Every vehicle they could see had methodically, pointlessly been vandalized, tires slashed, windows smashed, interiors ripped to shreds.

“Frustration. That’s what happened here.”

“I don’t remember this garage.”

“It’s new. Part of the renovation. But the deep part is still here somewhere. It’s been covered over, not destroyed.”

The garage sloped down another level, to a more confined area where two news vans were parked, white with blue KFSF logos on their sides.

From the streets above, they could hear distant, now disorganized drumming and savage, protracted shrieking, the sound of hybrids in confusion, living expressions of their growing impatience and frustration.

The only nearby sound was that of dripping, and Mark saw that it was coming from one of the vans. A glance inside revealed a tangled mass of remains so badly damaged that he could only assume they had once been human.

“It scavenges for organs,” he said.

At the lowest point in the garage, there was a manhole. “Down there,” Mark said. “Somewhere down there is the heart of the infestation, and that’s where we should find the bombs.”

He lifted the manhole cover and tossed it aside, then dropped in. After a moment, Gina followed him into a narrow, downsloping corridor.

Their light was poor. They had just a couple of flashlights from the station’s earthquake kit. But even so, Mark saw what he had hoped to find.

“The elevator. Remember it?”

She looked at the black, rusting door, then back at him with wide, odd eyes. “I remember, but it’s not a normal memory. It’s more like sort of an—I don’t know what to call it—”

“An echo. An echo of the mind. The moment you see it, it’s familiar, but before that, you have no memory.”

“An MP was stationed in this room. They never let you in.”

“They let you in. That memory’s been erased.”

The elevator was far from being serviceable, so they ripped the door off, pulled up its floor, and slid down its cables, dropping until they had to break the fall, then dropping again. They had come perhaps ten stories straight down when they reached the base of the shaft.

“It was deep to make sure the hybrids didn’t escape.”

“Why San Francisco?”

“Near Palo Alto and Emma Walker’s lab, but in an earthquake zone, so the vibrations of the digging would be taken as microquakes.”