LOGIN"Stairs are gone," Alex shouted over the comm. "They're coming from both sides.""How many?" Cedric didn't slow down."Too many. And Cedric, they aren't regular guards."The alarm swallowed whatever came next. It rattled up through his boots and into his teeth, and every steel door along the corridor hummed with it. He swept the children toward the stairwell with one arm, Hope's hand still gripped in the other. Jina ran at the back counting heads under her breath, losing her place, starting over."Left," she called. "Not right, that corridor floods.""Left," Cedric said, and the children turned all together, like a school of fish.The first guards met them at the landing. Ordinary ones, scared, sloppy, and Alex's people dropped them quickly enough that Cedric let himself hope. Then the doors at the far end slid open and the others walked in.They moved wrong. No shouting, no fumbling at holsters. They had the same flat face, every one of them, and they came down the hall as if the out
"There's a weakness," Cedric said. He still hadn't looked up from the blueprints."In a glacier?" Anna leaned over the table. "It's a mountain of ice with guns bolted on.""The geothermal vents. They heat the lower levels, so somebody had to cut channels through the ice, and nobody guards a pipe.""Those aren't pipes, they're wired. Every inch of that network has sensors.""Then we go slowly.""Through steam. Hot enough to cook a person.""Hot enough to hide one." He finally glanced up. "The Icebox was a military base once. Automated defenses, a few hundred guards, and one bad habit. It trusts its own walls.""I'll lead the infiltration team," Alex said from the doorway.Cedric didn't turn around. "You've never done this for real.""I've been training for it.""Training has rules.""So does the mission. You just gave them to me." Alex stepped inside. "Slowly, through the vents. I can do slowly."Cedric rubbed the bridge of his nose, which bought him a second, then two. Fine. Fine, but
Vance played her last card at six in the morning, when most of the house was still asleep.Someone in the kitchen yelled for everyone to come, and people stumbled into the main room in socks and blankets. The video was already playing on the television, on the laptops, on the phones people held up in unsteady hands.Marcus Chen sat in a white room. He was thin to the point of being hollow, his skin the color of old newspaper, and it was obvious he was dying. But his eyes were clear, and that was what made it hard to watch. The camera caught every line in his face and every wobble in his voice."My name is Marcus Chen," he said. "I am the founder of the Ouroboros Society. I am responsible for the trafficking, the murders, the clones. Cedric Santos was my victim, not my accomplice. He tried to stop me. He saved lives. The Bureau is innocent of all charges. They are heroes."He stopped to breathe, and the rattle of it came through the speakers. Then he looked straight into the lens."I a
The safe house in Montana sat at the end of a gravel road that nobody would find unless they were looking for it. Mountains crowded in on every side, already white at the tops, and the wind that slid down them got into the cabin through gaps no one had been able to find. The clones were being looked after by doctors and therapists and a few volunteers who talked softly and never stood too close. Some of them still jumped when a door opened. A few had spent entire afternoons just holding mugs of tea, like the warmth was something that might be taken back.The family sat around the big wooden table with coffee that had gone cold an hour ago. Gianni had pushed his plate away without touching it. Cedric kept turning his cup in small circles, watching the surface tilt. Lily sat with her hands folded, quiet in a way that looked like tiredness from the outside, but wasn't.Then someone turned on the television, and Vance was on every channel.She stood at a podium with a row of officials beh
The desert didn't care who they were.By day the sun beat down on the sand until the air wobbled. By night the heat drained out of the ground all at once and the cold got into their bones. There was no shade, no water, no food. Cedric led the clones through narrow canyons and across cracked riverbeds and up ridges of loose rock that slid out from under their feet. His boots were gone, left behind in a cell he never wanted to see again, and the soles of his feet had split open somewhere in the first hour. He felt every step. He kept walking.The youngest was a girl named Nova, maybe six, who hadn't said a word since they left the facility. Sometime on the second afternoon she stopped in the middle of a dry wash and sat down in the dirt like someone had cut her strings. Her lips were gray and cracked. When Cedric knelt and touched her cheek, her skin felt hot and papery.He didn't ask her to get up. He turned around, pulled her onto his back, and hooked her thin arms around his neck. Sh
The facility was a maze. Hallways split into hallways, and under the red emergency lights they all looked the same. Daniel didn't seem to care. He walked like a man who'd run these routes in his sleep, and he took Cedric into the maintenance tunnels, a cramped crawl of pipes and cable trays that smelled like hot metal and dust.They had to stop twice for patrols. The first time they squeezed behind a coolant pipe while two guards strolled by close enough that Cedric could hear their radios crackle. The second time Daniel didn't bother hiding. He pulled a strip of black tape out of his pocket, slapped it over a camera lens, then popped open a junction box and twisted two wires together. His hands were steady now. Whatever fear he'd walked into that cell with, he'd left it somewhere behind."Eleven cameras on this level," he said under his breath. "I've spent weeks figuring out which ones lie."They went down a ladder and through a steel hatch, and Daniel stopped so suddenly that Cedric
Cedric stopped, then he turned around slowly.Falcone was looking at him now, really looking, his phone forgotten on the table. His expression was unreadable, but something was happening behind those eyes, some calculation, some recognition that Cedric didn't understand."Come here," Falcone said.
“Jesus Christ, what the fuck happened to your face?”Cedric kept his hood up and his head down, ignoring the pitying looks and questions from late-night commuters on the subway who caught sight of his busted face. He could see the full extent of the damage reflected in the scratched train window,
The guy Cedric was just about to fuck ran off, leaving Cedric’s alone to scramble for an exit strategy, What the hell was he supposed to do? Talk his way out? Run? Fight? Beg?There was absolutely nowhere for him to hide, the alley had only one single exit, currently blocked by three guys who looke
“Shut the hell up, don’t take your mouth off my cock unless I say so.”Cedric huffed with annoyance, dragging his teeth along the underside of the guy’s cock so it would hurt, as payback for talking to him like he was some cheap fuck. Well, he was one, but still…“Cut that out. What kind of pornsta







