FAZER LOGINJoanna scanned the immediate area and saw only one zombie wandering nearby. Moving with fluid precision, she stepped forward, swung her hatchet, and cleanly decapitated it. With a quick wave of her hand, she extracted its core from the falling corpse.
Wasting no time, she pulled three heavy-duty motorcycles directly out of her pocket dimension. A second later, she summoned Jake and Julian back into reality. Both men
Joanna looked back at her old house one last time. She and the team had agreed to leave it standing, along with the house next door, as the only two worth taking. Every other house on the ridge was marked for demolition.She turned to Kailee. “I have some small cameras in my space. We could set them up here and give ourselves eyes on the place.”Kailee nodded. “I know how to tie them into a computer, if you have a laptop.”“I do.” Joanna reached into her space and pulled out a battered laptop and a crate. Twelve compact camera units sat nested in foam, each one the size of a deck of cards, with weatherproof casings and a lens like a black bead. She handed the laptop to Kailee and a handful of cameras to Will and Caleb.“They don&
“I know,” Joanna said.They climbed out, and the others followed a few steps behind, giving her room. She walked up the cracked path alone, boots crunching on dead leaves, and stopped at the threshold. Much of the house was destroyed: ceilings stained brown and bowed with water, wallpaper hanging in strips, glass crunching underfoot, a tree growing up through the dining room floor.But the memories rose anyway, as sharp and clear as if no time had passed.She had grown up here, with her mother, Gwen, and her stepsister, Alice. There was the kitchen where she had scrubbed the dishes every night while the other two laughed in the next room. The hall closet where she had kept the vacuum, because the vacuum was hers. Up the stairs, behind the broken banister, was the best bedroom, big and sunny, with a windo
Joanna pulled her team out inside Glacier’s building, and the first thing she noticed was how solid it felt. The sagging ice was long gone. Fresh stone and steel plating covered the old damage, the fencing outside held firm, and a guard stood posted at the gate.Glacier and Fletcher were waiting in the entry hall. Glacier looked tired, with shadows under his eyes and a smear of rust on his sleeve, but he stood straighter than he had in weeks.“How is everything?” Joanna asked.“Better,” Glacier said. “After you cleared the warehouses, we hauled in a lot more materials. I used some to fix up another place for your team, in the building next door.” He jerked his chin toward the street. “Come see.”Fletcher fell in besid
Wrestling the sproutlings into order took far longer than Joanna had planned. Ten of them had to be counted, separated from the other ten, and convinced that guarding a wall was a promotion and not a punishment. Two refused to let go of Piper’s vines. One climbed a tree in the garden and wouldn’t come down. Another was found halfway through eating a fence post and had to be talked out of it, mostly by bribery with a level four core.Piper handed over the final sproutling, a small, stubborn one with a particularly glossy blossom. “Those are the ten,” she said. “Including the ones I mentioned. The tree-eater, the biter, and that one.” She jerked a vine toward the little sprout, who was sidling toward the barbecue grill by the hot spring. “That girl needs to stop flirting with the g
After breakfast, Joanna went to collect the toxin from Michelle and see the soldiers off. The plan was simple. She would teleport the route first to scan for hangups, while the convoy drove the whole way to Dillon in a day. The knot in her stomach hadn’t loosened since the dream, and it made her want to get to Dillon fast.In the lab, Michelle handed over a sealed, padded case. Inside, rows of glass vials held a fine, pale powder, the processed spores. “Handle it like it’s a sleeping dragon,” Michelle said. “Do not open these without masks.”“Understood.” Joanna slipped the case into her space and nodded to Warren, who gave her a thumbs-up from behind a respirator pushed up on his forehead.Out in the courtyard, two large military trucks sat idling, and s
Joanna stood in a room she didn’t remember entering.It was dark, and the dark felt thick, like something she had to push through to move. The walls were bare concrete, stained black in long vertical streaks where water seeped down from somewhere above. It dripped in a slow, uneven rhythm into puddles she couldn’t see. The air tasted of mildew, old blood, and something sharp and chemical underneath.She tried to step forward, but her body wouldn’t answer. She could only watch.Five men knelt against the far wall, chained at the wrists and ankles to iron rings set into the concrete. Rough burlap sacks covered their heads, cinched at the throat with twine. Their shoulders sagged, and their breathing came in shallow, wet rasps. Despair rolled off them in waves so heavy she could feel it pressing on he






