“There are more guards coming,” Hagar said. “We have to pull out.”
“No,” I demanded. “You told me this was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to get our hands on this material. Where’s the target?”
“It’s dangerous, Jace,” my handler insisted. “We don’t know what it can do. The extraction team has containment gear—”
“No time,” I said. “Which way?”
Hagar debated whether to give me the location for what felt like hours. The sound of boots on the tiles rang through the building all around me. I was just about out of time.
“Straight ahead to the end of the hall, then right, first door on your left.” Hagar’s voice sounded hoarse. “The material isn’t stable, Jace. If you touch it, no one knows what will happen.”
“I understand,” I said as I raced down the hall. “I’ll do this.”
The guard stationed in front of the door leading to my target had wisely held his ground despite the disturbance. He was there to protect what I’d come to steal, I was sure of that. Nothing was as important to him as keeping it safe.
He hadn’t, however, drawn his gun, and he wasn’t anywhere near fast enough to do it after he saw me. His hand hadn’t even reached his holster before I was up in his face.
I snatched the guard’s harness, dragged him away from the wall, then slammed him back into the drywall as hard as I could. The impact drove the air from his lungs and rattled his brain in his skull like a nut in a cup. The guard was out like a light.
I kicked the door in, and it bounced back on its frame to close behind me as I charged into the room. Like the storage unit, there wasn’t much in this room. A naked lightbulb over a desk that held a small, strange cube beneath it. A manila folder lay next to the cube, opened to a sheet of paper inside it.
I wished I still had the eye-snapper and hoped that my helmet could capture at least some of what I saw. I rushed to the desk, looked down at the paper, and saw a bizarre mess of technical diagrams and handwritten notations. I couldn’t make heads or tails out of the diagrams, but a tangled scribble on the right side of the page snagged my eye.
It was my mother’s signature.
“Device needs more power,” she’d written, then signed it with the same scrawl she’d used on the notes she’d written to my school when I missed a day sick.
The device on the diagram was clearly a match for the cube in front of me. Why would my mother have been involved in this thing’s creation? I couldn’t understand how all the pieces I’d gathered fit together.
“You’ve got guards coming,” Hagar practically shouted in my ear. “You have to get out of there.”
“Is this it?” I stared at the floating cube to make sure Hagar understood what I was asking.
“Yes,” Hagar said. “But—”
We were out of time for buts.
I hooked my serpent around the cube and yanked it off the table.
A blinding flash of light exploded from the device. A blast of searing pain rocketed into my core, and for a moment I thought Hagar was right. I’d screwed up. I was dead.
Except, I wasn’t.
As fast as the pain began, it vanished. A strange vibration poured out of the device, rumbling through my serpent and into my core. It was familiar somehow. Like I knew this thing. Or at least I should have known it.
“How do I get out of here?” I asked.
“Back the way you came!” Hagar shouted. “Go go go!”
I banished my fusion blade and ran like I was being chased by the world’s angriest pit bull.
Jinsei flooded into my legs from my core, increasing my speed even further. A pair of guards drew their weapons at the intersection, and I ducked around them and kept running. Left, then right, I juked back and forth across the hallway, hoping speed and evasiveness would keep me safe.
Five feet away from the guards, they realized I wasn’t going to stop and raised their weapons. At that range, there was no way they could miss.
Which is why I didn’t let them fire.
My remaining tentacle smashed across the chest of one guard, knocking him to the ground. Before he regained his feet, I slammed the serpent across the other guard’s knees. He went down with a grunt, and I was past them and around the corner.
“We’ve got company on the roof,” Hagar said. “Two minutes, Jace. Then we have to pull out.”
Another guard seemed to materialize from thin air in front of me. He raised his gun, and I threw out an elbow that caught him across the chin. He flew backward from the blow, his eyes unfocused. His pistol roared, and something tugged at my sleeve.
That had been too close.
My serpent slammed into the side of the man’s arm, knocking the gun out of his hand, then spun back to bounce his head off the wall. His legs gave out, and he went down.
I crashed through the stairwell door and raced up one flight after another. The jinsei in my core was almost gone. I didn’t have any left to pump into my legs. I wasn’t going to make it. My lungs burned, and my muscles were on fire. Doors behind me flew open as more and more guards joined the chase. I’d never be able to outrun them.
“One more floor,” Hagar shouted into my helmet. “You’re almost there!”
My core ached as I wrenched a final drop of jinsei out of it to fuel my run. Finally, I reached the maintenance room and burst through its door onto the roof.
There were guards hunkered down behind ventilation fans and raised conduits, all of them with weapons trained on the transport.
