The Black Tide (Outcast 3)

Could she see it?

“Anything?” the man still inside the vehicle said.

“No.” The woman's voice was curt. “If this is another false alarm, I'm going to be pissed.”

The man snorted. “And? It's not like you'll say anything—not given how complaints are handled. Check the other side of the thing.”

The woman grunted and obeyed. I quickly moved around the rift, making sure I kept enough distance between it and me to prevent activating the energy whips.

The woman reappeared and walked toward me. Her scent was unpleasant and acidic, but she nevertheless registered as human to my senses. If she were anything else, she surely would have smelled me by now. Or, at least, smelled the drying blood on my clothes.

But if she was human, then that also presented a problem. The scientists who'd designed us had made damn sure we could neither attack nor kill a human. I’d never actually tested that particular restriction before—it had never occurred to me to do so during the war, and there'd been no need in the 103 years after it.

She walked past me. I glanced at the rift; I couldn’t see the hover, which meant that even if her partner had raised the blast shields, he wouldn’t be able to see us. I flexed my fingers and then stepped up behind her. Though I’d been specifically designed to infiltrate shifter camps and seduce those in charge in order to gain and pass on all information relating to the war and their plans, I was no stranger to killing. Very few of the shifters I'd lain with had survived to tell the tale, but it was never something I'd done by choice—not until recently, at any rate.

But assuming this woman’s identity was possibly the only way of uncovering what was going on in this desert with any sort of speed, and merely knocking her out wasn’t really an option. I simply couldn’t risk her coming to and raising the alarm.

I guess I was about to discover if old programming still held sway.

In one smooth motion, I covered her mouth with one hand and forced her head up and back with the other, shattering her neck and taking her life between one heartbeat and another.

And felt neither restriction nor remorse at doing so.

How could I, after what had been done to the children and the horrendous dissections that had happened at Winter Halo? Everyone involved in the mad scheme to provide light immunity to the vamps and the wraiths deserved nothing more than death.

Everyone.

I lowered her body to the ground then released the light shield and quickly stripped her. Once I'd exchanged clothes, I shoved my two guns, the tracker, and the ammo into the backpack, and then strapped on her pulse rifle.

With that done, I bent down and studied the woman's face, fixing her sharp, thin features, lank yellow hair, and pale brown eyes in my mind. Her body shape was close enough to mine that I didn't have to do a full shift, but her features were so different that a facial change was necessary.

Once I had a firm grasp of the look I needed to attain, I reached for the part of my soul that made shifting possible. The force of the change swept through me like a gale, making my muscles tremble as my face restructured, and my skin, hair, and eyes changed. It was a process that was usually very painful, but this time, there was barely a flicker of protest from the nerve endings and bone structures being rerouted in the process.

“Banks?” the driver said. “Everything all right back there?”

“Yeah.” Even though my vocal chords had been altered and I now sounded like the woman, I hadn't heard her speak enough to catch the rhythm of her words, and that meant keeping my replies short.

After a quick check to ensure there were no comm devices attached to the woman, I dug the Radio Frequency Identity chip out of her right arm and wiped it clean on the discarded remnants of my shirt. It was law these days that everyone, be they human or shifter, have RFIDs inserted into their arms at birth. They held everything from medical records, work history, and credit information, but could also be programmed for use as a key in areas that required secure access. I currently had two of them—one inserted into each arm—thanks to Nuri and the fact I'd assumed two very different identities in Central.

I grabbed the small tin of false skin out of the pack, positioned the chip over the

one in my right arm, and then sprayed it into place. Jonas had assured me it would be undetectable and, after a few seconds, it was indeed hard to tell where my skin ended and the false skin began.

Finally, I unlatched her eye device and put it on. The world became nothing but a strange blur. I fiddled with the dial on the right side of the visor; turning it one way sharpened focus, allowing me to see the terrain but not the rift. Turning it the other made the rift jump into focus but threw everything else into an odd sort of darkness.

That was the reason she'd seen the rift, but not me.

“Banks, stop fucking about and get back here,” the driver said. “That sandstorm we spotted is getting far too close for comfort. We need to get out of here.”

“Give me a minute—I’ve got to dig the thing out.”

I set the eye device to normal vision, quickly shoved enough sand over the woman’s body to cover her, and then grabbed the pack and headed for the hover.

“Is that it?” The driver—a thin, wiry looking man with dark skin and a shock of coarse yellow-white hair—pointed with his chin at the backpack. “That hardly seems worth the time and effort to retrieve it.”

“Yeah.” I dumped the pack into the foot well then climbed into the vehicle.

“Did you open it?”