(Due to a character-count limit, this chapter is in two parts. Please find Part One if you haven't read it yet!)
She let go of the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. Gods, but soldiers could make her nervous—and there was no reason for it. It’s not like she had any terrible experiences with them, and these guys seemed pretty friendly. Maybe it was the guns. They weren’t pointed at her, but just the fact they carried them put her on edge. On station, this kind of weaponry was seen only rarely. And, except for last year’s drug sting, there hadn’t been a reason to bring out the riot gear since before she was born. Tianjin Station, though large, generally worked without incident.
Unhooking her netlink from the node, she slipped it back into her pocket and stepped back. Around her, the patched metal walls ran straight up to a ceiling, with one of the stark box-lights shining white from the grungy ceiling. Cables and pipes looped around the walls, attached with varying types of ropes and brackets. A few feet down, a large vent opened mid-way up the wall. Beyond, the hallway continued on until it hit a wall about thirty meters down, ending in a T-intersection.
“Sergeant? Do you copy?”
She brought her attention away from the end of the hall as the man—hells, what was his name?—turned toward the other three soldiers, catching their gazes. “Is my comm working?”
“I can hear you,” Dimas said. “You’re coming through.”
“Yeah, same here. It’s not your comm.”
“Maybe Preston’s comm, then?” he tapped his earpiece, presumably changing a setting. “Hey, fourth squad, do any of you copy?”
Jiayi frowned up at the hallway again. Something was pulling her attention that way, and she didn’t think it was just sleep deprivation. She detached herself from the group, slipping around the man next to her to wander up the path, head cocked as she tried to pay attention to the environment around her. Her sneakers made quiet thumps on the metal floor below her.
“Fourth squad, do you copy?”
The vent opened up above her. She stopped and turned her frown up toward it. Its grating was thin and rusted, caked with decades of dust and grime—cleaning bots tended to interfere with wires, and Tianjin’s engineering maintenance union had voted long ago to not, under any circumstance, allow one within the sub-levels or anywhere near station circuitry. After a quick study of the old screws that kept it in place, she squinted beyond its old tines and into the darkness beyond.
Back down the hall, Dimas had taken to his comm. “Fourth squad, are you there?”
She ignored him, listening hard.
“They’re not responding,” he said. “Maybe we’re out of range? Pretty thick steel around here.”
“I doubt it’s that. Comms go through steel regularly. They’re meant to go through at least seven levels.”
“Bad angle, then? Weird electrical field?” Dimas gestured to the wires around them. “I mean, we are standing in a buttload of possible interference.”
Jiayi cleared her throat. “Do you guys hear that?”
As one, all four soldiers looked to her.
“Hear what?”
“Shhh,” she said. “Come here. Listen. It’s weird.”
There was another exchange of looks—probably, none of them wanted to listen to anything weird in here—but, after a moment, they took the few steps to join her.
“Here,” she said, moving to the side. “In the vent. Kind of like a pulse.”
The hall quietened again as they listened, and she felt a tremor of tension slip through her gut. After a moment, she realized that her entire body had gone rigid, from her abdomen to the taut ligaments in the back of her neck. She squeezed her right hand into a fist, then made it relax, forcing herself to breath out as she flexed it. Beside her, Dimas and the other man, whose name she’d forgotten, leaned in to listen to the grate.
The sound came again, faintly. A staccato percussion that triggered something from her memory, though she couldn’t put her finger on exactly what it was.
By the way all four men stiffened, they knew.
“Blasterfire,” Dimas breathed. “They’re under attack.”
The second man was already backing up, shouldering his weapon. “We’ve got to get her out of here. We put her somewhere safe, then we can help. Or, maybe—Tuomin, you can stay with her in the elevator and call HQ. If we can’t get contact with fourth squad by then, we—”
At that moment, the lights around them gave a hard, silent flicker. They all froze. After another few seconds, they did it again.
Jiayi frowned up at the box-light above them. It hadn’t made a sound. Normally, if lights flickered like that, they made a sound. Especially these ones, which had been around long enough to see the station get floated and which shared similar circuits to the heavy, clunking switches that Yamaguchi used for Curlew’s main lights.
The light flickered again, silent. Then, it went out.
For five long, tense seconds, they all stood in the dark. Down the hall, something gave an audible shift.
Jiayi gave a hard swallow as the lights came back on, her eyes on the intersection ahead of them. Already backing up, she wasn’t surprised when the man right behind her, whose name she’d forgotten, placed a hand on her shoulder and guided her back. Quiet taps sounded on the metal beneath her as they funneled themselves back down the hallway. With a slow, steady movement, he pulled her back behind him, into the middle of the group. She picked up her duffel as they came even with the main terminal, the equipment inside giving a few quiet clicks as it shifted.
The lights flickered again. Another sound shifted at the end of the hall. Something interrupted the light at the corner, casting a second, subtle flicker on the wall as it moved.
Then, with the slowness of a movie, a Shadow-man stepped around the corner and into sight.
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