the pull cord, which struck it to life as I did. Red light glared into the darkness, and I lifted the flare over my head and out of my own vision in my left hand. I held the P-90 in my right. The small weapon could be fired in one hand, no problem, and while it wouldn’t be as accurate, I could still send bursts downrange almost as well as I could two-handed.
The pops and clicks continued, everywhere and nowhere. I had no idea where Will and Marcy were, and Nothing and the other turtleneck had an awful lot of shadow to hide in. I realized I was essentially sitting in the middle of an open floor under a spotlight, a perfect target for Nothing and his weird little urchin-gun, and I retreated toward the caged prisoners.
“Georgia,” I said, crouching down beside her. I studied the door of the cage, and found that the thing wasn’t even locked. It had a ring for a padlock on it, but the door’s mechanism was simply cycled closed. I spun it open and pulled open the cage door. “Georgia. Can you move?”
She lifted her head and stared at me grimly. Then she turned her body and leaned forward, moving as though underwater, and slowly began to crawl out of the cage. I hurried to Andi’s cage and opened that door as well—but the girl did not so much as blink or stir a finger when I urged her to get out. So much for reinforcements. I felt useless. I couldn’t go out there into the dark to join Will and Marcy in the hunt. I’d be worse than useless, stumbling around out there. They’d be forced to take their attention from their attack in order to protect me.
“Murphy,” Georgia said. “M-Murphy.”
I hurried to her side. “I’m here. Are you hurt?”
She shook her head. “N-n-no . . . L-listen.” She lifted her head to meet my eyes, her neck wobbling like a paraplegic’s. “Listen.”
Clicks. Pops. Once, a hackle-raising snarl. The whishing sound of an urchin flying through the air, and the sharp pong of its hitting a metal exterior wall.
“The guards,” Georgia said. “Sonar.”
I stared at her for a second, and then clued in to what she was talking about. The clicks and pops had sounded familiar because I had heard them before, or something very close to them—from dolphins, at the Shedd Aquarium. Dolphins sent out sharp pulses of sound and used them to navigate, and to find prey in the dark.
I dropped the flare on the ground well away from Georgia and began unscrewing the suppressor on the P-90. “Will! Marcy!” I shouted, unable to keep the snarl out of my voice. “They’re about to go blind!”
Then I pointed the weapon up and off at an angle that I thought would send the rounds into the nearby lake, flicked the selector to single fire, and began methodically triggering rounds. The second clip had been loaded with standard, rather than subsonic, ammo, and without the suppressor to dampen the explosion of the propellant, the supersonic rounds roared out, painfully loud. The flash at the muzzle lit the entire warehouse in strobes of white light. I didn’t fire them in rhythm or any particular pattern. I had no idea how actual sonar worked in biological organisms, but I’d taken several nephews as a pack to see the Daredevil movie, and rhythmic sounds seemed to create a more ordered picture than random bursts of noise.
As I worked my way through the fifty-round magazine, I could all but hear Dresden’s mockery, his voice edged with adrenaline, the words coming through a manic grin, as I’d heard several times before. Murph, when you’re reaching out to movie concepts that involved millions of dollars in special effects for your tactical battle plan, I think you can pretty safely take that as an indicator that you are badly out of your depth.
But as the last round left the gun, I heard one of the turtlenecks screaming in pain—a horrible cry that ended abruptly. And then the warehouse fell silent again—only to be invaded by another steady series of rhythmic clicks.
And this time they were definitely getting closer.
I unclipped the P-90 and set it aside. I had only the two clips for the weapon. But my Sig came into my hand with the smooth familiarity of long practice, and I moved, away from Georgia and the other prisoners, around behind the empty cages that had been meant for Will and