THE RIALTO – DETROIT – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. Whatever the identity of the strike team he’d encountered at the Sarif factory – Jensen put little stock in their claim to be ‘police’ – they were

Jensen kept to the shadows, slipping from one pool of darkness to another, pausing every few moments to listen carefully for any ambient sound. Once in a while, he glanced up, wary of the sudden appearance of a black shadow high over the alleyway; but nothing came.

Whatever the identity of the strike team he’d encountered at the Sarif factory – Jensen put little stock in their claim to be ‘police’ – they were clearly a professional crew, and every step of the way along his escape from Milwaukee Junction, he had been looking over his shoulder for them. He wanted to believe that he was out of their grasp, but it was two hours now since Jensen had last had radio contact with Pritchard and he suspected the worst.

The hacker had been right about the sewer access beneath the building, but to reach it meant a run through an inferno. The shabby surplus jacket Jensen had been wearing since Alaska had burned off his back, and without his rebreather implant and smart-vision optics he would never have made it through the thick, choking smoke filling the warehouse annex. Wading through the waist-deep filth of the sewer pipe was practically a relief, and by the time he crawled out of a manhole a kilometer away, Jensen was on the verge of collapse. His bio-cells were at a low ebb, his lungs felt like they had been filled with metal shavings, and every step was an effort.

But one look over his shoulder at the glow of the fires told him he had to keep going. Such destruction would have to bring the DPD in to investigate, and he needed to be far away when they finally arrived. He felt a knife of guilt twist in his gut over Stacks and the brutal fate that befell him. The man’s death is on me, he thought grimly. I took him into harm’s way and he wasn’t up to it. Pritchard was right. I should’ve listened.

On his way back to the derelict cinema, Jensen picked over his reasons again and again. He wanted badly to strike at the people who had robbed him of so much, to lash out at the shadowy cabal manipulating events from on high… and with his mind set on that, he hadn’t stopped to consider if Harrison Stacker was really ready to stand with him. Now a deeply troubled, damaged soul was dead and any chance he might have had at redemption was gone with him.

A bleak question gathered in Jensen’s thoughts. Pritchard had been an irritating, arrogant ass for as long as he had known him, but by the same token he had always been brutally honest with Jensen. There were few people, he reflected, that he could truthfully say that about. And if Pritchard had been right about Stacks, was he right about this road that Jensen had started down? My crusade, he called it…

“Where the hell do I go from here…?” Jensen said the words aloud, looking across the alley to the back entrance of the old building. But no answer was forthcoming. He could see the metal security door hanging open in the gloom, and his fingers gripped the butt of the Hurricane machine pistol hanging at his side. Was Pritchard in there, collapsed over his keyboard with a bullet hole between his eyes? Had Jensen’s single-minded need for retribution cost the life of someone else tonight?

There was only one way to find out. He couldn’t chance the energy drain of using the cloak; this would have to be a direct approach.

The Hurricane’s magazine was half full. Jensen extended the gun’s wire-frame stock and pulled it to his shoulder, moving low and fast to the door. He circled the entrance, peering into the semi-darkness within, then slipped inside.

The random clutter of the interior worked in his favor, meaning that no shooter with a high vantage would be able to get a clear sight-line and shoot him as soon as he entered – but it also meant that Jensen couldn’t gauge what kind of threat might be waiting for him. His cyberoptics cycled through vision modes, looking for the telltale threads of an invisible ultraviolet targeting laser or the bloom of heat from a concealed gunman. He saw nothing.

Although most of the movie theater looked like the aftermath of a bomb explosion as a matter of course, Jensen saw no signs that Pritchard’s remote mines had been triggered. That meant that whoever had opened the door and taken the hacker off the air was capable and dangerous. He thought about the black-clad woman on the roof and her unit. They certainly fit that profile.

Moving around a heap of rubble that had fallen from the ceiling, Jensen caught sight of the stage. Nothing had been upset, everything was untouched. He made out a motionless figure sitting in a chair, back-lit by the glow of a monitor screen – thin, angular, with an unkempt ponytail hanging over his shoulder.

For a long second, Jensen thought Pritchard was dead, but then the hacker gave a low sigh and looked off to his right, where shadows fell thick and deep. “How long do you expect me to sit here?” he asked.

“Clearly, until you learn the meaning of stay there and don’t say a goddamn word.” The terse reply had a Hispanic lilt to it, and presently a woman in a baggy civilian pilot’s jumpsuit emerged from the darkness. A heavy Diamondback revolver dangled at the end of one of her hands, and she crossed toward Pritchard, her manner lazy but her eyes alert. Her hair was short in a mix of cornrows and a semi-military cut, revealing a lengthy augmentation scar running from just above her left brow in an arc that ended behind her ear. She wore the mark like a badge of honor, but the woman’s gear and her swagger didn’t chime with the team Jensen had run into at the manufacturing plant. He had the immediate sense that he was looking at a brand new player here, someone with an agenda of their own.

Jensen took aim with the Hurricane, considering his options. The range wasn’t good, and he had a fair chance of clipping Pritchard with a stray round if he let off a burst of fire. He held his finger away from the trigger as the woman suddenly halted, casting a look in his general direction.

“He’s here,” she said to the air. “Huh. Took long enough.” The revolver rose to aim toward Pritchard’s head. “Come on up, esé. We’re all friends here.”

Jensen took a step forward into the spill of light from the stage and he saw Pritchard shift in his chair. “Want to tell me what’s going on here, Frank?” He ignored the woman, even as he kept the gun on her. It wasn’t just the three of them in the building, he was certain of it.

“They came in right after I lost the infolink,” said the hacker, confirming his suspicion. “Jammed the signal and shut me down at gunpoint.”

“Lose the weapon,” said the woman, nodding toward Jensen. “Let’s be civil, yeah?”

“You first, chica,” he shot back. “And tell your pal to quit the cloak-and-dagger routine. It’s been a long day and I’m not in the mood.”

“Jensen,” said a voice from nearby, dragging his name out into a languid, reproachful Irish drawl. “And here you used to be such an affable fella.” Until that moment hidden from view, a man got up from one of the slumped chairs in the front row and turned to face him, spreading his hands in a gesture of conciliation. He had short hair over familiar, deliberately average features that were marred by circular scar-lines indicating subdermal implants and neural augmentations.

“Huh.” Jensen lowered the machine pistol, but not the whole way. Of all the people he might have encountered in this moment, the last face he expected to see belonged to a man he’d crossed paths with half a world away, on a deep water platform in the middle of the South China Sea. “Hello, Quinn… or do you have a new identity this time?”

“Garvin Quinn is as good a name as any,” he replied, with a wan smile. Then his expression shifted, becoming wolfish, and when he spoke again his accent was pure Muscovite Russian. “It’s been a while. Surprised to see me, bratán?”

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