At this point their communication became entirely nonverbal, and even with her adrenaline pumping Kira had to concentrate as hard as she could not only to detect all the link data but to interpret it. Emotional cues as simple as SEE and SUPPORT seemed to have much deeper meanings, sending one Partial ahead and another to a flanking position. The team moved seamlessly through the aisles and shelves, and eventually to the mall and the storefronts beyond, and Kira simply followed Green, stopping when he stopped, hiding when he hid. The link data sounded an alarm in her nervous system, and Kira found herself raising her rifle before she even understood why, firing down a hallway as a figure she hadn’t even seen dove smoothly into cover. Falin took up a firing position by the base of an escalator, and Jansson did the same in some kind of café across the hall. Green and Kira and the final soldier, a man named Colin, raced down the hall toward the fleeing shape, only to dive to the floor and scramble for cover when the entire mall seemed to explode into gunfire, bullets flying in all directions at once. Kira crawled into a clothing store, past the racks of snarky T-shirts to the sturdier wood of the counter, and covered her head with her hands. The soldiers started firing back, and Kira was deafened by the noise, until suddenly the shooting stopped and she heard a voice echoing through the halls.

“Whoa! Whoa! Everybody stop shooting . . . everybody else. This was a carefully calibrated ambush that was not intended to catch what looks like . . . an entire squad of Partial soldiers? What? What are you even doing here?”

Kira raised her head. She recognized the voice.

“Look, fellas,” said the voice, “we are trying to engage in a deadly game of cat and mouse with a psychotic murderess right now, so if you’d all just keep your noses out of other people’s business, we could get back to the nightmarish hellscape that our lives have become. Or you could just help us find her. Unless you’re working with her, in which case I really ought to stop talking, and we can all get back to shooting each other—”

“Marcus?” Kira shouted, standing up and edging carefully into the hallway. Green and Colin were both there, in cover positions of their own, linking their confusion. “Marcus Valencio! Is that you?”

There was a long moment of silence, and then she heard him again, his voice shocked and uncertain.

“Kira?”

Chapter Thirty-three

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Kira looked up and saw Marcus on an upper balcony, leaning over with wide eyes and his jaw hanging open in abject surprise. He looked like he’d been living in the wilderness for weeks, his bronze skin flushed with sweat and adrenaline.

“Kira!”

“Marcus!”