The slumlord gestured, his eyes darting to the interior of the hangar.

“Come in,” Sam said. “Take a load off.”

He nodded and stepped inside. She led him to the circle of couches and chairs that the crew used to sit in when planning missions. Grillo deliberated for a few seconds before selecting a wooden chair. Sam flopped onto the black leather couch opposite him and tucked her feet up beneath her legs. “You could have just sent a list.”

“It’s not that kind of mission,” he said flatly.

Samantha waited.

“Do you recall,” he said, “the explosion just south of the aura, in Old Downtown, a few months ago?”

“Sure. I heard the, um, ‘traitors’ tried to blow up Nightcliff. Good thing they missed, too, since I was locked up in there. Look, we’ve talked about this. I’ll keep the crews in line and all that shit, but I draw the line at doing anything that might hurt my friends.”

Grillo held a hand out, waving her off. “Our arrangement is well understood. Hear me out.”

“Okay …”

The slight man leaned forward in his chair. “The site of the explosion is seeing some”—he searched for words—“activity.”

“Huh? Subhumans?” She thought that unlikely. Old Downtown sat beyond the aura, yes, but it was only connected to land inside the aura, effectively making it an island. The small subhuman presence that existed there in the first weeks and months of the disease had long died out, leaving the place a ghost town.

He shook his head. “A cloud blankets the whole area. Darwin gets fog on occasion, but this is localized to just that area, and it’s been there for two days now.”

Samantha studied him. “So their bomb hit some subterranean infrastructure. Ruptured a pipe or a mini-thor’s cooling system.”

“Maybe so,” he said.

“So what’s the problem? It’s walking distance from the aura. Send a team in environment suits to scout it out.”

“We did,” he said. “Yesterday.”

His tone implied the result.

Grillo went on. “Five suited men hiked down there, but the moisture obscured their helmets. Zero visibility. They said they were going to turn back, but got lost. And then we lost all contact.”

“Subs,” Samantha said, “probably. They can track by sounds, so the fog wouldn’t slow them down much.”

Grillo spread his hands. “That’s what we’d like you to find out. You don’t need a suit, and you’re the only—”

“The only immune. Hooray for me,” she muttered.

“I’d just like you to poke around. Find out what happened, and that’s it. I’ll send a few good soldiers with you, yours to command. Men who fought in the Purge and know how to handle an environment suit.”

She’d prefer to go alone, but Grillo had a certain tone he used when something was not debatable, and he’d invoked that now. Maybe he feared she would run off.

“Clear the place out,” he added, “if you can, and then we’ll get some engineers in there to make sure whatever is generating that steam is not a danger to the city.”

She folded her arms and leaned back into the plush couch. “Our agreement was that I would get the crews flying again, which I’ve done. You never said anything about playing sub bait, or babysitting your goon squad.”

His face remained a mask, but she caught his grip tightening on the leather-bound book in his left hand. “Do this,” he said, “and I’ll bring you to my compound afterward to visit your friend.”

“And if I refuse?”

Grillo shook his head. “This is not an ultimatum, Samantha. I’m asking for your help because you’re the best person for the task. Whatever is going on out there, it may pose a threat to us all.”

Samantha shrugged. “Okay then. Sounds easy enough. When will your people be ready?”

“They’re waiting outside.”

The drive, despite being only eight klicks or so by road, took more than an hour.

Samantha sat in the back of the armored vehicle, rocking back and forth as it trundled over Darwin’s battered streets.

The two thugs Grillo brought along remained silent after the briefest of introductions, as if they’d been ordered not to chat with her. The taller one, David, had a ragged beard worn in contradiction to his neatly cropped black hair. His teeth were yellow and crooked, and there were wrinkles at the corners of his hard eyes.

The other was a Middle Easterner of average build and height. He’d said his name, Faisal, with a strong accent, and had not even made eye contact with her. Perhaps, she thought, he still believes women should cover themselves.

Darwin’s filthy streets blurred by. The morning sun would soon become intolerable for most, giving urgency to the foot traffic and makeshift street markets. Children chased after the caravan, laughing and waving until they could no longer keep up. Then they would bend down and pick up the nearest rock, hurling it at the trucks with total abandon, as punishment for not stopping.

Eventually the vehicles turned down Cavenagh Street and surged in speed. This close to Aura’s Edge, the people out and about were the lowest of the low. The single-story buildings here were all crumbling, looted shells. Hardly any had gardens on the roof, Samantha noted. Too easy to raid, too hard to defend.

Groups of citizens huddled in whatever shade they could find, all dressed in dirty rags, their faces skeletal and arms stick-thin. They watched the trucks roll by with hollow stares, having lost hope years ago of anyone coming out here to help them. Samantha glanced at Grillo. He sat in the front passenger seat, his back to her, and she expected him to be ignoring the heartbreaking view. But he wasn’t. Grillo was turned toward the window, his face scanning back and forth as he studied the sights. His lips were pressed into a thin line, and though she couldn’t see his eyes behind a pair of small, round sunglasses, she suspected there was no disgust to be found there.

After a few blocks the trucks reached the barricade and fanned out to park side by side. Samantha squinted when Faisal opened the back door of their APC and hopped out. Sunlight flooded the compartment, reflected off a dusty concrete sidewalk they’d parked on.

“After you,” David said, the only words he’d spoken the entire drive other than his name.

Outside, Samantha waited while the two mercenaries pulled on bright yellow environment suits that were produced from the back of one of the other trucks. The final truck held a selection of weapons and a comm terminal. A black woman in civilian garb sat at the screen, pulling a headset on. She smiled halfheartedly when their eyes met, then focused on the equipment in front of her.

Sam glanced over the weaponry arrayed along the floor of the truck, but there was nothing tempting. She made sure her own machine gun was loaded and ready. She’d yet to find a replacement for her beloved Israeli shotgun, lost when the Melville crashed. Someday, soon perhaps, she resolved to take a crew out into the Clear just to find another. For now, one of Skyler’s extra rifles would have to do. She’d found it in a private, hidden stash shortly after returning to the hangar. The place had been ransacked by Nightcliff’s finest, but in their haste they’d missed a few spots.

Skyler, despite his many faults, knew how to keep a weapon clean, and so she had no qualms about carrying one of his guns on a mission. In some weird way it felt like a small tribute to his memory.

“Up here, Samantha,” Grillo said. He’d scaled the barricade and now stood atop it. The mound of trash and debris roughly marked Aura’s Edge along the entire circle, except where it went out into the ocean. Beyond, a no-man’s-land extended for a hundred meters. Here the aura’s protection rippled, shifted, and weakened. Only fools ventured beyond the barricade without some form of protection against SUBS.

Sam bounded up the five-meter-high “wall,” hopping from one broken chunk of concrete to another, avoiding a rusty bit of chain-link fence that protruded from one spot.

Up top, Grillo waited with a pair of binoculars already extended to her. She took them, but didn’t raise them to her eyes just yet.

The street beyond the barricade was markedly different from the portion inside. Because so few dared to venture there, very little had been looted or picked over. Cars dotted the road. They weren’t packed in like sardines here, because Darwin’s Old Downtown was effectively an island, cut off by the aura. Farther west, Larrakeyah Army Base found itself in a similar state of isolation, but it had been one of the scavengers’ first hunting grounds for useful items.

Sam’s gaze settled on the area just beyond no-man’s-land. A group of tall buildings marked the local government offices, half a kilometer away. She could only see the very top floors. Everything else lay blanketed under a thick cloud that hugged the ground despite an ocean breeze. The gray-white haze swirled and billowed gently.

Grillo tapped her shoulder and handed her a headset. She slipped it over her head and adjusted the boom mic to rest near her cheek.

“Sound check,” a woman’s voice said in her ear.

Sam glanced back at the truck below her, and said, “Testing one two.”

“You’re clear,” the woman replied.

The two mercenaries, David and Faisal, were suited now and climbing the barricade. They both carried matching assault rifles, standard army issue stuff. David, she saw, had a couple of grenades on his utility belt. Oddly, both men had towels wrapped around their left forearm, as if they expected to get bitten by a police dog.

Next to Sam, Grillo cleared his throat. “I’m most interested in what is causing that cloud. If you can find yesterday’s party, please ascertain their fate, and salvage what you can.”

“And the headset is so I can call in reinforcements?”

“Do you want the truth?”

“No,” she said. “Glad-hand me.”

Grillo’s eyebrow twitched slightly but he did not smile. Sarcasm seemed to be the only thing that rattled his calm veneer. “The headset is so you can report back what you are seeing,” he said. “Up until the end, if need be.”

No offense, mate, but I’m not risking my life just to give you a little intel. She kept this to herself and nodded. “Let’s go, boys.”

She hopped down the other side of the barricade and stepped onto the dirty road beyond. When her two companions didn’t immediately join her, Sam glanced back to egg them on, expecting to see them eyeing the Clear with worry.

Instead, she saw them standing in a rough circle with Grillo, their hands clasped and heads bowed.

What the fuck is this? Prayer?

The posture only lasted a few seconds, and then in unison they broke their circle and the two men jumped down the mound of debris to join her.

Chapter 17

Darwin, Australia

5.MAY.2283

SAMANTHA TOOK POINT, with Faisal and David following a few paces behind, off to her left and right, respectively. The air processors on their backs hummed each time they took a breath.

They walked in this formation through no-man’s-land and into the Clear beyond. Clear, of course, being a misnomer. Samantha often chuckled when the term was used to describe the world outside Darwin. With no more humans polluting the shit out of everything, the theory went that the world would “clear up,” hence the name. Some thought that might be why the Builders confined everyone to a single city. A punishment, or judgment, of sorts. A chance for the planet to recover.

And the world may have indeed cleared up in places, but so many factories, chemical plants, power stations, and other bits of infrastructure were abandoned in haste that many of them ran on their own for years, unchecked. Fuel stations caught fire and burned for so long that they would shroud an entire metropolis in dark smoke for months. Samantha had seen all of this in her forays. Yet even she used the name Clear. It’s the name that stuck, and if it had a tinge of irony to it, so be it.

Fog started to envelop them. Samantha called a halt by raising her fist and then motioning for them to lower into a ready crouch. She felt a bit more confident when both men complied like such a silent command was old habit.

She instructed them to come to her position. “The thicker this gets, the closer we bunch, understood?” she asked when they were next to her.

Both men nodded. The masks of their environment suits were already dappled with condensation. Faisal raised his left arm, the one with a towel wrapped around it, and wiped away the moisture.

“If you get separated, stop and do a quick little whistle, nothing more. Subs are wired to attack humans, and our speaking voice is something they key on. Despite your helmets, a loud shout of surprise will still carry.”

Whether they knew this or not, they both flashed her an a-okay with their hands. She’d made the comment more for Grillo’s benefit, and for the woman operating the comm, so that she wouldn’t have to provide a running commentary.

“Okay,” Samantha said. “Follow me.”

Less than ten meters into the cloud, Samantha could hardly see her hand in front of her face. The swirling fog was cool on her skin, and in no time her body glistened from the water as if she’d been caught in a morning drizzle. She glanced back. Faisal and David were nothing more than apparitions in the fog. David drew his towel-wrapped arm across his mask, leaving a swath of clear plastic through which to see.

She faced forward again and crept farther into the thick mist.

The crystalline spike appeared so suddenly that she almost ran into it.

A needle point of pale blue glass, just a few centimeters in front of her face. Samantha halted and raised her hand for the others to stop. “Found something,” she said in a low voice.