“Once we made it clear of the demons, we stayed out in the wild and kept quiet,” I replied. “One run-in with another alliance of killers, but we took care of them.”

  “Prezz got caught between a rock and a…well, just a rock,” Emerald laughed.

  “When we were making our way here, we encountered the small demons, but also a couple large ones. They were nearly fifteen feet tall and a hell of a lot stronger than the rest,” I said.

  “Gorathi Queens,” Veneel explained. “That you saw one and survived is beyond impressive, even for you. But you’ve mastered the ancient tech, it seems. You saw two? Is that how you escaped? Absent the will of Sulamat, two queens in proximity of each other are destined to fight for dominion."

  “We could have used you last night,” Kat said. “You seem to know a lot about the creatures here. Do you know what planet we’re on?”

  “I do not, but the legends of Sulamat and the gorathi, as well as myths of the larger pantheon of Eldritch Gods have long been popular on my homeworld. I never believed any of the stories had any truth to them before arriving here.”

  “Come to think of it,” Druck said. “Those things remind me of the natives on Gia’s World. Do you remember, Boss?”

  “I remember. They attacked the spaceport as we were leaving. They were smaller and less spikey though. More like humanoid bats or something.”

  “Could be in the same food group,” Druck surmised.

  “Food group?” I gave him a long searching look.

  “Genus, genius,” Emerald said. “Not food group. Related, but not the same.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I meant,” Druck agreed.

  “But this planet was supposed to be deserted,” I said. “Kill Spree’s production team scouted the area. They said the place was clean.”

  “It would have appeared that way if the gorathi remained underground or beyond the range of the Kill Spree reconnaissance,” Veneel said. “I doubt they put that much effort in their exploration. They don’t need an overly large arena.”

  “Do you know how they keep contestants inside the boundary?” I asked.

  “I do,” Druck said. He shifted on the sofa, pointing to his eyes. “The signal strength for the feed from the eye cameras marks the territory, which I can see in the corner of my eye. I’ve got four bars right now, which means we’re near the center of the field. Once we hit five we’ll basically be directly underneath the mothership. I was at two when I came out of my crate. Closer to the edge of the game map.”

  “Okay, but what happens if you lose the feed?”

  “Lose the feed, lose your eyes,” Veneel said. “Go blind in unfamiliar territory, and you’re as good as dead.”

  I cringed at the idea.

  “If the goal is to get off this planet, perhaps the mothership is our best bet,” Kat suggested.

  “Except it’s in orbit, and we’re down here,” Druck replied. “And the only ships that go to and from it are the drones, which are too small for us to ride.”

  “Not all of us,” I said, glancing at Shaq.

  “I know the little guy is smart, but even if we could get him up there in a drone, how’s he going to fly the ship down here to pick us up?”

  “Good point,” I agreed.

  “Sorry,” Shaq buzzed.

  “Not your fault, bud.” I raised my voice to speak to the entire group. “Yen mentioned having a combat team waiting in orbit. What if we could convince them to come down?”

  “How could we do that?” Kat questioned. “He refused to send them to help the contestants, and I don’t blame him for that. What could we do to bring them running?”

  I turned to Druck and leaned forward, staring into his eyes. “What do you say, Jason? We could use a lift out of here.” Of course, the producer couldn’t reply through Druck’s feed, but maybe he had heard me.

  “I doubt he’ll be too eager to help us since we keep blasting his drones out of the air,” Emerald said.

  “And you did give him the finger,” Druck added.

  “Maybe he wants to get rid of us so we stop interfering in the game,” I suggested.

  “Are you kidding?” Emerald laughed. “I bet the viewer numbers are through the roof. The only way out of this may be to win.”

  “I have my own contingency,” I said, considering the transit sigils in the construct. “But it’s not a sure bet.”

  “Ooh, juicy.” Emerald flipped over on the sofa, leaning against the back to look at me. “Do tell.”

  “No,” I replied. “It doesn’t matter unless it comes to that, and I really hope it doesn’t.”

  “Ben, there’s something else you should know,” Veneel said. “Are you familiar with Colonel Coil?”

  “I saw him in the promos. He looks like a badass.”

  “The worst ass,” Veneel agreed. “He’s probably the only killer here who can offer much of a challenge to you. I saw him in the city center. He had already enlisted a dozen other killers to his side, probably more by now. They have to know he’s going to kill them as soon as everyone else is dead, but they’re probably hoping they can take him by surprise more easily if they’re closer to him. I think they’re wrong. Dead wrong.”

  “But in the meantime, he’s assembling his own army.”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe Matt and Quasar joined up with him,” I said. “That may be good news for my purposes.”

  Veneel looked thoughtful. “Perhaps. Discovering the truth of the matter may prove difficult.”

  “Well, I’m not leaving until Matt is either safe or I find his body. I don’t care how difficult it may be.” I swept my eyes across the others. “You’re all relatively safe here, at least for now. I’m continuing deeper into the city. Anyone who wants can wait here.”

  “And miss all the fun?” Emerald said. “Not a chance.”

  “Noooo,” Ixitat said.

  “I’m with you,” Shaq buzzed.

  “My orders were clear, Captain,” Kat said. “I follow your lead.”

  “I pledged my allegiance to you,” Veneel said. “I will follow you unto death.”

  “Druck?” I asked when he didn’t say anything.

  “I’m thinking about it,” he replied. “No offense, but I did almost get my head blasted off twice already today, after nearly being eaten last night.”

  “If you stay behind, I’m going to circle back to kill you,” Emerald said.

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “If I was threatening you, I would be laughing.” Her face was stone cold, as serious as I had ever seen it, to the point that it nearly became comical.

  Druck laughed nervously. “Right. I’m with you, Boss.”

  I handed Veneel his plasma rifle back. “I’m trusting your pledge.”

  He nodded. “I know your dealings with our kind have been…uneven at best. But Duke Sedaya cast me aside, allowing me to serve another. And I choose to serve you. I will die for you, Benjamin Murdock, if it comes to that.”

  “I really hope it doesn’t come to that. Let’s move out.”

  CHAPTER 24

  We followed my original plan through the outer reaches of the settlement, moving from plot to plot, checking each house and staying behind cover as much as possible. Because of our caution, it took nearly three hours to advance beyond the outskirts to what quickly became identifiable as the industrial part of the ruined city. Here, numerous heavy stone buildings, many of which were lined with shattered windows, occupied larger sites surrounded by trees and other vegetation that had probably never been intended to grow so wildly. In sharp contrast to the smaller individual homesteads, the overgrown brutalist structures were anything but inviting, their weighty exteriors like massive warning signs screaming at us to stay out.

  Of course, staying out probably wasn’t an option. The randomly intermixed factories and offices offered plenty of square footage for a contestant to hide in, assuming they could overcome the fearsome facades of the shrouded entrances. Following a crumbling street between two of them, blaster raised and eyes flicking back and forth, I wondered how many killers had been able to avoid the sense of foreboding to go inside these buildings. Not Matt. I was pretty sure he wouldn't have breached these doors. He hated horror movies and clowns, and the entrances to the filthy structures reminded me of both.

  We passed through the entire area, remaining cautious as we navigated the streets between the buildings.Not that avoiding going into any of them resulted in the settlement becoming that much more inviting. As the technology of the time was her expertise, Emerald emerged from her psychosis long enough to explain that the settlers had brought their raw building materials with them, mixed them together upon arrival, and then sprayed the heavy architecture into existence with large three-dimensional printers.

  Over the years, the technology had improved by leaps and bounds, leading to some structures being composed entirely of crystal or other exotic materials and containing all of the wiring and plumbing needed to support human beings. It was like comparing the CGI of something like the Last Starfighter to modern special effects. The end result felt to me like the bastard child of Mad Max and Blade Runner.

  The first of the planet’s two suns was directly overhead as we entered the city proper. As before, the buildings were thick and angry-looking, though the human corpses in the street stole some of the construction’s terrible thunder. There were far too many bodies in our path as we crept slowly along the side of one of the structures, which had a trapezoidal shape and eight levels of doorways leading to individual apartments. Any of them could have a killer inside, either hiding or waiting to ambush another unsuspecting contestant. A matching structure occupied the other side of the street, another two hundred potential doors to keep an eye on.

  How would I ever find Matt in this maze?

  I knew one way, but I wasn’t quite ready to go there just yet. Maybe Veneel hadn’t spotted Matt or Quasar, but there was a chance someone had.

  “Remember,” I said, loudly enough for all of Team Hondo to hear but quietly enough the message wouldn’t go beyond us. “If anyone attacks you, shoot to injure. We need to question as many killers as we can.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Druck replied. “You have shields.”

  “Which I’d rather not use,” I countered. “The sooner we find Matt and Zar, the sooner we all get the hell out of here.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Emerald said, motioning to the building on our left. “I’m going to check out those apartments.”

  “We should stick together,” I replied.

  “Yeah.” She paused. “I’m going to check out those apartments.” She cut away from the group, completely disregarding my opinion. It was obvious she had no interest in following any kind of chain-of-command orders. Almost everything she did seemed to be on an inexplicably irresistible impulse.

  “Why aren’t there any gorathi corpses?” Kat asked as we approached another dead killer. He had deep wounds on his chest consistent with the demons’ claws and lay in a pool of blood, rifle still in hand. “They were pretty easy to kill individually. You’d think these people would have knocked out a handful, at least.”

  “The gorathi always claim their dead,” Veneel said.

  “They’re cannibals?” Druck asked.

  “If her preferred energy source is lacking, the Queen will devour them, yes.”

  “Gross.”

  “It’s a noble sacrifice to serve your master in such a way.”

  “To be eaten? I strongly disagree with that.”

  I glanced over at the apartment building, finding Emerald on the fifth floor, near the center. She walked quickly, as if she already had a destination in mind. What did she know that she hadn’t told us?

  Gunfire broke the relative silence, coming from somewhere deeper in the settlement. It was the first shooting we had heard in almost two hours and it stopped only moments after starting, suggesting one of the killers had just whittled the number of other players down by one.

  “A few blocks that way, if I had to guess,” Kat said, motioning to our left side.

  “I suddenly have the intense feeling we’re being watched,” Druck added, looking to the apartments on our right.

  “I’m sure we are,” I replied. “But no individual killer is going to challenge us as a group. Especially once they see Ixy.”

  “Yesss,” Ixitat agreed with a clacking laugh.

  As if to drive the point home, a loud bang to our left drew my attention to where I had last seen Emerald. I spotted her just in time to watch her enter one of the apartments through the door she had just busted open. Out of sight, I worried about her when a pair of gunshots rang out from the apartment.

  “Shit,” Kat said. “Should I go up there?”

  “Leave her,” Druck answered first. “She wants to be the lone wolf, she has to deal with the consequences.”

  That wasn’t the response I had planned to give, but I couldn’t argue with his logic. Even so… “We’ll all go up there,” I decided. “Someone other than Emerald is in that room and we still need information, no matter what happened to her. Kat, Ixy, take the right side. Druck, you, me, and Shaq will go left. If anyone makes a break for it, try to stop them without killing them.”

  “What if it’s Emerald?” Druck asked. “Can we kill her?”

  “No,” I snapped back. “Come on.”

  We split up and ran to the stairs at either end of the building, climbing quickly to the fifth floor. Running along the outer walkway, the place suddenly reminded me of the apartment in Modesto. So much time and distance, and some things had hardly changed. Reaching the open door, we paused on both sides, preparing to storm in.

  “Oh, the cavalry’s here!” Emerald said excitedly. “You’re a lot late.”

  We lowered our weapons, and I moved into the door frame. Emerald sat on the back of a woman in green combat armor, one hand holding the woman’s dark hair pulled back to raise her head, the other clutching her knife to the woman’s throat. A discarded rifle rested on the floor beside what looked like a shard of glass from a mirror.

  “This is Mio. Say hello, Mio.” Mio stared at me as I entered the apartment. Emerald yanked her hair back a little more. “I said, say hello.”

  “Hello,” Mio spit out, eyes pleading with me to get Emerald off her.

  “Mio was being a naughty girl, and using that piece of broken mirror to signal someone on the other side of the street, who was in turn signaling someone else further away. A pretty organized system to keep track of incoming killers and efficiently set up ambushes. Am I right or am I right?”

  “How do you know her name?” Druck asked.

  “You don’t recognize her from the hypernet?” Emerald replied. “It has been a while, hasn’t it? How many years, Mio?” She didn’t respond until. Emerald tugged her hair again. “How many?”

  “Eight.”

  “Wait,” Druck said. “Mio Ito. The Devil of Hatana, responsible for the murders of twelve law enforcement agents. If I remember the reports right, you hunted them for sport.”

  Mio didn’t answer.

  “That’s her,” Emerald said. “We were in the same training group on Kirillia. She’s a mean bitch, I’ll tell you that.”

  “Let her up,” I said.

  “What?” Emerald replied. “That’s no fun.”

  “Emerald, please let her up.”

  “Well, since you said please,” she replied, removing the blade from Mio’s throat and jumping to her feet.

  As soon as Emerald’s weight was off her, Mio scrambled for the door. I pushed her back down before she made it two feet. “Not so fast,” I said as her head whipped toward me, the sigiltech taking her by surprise.

  “How?” she asked.

  “I’ll ask the questions,” I replied, glancing around the apartment. Covered in dust like the homes on the outskirts, it was simply decorated, the hard walls covered over with long-disabled flat screens that had probably shown personal photos or landscapes. My eyes were drawn to a small kitchen in the back, where a mug had been knocked over hundreds of years ago, the trail of the contents still visible in the resulting growth of mold.

  “Captain,” Kat said. “Are you sure you want to do this now?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Emerald just said Mio was signaling someone on the other side of the street, who passed the signal down the chain. If they know she’s in trouble…”

  “This is Kill Spree,” Druck said. “They won’t come for her. She’s just another minus-one to them.”

  “We all are,” Mio said. “Sooner or later, only one of us will get out of here alive. Maybe not even one. Not with those things out there playing their own game.”

  “What do you know about them?” I asked.

  “Let me up, and I’ll tell you what I can. There’s no sense in taking secrets to the grave when the grave is coming soon for all of us.”

  “I wouldn’t be so fatalistic,” I said, releasing the push so she could shift to a seated position on the floor. “We’re making our own rules.”

  She laughed. “Coil said something similar about making his own rules. I went along with it, but I don’t believe it.”

  “So you’re allied with Coil? How many others has he recruited?”

  “As of sunrise, nearly sixty.”

  “That’s probably a quarter of all the remaining killers,” Veneel said.

  “Yes, I would estimate the same. He’s convinced them that he knows how to get the special ops team to come to the surface, and that he has a plan to seize their gunship, take it to the mothership, and escape with everyone who follows him.”

  “You don’t believe it?” I asked.

  “Do you?” she replied.

  “Part of me wants to,” I answered. “We’re looking for a way off the planet too.”

  “He gives them hope. In exchange, they do his bidding. In the end, their hope becomes their destruction.”

  “Deep thoughts from a serial killer,” Druck said.

  “Survive long enough, and you will see,” she answered.

  “You still joined his alliance,” I pointed out.