“I don’t know. From what David told me, she was supposed to have access to Metro through the seal we broke. Her team had placed a device beneath it to keep it from locking fully, at least until the trife got through. Maybe she was using the seal you found?”

  “It’s right around the corner.”

  “Let’s assume she got in that way. She brought the trife she had stashed down here for safe-keeping, and to keep them alive. She was awake for two years after I went into hibernation, so there’s no way to know exactly when she entered the first time. It’s still odd that there’s no nest. If they weren’t reproducing, she couldn’t have been using them for her gene editing experiments. So what was she doing with them?”

  “She must have done something to them,” Dante said. “If they aren’t acting the way you expected. If her goal was to control them, it could be she cut off their ability to reproduce. She might have even tried making them more tame and subservient.”

  “Slaves,” Caleb said. “If she had an army of submissive trife to support her army of hybrids, it would leave the stronger hands free to fight while the weaker units carried out less important tasks.”

  “That hypothesis works for me, Sergeant.”

  “We’ll go with that for now.” Caleb paused. “You said you have full access to the complete datastore?”

  “Any part of it that isn’t damaged. There’s a simple search mechanism if you want to look for something?”

  “I do. I want the recordings of the Research Module from two hundred thirty-six years ago. I think getting a full picture of what Riley was doing will make everything we found more clear.”

  “Don’t we have more important immediate concerns?”

  “We do, but I want to leave here with something. We can get the rest of it later.”

  “Understood, and I agree. Let me run the query.”

  Dante’s hands moved swiftly over the control surface, entering the query.

  SEARCHING…

  The search was short. Too short. Instead of a list of results, the display went dark. Then a recording started to play without their intervention. Dante glanced over at Caleb, who shrugged in response.

  The recording was of the room they were currently standing in, taken from the left upper corner and showing a wide-angle view of the entire space. Caleb looked in that direction. He didn’t see a camera, but he did see a small air vent where the camera might be placed.

  “I didn’t ask for this,” Dante said.

  “No,” Caleb replied. “But I think someone wanted us to see it.” Someone who knew that if someone had learned the truth, they might have come seeking evidence.

  The screen was unchanged for about twenty seconds. Then someone entered the room.

  “Harry,” Caleb said, recognizing the Reaper right away.

  Harry went directly to the display. He looked over his shoulder, clearly nervous. He must have known Riley was behind him. He started working the terminal, entering commands too quickly for Caleb to follow. He seemed to know exactly what he wanted to do.

  He remained at the terminal for half a minute, tapping one final command and then running to the back of the room and ducking into the corner. He drew a pistol from his side right before he ducked beneath one of the mainframe servers, out of sight of the camera.

  The recording returned to calm for a few more seconds. Then a new form entered the room. Beside him, Dante gasped. “What the hell is that?”

  It wasn’t Riley.

  It was a human-trife Reaper.

  The monstrous hybrid stepped into the room, head swinging back and forth, nostrils flaring. An instant later, it looked directly toward where Harry was hiding. Then it started in his direction.

  “Stop.”

  Caleb recognized Riley’s voice immediately. The Reaper stopped as Riley entered the room behind it, partially obscured by its body. The hybrid’s presence confused him. Hadn’t she lost control of all the hybrid Reapers before Harry died?

  Not that it would be a surprise to learn she had lied about that too.

  “Harry, there’s no point in hiding,” Riley said. “Everyone knows you’re in here.” She glanced at the terminal. “The question is, what did you do in here?”

  Harry stood up, his face pale. “You’re out of control, Riley. The people in Metro don’t deserve what you plan to do with them.”

  “Oh please,” Riley replied. “You weren’t saying that before we boarded.”

  “I’ve been saying it for weeks and you know it. Ever since you killed Pratt and brought David in. I thought you would come to your senses, but since you haven’t…here we are.”

  “Here we are,” Riley repeated, looking around. Caleb guessed it was the first time she had entered the area. “I take it this is the central mainframe? I didn’t know you knew how to get down here.”

  “I don’t tell you everything anymore.”

  “The jilted lover. How dramatic. Didn’t it occur to you it might be a mistake to give me access to this area from outside the city?”

  “What can you do from here that you can’t do from somewhere else?” Harry raised his pistol, pointing it at her. “Do you think your pet can get in front of you before I pull the trigger?”

  “I don’t know. Why don’t we find — ”

  Harry’s weapon discharged. Caleb tracked the shot to Riley’s chest, watching as it pierced her uniform, knocking her backward a step. Blood began to spread from the wound, and he watched in horror as it made only a small stain before the flow stopped.

  Riley smiled. Harry’s face fell. So did Caleb’s.

  “Shit,” he said, looking at Dante. “We need to get back to Metro.”

  “What did I just see?” Dante replied.

  “Evidence, but not the kind I was looking for. Let’s move.”

  “What about the rest of the recording? What about the damaged servers?”

  “We can deal with all that later. I don’t know how long Riley is going to stay dead.”

  Chapter 10

  Riley Valentine’s eyes fluttered open. The first thing she noticed was that it was cold. Very cold. The next thing she noticed was the row of lights over her head.

  Where was she?

  She pushed herself up on her elbows, looking around. A morgue? What was she doing here?

  She was naked and cold. A tray was resting beside her, lined with tools for an autopsy. She had died. That much was obvious. She didn’t remember how. The last thing she could recall, she was in the hospital, waiting for Sergeant Card to get patched up so Sheriff Dante could bring them both to the Law Office and lock them up.

  She smiled at the idea. Lock her up? She would have gone along with it, but not forever. She was the rightful governor of Metro. This was her mission to lead. Sticks and Stone weren’t going to keep her from doing what she had come to do, despite the best efforts of David, the alien AI, and Caleb Card.

  Someone had killed her. Did they know she had done the gene editing on herself? Obviously not. If they did, they would never have left her here, preparing to cut her open.

  She slid off the table. She needed clothes. They were resting in a transparent bag on the counter. Her body armor was hanging nearby. She padded over to it, examining it. There was no sign of fresh damage. No blood stains. No obvious entry point for a weapon. Interesting. She crossed back to the bag holding her clothes, opening it and dumping them on the counter. Her panties were clean. Her undershirt clean. Everything was clean.

  How had they killed her without soiling her clothes?

  She wished she could remember what had happened. Why had the people of Metro turned on her? Had Governor Stone put them up to it? Had he assassinated her to keep her from taking control? Was Sheriff Dante the one who shot her?

  It couldn’t have been Sergeant Card. He was in the examination room with Doctor Brom. It had to be the sheriff or one of her deputies. That was the only choice that made sense.

  If she saw the bitch, she was going to kill her.

  She started pulling on her clothes, sliding her panties up. She heard the displacement of air as the door opened behind her.

  “What the hell?” Doctor Brom muttered, dropping something onto the floor.

  Riley turned around. “Doctor Brom. I want you to tell me what happened. Right now.”

  Brom was backing toward the door. “You. You’re supposed to be dead. You were dead. I checked you myself.”

  He was retreating. Trying to escape. Riley couldn’t let that happen. She leaped the distance across the room, carried by muscles stronger than any regular human’s. She had conserved herself before, keeping her secret from Card and the Guardians, and later Governor Stone and his underlings. Now that the secret was revealed, there was no point in being shy about it.

  She grabbed him by the arm, yanking him roughly back and around. He slammed into the counter, flailing as he stumbled to the floor.

  “Doctor Valentine,” he said. “Wait.”

  “Tell me what happened, Brom,” she said. She leaned down, grabbing him by the neck and lifting him back to his feet. She was angry. Furious. She had been on fire for years, ever since the trife had taken her sister and put all of her hard work to waste. Now she felt like she was going to explode.

  “You were dead. Clinically dead. For at least thirty minutes now.”

  “How did I die?”

  “You shot yourself. Or rather, you tried to shoot yourself. The gun was empty. You died anyway.”

  “That’s impossible.” She said it, but she wasn’t sure it was true.

  “That’s what happened. I swear it. How are you alive? Your brain has been without oxygen for a long time. Even if you started breathing again, you should be a vegetable.”

  “I’m resilient.” She could see his face was turning pale, her grip on his neck cutting off his oxygen supply. She could barely contain her fury. If she had managed to finish her research earlier, if she had given the sequence to her sister, she would still be alive. She would be as strong as Riley was now.

  “Please,” Brom said. “Let me go.”

  “I committed suicide with an unloaded gun?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he confirmed.

  “And you brought me down here to cut me open?”

  “To understand why your body reacted the way it did to the hallucination.”

  “What was I doing before I shot myself? Did I say anything?”

  “I don’t know. I came out late. I only heard you say something about being the devil and making the hard choice.”

  “So they know.”

  “Know what?”

  “Why I brought the Deliverance here.”

  Doctor Brom didn’t say anything. He looked more frightened. Riley kept holding him, squeezing a little tighter. If the Governor knew what she had done, if he believed it, they would never let her take control. They would never let her finish her mission. Especially now that Card would know she had changed herself the way she had changed David. She was a threat they couldn’t afford to ignore.

  “Please,” Brom said again, straining to get the words out. “I didn’t do anything to you. Let me go.”

  “I’d like to let you go, Doctor,” Riley said.

  “Thank you,” Brom replied.

  “But you already know too much.”

  She squeezed even harder. It was enough to break Brom's neck, shattering his spine and leaving his head hanging limply in her grip, his body becoming heavy as he died.

  She let his corpse fall to the floor. Murdering him didn’t cool her fire. The act only fanned it, increasing her anger. Even if her original mission had gone completely sideways, she could still salvage some part of it. Command had let her come here for a reason. A purpose. She wasn’t going to give up because she had run into a few roadblocks.

  She finished dressing, putting on her clothes but not wasting time with the combat armor. She didn’t need it, anyway. She took Brom’s lab coat, sliding it over and buttoning it closed to give herself a more modest, professional appearance. As if her nearly bald head wouldn’t give her away. She rifled through the drawers, grabbing a pair of laser scalpels. She wanted guns. She knew where to get them.

  Then she left the morgue, making her way through the lower levels of the hospital and following the signs for the exit. She passed a couple of nurses along the way, smiling warmly and wishing them a good day. They eyed her with suspicion but didn’t try to stop her. These colonists were the sheep the Deliverance had launched with, not the lions she had intended them to become.

  She made her way out of the building. The streets were empty. Not a single colonist was nearby, giving her an eerie feeling that something had already gone horribly wrong for them. But the nurses would have been gone too if things were that bad. So where was everybody?

  She turned to the south, looking down the central strand that cut through the heart of Metro. She had visibility all the way to the other side, and she found some of the colonists there, moving away from her. “Damn it,” she cursed under her breath, her heart thumping hard in barely contained rage.

  She had to go that way to get out, and she had been hoping to do it without notice.

  At least she would find out what the hell was going on.

  Chapter 11

  Riley made her way south, following the tail of the colonists heading in the same direction. She stayed off to the side of the strand, hugging the sides of the run-down blocks and doing her best not to attract attention. At least whatever was happening out here had reduced the hospital to a skeleton crew. It meant she would have more time before anyone discovered poor Doctor Brom.

  She hadn’t gone far when she heard a noise to her left, down one of the narrow alleys that split the tightly-packed blocks from one another. She looked in that direction, catching a glimpse of a pair of law officers flanking a woman in gray overalls. They were moving slowly. As if they were looking for something. She smirked when she realized they were probably worried about the alien that had tried to kill her. If it had made her hallucinate it had to be nearby, and that was a definite danger to the population.

  Or it would be if it had any intention of staying in the city. The AI Caleb had thrown out of the airlock wanted to get to the surface to escape. It had wanted off the Deliverance. Card and his Guardians had destroyed that one, but it appeared there was at least one more. How had it gotten on board? Where had it hidden for all these years? Or had their original enemy been as disposed of as she was?

  Either way, she was going to destroy it too. It had tried to kill her, and she wasn’t about to let that stand.

  She passed the split, continuing south. It took a few minutes to come close enough to get a better idea of what the gathering was about. The area that had once been a park came into view, and Riley noticed that a flatbed transport had been driven into the center of it, with a simple microphone and speaker setup resting on the bed. There were deputies and members of the Governor’s militia surrounding it, keeping the people a few meters back. She could make out a space to the right of the truck where she expected the Governor would walk.

  He was going to address the colony. That much was obvious. He was going to have to tell them the truth about their situation, after years of maintaining the lie that they had never actually left Earth. Surprise.

  The Governor’s progenitors had been stupid to hide the truth and cause the colony to forget. If he didn’t handle his speech the right way, he was going to have a panicked population on his hands.

  Good. Panic would make it easier for her to slip past the crowd and into the engineering passages, back to the broken seal and then down to the lower levels. She had to get back to the armory that had been secreted away beneath the city. She could get anything she needed down there.

  She knew there was an entrance to the armory from inside Metro too, but the wires had never been connected to keep the colonists from accidentally discovering the stash. It would be far faster and easier to circle around and use her clearance to get into the second seal, and from there she could gear up for her expedition into the Essex wilderness.

  The alien AI wanted to go somewhere, which meant she wanted to go there too.

  She was nearing the outer gathering of colonists when the soft rumble of their collective voices began to fade. She looked to the lane on the right of the transport, finding Governor Stone walking purposefully along it, joined by a woman Riley assumed was his wife. Their faces were stoic, forced into expressionless solidarity. They had to put on a brave face while they dealt with the death of their child. A death Sergeant Card should have prevented.

  The colonists didn’t cheer for their Governor. They were too nervous for that. They fell completely silent without prompting as he climbed onto the transport, making himself more visible. His wife was a pretty woman, with long reddish hair and a round face. She wore a silver suit that elegantly hugged her frame.

  Riley glanced back to the aisle. Where was Caleb? Where was Sheriff Dante? Shouldn’t they have been here? If they were both missing, they were probably together. If they were both missing, they were probably involved in something they considered more important.

  She remembered mentioning the armory to Caleb. Had he gone searching for it? She growled under her breath. Stupid. She should never have told him about it, but she hadn’t expected things to shake out the way they had, with David getting involved and Caleb moving against her.

  Her hands clenched into fists. Damn them all.

  She continued to emit a low, guttural growl, forcing herself to stifle it when some of the nearby colonists turned to look. She smiled tensely, edging around the crowd and circling toward the engineering hatch, all while keeping an eye on Governor Stone. If Caleb was looking for the armory, she had to hurry and get there before he did. She could handle him if he were unarmed or if she took him by surprise, but otherwise—he had killed the trife queen and cut down her hybrid Reapers—he wasn’t exactly an easy mark.

  She would prefer not to confront him. She hated him for what he had done, but her hatred could wait. If the AI got too far ahead of her, she would never be able to follow it.