had ever produced, toward the singular goal of covering their tracks.
And if they still couldn’t spend an hour outside without getting tagged, it was all for nothing. A hopeless delusion.
“I’m trying to crack the Protectorate tracking system,” Conall muttered. His open beer sat untouched in front of him, and he had a large tablet unfolded. His fingers tapped in hypnotic patterns, gliding over the surface as text flickered past too fast for Knox to even read. “I basically rebuilt it a decade ago, but they must have let Charlie in there to lock me out.” His face twisted into a scowl. “I beat her out for the top spot in our cohort by a thousandth of a percent. I bet she’s loving finally being number one.”
There were shadows under Conall’s eyes. Even his perfectly calibrated implant couldn’t eliminate his need for sleep. He was one person, fighting everything the TechCorps could throw at them. He couldn’t sustain this for long.
“Fuck this.” Rafe suddenly exploded. He slapped the tablet open and pulled up his messages. “Let me see if I can—”
His tablet pinged softly.
A shiver of warning clawed its way up Knox’s spine.
Something was wrong.
He assessed the room. He’d done it upon entering, marking the grungy windows in the front, the bar, the swinging door that led to the kitchen, and the narrow hallway that led out the back. The kitchen shared a wall with the sketchy secondhand tech shop next door.
The seventeen civilians he’d counted on arrival had grown to twenty-three. Twenty-three people who could have sent covert messages. Twenty-three people who could turn into collateral damage if a fight broke out.
A Protectorate squad wouldn’t care about civilian casualties. They weren’t trained to. Neither was Knox, except that he had to. Otherwise, what the fuck was the point?
“Shit,” Rafe ground out, voice spiking with panic. “Shit, shit, shit. It’s from McClain’s sister. A Protectorate squad picked him up two hours ago.”
“Plenty of time to torture someone for information and deploy a couple of squads.” Gray finished his beer. “We’re surrounded, of course.”
An odd peace settled over Knox at the certainty. At least this was a battle he was equipped to fight. “That’s a safe assumption.”
“Well, fuck.” Conall snapped his tablet shut with a sigh. “We should probably get out of here before they get bored and blow up the whole block.”
Rafe still looked stricken. Luna’s kidnapping was still a fresh wound. It couldn’t be easy for him to find out that another of his contacts was in Protectorate custody because of him.
Knox reached across the table to grip Rafe’s wrist. “We get out. Then we deal with the fallout.”
Gray was already on his feet, his beer bottle grasped loosely in one hand. Knox jerked his head at Rafe as he hauled Conall from the booth and started for that narrow corridor.
A typical Protectorate squad was five to eight men. Knox’s team was down a man, but none of them were typical. He’d recruited the best men the Protectorate had to offer, and year after year of difficult missions had given them an edge. No other squad stood a chance against them, one-on-one.
“Like that time in Memphis,” Knox murmured as they approached the back door. “On three.”
Conall pulled his sidearm—a deceptively modest small-caliber pistol with rounds that could burrow through armor—and thumbed the biometrics.
“One.”
Rafe closed his hand around the doorknob, the muscles in his arms and shoulders flexing.
“Two.”
Gray smashed his empty bottle against the wall, leaving behind only the jagged neck in his fist.
“Three.”
With a snarl, Rafe tore the door off the hinges and charged into the alley, holding the door in front of him like a combination shield and battering ram. He’d barely cleared the doorframe when Gray lunged through, slashing a startled Protectorate soldier across the face.
66–987. Knox identified the man’s ID number automatically as he dove through the doorway. This was what it felt like to operate at peak performance. To have every muscle move in concert as the world slowed to a blur around him, the space between each heartbeat stretched out into enough time to analyze, extrapolate, and act.
Thump.
66–987 was a member of the Lucky Sixes, a squad led by Captain Patel. Efficient, dangerous, but inflexible. Patel was meticulous and methodical, but he couldn’t adapt when a situation changed.
Like when the targets he’d been closing in on burst into his midst.
Thump.
Knox cleared the doorway and swung around. Shocked blue eyes stared back at him from a grizzled face. 66–591. Carl. Carl liked to cheat at pool,