Chapter 37

Above us, the flares drifted, slow and steady.

They cast visible light, but the colors felt wrong. Too soft. Too clean for a place that held so much space. The grass shimmered underneath, almost peaceful in the artificial glow. But it felt revocable at a moment's notice, like everything else I'd come to rely on before I'd had to leave my old life behind me.

Sam moved like a half-remembered echo, her presence as taut as a tensioned thread strung in a silent room. We slinked into receded shadows, careful and wordless, two figures stitched together by a shared insistence to remain unseen.

Her eyes swept the obstacle-strewn path like a pair of searchlights in the dark.

For what exactly? Hell if I knew.

Dark shapes. A flicker of movement. Something in wait, ready to materialize like a phantom in a forgotten graveyard....whatever it was, she acted with the wariness of someone who'd been ambushed too often to mistake quiet for safety, so I paid careful attention.

After the day we’d had? I understood.

I kept close. Kept low and allowed her paranoid movements to set the pace for me. There was a rhythm to it. Her shoulders were drawn. Her breath was shallow. Her steps were soft enough the gravel was barely disturbed.

If Rob wore his carefully cultivated indifference like a mask, all smooth flow and city swagger, built for hierarchies and the concrete jungle of the stacks, Sam was different. Her movements were raw and animal.

I tried to match her crouch. Her stillness. To mimic the way she listened to the air as if it could whisper what she'd need to do to remain stealthy. She was instinctive and wild.

Between us and our path forward, everything held still. No birds. No goons in sight. Just the steady spill of rain and the peculiar hush that settles when a place forgets there's an audience. It was like, in the absence of watchers, even the landscape itself had grown self-consciously quiet.

I stopped cold as a flare tore open the eastern sky, its light briefly illuminating rain like fallen threads of electrified static. Sam paused, crouched low, her body folding into readiness like a reflex. I watched her silhouette against the shimmerless grass as more flares followed, barely a skipped beat between each as they rocketed skyward in tight formation.

Her hand rested on the butt of her slung rifle as I joined her in silent observation. "They're tracking something," she whispered.

I didn’t move. Not yet. Something tickled the back of my mind. The very last thing I wanted to do was botch it up and get us caught, but...no. Something felt wrong, like a broken rhythm where someone had missed a note in the scale.

I looked again. The positioning of the clusters was all wrong.

It felt like something we weren’t supposed to notice, except we did. Or at least I did. Each burst felt like a blip on some distant screen of predators converging, drawn toward whatever poor bastard had tripped the wire.

A chance, maybe? Or a trap dressed as possibility?

Quietly. Very quietly, I leaned over, voice low. No sudden moves.

"Sam. Quick question." I said aloud. Portsign would make it so we couldn't observe and communicate with the same amount of focus.

She didn’t look at me. Just kept her eyes on the area around us. Her voice was gruff but not aggressive. "What is it?"

"Listen. This Jones guy."

"Yeah? What about him?"

"He's looking to get out, right?"

She glanced at me, skeptical. "Probably. But what’s that got to do with us?"

"I think this is seriously important." I said, "If he’s looking to slip the net, where would he go? Any alternate exits that don’t end with a bullet?"

She paused. Actually paused. That alone earned my gratitude.

"From here?" she said. Her eyes swept the terrain. "No. The locks are the only guaranteed cross. Especially with the rain the way it’s been. The systems monitor water height. They hit a certain point, and they cycle. The first set of locks are fed into the Spireland's irrigation tanks and processing reservoirs."

Interesting. I filed it away.

"That's part of why timing is so important right now," she added, just as another set of flares went up. Green this time. Across the way, orange and green answered. Signals in a code we lacked the key for.

"But, if the rain keeps up and the levels spike," she continued, "the system triggers a purge. Emergency protocol. The locks open wide to dump the excess straight to sea. Keeps the canal sectors from flooding. The runoff lines lead out toward the Port."

Ah. That tracked.

I nodded. I’d seen the flow lanes before. Countless times. They ran like veins through the Stacks and Port, and I'd never asked where they led. Never wondered what they carried. Just another part of the machine I’d learned to ignore. Like the hum of the grid or flicker of surveillance lights.

Maybe it was the deterrence protocols or just human nature. I hadn't asked and hadn't looked too closely.

Huh.

Sam's voice snapped me out of it.

"Price. Listen, we gotta get moving. Without Rob, I've got one clean window for the two of us to get out of here, so time is short. Is there a point to all—" She waved her hand at me with an open palm, as if to scan me. "This?"

"Uh, right," I said and reoriented to my original train of thought. "So if the purge is triggered, what does that mean for us?"

Another series of flares. Orange, then orange.

Her face looked grim as she glanced toward them; they were in the direction we were going to go. "We'd have no way to tell how long we'd wait for the next window. We'd be stranded."

The word hung there, heavier than it should’ve been.

"Stranded?"

"Yes. Stranded. If that ever happened, it'd normally be when Frank or I would find Rob for new orders. Once the gates are open, the easiest-to-access physical bridge between the Corpo and Glow sides will be cut off."

Most of her expression was schooled. Calm. Procedural, like she was reading from a manual etched into her implants. She wanted to project no fear. No urgency. Just protocol. Like being cut off, isolated, and left behind was just another line in some handbook they all stuck to religiously.

I examined her face as she spoke. The edges of her eyes told the truth: she was terrified at the very thought. "If they open, the only other nearest option would be the Borderlanes." She hesitated. "Trust me, Owen. We do not want to go to the Borderlanes, especially not you. Not yet."

Another flare cracked the sky, this one slower, drifting wide. Not part of the pattern. Not part of the chase. The flares kept coming, but the rhythm was off now. Too many too fast. Someone was panicked.

"Sam, hold up." I murmured with a raised hand toward it, "Look. Over there...the stray. You see it?"

"Huh." Her voice was low, her forehead drawn tight with bewilderment.

Sam and I observed the groups as they moved. Off in the distance, the popcorn sound of gunfire was heard as another flare launched; blue.

"Okay, so is that him that's launching the flares and causing a scene?" I asked.

"Could be," she muttered, but didn't sound convinced of her own statement. "Or maybe someone got spooked and lost it."

"Why?"

She didn’t answer right away. The flare arced overhead as it cast long shadows into the open space beyond.

"To draw eyes," she said finally. "Or flush someone out."

More gunfire, followed by more flares. A mixture of orange, green, and blue.

"Why would he want that?"

She turned and gave me a look like I’d asked her to explain fire to a drowning man.

"You want me to psychoanalyze the guy who beat a man to death with his bare hands under the same tree we were hiding in?"

I exhaled.

"Fair."

The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It was loaded. Like the air itself was waiting for someone to say the wrong thing. Another flare went up. Orange this time, but it didn’t matter. The pattern was gone. The chase had unravelled into static. Chaotic noise.

And somewhere in that noise, Jones was moving.

Not toward escape, at least not for the moment, but toward something else.

I stopped watching the flares.

They’d lost their meaning. Too erratic, too loud. If Jones was behind it, he wasn’t signaling. He was baiting. Sam kept scanning the grid, eyes sharp and methodical. She was still playing by the rules. Still on the lookout for expected patterns.

I wasn’t.

If it was Jones, he didn’t move like a man focused on a clandestine escape. He moved like a man who tried to be seen. Every flare, every misstep wasn’t about evasion. It was about provocation.

He wanted someone flushed. Someone exposed. It was a game of chess, and only he knew the shape of the board.

I thought back to the body under the tree. The way the blood had pooled in the roots. The way Jones had looked afterward. He hadn't been panicked or rushed. Just...finished. Like he’d crossed something off a list. One task down, onto the next.

A theory began to form, sharp and insistent. I had to suppress the trill of excitement before it got ahead of me.

"Sam," I said quietly, "I don't think he's running from the system. Not yet anyway. I think he's rearranging it so they can't stop him."

She turned toward the horizon; her expression shifted as she watched the sky. The gunfire had stopped, but flares still rose. Much slower now. Spaced out like a blind game of Marco Polo with a player who refused to respond.

The short of it: whatever triggered the alert and set the chase in motion? It was working in our favor.

The irony wasn't lost on me either, that it was exactly what Sam had unconsentually been for me when I'd initiated her chase purely by accident. It had been the stroke of luck I hadn't realized I'd had until it had already changed the board.

With a shared look, I could tell she'd arrived at the same exact conclusion. The faint shadow of a scowl was on her face as, suddenly, I became very invested in what might be over the way and snapped my eyes onto the tree line to avoid her soured gaze.

Then...it happened.

The pause.

No flare. No gunshots. No sound.

We were just handed the distraction we sorely needed. A shift in attention. Eyes diverted elsewhere.

Without hesitation, Sam cradled her rifle into her arms and stood smoothly. She gestured for me to do the same.

"Let's move."