Chương 22: Chapter 20 - We can be clandestine

"Clear!" four of them chorused. The other two were still putting their shoes on. I got out and counted heads while they filed after me, which I'd already decided I was going to be doing all night. Atlantic City looked like something had eaten it and been sick. The casino strip still stood at the south end, floodlit and ringed with army lighting towers, throwing up enough glow to wash the stars out of half the county. Everything between us and it had been chewed through.

Building faces lay flat in the streets where the fighting had put them, whole grids of window frames on the asphalt with the glass long since swept or stolen. The wind came in off the water, went through the hollow towers, and came out the far side carrying a low note that never quite stopped. Kaiju parts lay in among the rubble. The cleanup crews were working, but corpse production had beaten them five months ago and never let them catch up.

A pincer the size of a bus sat in the middle of an intersection with a traffic light still bolted to it, blinking amber for nobody. What I'd taken for a neatly symmetrical hill from the chopper turned out to be a cone of small kaiju, bulldozed together forty feet high and half-heartedly set on fire at some point. They hadn't burned well. They'd rotted instead, though the smell stayed thin and chemical, nothing like a slaughterhouse.

Earth's insects wanted nothing to do with kaiju meat, so decay had to do all its own work without any help. Or the goddess who designed them had thought ahead about the smell, which was probably what had happened, as far as my knowledge of demon princesses went. We took a loop around the edge of the district, keeping off the stretches lit by the surviving street lamps.

"So," Volk said.

"What are we looking for?"

"Smugglers. The company wants kaiju material for research, and there's more raw material sitting in this city than anywhere else on the continent. Somebody is selling it." Ookami frowned at me.

"Isn't our research the best there is? V says our corporation is the best at everything."

"It is, and a large part of that is we're extremely good at bullying smaller criminal organizations. Which is what we're doing tonight." I stepped over a length of rebar that had grown out of the pavement like a weed.

"An operation this size needs three things. Somebody prospects the corpses for the parts worth money, because the army out there—" I pointed south, where the lights spilled into the sky "—sweeps the field, but it sweeps for weapons and misses everything else. The prospectors mark what's good and pass it up the line."

"And then a warehouse," Wilk said.

"One warehouse. You can't steal this much material out of a war zone in a disorganized way without getting caught inside a week, so it all funnels through one depot with the right people bribed to never look in that direction."

"And the bosses aren't in the depot," Farka said, in the tone of somebody who'd already worked out where this was going and wanted credit for it.

"Usually, the bosses aren't in the depot. They sit close enough to run it and far enough that the two don't get busted on the same night. And since they don't trust their own people, there'll be an outpost near the city exit, watching their own trucks come and go. That's what we're looking for." They took it in with an attention I hadn't gotten out of anybody in Wharton Squad. Earbuds out, hands out of pockets, six pairs of eyes going over the ruins.

"Over there," Lyke said, pointing.

"And there too," Wilk added.

"No, I saw it first!" Ookami pitched in, and then the three of them growled at each other until Varg elbowed the nearest one in the ribs. I looked where they were pointing and saw a road.

"What's there?"

"Deep tracks," two of them said.

"From trucks with kaiju in them," three more said over the top of each other.

"Or just garbage," Farka finished. We went that way, and once we were close enough I could see them too. Shallow ruts led in toward the corpse mountain and deep ones led away, pressed into the mud and dried hard through the summer, the same two axles over and over.

"We follow those. Keep up." We broke into a jog and then into something considerably faster. My endurance meant I could hold that pace until the sun came up and then hold it through the following day, and their werewolf nature meant they didn't have to think about it either. The tracks left the main roads inside a mile and went into the pines, and the pines closed over the top of us and took the last of the city glow away. They loved it.

I could hear them spreading out behind me, cutting off the fire road into the trees and rejoining it further up, breathing easy, teeth out. One of them tried to overtake me, so I let her, and then two more tried, and for about half a mile it stopped being a mission and became six teenagers racing a man in a hoodie through a forest at one in the morning. I let it run. They'd be quieter afterward. The tracks ended at a complex bigger than I'd expected.

Four buildings sat in a cleared square of the pines behind chain-link, three of them long prefab warehouses with roll-up doors and pooled sodium light over the loading aprons. The fourth was newer, two floors of poured concrete with narrow windows set high, closer to a private clinic than to a warehouse. Forklifts moved between the three. Somebody had a radio on down there, tinny and cheerful. The fourth building had no lights in it, no vehicles near it, and nobody going in or out.

Even criminals didn't want to work the night shift if they could help it. I took the pack around inside the treeline to the back of it, and counted them again at the delivery door. All six, present, breathing hard and enjoying themselves enormously. No cameras anywhere on the building, which I'd counted on. Electronics meant a network, and a network meant a corporation like mine strolling in from four hundred miles away without leaving the office. You might be reading a pirated copy.

Look for the official release to support the author. I put two fingers on the lock and squeezed, and it came apart into pieces small enough to pour. Inside, the dark was total, which was a problem for exactly one of the seven of us. I took out my phone and turned on the torch. They all looked at me, puzzled.

"Some of us have to see with our eyes," I said, and went in. The ground floor was a clinic, and a serious one. Stainless tables in rows, drainage channels cut into the concrete, hoses coiled on brackets at the end of every aisle. Kaiju blood had gone down into the grout and stayed there, dried to the colour of old ink. Four tables still had half-processed bodies strapped to them with the cuts left open and marked up in grease pencil.

Organs sat sorted into steel buckets by type, and every bucket had a label, and every label was written in the same careful hand. Somebody here took real pride in their work, which was worse than if they hadn't. The pack fanned out into it before I could tell them not to. Ookami came up on her toes to look into a bucket and announced the smell was making her hungry, which two of the others agreed with far too quickly. Wilk found a butcher's apron on a hook and put it on. Volk picked a bone saw up off a tray.

"Put it down."

"I'm just holding it."

"You're supposed to not leave fingerprints behind." He put it down and wiped it on the table. I turned toward Lyke. Blood covered half of her face, a half-eaten kaiju heart in her hand.

"And you're really not supposed to be eating anything."

"But it looked delicious." She didn't want to put it down.

"That thing might be full of kaiju parasites nobody has discovered yet, the kind that eat your stomach from the inside with no known cure." She yelped, throwing the heart away. A flash lit up the space to my side. I turned, seeing three of them taking selfies around the tables, holding kaiju organs and more equipment.

"When committing criminal activity, you do not produce evidence of it."

"But you didn't complain about the dance videos after the missions."

"We aren't after a mission yet." Reluctantly, they put everything down, acting as if they were scrubbing off the fingerprints. When the pack calmed down and lined up, I found the stairwell at the back and took them up. The second floor had more dissection rooms, smaller ones set up for finer work, and past those a short corridor of offices with hollow doors and worse carpet. As we were passing the bloodiest one, I just motioned at it.

"Don't even think about it."

"About what?" two asked, while three more returned to the formation behind me from trying to sneak into the room.

"You know what." We passed through to an office. Three desks, four computers, a wall calendar two months out of date, and a coffee machine with a passive-aggressive note taped to it about rinsing the jug. Criminal enterprise or not, an office is an office.

"Anyone got a company USB?" I asked. All six drew one at the same instant, so I was the only one who left it at home. Lyke had hers out fastest, so I took it, woke the nearest machine, and pushed the stick in while I texted V.

'Does Matthew still work here?'

'He will be delighted to be woken up tonight. He will call you presently.'

"Who's Matthew?" Volk asked.

"Never heard of him," two more added.

"Our department's IT head. He was here before I was, and I've never met anybody else from IT, so as far as I can tell he is the department." My phone rang about ninety seconds later. I picked up.

"What's up?" A voice arrived through it at half speed.

"We really need to start doing missions during the day. Anyway, what's up, Peter?"

"Lyke's thumb drive is in a machine in a smuggler office outside Atlantic City. I need in, and I need the whole place mined."

"Give me a minute… I don't see it connected. But I see Farka's active." They all giggled behind me. Ah, so they let me use the names wrong, waiting to see how long I could keep it up. Hilarious.

"Yeah, Farka's." The cursor started moving without me. The screen flickered twice, a console threw itself open and filled with text, and then the desktop came up with somebody's daughter set as the wallpaper. I opened the file explorer and typed Energies of Emptiness into the search bar.

"What's that?" Ookami asked.

"That doesn't sound like smuggler stuff," three more said.

"Matthew's taking everything on the kaiju trade. That part's the mission. This part's an addon." I watched the progress bar crawl.

"I lifted a book off one of their operations in Camden a while back. Whoever wrote it understands magic better than anyone else whose work I've read, and he isn't from anywhere on this planet. I'm trying to find out whether it exists anywhere else." The search turned up the PDF, and in the folder were two other files with it. I opened an incognito tab and logged into one of my burner accounts.

"Somebody give me an email address." They looked at each other.

"Can you just DM us on TikTok?"

"You needed an email address to make the account." There was a burst of furious swiping.

"Found mine!" Volk said.

"It's volkthealphawolf666 at gmail dot com."

"Right." I put the email in, attached all three files, and sent them. That put a copy somewhere I could reach later.

"Read those when you get the chance."

"Right!" two of them said.

"But what are we looking for?"

"Nothing. You're reading them to understand them. Your power comes off a wolf spirit, but that doesn't put you outside the rules the rest of magic runs on. Everything anybody has ever built, they built standing on the shoulders of somebody who came before them. He did the research before us, wrote it down, so we read it." They went quiet in a way that suggested trouble.

"Isn't there," Lyke said, "like, a video guide?"

"There's a PDF." Varg snorted.

"I guess I could put it in an AI and have it explain it to me."

"You could read it."

"That's the same thing, but slower," Farka said.

"You're trying to teach yourself something, not your AI. If you don't process the information yourself, then you won't understand it. Memorizing a summary isn't understanding the concept. You aren't reading this to pass a test, but to use it in combat against mages." They fell quiet, almost uncharacteristically. Then, while Matthew was hoovering out the rest of the machines and I was waiting on him, the light in the corridor changed. It wasn't my torch.

This one was whiter and a great deal brighter, and it was coming from the dissection room three doors down. I got there and found four of them arranged around a ring light on a tripod with a phone mounted above it. Wilk was again wearing the butcher's apron. Ookami had a kaiju femur across her shoulders like a barbell. All of them were counting themselves into another dance. The ring light was aimed directly at the window. Down in the yard, a flashlight beam came up and swung across the second floor.

I put a hand over the ring light, which killed it and also ruined it.

"Down. Away from the glass, all of you." They dropped fast, so they did have some training. Boots crossed the gravel below, one man, no radio chatter and no shouting, which meant he wasn't confident enough about what he'd seen to make himself look stupid in front of the shift. I motioned them to follow me and headed to the office. On the way, I messaged Matthew:'Removing the USB in three.' He texted back.

'k' I yanked the stick from the PC, unplugged the monitor power cable, and headed to the window. The steps slowly approached through the clinic underneath toward the stairs. I opened the window.

"No selfies during the jump." I jumped out, dropping into a roll on the ground. One by one, the members of the pack jumped out of the window, each taking a selfie mid-fall. Right. I had to be careful about what ideas I gave them. We ran through the complex back to the forest. By my math, I still had six teenage werewolves with me, which was the correct amount. We jogged the tracks back and picked up the van, and Varg had the K-pop going before the last door finished sliding shut. Wilk was still wearing the apron.

I decided that was going to be somebody else's problem. They dropped me at the northern wall a little before four, waving out the windows the way they always did. I went over the wall, in through the maintenance door, and lay down on my bunk with the whole base asleep around me. My phone vibrated as I was about to get into the bed. A message from V:'So, you can be clandestine when you have a reason to: -)'