Field Commander is indisposed.”