Don't worry, Lucas said into her mind. The humans here won't remember us at all.

Liar, Samantha said.

His laughter echoed in her mind, the psi link thin enough and precise enough that she knew they were the only two tied together in it. I never lied about saving you.

The world shifted, crumbling at the edges of her vision as Lucas's telepathy roared through the mental grid, slicing through everyone's thoughts with a ferocity Samantha could barely counter. She dug in with her own telepathy, slamming her shields up high and tight around her mind, around Jin Li's, around the two telekinetics who lashed out with their combined power at where Lucas stood. She left Kristen alone. Kristen was more than capable of taking care of herself.

The railing Lucas was leaning on cracked, the metal shearing off in large chunks. He lurched backward, catching himself before the spot he'd been resting against fell off onto the maglev platform below.

Fire exploded in the air around him, around the Warhounds, an inferno that scorched the area they were standing in. A Stryker pyrokinetic, because they didn't have a Warhound with that particular power in their current group. Samantha grabbed Kristen by the collar of her skinsuit and dragged her in close when she would have run forward. The girl never did care about her own skin. The telekinetics strengthened their shields and stood their ground. Jin Li took a few steps forward, eyeing Lucas with a feral look on his face.

"Nathan wants you dead," Jin Li said.

Lucas spread his arms wide; offered up a slick smile. "Go ahead. Try. I'll even let you get close enough to touch me."

Jin Li wasn't stupid enough to agree to something like that, at least, not alone. Linked to the telekinetics by Samantha's telepathy, Jin Li was teleported within striking range of Lucas, shielded down tight except for his hands as he reached for Lucas's throat. Lucas reacted like any well-trained Warhound would-with exponential force.

The ground he was standing on cracked, the air burned as his telekinetic blow slammed Jin Li into and through the support wall of the building they were fighting next to. Jin Li survived only because the Warhound telekinetics with them were well-trained in their power. They managed to cushion Jin Li's landing as best they could. Jin Li fell to the ground across from Kristen, half-conscious and bleeding from his nose and mouth, but mostly whole and alive.

Kristen turned her face in Lucas's direction, the smile she gave him stretched to its limits. "Try," she echoed, then wrapped her power around his mind in ways that not even Nathan could achieve.

The solid, mentally corrosive barrier she erected around her brother skewered his attention for only a few seconds, long enough for Samantha to dig her telepathy into his shields, to scorch her power over his. It was followed, incongruously enough, by two telepathic strikes from the Strykers.

It wasn't a merge. The Strykers didn't know how to merge, and Samantha was alone in her attack because no one merged with Kristen and walked away alive. But a Class I, for all his or her strength, still had limits. Every psion did. Lucas, forced to battle on three separate fronts, remembered that when his top shield cracked beneath the onslaught, crumbling away.

He could sense Kristen's glee, Samantha's determination, and the Strykers' desire to see them all dead. He could also sense the minds clustered in the maglev train that was kilometers away and getting closer, running on the last dregs of power that could safely be siphoned off the generators as it struggled to make a stop on its schedule. He reached for the Stryker telepath he had altered, giving her a different set of orders this time, letting the woman target the soldiers in that approaching maglev train and the quads already here for him now that most of the Strykers nearby were either dead or incapacitated. The effort of fighting against his orders would probably break her mind. Lucas didn't care, so long as the Stryker had a target that wasn't him.

With a wrench that left his ears ringing, Lucas slid his mind away from the psions who wanted so badly to break him and teleported down to the maglev platform. Quads were rapidly surrounding the area, having long since shoved their way through the fleeing crowd for a better position from which to shoot and kill the enemy. They lined the second platform with only one intent, but Lucas knocked the group of soldiers down and out with a telepathic blow that left half of them catatonic and the other half bleeding their brains out their ears and noses.

Left behind on the walkway, Samantha holstered her gun and shoved herself to her feet. Cover me, she snarled at the pair of telekinetics, even as she launched herself over the railing.

It was a three-story drop to the platform below; she landed with telekinetic help. Still shielded, her movements jerky from running in step with someone else's power, Samantha raced toward her brother where he waited on the maglev platform.

Why now? she sent at him, layering her shields as Nathan had taught her when she was a child, creating a canyon between herself and her older brother on the mental grid. It wouldn't be enough, but she still had to try. Why ruin everything when we're so close to being free of this place?

What if I said this was all just meant to be? Lucas told her from where he stood, tense and waiting before her. That it was inevitable?

Nothing's inevitable, you know that. Samantha skidded to a halt, breathing heavily, feeling the telekinesis forced away.

The alarm was still sounding in Bunker East, the lights still dim along the walls and ceiling and floor. The hologrids were dark, any and all extra energy diverted to the maglev tracks, which were beginning to hum. This far underground, the storm couldn't reach them, but they were building their own where the humans had lived for generations.

What if it is?

Samantha felt the mental grid stretch itself thin and tight against her mind, Lucas's power reaching for something inside her that she never knew she carried. Consciousness. Awareness.

Memories.

Hers and not hers.

No. She threw up more and more mental shields, but he tore them all down.

I can't do this alone, Lucas told her, sounding tired. Old. As if he'd lived too long and hadn't died young enough before the bitterness overtook his life when he was only twenty years old.

She didn't feel herself hit the ground, just knew that her skull hit first, then her shoulders. The world spun in a sickening lurch that she felt in her gut, and Samantha choked on her breath the way people choked on water when they drowned. Warm hands pressed the side of her face against the stained metal of the platform that too many feet had walked over, dragging the dirt of the world down to a place where people bled out hope.

"You know what they said when the bombs fell?" Lucas pinned Samantha down against the maglev platform with his physical strength alone, his mind busy tearing hers apart. "Don't fear the end of the world. Fear what comes next."

She fought him with everything she had, but it wasn't enough. It had never been enough. As the maglev train roared into Bunker East, sliding with a hard, telekinetically anchored stop against the platform, Lucas leaned down and whispered into his sister's ear, "We are what came next, Sam. And I am so much better than what you could ever hope to be."

"I'm not-scared of you," Samantha gasped out as his telepathy curled through her mind and ruined what Nathan had built her into.

She broke; pieces of who she was shearing off, all the scar tissue that she had accumulated over the years just-ripped away.

Breathe. I still need you.

"You should be." Lucas rested his forehead against hers for a moment, just a moment, before he got to his feet and walked onto that train, leaving her a panting, bleeding wreck on the platform. "You really should be."

Panicked humans were struggling to get off the train, those that weren't already dead or dying, brains fried by the telepathic attack that the altered Stryker had aimed in their direction mere moments ago. Just bodies lying one on top of the other, on the floor, on the benches, the stink of bodily fluids filling the air. Death, when it came, always smelled human.

Lucas lifted himself above the mess with his telekinesis as the doors slid shut, looking through the clear plasglass at Samantha as she picked herself up off the ground with shaky effort.

Come after me, he said into her fractured mind. I'll be waiting.

Footsteps raced over the platform as the maglev train lurched forward with a hum of power. The lights all through Bunker East flickered dangerously low as the train drew nearly all of the remaining electricity out of the generators that kept everyone breathing down below.

Jin Li reached Samantha's side, dragged her all the way to a standing position, then got her the hell out of there. "That train's going to Bunker North," he said. "By the city towers. We'll get another telekinetic to 'port us there."

"Everyone else?" Samantha asked in a ragged breath as he pulled her into a waiting area on the platform with an overhang, where Kristen had her hand against the temple of the telekinetic that had survived Lucas's show of power. Blood was pouring out of the man's ears, pumping through her fingers. His partner had a halo of red around her head on the floor beside him, life already gone from her body.

The Sercas were the best assassins the Warhounds had. They needed to remember that.

"Dead and dying," Kristen reported cheerfully.

Samantha leaned down, letting Jin Li support her as she pressed her hand over the telekinetic's forehead.

Get us out of here, she said into the Warhound's mind, holding on to his thoughts and power, cognizant that she could barely hold herself together.

She kept him alive long enough for him to teleport them all to the surface.

Kristen devoured his mind as he died, smearing her fingers through the blood and acid rain that greeted them when they arrived in the middle of the storm that had been centuries in the making.

[TWENTY-SIX].

AUGUST 2379.

BUFFALO, USA.

The lights in the tunnels, already a dim emergency blue, flickered ominously. Some went out, others came back on a little brighter than before. No one still making their way toward Bunker West from Bunker South thought that was a good thing.

They'd made it into Buffalo from the outskirts, then been forced belowground, just as Matron had said. It was a good thing none of them were claustrophobic. Threnody slowed to a stop, pressing up against the curve of the tunnel as a straggling group of humans passed them by. Quinton was right beside her, cradling his rifle, watching their back. Kerr was barely an arm's length away on point, his telepathic shields wrapped tight around their minds, projecting them as human on the mental grid with an ease that he'd never before had. Even Threnody, who was not a 'path-oriented psion, could feel the difference against her own shields.

She peered past the brim of her stolen cap, pulled low over her eyes to shadow her face, as the humans continued straight ahead to the cross-tunnel intersection fifteen meters from where they stood.

"Quinton?" she asked softly.

He checked the datapad in his hand, thumb swiping over the screen to get a new readout. "If we follow them, there's no quick way out of the tunnels for another three, four kilometers. We've got to go aboveground if we're going to reach our target. No way around that now."

"Right or left?"

"Right. That tunnel will spit us out northeast of where we need to be, but closer than the last one."

"And with more problems." Kerr was squinting up at the ceiling. "The lights? That was Lucas being our distraction. He's on a maglev train heading to Bunker North."

"Why?" Threnody asked as they started forward again.

"He didn't say and I didn't ask. The good thing is that the Strykers are beginning to focus their attention on him instead of us."

"Were they getting close?"

"Close enough."

It took less than a minute to reach the latest intersection in the maze of tunnels. They turned right, carefully averting their faces from the security feed that they couldn't completely hide from. The tunnels weren't lined with hologrids, not as the bunkers were. Instead, at intervals every quarter of a kilometer or so the gray metal gave way to an opaque hologrid that could become anything it was programmed to be.

Crimson lines sparked across the hologrid, projecting outward to form a mirror image of themselves. Three dark figures running where they shouldn't, the bioware on their faces and in their eyes difficult for the computer to work around. It still got something, coming up not with their false identities, nor their real ones. Just trouble.

"You are in a restricted area," an automated voice said as they stared at themselves reflected in the hologrid stretched between the walls, facial-recognition software still looking for points to build off of. "All citizens are to obey curfew and return to their domicile in bunkers, tenements aboveground, or city towers. You are in a restricted area."

Threnody reached out with her hand, fingers sliding through the holo, until her skin touched the smoothness of the grid. Electricity danced around her wrist, curling from red into electric blue as she tapped into her power and burnt out the hologrid with a controlled shock. Electricity crawled over it, arcing high around her to the other side with a single thought as she fried the localized system that the hologrid ran on.

"You know that whoever is monitoring the security feeds probably got that on record," Kerr said. "Strykers will start coming down into the tunnels where we are instead of where we aren't."

"We won't be in the tunnels long enough for them to find us." Threnody clenched her hands into fists, the electric spark of her power fading away. She took off her stolen cap and tossed it to the floor. "Let's move."

They ran for it, gear and guns secured tight to their bodies. The tunnels were getting darker the farther away from the bunker they ran, the air hotter. A constant clicking sound that they couldn't locate echoed in the guts of the tunnels.

"We're losing oxygen," Quinton said as they turned at another cross-tunnel intersection. "CO2 scrubbers aren't working right. That's what we're hearing, according to the computer. I've got a warning feed on the bottom of my screen."

"No shit?" Kerr shook his head as they ran. "I couldn't tell at all, the way my lungs are burning."

"The government is taking a risk," Threnody panted out.

Kerr snorted his opinion on that. "The government enforces policy. Everyone else takes risks."

They kept running, the tunnel snaking out in front of them and on the screen of the datapad in Quinton's hand. They made it to the exit point ten minutes later, breathing harshly as they slowed to a stop.

Strykers aboveground, Kerr said through the psi link.

Do they know we're down here? Threnody said.

We're human on the mental grid, but I've had us blocked completely since you slagged the computer back there.

Threnody looked up at the dark ceiling, dim blue light creating long shadows over her features from the emergency shine a ways behind them. So they're waiting for us.

This was the most logical exit route for us to take. Yeah, I'd say they're waiting for us.

Can you tell what we're dealing with? Quinton asked.

Kerr closed his eyes, brow furrowing in the darkness. Two telepaths, one telekinetic, two pyrokinetics.

Class?

Class IV and lower.

All less powerful than they were. Threnody shared a look with Quinton. I've got the pyrokinetics, Quinton said, pocketing the datapad.

I'll deal with the telekinetic and telepaths, Kerr said. Threnody, you've got to knock them all out. I don't trust myself not to kill them. My control isn't good enough yet.

The government had a kill order out on them, they knew that. Defection resulted only in a grave if the escaped Stryker was caught. That was never going to change, but they weren't here to kill their fellow Strykers. That wasn't their goal. Their objective was the electrical grid, the power plants it ran off of, and whatever else Lucas needed.

Threnody snapped her fingers together, creating bright electric sparks that lined her nails. You sure about this, Kerr? Your head's only just been worked on.

Lucas does excellent work. Grudging respect was in Kerr's mental voice. I trust what he rebuilt. I kind of have to because I've got to live with it.

Good enough for me.

They didn't have a telekinetic for offense; Jason was back at Matron's base, frantically working to get the shuttles online. Lucas was elsewhere, pulling Warhounds and Strykers alike to him. That didn't mean they were at a disadvantage.

They took the stairs up to the surface two at a time, minds sharpening into battle focus as the roar of the storm filtered slowly down to their ears. The closer they got to the top, the slicker the steps became, acid water flowing where gravity led. The air became thick and warm and hideously saturated. Side by side, the three reached the surface, coming up into a small storage warehouse, all the windows broken and the blast doors wrenched wide apart.

They stood there for a moment, listening to the wind howling outside the building, catching flashes of lightning sparking through the sky, feeling thunder rattling the ground.

Now, Threnody thought over the psi link even as she raced out of the building, Kerr's mind a heavy presence in her own.