Devana Files: Chapter 34

Ascendancy, Part 2

Note: This is another long chapter. I put a scene break halfway through. I don’t know how Substack will react to long chapters, so if you run into technical difficulties (e.g. cannot see the end because its been cut off) let me know.

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This is the Thirty-Fourth chapter. We are in the home stretch, with about forty chapters in all!

You may find earlier chapters here:

Kate Devana Files: Table of Contents

Space 2074: The lunar colony is the new Wild West. Sheriff Kate Devana goes off-colony to wrangle a fugitive con artist who bilked retirees for billions and is trying to escape to Mars on a deep space supply shuttle. But back home, robots are glitching, killing people, and she is the target of a corrupt Federal Agent looking to avenge the death of his former partner. Bodies are piling up faster than she can get home.

On the moon, Kate Devana is the law.

While this is the 3rd novel in the series, each is designed to be read independently.

For accessibility, there is a voiceover for each chapter.

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Ascendancy, Part 2

APRIL 12, 2074

PROCELLARIUM IMPROVEMENT DISTRICT, LUNAR COLONY, U.S.A.

Kate put her palm flat on the morgue door and cautiously pushed it open to peer into the hallway. Rae stood behind her, using Kate’s height to shield herself from whatever might barge through. If they were in an old western they’d be peering out of a saloon onto the dusty frontier street, wearing belts with dual pistols and a lot of bullets weighing down canvas trousers, a Winchester 94 slung over their wool sack jackets, plus leather boots and wide-brimmed hats to hide their eyes from the evening sun so they could shoot straight. Behind them, the bartender would be cleaning up after a deadly bar fight. In the new wild west, their freshly laundered blue scrubs made of vat-grown cotton felt like canvas, and Eric was hurriedly shoving the last of their bloodstained clothes into the morgue aquamator. The similarity stopped there. On this frontier, the thieves and corrupt Feds ran with maniacal androids. There would be spider drones in the vents instead of cowboys on the roof. Not even the Almighty John Moses Browning could save them from the coming stampede of silicone and metal. The pistol taped to her back would do little more than annoy the swarm. Anyway, Browning would say a pistol was the little gun you used to fight your way to find a bigger gun, like a coilgun rifle, or a howitzer, or a nuke, which she sorely needed.

The hall looked safe enough. Empty, with nothing but dust eddies and prematurely peeling beige paint in both directions. There were no footfalls from the floors above of panicked humans running away from gunshots. Nor of armed androids creeping towards them. The skittering inside the ducts had died down. Maybe it had been a rodent, evacuating, because it knew danger was coming. Vent fans hummed, pumping something that smelled like ozone.

Two sharp trills sounded inside her pocket. Another problem arriving.

“Is that Agent Lindsay’s phone?” Rae asked.

Behind her, she heard Eric slam a door and punch a button. The aquamator began to gurgle.

Kate pulled the phone out and glanced at the message.

From Agent Anders: “Status?”

She held the phone wide so Rae could see the screen.

“You should shut it off.”

She wanted to keep the phone as long as she could. Long enough to clone it, at least. In the brief time she’d swiped through it, she’d already gleaned a lot of information. It had more, much more. Possibly even Axio’s location. Still, Rae was right. It was a homing beacon. A green dot on a map in a control room somewhere, or coordinates in an algorithm, leading directly to the three of them. It may as well have been an ankle monitor.

She wanted to keep it, but she couldn’t shut it off. Like ankle monitors, when she shut it off, the network would likely broadcast all sorts of alarms. Spider drones would overrun the phone’s last known location. She wanted to be on the other side of the colony when that happened.

“I can’t.” She shook her head.

“Are you going to reply then?”

She couldn’t reply to the message because they might guess it wasn’t from Agent Lindsay. But she couldn’t not answer it either. Not replying was as suspicious as dropping off the network. She had to think of something soon.

“I don’t know yet.”

Eric pulled up in line. Professor Rae decided it was time for the day’s janitorial quiz. “Did you spray down? Did you rinse the counters off? And dump the water?”

After every checklist item, Eric nodded. Kate tuned out, pocketing the phone and listening to the rhythm of the hallway. The elevator motors were humming, moving people. So far, so good. The first thing the Feds would do was shut down the elevators.

“Metal ruins the blades,” Rae said, deep in lecture mode.

“Metal?” Kate asked, re-entering the conversation.

“She had a prosthetic. You’re not supposed to put metal in the new aquamator.”

“Right, the prosthetic charade.” Kate remembered thinking Agent Lindsay was hiding a prosthetic on the skybridge and pretending to have a limp.

She turned and put her arm around Rae. “It’s not his fault.”

Rae was in shock, nitpicking, clutching for control over an uncontrollable situation. Eric didn’t deserve the criticism. Most people would have froze or screamed or wept. Even if they saw it coming. He had the aquamator open and ready to go, and it wasn’t like they had other options. Someone would have come and poked in the body freezer. The aquamator was quick thinking, and it bought them some time.

“And I didn’t break it. In fact—”

Kate held her palm out. They didn’t have time for bickering. “I ordered him to do it, so blame me. Our options were limited. Look, we didn’t—don’t have a lot of time. Let’s make the aquamator a tomorrow problem.”

“Don’t patronize me.” Rae landed an elbow in Kate’s side. It didn’t hurt as much as she expected.

Eric was frowning and shaking his head. Rae wasn’t looking at him, thankfully. It would have made her even more miffed than she already was.

“Eric, go grab two of the pathology saws,” Kate told him.

“What are we doing with those?” he asked.

Cooling off, she thought. But the saws might prove useful.

“Just go get them.”

Eric wavered, looking at Rae.

Kate said, “They will come in handy for disabling androids. If we are lucky, we’ll break more machines before today is over. Maybe all of them.”

Rae nodded. Eric grinned, zipping across the room to a metal cabinet along the far wall.

“Don’t be hard on him,” Kate said. “He did good.”

“Are you taking his side?”

“I’m not taking anyone’s side, sweetie.”

“Because it sounds like you are undermining me in my own morgue.”

“I’m on the same side you are. The let’s get the fuck out of here we just shot a Fed side.”

She was interrupted by more trilling inside her pocket. She could hear Rae in her head, stop looking at the damn phone. But she had to risk it and read the message.

Agent Anders: “Did Devana take the bait?”

She needed to reply and she needed to reply soon. She also needed to reply in a way that wouldn’t make Anders suspicious.

She scrolled the message thread to get a feel for Agent Lindsay’s style. It was strange that there was not a lot of history. The beginning of this conversation was about a day ago. Swiping around, she found an older conversation that ended three days ago. Was that odd, a three-day gap in their messages? They were partners for six months. Did they talk in person for those three days? Or did they delete those messages?

It felt weird to read about herself in the third person. Maybe she should have been flattered. They had one brain between the two of them, and it looked to be entirely occupied with Devana. It was like reading messages between obsessed paparazzi, except these two were Federal Agents. His messages were filled with vitriol and frustration. He complained they’d let Devana escape again, and expressed irritation that they couldn’t go into Playground. Lindsay, for her part, didn’t engage with his anger. Her responses stuck to flat status updates. Devana on skybridge. Devana exiting Playground. Devana in morgue. Devana here, there, and everywhere. His predictable response: We should kill her now!

She swiped to the end and started typing.

Eric practically skidded to a halt in line behind Rae. The pathology saws had disappeared up his sleeves, hidden by his massive forearms.

Rae looked up at Eric and sighed, deflated. “I’m sorry I dragged you into this mess. You shouldn’t have to clean up after me.”

“No need to apologize.” He smiled. “It’s literally in my job description. Plus, I’ve wanted to stuff her in the aquamator since she got here. I’m just thankful Anders isn’t alive to see us kill another one of his partners.”

“Anders is alive,” Kate said evenly, and showed Eric the message.

“Huh.” He paused thoughtfully. “Agent Lindsay told us he died on Kuipers.”

“When was that?”

“When did he die, or when did she tell us that?”

“When did she tell you that?”

“Yesterday. She showed up alone. Here, actually. We—Leyna and I, that is—were standing right outside the door, when Agent Faker Limp comes strolling off the elevator. We both thought it was odd. Feds and demons travel in pairs, right?”

Kate nodded. “Did you ever see Anders?”

“No. Leyna was pretty convinced he wasn’t here. On the colony I mean. Agent Lindsay said Anders fell out of an airlock on Kuipers. Some kind of freak accident. Leyna said something about—ahh, I don’t remember exactly. She thought Anders was maybe holding Jin. She was saying a lot of things I didn’t follow. At first, I thought it was because Jin was missing, and she was upset. That was part of it. I think she was also…”

When Eric didn’t finish, she asked, “She was also what?”

He looked at Rae. “Not important. Right after that, some security guard showed up and gave her that thing.”

“Did you believe Agent Lindsay’s story about Anders?”

It was a dumb question. Kate wasn’t even sure why she asked. No, she was sure why she asked: It was the skull after Ander’s name in the file on Agent Lindsay’s phone. Still, it was a ridiculous question. She knew Anders was alive. She’d spoken to him on the skybridge, through Leyna.

“When a Fed’s mouth is talking, they’re lying,” he said. He didn’t sound convincing.

“But?”

“But nothing. She’s a liar.”

Kate waited.

“I did wonder about the story, though. I mean, she could have said anything. She could have said Anders was delayed. She could have said he’d gotten spacesick and couldn’t come out of his room. A million other excuses. Instead, she said he fell out of an airlock. Oddly specific. Who makes that shit up? And there was another thing—I checked the reports. There was a freak accident on Kuipers a few days ago. But no name. The details have been redacted.”

Kate looked at the phone and reread the conversation between Anders and Lindsay. “Another day, another Federal Agent lie, I guess.”

Even as she said it, she had doubts. A crazy theory tried to tunnel to the surface. Why would they do that? The answer was too terrifying, so she stomped it back down. They needed to move.

“You should reply, ‘I’ll get back to you later. I’m in the bath right now.’” He laughed.

She grinned. Tempting, but she wasn’t suicidal.

Rae said, “She lied about everything, including that stupid limp. She lied about Anders, and she lied about Axio—” Rae’s voice started quivering, but then she seemed to regain her composure. “I am still not sorry I shot her. They took Axio.” Rae held her breath a moment, shaking her head, like she was building courage for something. And then it spilled out like water over a dam. “Maybe I should just turn myself in.”

“No. Absolutely not. We stick together,” Kate said. She almost added: ‘till death do us part,’ but decided it would hit too close to home.

“I can say I panicked and you two had nothing to do with it.”

Eric said, “I go where you two go.”

“It won’t work,” Kate said. “They’ll know we helped you. And even if they don’t, they’ll come after us anyway.”

Rae assented, weakly. Eric said, “So how are we getting out of here?”

Kate peeked out into the hallway again. It was empty, but the wrong kind of empty. It felt like the rats had hidden themselves from a looming shootout.

“Same way we came in. We put one foot in front of the other and pretend nothing happened.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Eric and Rae asked, almost simultaneously.

“My grandfather’s exact words when I told him I was enlisting in the Marines.”

“Shouldn’t we take the service tunnels?” Rae asked.

The service tunnels were two floors below, a maze of mean breaker boxes labeled HIGH VOLTAGE and pipes the size of Eric’s torso, carrying pressurized steam or raw sewage.

“If we want to keep the phone, we have to assume they are tracking it. She has no business being in the service tunnels. Plus, the signal is spotty down there because of all the metal. As far as they are concerned, she’s alive. We’re innocent, so we go where innocent people go.”

Which reminded her, too much time had gone by since the phone trilled. Kate finished typing the truth. The reply whooshed into cyberspace.

“What did you just do?” Rae asked.

“Agent Anders wanted to know whether I took the bait. I told him the truth.”

She showed Rae the reply. ‘Devana didn’t bite.’

The phone trilled. Agent Anders: ‘Bring Dr. Torres here. We are ready for Dr. Torres’s ascension.’

“Shit,” Rae said. “Now what?”

She could work with this, maybe even turn it to their advantage.

“Do you have your phone on you?”

“Of course I do. Why?”

“Agent Lindsay is taking you into custody.”

“I’ll go on my own,” Rae said, “and tell them you weren’t here.”

“We need to stick together. They are trying to separate us, and so far, they’ve been successful. Eric, you shut your phone off.”

“Why am I shutting mine off?”

“They will see Rae’s phone and this one moving together. We don’t want yours alongside, raising suspicions.”

Eric clicked his phone off. Kate replied to Anders: ‘Bringing her in,’ and pressed send.

Shit. Her body clenched as the message whooshed away. She couldn’t undo. Or edit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Should she have typed, ‘Bringing Dr. Torres in,” mirroring their formality?

Maybe it would be okay. Maybe Anders wouldn’t notice. The message status changed to read. Too late now.

She held her breath. When nothing happened in the hall, she put the phone away and pushed the door open. “Ready?”

“Is not ready an option?” Eric joked. “I was never good at acting.”

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“Sawman, you’re in the rear,” she said, pushing the door all the way open. “Sweetie, you’re in the middle. We’ll take the stairs and go past the ICU.” And see how long their luck would last, she didn’t say aloud.

“I am Sawman.” Eric held up his arms, grinning like a cartoon villain, holding the rotary saws like horrifying prosthetics. Somehow, he’d flicked his forearms, slipping the saws out, while thumbing them on. They buzzed and vibrated, ready to cut metal. He was frightening. With his wild eyes, long beard, and blue scrubs, he looked like some sort of madman doctor. A human would see him and run. But an android would keep coming. They were relentless sociopaths that didn’t feel fear.

“Go for the chest, Sawman,” she said, stepping into the hallway. “That’s where the batteries are.”

The corridor was clear in both directions. The stillness bothered her. This floor was always still, of course. It was the morgue floor. Today it had a coldness, too. Ghostly fingers scratched the base of her skull. It was the theory about Agent Anders, creeping into her consciousness.

They made it through the hall, creeping slowly at first, and then quicker. They went into the stairwell and up the stairs without encountering so much as a bug. She didn’t hear a single footfall on the stairs, nor one in the hallways above them. Each step through the hospital’s dusty nothingness made her stomach increasingly jittery. Her thoughts were scattered. Her mind was repeating: the Feds didn’t plan silent ambushes. Like a feeble mantra, it wasn’t helping. Maybe it even made her apprehension worse. She’d hear the thunderous footsteps descending on them from several floors away, she told herself. Noise traveled far through the thin aluminum-skinned walls of the hospital. So then, why didn’t anyone report gunshots? The Feds had told everyone to stay silent. That had to be it. They didn’t know Agent Lindsay was dead. What someone in a control room monitoring phone locations would see is Rae’s phone pinging alongside Agent Lindsay’s, as they expected. Rae was coming in, wherever in was. Why was there a three-day gap in the conversation between Agent Lindsay and Agent Anders? She hoped she didn’t fuck up the reply.

They reached the wide entrance to the ICU. It looked like it had returned to some semblance of normalcy on a lunar Monday evening. Machines beeped in the far corner behind blue curtains. At the front station, she saw the same nurse she’d seen before, brown eyes with pink scrubs, her head down in a tablet.

They’d almost slipped past the ICU, to the other side of the entrance, when the nurse said, “Your friend is gone.”

Kate backed up. The nurse was smiling at her over the tablet on her desk.

“Friend…?”

“You know, your boyfriend.”

Boyfriend was a strange word choice. Maybe the nurse was trying to tell her something. She had no idea what. Kate looked at Rae, who shrugged, and then Eric, who repeated the shrug. Everyone in the solar system knew she was married to Rae. For a time, there were servers devoted to The New Lunar Power Couple and channels with live sightings and paparazzi following them around. The frenzy, thankfully, died out after she’d put a few aggressive influencers in the hospital. They broke into the apartment and harassed Axio. What they hadn’t appreciated was how much restraint she’d shown, not tossing them off the balcony. A sixteen-story fall, even on the moon, would have sent them to the morgue.

The nurse knew she didn’t have a boyfriend, and Rae was standing right here.

“Ex-boyfriend,” was all she could think to say, playing along.

The nurse smiled. She paused for what felt like a long time, as if she were thinking up the right words. “I heard you broke up. He left fifteen minutes ago with his asshole buddy.”

There was some extra emphasis on ‘heard.’ Subtle, but she picked it up. And maybe she imagined it, but the nurse had a look on her face as if they were now co-conspirators. As if she strongly disapproved of what the Feds had done with the place.

Kate looked down the hall to the hospital lobby. She could make out shadows, the outstretched feet of people waiting in chairs.

The nurse was trying to tell her she’d heard the gunshots. ‘Her boyfriend’ must mean the android that had been guarding the ICU, the one she’d asked about on her way in. It was no longer anywhere to be seen. ‘His asshole buddy’ must mean the android that had been with Agent Lindsay. The androids left the hospital together. She didn’t know exactly when Rae shot Agent Lindsay. It could have been thirteen minutes ago or seventeen minutes ago. In any case, the nurse was telling her that the androids were gone before the shots.

She’d rather be lucky than right any day. But, what were the odds? Could they really be that lucky? Lucky that the androids left, minutes before the shooting?

“It was a bad breakup,” Kate said. “I’ll be looking to avoid him for a while.”

“I heard them saying they were going clubbing.”

Clubbing must mean Playground. The nurse was saying they were going to stake out Greg’s place.

“Understood. Thanks for letting me know.”

It was good information, but why would androids say that out loud? Androids communicated with each other through electronic packets. They rarely spoke, and when they did, they spoke to humans, not each other. If it was a trap, it was set before Agent Lindsay was shot. Did that make sense? She’d read the messages between the agents, and there was no indication of a trap. But then, the messages only went back a day or so, and then there was a big gap.

The fact that the androids weren’t here for the gunshots should have been a relief. It should have put a dance in her step. Instead, it ratcheted her apprehensiveness three whole levels. Her stomach had a familiar burn.

When they got a few steps down the hall, Rae whispered, “What was that about?”

“We are changing the plan. We need to get into Playground through the back door.”

“Then why are we still going this way?”

“I need to see something.”

The hospital lobby had a handful of people waiting to be seen with the usual Monday evening ailments. One woman was bundled up to her neck in a cream blanket with a hotel logo on it, her face full of flu. A couple in the back corner looked as pallid as the oatmeal paint on the walls. The woman leaned against the wall, head tilted and eyes fixed on the ceiling, giving it the trying-not-to-vomit-again stare. The man had his head between his knees, holding it over a clear blue bag. Spacesickness, maybe, or too much greasy vacation food and alcohol. A mother and child sat along the left wall. The boy had his arm in a sling and was trying to operate a red pickup truck, a drone. Its controller, a small rectangular thing, was stiffly propped in his bad hand, while his good hand thumbed the screen. The mother looked healthy, trying to watch something on the tablet in her lap.

No one looked up as they crossed through. Everyone was too busy minding their own sickness.

At the threshold to the concourse, she raised her hand to signal for them to halt. It wasn’t crowded. There were maybe a dozen people walking around. A couple stood by a food kiosk waiting for a mechanical arm to retrieve deep-fried protein blobs from a fryer. A family lingered in front of a toy shop with their young boy’s hand pointing at a red and yellow superhero costume behind the floor-to-ceiling glass.

All in all, a normal Monday evening.

“What are we looking for?” Rae had taken Kate’s hand and tugged at it.

There were no androids in sight.

“Not sure.”

Her office was on the second floor, three doors down the concourse, on the left. The electronic blinds were closed, so she couldn’t have seen a ghost. No, she wasn’t seeing ghosts. She was talking to them. What would happen if she picked up the phone and messaged Agent Lindsay? She knew, and it filled her with dread.

Eric said, “We should hurry, there are no androids around.”

He lifted his foot to step into the concourse.

“Wait.” She inadvertently used her drill sergeant voice. Eric’s eyes got wide. He’d never heard it.

“What’s wrong?” Rae tugged at Kate’s hand again.

She felt like a mouse must feel at the threshold of a hole in the kitchen wall, knowing there was a cat somewhere around the corner ready to pounce. The hairs on her neck goose-pimpled.

They knew Agent Lindsay was dead. That much she felt in her gut. But it wasn’t because she’d fucked up the message. And they weren’t coming, either. How did that make sense?

Kate spun around and faced the lobby. It wasn’t important now. What was important was getting out of there.

The boy was running his toy pickup truck in a circle. It smashed the foot of a chair. His mother chided him with something that turned his face red.

Kate walked over. By the time she got there, the mother had bent over and yanked the pickup truck off the floor, placing it on the chair on the other side of the boy.

“I’d like to borrow your drone.”

The mother waved her hand, irritated, as if saying, ‘Oh please, take it away now,’ but then looked at her son on the verge of tears.

Kate kneeled down in front of the boy. “I need to borrow your truck for official police business.”

“You look like a doctor.”

Kate looked down at her scrubs. “What’s your name?”

The boy looked at his mother for permission. She nodded. He said, “Niko.”

“The three of us are undercover, Niko. Do you think you can keep our secret?”

“Are you hiding from the androids?”

“What makes you say that?”

“My mom said they’re Feds, and everybody who knows what’s good for them is hiding from the Feds.”

Kate stood up and looked outside the lobby at the people circling the concourse. The couple at the food kiosk was picking up their food off the counter. Something in a basket and dusted with powdered sugar. She wanted to ask the boy how long they’d been here and whether they’d heard the gunshots. Then she wondered whether Agent Lindsay’s death was always part of the plan, like the other victims in the morgue.

The mother patted the boy’s hands. “Why don’t you let them play with your truck?”

After a little more coaxing and a promise to get him a new one if she broke it, she had the pickup and the controller under her arm. She thanked them.

Kate led them back the way they came, down the hall, and past the ICU to the stairwell.

“Killing Federal Agents. Now stealing toys from kids. We’ve really hit rock bottom,” Rae said.

“It’s for a good cause,” Kate replied.

“Killing Feds should be the cause,” Eric added.

At the stairwell, she put the truck at her feet, aiming it down the hall, towards the hospital lobby and main entrance. The controller was a small handheld thing, like a smaller version of a phone. She opened it, found the map interface, and entered a bunch of waypoints, creating a path around the colony that eventually led to Playground. She made sure that the truck would hug the walls, where it was less likely to be stepped on or bumped. The route was believable. It was close to the route she would have taken. The battery was eighty-nine percent charged, enough for three laps.

Before she put Agent Lindsay’s phone on the toy, she checked it for the file on The Ascendancy Project. It had been updated. Process P028172 added a skull after Agent Lindsay’s name seventeen minutes ago, about the exact time of death. She’d been wrong. Very wrong. Agent Anders had a skull after his name because he was dead, too. He died on Kuipers four days ago, just like Agent Lindsay had told Eric. The message thread she’d been reading between Anders and Lindsay was only a day old. That made sense. It must be when Anders possessed Leyna’s body.

The puzzle pieces fell into place. She wondered whether the victims got to choose how they died, or if the algorithm chose for them, or whether it even mattered. She imagined a popup box on a cold monitor screen somewhere. Manner of death: Suicide by Dr. Rachel Torres, with an assist from Katera Devana. The candidate will achieve this by relentlessly turning the screws on Dr. Torres until she shoots. It was a test. Or some weird ritual. Except it wasn’t just a ritual, was it? She was no metaphysicist, or priest, or rabbi. She couldn’t say for sure whether the victims were conscious, or even sentient, in the form they were in now. She doubted it. But they certainly weren’t human. Now they were something much worse than dead. They were in that hellish place before sleep, where you just couldn’t turn your mind off. Some called it purgatory. This purgatory was powered by thorium. It wasn’t just about control, either. They were using the artifact like some sort of ancient, dark leviathan, sucking people into a silicon void and then killing them off. As many as they could. Maybe the whole colony. Maybe the whole planet.

She shuddered and rechecked the file. Kate herself was still Unsuitable. Leyna was still a Candidate, as was Rae. The question mark had been removed after Rae’s name. The status of Jin and Axio had been promoted to Ascended. There were no skulls after their names, thankfully. But there soon would be, if she didn’t stop them.

She set Agent Lindsay’s phone in the bed of the little red pickup and told Rae to put hers on top. The hallway was empty. The stairwell at her back would lead to the service tunnels.

Rae looked despondent.

She put her arm around Rae. “We don’t need it anymore. I know where Axio and Jin are.”

That wasn’t entirely true. She knew the approximate location. But she also knew the place had to be big and easily identifiable on recent satellite photos. If she were right, it would be heavily fortified. Probably hardened against nukes, too. Not that she could risk vaporizing Axio.

She didn’t want to think about the assault plan. It would require a whole lot of firepower she didn’t have. She needed to find them first. Later, she could figure out what to do about it.

Rae surrendered her phone, gently putting it over top Agent Lindsay’s, like she was lowering a miniature casket. After that, Eric did the same.

Kate put the drone controller on top of the three phones, face up, and then touched its green button. The red pickup with its deck of phones whirred down the hall, through the lobby, following its pre-programmed path.

Eric and Rae looked at her simultaneously. Eric spoke first. “So what now?”

“Service tunnels. To Greg’s. We need to stay off grid.”

“Like a bunch of rats.”

“Don’t knock rats,” she said. “They’re tasty. Plus, they are smart enough not to get stomped by fucking androids.”

Devana Files: Chapter 35