“Screw you,” he growled back. “You have no idea what you’ve done.”

  “I’m pretty sure I do.”

  His eyes hardened in a way that surprised Cassidy. “I’m pretty sure you don’t.”

  She considered asking what he meant, but she was sure he was delirious from loss of blood and full of shit anyway. “I just have one small problem.”

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  She raised the gun, putting it against his temple. “I told my boss you were dead. You’re making me look bad.”

  He coughed as he laughed again, falling silent when the report echoed in the corridor. Cassidy tossed the handgun in Josias’ lap as his head slumped sideways.

  “Thank you for your cooperation,” Cassidy said coldly, leaving him behind.

  She had a few minutes.

  She was going to set the children free.

  Chapter 2

  “Hey Cass,” Hall said, stepping out of the elevator flanked by a pair of UDF medics in navy blue uniforms and white coats. The medics rushed past her as if she weren’t even there, hurrying to the children she had let out of their rooms while the dark-haired liaison took a knee in front of her, looking her over. Most people would have been horrified by the sight of a twelve year-old girl covered in blood and wearing only a sports jersey. Not Hall. That’s why Dorne had sent him. “None of that is yours, I take it?”

  “Just the feet,” Cassidy replied, lifting her left foot to show Hall. She had found an old first aid kit behind the counter in the lobby, and had bandaged them well enough to staunch the bleeding and make it easier to walk. “Dorne said our people should be able to fix them up almost as good as new.”

  “I’m sure they can,” Hall replied with a wry smile that enhanced the wrinkles on his middle-aged face. “Did you leave any survivors?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Stupid question, right?” He looked over his shoulder at the elevators, which all displayed P1 on their boards. “We can get out of here as soon as the cleaning crew brings the lifts back.”

  “Jessie,” a small voice said behind Cassidy. She turned around, facing the youngest kid in the group, an eight year-old boy named Benjamin.

  “What can I do for you, Bennie?” she asked.

  He threw his arms out and fell into her, holding her tight. Cassidy froze for a second before returning the embrace.

  “Thank you for helping us,” Bennie said. “Thank you for killing the bad men.”

  Cassidy bit her lower lip to keep her emotions in check. “You’re welcome,” she replied. “It’s going to be okay now. These people will find your parents if they can, or they’ll see you get put into a good foster home.”

  He backed away from her. “Maybe I can come live with you?”

  “I don’t think so, Bennie.”

  “Why not? Don’t you like me? I won’t be any trouble.”

  Cassidy smiled. “You’re like a brother to me. All of you are like my family. But I don’t have a home. I’ll go into the system just like you will if they can’t find your parents. It’s out of our control.”

  “Isn’t this your dad?” Bennie motioned to Hall.

  “No. He’s a policeman. He wants to talk to me about what happened here. I’m going back to the station with him for a while.”

  “Oh,” Benjamin said thoughtfully. He considered for a few seconds. “Maybe I can come with you?”

  “Sorry, kid,” Hall said. “There’s not enough room in my roto. The doctors will take good care of you.”

  Benjamin shrugged. “Well, if I find my mom and dad, I’ll tell them they need to take you too. Because you helped me and you’d be a great big sis.”

  “Thanks, Bennie,” Cassidy said. “That’s really nice of you.”

  The door to the elevators opened. Each cab delivered three members of the cleanup crew and their equipment. Dressed in head-to-toe PPE and pulling wet-dry vacuums, stackable gurneys, and bottles of cleaning agents, they followed Hall’s pointed finger around the corner toward the restaurant.

  “Come on Cass,” Hall said. “Time for us to head out.”

  “Cass?” Benjamin said, confused. “I thought your name was Jessie?”

  Cassidy’s glare slammed into Hall’s grimace as he realized what he had just done.

  “Sorry, kid. Her name is Jessie,” Hall said. “My daughter’s name is Cassidy. I just messed up. It’s been a long day.”

  “Oh,” Benjamin said again with a laugh.

  “Goodbye Bennie,” Cassidy said, reaching out and squeezing his shoulder.

  “Bye, Jessie,” Benjamin replied.

  Hall and Cassidy walked back to the elevators together, boarding one of them. Instead of heading for the parking garage beneath the building, he directed the elevator to the roof.

  “Are you trying to get him killed?” Cassidy hissed once the doors closed. “You know there can’t be any loose ends, and that’s a loose end.”

  “He’s too young,” Hall replied. “And he won’t give it another thought ten seconds from now. I won’t tell Dorne if you don’t.”

  “She doesn’t need to know,” Cassidy agreed. “Good save, anyway, even if you did blurt it out like a jackass fresh out of training. How long have you been working with the bureau?”

  “Four years.”

  “How many other innocent survivors have you inadvertently gotten killed with your stupidity?”

  Hall’s face flushed. “Cass, I—”

  “I know. But you screwed up in front of me, which means it’s my job to chew you out so you don’t make the same mistake again. He’s eight years old, damn it.”

  Hall nodded. “Understood. It won’t happen again.”

  Cassidy exhaled sharply. “I would kill for a shower right about now. I must reek.”

  “I feel sorry for the tech who has to clean the roto after I bring you back to HQ,” Hall replied. “You stink worse than a sewer.”

  “I think asshole blood smells worse than regular blood. What do you think?”

  “Agreed.”

  The elevator stopped and opened on the rooftop, revealing a worn concrete surface where three vehicles waited, each parked inside a faded white-painted ring. Hall’s roto was easy to spot, relatively new and all black with tinted windows all around. The other two rotos were scuffed, worn, rusted and dented. Getaway rides for the gang. It brought Cassidy great pleasure that they wouldn’t be needing them. Ever.

  The doors on Hall’s roto swung open like wings as they approached while the headlights and interior lighting activated. She went around to the passenger side and climbed into the vehicle, leaning her head back against the soft faux leather as the auto-restraints swung down and pressed against her. Hall dropped into the pilot’s side seat, reaching past the yoke to the control screen and tapping to activate it. As soon as the doors swung closed on either side, suctioning into place, the interior of the roto became quiet as a tomb.

  “Dorne, this is Hall,” he said, activating the comms to HQ. “I’m bringing her in.” He disconnected, using the touchscreen to set his destination before settling back into his seat.

  “You’re going to let it fly itself?” Cassidy asked.

  “If it can do it, why not let it do it?” Hall replied.

  “Because it’s boring. And I don’t trust it.”

  Hall laughed. “You of all people don’t trust artificial intelligence?”

  “There’s only one thing I trust less.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Other people.”

  Hall laughed harder. “You’re a hard case, Cass.”

  “It comes from experience. I’ve been doing this for a long time.”

  “How long?”

  “This job was my forty-eighth.”

  He looked over at her. “No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  The roto powered up, the four anti-gravity spinners positioned in the corners of the vehicle beginning to rotate to counter the vehicle’s mass, while the blades beneath the spinners provided lift and vector control. They rose slowly from the rooftop, headlights cutting the darkening sky, the only roto anywhere near Old Town. The car turned itself east, angling toward the more crowded metropolis beyond. Even from a distance, Cassidy could make out the huge holograms and billboards that bombarded the population with a constant barrage of suggestive marketing. Some of them were projected high into the night sky, advertising to the cavalcade of rotos moving around the densely packed city.

  “You did a great job with that kid, Bennie, back there,” Hall said. “You actually seemed a little bit warm.”

  “Screw off, Hall. One, unlike my general feelings toward you, I actually like children. Two, Jessica’s feelings are siphoning through the imprint. Since you aren’t a Shade, they might not have told you, but shadowing children is hard work.”

  “I’m aware of the unique challenges. You forget I was in the program. I was cut during the final round because of an unexpected genetic abnormality.”

  Cassidy laughed. “Why do I have a feeling there was nothing unexpected about it?”

  “Shut up.”

  Their roto descended as they approached the city proper, sinking into one of the stacked lanes of traffic to navigate between the endless sea of glass, stone and steel. Other rotos passed by overhead and beneath them, criss-crossing their flight path, while ground traffic and pedestrians clogged up the streets below.

  “I can’t wait to get out of this repo,” Cassidy said absently, when the silence inside the vehicle had continued a little too long.

  “What, you don’t like being imprinted to a pre-teen?”

  “I like children. I don’t like being one. I did that already.”

  “Do you remember it?”

  “I could, but you know recall is dangerous during an imprint, and I don’t want my career to end with deletion. I do maintain every confidence that I was a child at one time in my life.”

  “Smartass. You don’t have many friends, do you, Cass?”

  “None of us do. You were lucky to get TKO’ed in that respect, Hall.”

  His voice lowered. “Yeah. Lucky me. I get to chauffeur you around and do your shopping while you get to play hero over and over again.”

  Cassidy looked over at Hall. “I couldn’t do it without you. None of us could without our liaisons. We need your support more than anything else. I don’t trust other people, but I almost trust you.”

  Hall met Cassidy’s gaze. “That’s nice of you to say. I almost appreciate it.”

  “It’s the siphon. It’s making me all blubbery.”

  “Bullshit.”

  They both laughed.

  The roto descended again a few seconds later, finding impossibly small empty spaces between the layers of traffic to slip through in order to bring them down to the level of the UDF Special Investigations facility and guide itself smoothly into the upper-level hangar.

  A green laser scanned the roto as it crossed the threshold of the open bay doors, identifying both the vehicle and the occupants. A positive result meant the gun turrets on either side of the hangar remained static while they passed overhead, reaching the open area a hundred feet later.

  There wasn’t much activity in the bay at the moment. Only six of the thirty-four landing rings were occupied, all of the rotos identical to Hall’s. One of the two techs standing on the floor raised a pair of glowing orange wands, swinging them in a pattern that directed the vehicle’s AI to its designated ring. Armed guards monitored the hangar from catwalks above the landing zone.

  Small landing skids extended from the roto as it neared the deck, the spinners winding down. Hall hit the controls to open the doors the moment the skids touched down, and both he and Cassidy climbed out at the same time, meeting in front of the rounded hood of the craft and walking toward the exit together. The tech who had guided the roto to its landing stared at Cassidy as she approached, clearly nervous about her age and appearance. But he recognized Hall and he knew better than to ask questions.

  The other tech reacted similarly when they passed him by, heading out of the hangar and crossing to the elevator bank. Hall tapped on the control pad in a specific sequence and then let the biometric security scan his thumb. There was no outward indication that the extra steps had any effect on the elevators until the cab arrived and they stepped in, it’s floor designation already selected.

  U9

  The Underworld.

  Chapter 3

  The elevator slowed to a stop. The doors slid open. Cassidy and Hall stepped out into a short corridor. A second door waited a dozen feet away.

  The cool cement floor comforted Cassidy’s bandaged feet, offering a measure of relief from the stinging she had done her best to ignore. She continued to tread lightly as she and Hall crossed the choke point to the Underworld’s primary personnel entrance, where Hall entered his ID code. The security scanned his face this time, instead of his thumb. There was no such thing as impenetrable security, but requesting three different factors of authentication certainly made it difficult. And getting anywhere near Hades required four.

  The second door opened into a larger corridor composed primarily of thick cement built to withstand any kind of external adverse event up to and including a nuclear blast. Intake was visible at the end of the hallway in the form of a kiosk fronted by a large touchscreen, a biometric scanner mounted above it. The overall space was small and silent. The only sound came from the heels of Hall’s loafers as they marched to the kiosk, with Cassidy taking the lead.

  She stopped directly in front of the touchscreen. A scanning laser swept over her face, confirming her identity.

  “Shade Cassidy,” the AI voice said. “Welcome back. Please report to Medical for treatment. Your mission report is to be delivered within the next seven hours. You are scheduled for scrubbing and extraction at zero nine-hundred tomorrow. Please confirm.”

  “Confirmed,” Cassidy said.

  “Confirmation accepted. Enjoy your evening.”

  She smirked at the canned response, stepping aside so Hall could take his turn. “I’ll be sure to enjoy my evening of having my feet draped in healing goop and writing a mission report.” She sighed. “And I’m in this repo for another nine hours.”

  “At least you’ll have time to shower,” Hall replied. He let the machine scan his face. Since he wasn’t a Shade it also requested his identification code and thumbprint, which he entered into the touchscreen.

  “Detective Hall,” the AI said. “Delivery of Shade Cassidy is confirmed. Request number six nine seven four is completed. Thank you for your service.”

  Hall looked over at Cassidy. “I guess I’m dismissed,” he said. “Good seeing you again, Cass.”

  “You too, Hall,” Cassidy replied. “I’ll see you when I see you.”

  “Back at you. Take care. Good work out there.”

  He offered a wave before turning on his heel and leaving the way he had come. Cassidy didn’t watch him go. Instead, she circled the kiosk to the back wall. As soon as Hall was out of range, the holographic mirage vanished and the steel blast door that housed the internal workings of the UDF’s Shadow Initiative moved aside.

  The passage beyond the third door remained as stark and silent as the first two by design. Liaisons like Hall never went past the kiosk, even though their identifiers and biometrics were part of the process of bringing a Shade back in. Instead, Hall worked upstairs in Special Investigations. By all org charts, pay grades and dossiers, he was a standard Law Enforcement Agent. Only operatives like Cassidy, her superiors and direct support staff like the scrubbers and doctors who managed the backend of the process ever used this entrance. They never arrived or exited at the same time as a Shade. Only Dorne, Hall, Doctor Campbell and Scrubber Singh even knew that she had been imprinted and what her repo looked like.

  It left Cassidy walking alone through the passageways of the Underworld past unmarked windowless doors. She knew the directions to Medical from experience and arrived there within a few minutes of entering the facility.

  Another kiosk waited for her when she entered Medical. Positioned in the center of a square room, two locked doors sat away from the entrance, on each of the three walls. Again, they were intentionally ordinary and unmarked. Since she had been ordered to report immediately, both the path to Medical and the reception area had been kept clear of other traffic.

  The kiosk scanned her face again, confirming her arrival. The inner door on the right side of the reception area buzzed as it unlocked, a green LED turning on above the door. Cassidy went through the door into a treatment room. She sat on an examination table opposite a long counter stocked with medical supplies, a chill from the cold floor on her feet raising goosebumps along her slender arms.

  She was only seated there for a few breaths before the door on the opposite wall opened.

  “Cassidy,” Doctor Campbell said, entering the room. She had been fresh out of the UDF medical program the first time Cassidy had worked with her, back when her reddish blonde hair didn’t have streaks of white, her porcelain skin had been mostly free of wrinkles, and she had weighed twenty or thirty fewer pounds. Her warm smile faded a little when she noticed Cassidy’s bloody state. “Why didn’t they send you to get cleaned up first?”

  Cassidy picked up her left leg, jutting her foot out toward Campbell. Her blood had seeped through the makeshift bandages. “They probably didn’t want me walking around on this any longer than I had to. How have you been, Rory?”

  Campbell made a face. “That looks like it hurts. Turn and lie down on the table.” She turned away, opening drawers in the cabinets and pulling out supplies. “I’ve been good,” she finally answered.

  She didn’t go into detail. She couldn’t without breaking regulations. Cassidy turned and laid face down, the position giving Campbell a good view of her feet. The doctor grabbed a rolling stool from the corner and pulled it to the end of the table, and then did the same with the smaller table where she had laid out tweezers, cotton balls, solution, gauze and a tube of healing gel.