"What about the main bunkers?" Quinton asked tightly.

"They have environmental systems that run on backup generators located all over the city," Lucas said. "For a lockdown like this, people can last a day, maybe two, with the environmental systems running at full before emergency restrictions would have to be enacted."

"You don't think it'll take that long, do you?" Threnody said as she came into the room.

"I think a lot of people are going to die under a government-sanctioned power outage with an acid storm riding a derecho spine about to hit." Dark blue eyes flicked her way. "The storms always do damage, that's expected. The government never shuts off the power just because the weather's bad. They're doing it this time to find us. Warhounds are spreading out through the city, so are Strykers, and they're all hunting for us. Kerr and I have already deflected search scans through human minds. We're linked to every scavenger, but that's a network that can be found more easily than a single mind, despite the precautions we've taken."

"So what are you saying?"

"I'm saying that we need the power plants to be turned back on-at least one of them."

"Can't you mindwipe those workers to change it for you?" Quinton demanded, not liking where this conversation was going.

"No," Lucas said, voice firm. "The second I start altering minds, my sister will pick up on it. Samantha's on the ground here and she was trained by Nathan, just like me. She knows the same tricks I do. If she finds out what I'm doing, she'll want to know why we want the generators on when I could just as easily teleport everyone out of this place. It won't take her very long to figure it out."

Threnody's gaze was steady when she looked at him. "You need us to turn the electrical grid back on for you."

"I need you to turn it on." Lucas turned his head and reached out for the map, dragging his fingers over the hologrid to zero in on one of the two power plants that kept the city running. "You're a Class III electrokinetic. You can override whatever lockdown they've got on the power plants and jump-start the grid."

"That much power in those places will fry her nervous system," Quinton said, voice hard. "That's suicide."

"Not necessarily. It'll take time for her to make her way to power plant two, and by then, the storm will have hit."

"The other power plant is closer."

"The other one feeds only into the city towers. We need the one for everyone else." Lucas pushed away from the chair he was leaning on to face the Strykers. "If you want to go with her, then fine. Take Kerr along as well. You'll need the coverage a telepath can provide."

"What about you?" Threnody asked. "And Jason?"

"Jason's working on the shuttles. He's not going anywhere until we launch. As for me? I'm going to be the bait." The smile Lucas gave them was tired, but every bit as dangerous as the ones he'd offered up before. "The Warhounds are looking for me because I called them here. The Strykers are just an additional bonus. I'll draw their fire and let them take each other out."

"And if you die?"

"This isn't where I die. I'll be there at the end to pick you up, as long as you get the job done."

"What if we don't?"

"Then Aisling was wrong."

Threnody pressed her mouth into a hard line. She swallowed and said, "I'd rather she wasn't."

"Kerr's getting a vehicle ready right now." Lucas nodded at the door. "Get your gear and get out of here. That curfew is already in effect and quads are going to be on the street."

"You'll want to hit the underground entrance about six kilometers north of here," Matron said as she hurriedly downloaded the city map into a data chip. "You'll need to travel underground half of the way to the power plant on the maglev trains, if they're still running. If not, take a pedestrian tunnel. The rest of the way in, when you get closer to the power plant, it's gonna be all aboveground travel. The government likes to see people coming."

"I'm guessing the security grid is still up and running through the backup generators," Quinton said.

Matron gave a hollow little laugh as she tossed the loaded data chip and a datapad to Quinton. "You'd guess right. Get the fuck out of here. You've only got so much time."

Quinton and Threnody left without arguing. Threnody was hell-bent on this mission and Quinton knew better than to try to change her mind. It was too late to back out now.

"Hope you know what you're doing," Quinton said as they finally made it to the garage, the doors winched wide-open and wind rushing inside. "You're still not fully recovered."

"Then you better hope that Lucas packed some decent medical supplies in those trunks you were loading onto the shuttles," Threnody said as they wove their way to where Kerr was checking over the SUV that would get them back to the city.

Kerr tossed a bag at each of them. "Our old uniforms," he explained. "I figured they might get us a little further than civilian attire if we alter them enough."

He was already wearing his, the black-on-black BDUs overlaid with bits and pieces of protective armor. Threnody and Quinton stripped right there in the garage, everyone ignoring them. The uniform felt strange after so many days wearing borrowed clothing. This wasn't who they were anymore, not completely, and Threnody couldn't help but wonder if the changes would show up on a feed.

They still had the strips of bioware on their faces, iris peels coating their eyes. False identities that might get them into the city without being detected, but if the security grid was running on full, Threnody had a feeling the precautions wouldn't get them far enough. They were the hunted this time, not the hunters, but they knew how Strykers thought. Maybe that would help.

Then again, maybe not.

Quinton packed extra ammunition into a case hooked to his belt before slinging a military-grade rifle over one shoulder. A separate hard pack that hung securely from his belt was a match for the one that Threnody wore as well: a field med-kit, specifically decked out to deal with loss of limbs. Quinton tended to lose parts of himself in the field while using his power if the fighting got bad enough.

"We good to go?" Kerr asked as he climbed into the driver's seat and started the engine.

The other two Strykers got into the SUV, Threnody in the back and Quinton riding shotgun. The side windows were all long-since broken and the windshield was cracked. It didn't seem to bother Kerr and it wouldn't impede Quinton's cover fire.

"Let's get the hell out of here," Threnody said. "Quinton, you got our way in?"

Quinton held up the datapad Matron had given him. "Just start driving. I'll navigate."

"Fine." Kerr revved the engine and shifted the SUV out of park and into drive, gunning it forward.

They drove out onto the dusty, barren road for Buffalo. They'd been inside for so long that they hadn't seen the change in the weather. They couldn't see the sun where they knew it was positioned in the western sky. Dark thunderclouds stretched from the city they were driving to all the way to the black line on the horizon that was steadily sweeping over the earth.

The wind picked up, sending dirt flying through the open windows of the SUV. Threnody blinked grit out of her eyes and reached up to tie back her hair as the first tiny drops of acid rain began to fall.

[TWENTY-FIVE].

AUGUST 2379.

BUFFALO, USA.

The landscape of Buffalo reminded Samantha of broken teeth-worn down, jagged, badly cared for-when they teleported into an empty street of the city. The wind seemed to find every open point of her uniform and blow through it to chill her skin with the damp. As they ran for the blast doors that led to the underground bunkers most of the unregistered humans called home, Samantha looked up at the world that surrounded them.

Broken buildings, broken lives, broken promises. It was the only thing every surviving city had in common.

The acid rain was coming down in sheets, soaking her in seconds as she dragged Kristen after her into the relative dryness of the small receiving building. Samantha swiped at her eyes beneath the dark glasses she wore, ignoring the burn. She tugged Kristen out of the way of the entrance to the far wall.

This entry point was minimally guarded, not meant to handle a huge influx of people going into the bunkers. The quads who had manned this post were already dead, bodies stacked against the other wall. A Warhound electrokinetic in the first wave had fried the security feed, and a hacker was busy writing it back into the main system on a different signal. They needed a place to act as their ground base for communications. The warehouse wasn't viable, not anymore. Lucas had already hit it once; he'd hit it again given half the chance. This would have to do.

"Tastes like fire," Kristen muttered as she licked at her wet lips, watching through half-lidded eyes as the other Warhounds in their squadron came hurrying inside.

"Shut up," Samantha said.

Kristen hummed against her side, and while she didn't open her mouth again, Samantha highly doubted that her order would be obeyed for long.

A tall figure broke free from the crowd and jogged over to them. Jin Li offered Samantha a casual two-fingered salute and a sharp smile. "Every other team's in position. We're the last. Ready to move out?"

"Been ready," Samantha said. "Let's go."

Jin Li gave her a sarcastic little bow. "Lead the way."

The blast doors rolled shut after the last Warhound came through. A skeleton team would remain behind to cover for them. This entry point wasn't going to be accessible to anyone but Warhounds from here on out. The humans still rushing around outside after curfew in this section of the city were going to have one hell of a hard time getting below before the quads discovered their presence.

The long stairs leading down were new, replaced every decade or so after countless feet had trod upon them until they cracked. The stairs led deep into the ground, to a metal tunnel that was big enough to house a maglev train, except it didn't. A quarter of the space that made up Buffalo were tunnels for straight foot traffic, or ground vehicles where it was viable. Another quarter were tunnels for the maglev trains that serviced only a handful of spots in the city, both below- and aboveground. The other half wasn't tunnels at all, but huge bunkers carved deep into the ground, the heart and soul of a city that had died centuries ago.

That's where they were heading, into Bunker East, along with hundreds of humans who had finally heeded the curfew call in the face of an approaching acid storm, late though they were getting down below. The storm above was just the leading front, a supercell that churned above them, a mere precursor for the derecho spine that hadn't yet hit.

Samantha tucked a wet piece of hair behind her ear as she stretched out her telepathy to sink into the human minds all around them. She let the humans believe that the people in the black uniforms were just as human as they were, strangers with faces they would never remember.

Are we hacked into the security feed yet? Samantha wanted to know.

We've got hackers working on it from the city towers, Jin Li said. They're coordinating with the ones in the field. We won't be recognized by the government, if that's what you're worried about.

That's only if the Strykers don't interfere.

Here's hoping they do.

Jin Li would want a challenge. Samantha only wanted this mission to be over.

The lights that lined the tunnels were at half-power, the dimness difficult to see through with her glasses on. She didn't have the option of taking them off. Samantha risked being identified without them, and Kristen wasn't even in the Registry, but only a blind person would miss the color of her eyes and not know what family she belonged to. They couldn't be made because that would break all of Nathan's carefully laid plans more thoroughly than anything the Strykers could come up with.

Warhounds peeled away at every cross-tunnel intersection they came to, telepaths pairing up with various other psions as they spread out for the hunt. Samantha, Kristen and Jin Li continued on through the main tunnel, followed by two telekinetics. Samantha didn't have Gideon with her down here, and they needed psions with telekinesis to counter what Lucas could throw at them.

Glancing down at the bioscanner in her hand, she couldn't find Lucas on it, but she could place the Strykers if she narrowed down the search. Strykers were incapable of hiding completely on the mental grid, and the government always had them tagged into the system. Government dogs needed to be watched over in case they turned rabid.

It took them an hour to circumvent the Strykers, all the while marching through the tunnels for Bunker East. Just because Lucas wasn't showing up on the bioscanner didn't mean he wasn't flickering on the mental grid. He wanted to be found, Samantha could read that in the way he stayed in one place. Whatever trap he was building, it wasn't going to be pretty, not for him, not for the Warhounds, and certainly not for the Strykers drawn to his mental presence.

Lucas was definitely Nathan's son, and Nathan never did anything by halves.

The Warhounds came out of the main tunnel into a wide underground space that was like a minicity, all steel-gray metal and walled-off habitation, the whine of generators cutting through the sounds of human life. Straight down the center of that huge space, the size of an old stadium, was an empty maglev platform, the line of it lit brighter than anywhere else.

The unregistered humans with the most corrupted genetics called Bunker East home. It was closest to the deadzone that took up half of New York State. Even with shielding against radiation, the people here were never going to scrape their DNA clean. They were never going to escape what their ancestors had left for them.

Kristen moved away from Samantha to the railing that separated the crowd from a short fall to certain death on the maglev tracks below. She leaned over that point of separation to look down at the maglev platform, the tracks and the humans waiting there for a train that wasn't going to arrive anytime soon.

"Bet they'd all taste so good," she said around her smile.

Jin Li clamped a hand on her shoulder and pulled her back into the group. "Start walking, girl. You've got a bigger target to find."

The bioware that lined her skinsuit flickered a warning, which she ignored. Kristen didn't care about the prison she wore, just about her chance at survival that she could taste beyond her shields.

Samantha curled her fingers around the back of Kristen's neck and squeezed down warningly. "We're not here for them."

"Of course not, Sammy-girl," Kristen drawled as she reached up and squeezed Samantha's fingers tighter around her own throat.

Even down here, the world wasn't much different from the one above: still a mess of people, of poverty, of the dying looking to forget. Hologrids rolled adverts over every conceivable surface, interrupted here and there by the government's curfew reminder. They weren't enough of a distraction.

Samantha felt it when Kristen started to engage her empathy, Kristen's power bleeding through her shields. It weighed down the mental grid in a way few other powers could, because a mental dysfunction was hard to correct and even harder to hide. Samantha had her own shields wrapped around Kristen's mind, forcing the other girl to work beneath a veneer of human static, but the shields just barely held and their cover didn't last.

They made it to one of the lower levels of Bunker East at the same moment as the Strykers. It didn't really matter to Samantha how they were found out as a telekinetic blow leveled everyone flat between the Warhounds and the team of Strykers coming at them, just that they were.

The attack hit hard against the telekinetic shield that surrounded the Warhounds, and Samantha reached out to pull Kristen up against the wall, trying to make them less of a target. Grabbing her gun, Samantha fired on the Strykers, the two Warhound telekinetics letting her attack get through. The bullets never hit their target. She didn't expect them to.

Kristen, go, Samantha ordered even as she dropped her shields.

A hole opened up on the mental grid, pulling everyone into the manic swirl of insanity that was Kristen. The mental grid buckled beneath the Class III strength made all the more dangerous by her insanity. It washed over human and psion minds alike. The only reason that her power didn't begin to eat through everyone immediately was the solid telepathic shield that slid between Kristen and her next meal.

"Not fair," Kristen spat out, dragging herself to her feet to glare at her oldest brother, where he leaned up against the railing, standing between them and the Strykers and the quickly scattering humans.

The security feed, Samantha sent out on a broad 'path. Shut it down!

Whether or not their hackers obeyed her in time, she would never know. Lucas wasn't bothering to hide his identity. She could have killed him for that callous thoughtlessness.

"I hear you've been looking for me," Lucas said, his voice barely audible above the screaming and the sharp, shrill sound of the alarm as people ran for a safety that couldn't be guaranteed.

Tension snaked through everyone on both sides of the fight, Lucas the line no one could cross. He knew it, they knew it, and the smile he gave his sisters was both condescending and cruel.

Kristen offered her own in return as she slid her power up against his shields. "Oh, I've missed your games. Nathan's not happy, but come play with me anyway."

"What else is new?" Lucas said as he raised a hand at the Strykers.

The Strykers amassing behind him were bowled over by a line of telekinesis that cut through their defenses hard enough to break bones. Lucas wasn't there for the Strykers. He was there for the Warhounds, for his sisters. The Strykers were just a complication he had dragged here because he needed the distraction. He'd had two years to perfect how to play the role of bait, and getting people to follow him had never been difficult. Digging into three of the Strykers' minds, he broke their shielding and altered their way of thinking, a quick and dirty mindwipe that would leave them unable to differentiate between their teammates and the enemy.

Then he let them go, let them attack humans and psions alike, because even Lucas needed backup sometimes. The results were bloody, but he couldn't regret the deaths of civilians down here, not when the rest of the world needed saving.

Samantha fell into merge with the two telekinetics, their strength together enough to counteract most of what Lucas could possibly throw at them. Maybe. She briefly regretted leaving Gideon behind, so used to her twin fighting alongside her.

The roar of energy darts rained down from above with sudden brutality, smashing into telekinetic shields and ricocheting every which way without finding a single target. Quads, military soldiers. They'd drawn the attention of the government, and that was never a good thing.