The Black Tide (Outcast 3)

Lyle had paused at the bottom of the stairs to allow a forklift to pass, so I clattered down to catch up with him. “Where's Martin likely to be at this hour?”

“Where he always fucking is—in supplies.” He made a vague motion toward the tunnels on the right then threw me a sour look. “And don't forget it's your shout at the bar tonight. No feigning illness again.”

“Shout” wasn't a term I was familiar with but it obviously had something to do with drinking and alcohol. While shifters did drink, they didn't do it to excess, as the humans seemed to. Which was probably just as well given a drunken shifter could cause a whole lot more damage to flesh and furniture than a human ever could.

“Right,” I said, and walked off.

Aside from the buzz of the forklifts, this place was strangely quiet. The yellowish lights dotting the dome high above lit some sections of the sandstone walls but cast others into shadow. The air was cool and somewhat stale, suggesting the purifiers weren't working at full capacity. Maybe that was why the guards had been wearing breathing apparatus—although it didn't explain why everyone else wasn't.

I reached the first of the two tunnels on this side of the room and paused. There was no guide to tell where it went, and the tunnel itself curved sharply away from the entrance, making it impossible to see what might lie up ahead. I moved on to check the other tunnel. It, too, was decidedly void of any useful information.

I pulled the small dart gun from the pack and then headed in. I couldn’t afford to linger, given the woman I was impersonating would obviously know her way around this place. The last thing I needed was to attract unwanted attention.

Once again the ceiling lights were dull, creating smalls pools of yellow surrounded by shadows. There were no doors cut into the thick metal walls and no sound other

than the soft echo of my steps.

Then, from somewhere up ahead, came a sound so soft human hearing wouldn't have caught it. It was nothing as clear as a footstep, but more a scrape, as if something had dragged briefly across the metal flooring. I frowned, my gaze sweeping the shadows, seeing nothing, sensing nothing.

The odd sound came again. Unease stirred, and my grip on the dart gun tightened as I continued on.

The noise echoed a third time. Tension wound through me, but I resisted the urge to stop. The tunnel began to curve to the right, and the shadows became thicker—so thick, in fact, that they chopped off the pool of light that puddled underneath one of the overheads.

That darkness wasn't natural, I realized abruptly. It was someone hiding behind a shield of shadows. That was why this place was so oddly lit.

My fingers twitched against the dart’s trigger, but I resisted the urge to fire and continued past that odd patch of darkness. Once I was sure there were no cameras or other guards hidden in the shadows further along the tunnel, I turned and fired. The drug on the dart’s tip was fast acting. In little more than a couple of seconds, there was a soft clang as something—someone—hit the metal floor.

The shadows remained clustered around the guard, but a quick pat down revealed the presence of some sort of device connected to his chest plate by several wires. Once I broke that connection, the shadows evaporated, revealing him to be another of the masked guards. I pulled off his breathing apparatus; his features were a twisted mess that was half human and half reptilian, and his skin was brown with odd patches of scales that were almost fishlike.

Whatever else this man was, he wasn't a product of natural selection. He was either a rift survivor or a result of human engineering.

If the latter applied, then maybe the only reason Sal and his partners hadn't acted on their mad plans before now was the simple fact that they’d been unable to recreate the success of the déchet program. It also meant that these lizard men, however ill-formed, might not be the only ones successfully raised to adulthood.

He was beginning to wheeze, his body shuddering as he struggled to suck in enough air. Either his lungs were malformed or the weird mix of his DNA meant he simply couldn't survive on regular air. And while I had no desire to let him suffer any longer than necessary, I also needed information. I couldn't keep wandering around this place aimlessly. I hesitated, and then touched his face; his skin was cold, clammy, and unlike anything I'd ever felt before.

I shuddered, even as information began to flow. Within seconds I had a somewhat fractured mental map of the base; this tunnel led to the bunkhouse and the medical facilities, which was perhaps why my approach hadn’t been challenged. The stock and supplies area was in the first tunnel, but it was the information on the largest tunnel that snagged my immediate attention. It apparently led to what the guard’s memories simply knew as research and production.

I pushed a little deeper and caught various images of needles being injected into his arm. We knew the trio had been intent on developing a pathogen capable of altering a vampire’s base physiology so that they no longer had to fear sunlight, but maybe they were also trying to find a shortcut to creating an army with the strength and speed of the déchet.

I could only hope that this poor man was an indication of how far they’d yet to go with the latter.

But maybe that was only because they were, unfortunately, a whole lot closer to achieving the former. The children they’d stolen—all of whom were either rift survivors or the children of survivors—had been their test subjects for such a pathogen. And at least one of those children—Jonas’s niece, Penny—had recently developed vampire-like tendencies while showing no fear of light.

If they’d developed a pathogen capable of turning a shifter or a human into a vampire, how far off could they be from being able to do the reverse?

Not far at all, if the recent attack on Chaos—the ramshackle city that clung to Central’s metal curtain wall—was any indication. Neither firelight nor regular light had affected the vampires who’d gone there to retrieve Penny, but at least the UVs had still turned them to ash.

I removed the spent dart from his arm then replaced his breathing apparatus and sat him upright against the wall. Hopefully, given his restless movements earlier, he’d put his collapse down to exhaustion and wouldn’t report the incident. Even if he did, how likely was it that he’d connect his collapse to Banks, given it had happened after I’d walked past him?

I reattached the wires on his chest unit and, as the thick shadows wrapped around him again, thrust up and strode back down the tunnel. No one paid me any attention as I walked across the loading bay, but the minute I drew close to the entrance to the larger tunnel, a light flashed on, bathing the entire entrance in eye-watering brightness. A burly, pale-skinned man stepped forward and held out a small scanner.

“Present your chip, soldier.”

I raised my right arm and watched as the screen flashed red.

“You haven't the clearance to proceed into this area,” he growled.

“I know, but I’ve been ordered to take this bag to Martin.”