Toys

Chapter 84

My old partner and “good buddy,” Owen McGill, was waiting for me on the city’s south side, at the fringe of the so-called Human Slums, or Darkness. It was already night when I got there, but McGill’s height and build were easy to spot. Some things never change.

“My main man!” he said, hurrying to give me a bone-crushing hug. “Welcome back, Hays. The good times are about to get rolling again.”

“Going to roll right over whatever gets in our way,” I said with equally false heartiness. I was remembering how McGill had spat in my eye while I lay strapped to a hospital bed. And how he had punched me in the face.

That was another score I wanted to settle, but now wasn’t the time for vendettas. Now was the time to find a way for Lucy to escape from an Agency trap, whatever it might be.

What a foul night this was turning out to be. I’d driven here with my hands clenched so tightly on the wheel that I almost snapped the damn thing off. I couldn’t think the situation through because I didn’t know enough about this mission, the plan of attack, or even where Lucy was supposed to be hiding. Jax Moore had told me that McGill would fill me in, then he hurried me out of his office-probably because he still had doubts about me. Moore is nothing if not clever, devious, paranoid, and a chilling murderer.

“You’re probably thinking the skunkess is in there.” McGill jerked his head toward the slum’s squalid streets, which were crowded with hapless humans, plus violent Ghools-wyre addicts-moving through the smoky glow of the cooking fires. “So did we at first. It took us a while to locate the clever bitch. But we’ve got her, Hays. We have her nailed.”

He pointed in the opposite direction, out to where the slum ended at a dried-up river channel and a dark wasteland stretched into the distance. The only structure I knew of there was the city’s old water-filtration plant-a concrete hulk about the size of a sports stadium.

“That old plant?” I said. “How has she managed to sneak in there?”

“That’s where we’ve got a small problem,” McGill said. “Take a look at this.”

He handed me a perspective imager, a slender mask that fit across my eyes and relayed a sharp picture of the building’s interior.

I knew that Lucy would be there-but actually seeing her was like taking a hard punch in the stomach. She and two men were working at tables spread with a cache of rifles and pistols, the kind that shot metal bullets. It looked like they were cleaning the outmoded weapons, getting ready to use them.

And McGill’s “problem” was easy to see on the imager-Lucy had an escape route. The plant’s water mains had been opened and their maintenance hatches torn off. The mains dropped underground and branched into a complex network that ran under the entire city. At the whisper of alarm, Lucy and her team could easily disappear into the tunnels. That was certainly reassuring to me.

“We need her alive,” McGill emphasized, laying a comradely hand on my shoulder. “She knows what the humans are up to. We need to know everything she knows. Actually, this should be fun. For both of us.”

I studied the imager for a few seconds longer. The plant’s entrances were sealed, but there was a row of grimy industrial windows about twenty feet above the ground. That’s where I planned to go. I was starting to see a chance of how I might succeed-by failing.

I took one last close-up look at Lucy’s face, then I set off, ostensibly to capture or kill her.