Daughter of Zeus ✔

11.4

He hit send and waited for Kressick's answer. Infiltrate. Shylar spent the night in his car, not doing any sleeping, just watching and waiting. Citizens walked by his car, peering in through the rare unbroken windows. He held up his gun and they kept on-a walkin'.

A few hours before dawn, a black youth stepped out from the side of the building. He looked around, none too discreetly, then signaled to something in front of him. The something turned out to be a small electric vehicle, an older model in awful condition to match the building, but it was running. The youth knocked on the window of the passenger side, and the door opened.

"You're jittery as fuck!"

Shylar heard the driver through his amplified listening device.

The youth jumped in, and the car finished backing out onto the street.

After a minute, Shylar followed. The car drove for miles, reaching the newer parts of the city. On the outskirts were factories and industrial buildings. They stopped at a small white concrete hub he recognized as a food processing plant.

Not well-fed after all. Two youths emerged from the car, and the driver wasn't the girl as Shylar assumed but a different one, darker skinned with braided hair. She had a sweet face, at odds with the huge gun in her grip. Immediately, she shot a hole through the dissipating door of the hub. The hole shrunk, collapsed, and re-formed the composite barrier. Before the barrier re-formed completely, she leapt through the hole.

Jittery paced outside, his eyes roving around in several directions, hands over his ears to drown out the fierce ring of alarms going off. Staties would respond in three minutes or less, and the pair had to know that. By their actions, Shylar thought maybe they didn't.

He got out of the car and jogged a safe distance to Jittery's eye line. Hands up, he approached. Jittery raised his gun, ready to shoot Shylar to high heaven. He brought out his far superior weapon and shot.

The Statie behind Jittery dropped to the ground. With the blare of the alarm in the background, Shylar checked the dead woman at his feet.

No use, she's gone to that place.

The woman's body reminded him of his mother. She'd overdosed on hallugin when he was ten. At the funeral, his grandfather had explained it away as: your mother gone to that place.

There was no time for Jittery to thank or question Shylar's presence. The girl came blasting out of the building the same way she'd gone in. Though they hadn't spoken, he liked her ferocity. She reminded him of Ada.

"Who the fuck's this?" she screamed to be heard over the alarms.

Jittery shrugged. "I dunno, but he helped me." He kicked at the dead Statie.

She narrowed her eyes

"Come the fuck on, then."

She dashed to the car, not slowing for either of them.

Back at the rebel headquarters—Shylar had no other name for it—she tried explaining to her superior how they picked up a stray on a simple food retrieval mission. Using suggestive techniques hardwired by Kressick, he managed to assuage their doubts. The group's leader, Shana, was the young woman who gate-crashed Moretz's mansion. She informed him she had trouble feeding the group, and she didn't want to feed another asshole with a gun.

He smiled and held up his laser pistol. Shana gave him a nod of appreciation.

"Nice, but I can't use you. I don't know what you were doing at that hub, but it wasn't luck."

"No, not luck."

He placed his interface on their dirty tabletop, allowing a stream of holographic images, all of them of Moretz in various locales.

Shana nodded and put her hand out. He shook it happily.

"Maybe I can use you," she said.