Page 13 of Alien Mercenary's Wife
Instead of boarding with the rest of the crowd, she turned and ducked through the crowd, keeping herself low to avoid being spotted.
She was almost at the top of the stairs when the train exploded.
The shockwave hit her. The floor shaking beneath her feet, dust and debris raining from the ceiling as alarms began to wail.Behind her, screams pierced the air, along with the crash of falling glass, the electrical snap of severed power lines.
She spun around to see smoke pouring from the platform she'd left. The train she would have boarded was a twisted wreck of metal and flame. Emergency lights flickered on as the primary power grid shut down, casting everything in harsh red shadows.
"Attention passengers," a calm voice announced over the emergency system. "Please evacuate the station in an orderly fashion. Emergency services are responding to a mechanical failure on the main platform."
Mechanical failure.Right.
She joined the crowd running for the exits, her mind. They'd tried to kill her. She knew that without thinking. An explosive device, probably planted in the maintenance cart or hidden in the infrastructure somewhere. If she'd boarded that train like any normal commuter, she'd be dead right now.
Reaching street level, she yanked off her cap and threw it in a bin, shaking her hair out as she kept walking. She needed to put distance between herself and the station. Around her, emergency vehicles were already converging on the scene, their sirens adding to the chaos.
She yanked out her datapad and checked the headlines:Metro Explosions Rock Multiple Transit Stations.Not just here, but stations for Sectors 5 and 8 had been hit as well—every possible route she might have taken to return home.
Her blood turned to ice.
They'd tried to kill her no matter which train she chose. The only reason she was alive was her decision to change her escape route.
Which meant that whoever had sent that message about meeting at Café Luna was either dead or working for the people trying to kill her.
The smart thing would be to run. Disappear into the underground, abandon the lawsuit, try to survive long enough to die of natural causes rather than corporate assassination.
Her jaw tightened. But that meant that people would have died for nothing. Good soldiers who had done nothing more than their duty, and they’d been screwed over by the very people they should have been able to trust. Their deaths were evidence of a conspiracy that reached into the highest levels of corporate and government power. One she intended to uncover.
So she walked deeper into the city, away from the emergency response teams and smoking transit stations. Her left leg sent spasms of pain up her spine with each step, each cramp a reminder of her deteriorating condition. But despite the state of her body, her mind was clear.
If Nexus Dynamics wanted her dead, she’d make the fuckers work for it.
Because one way or another, the truth about those neural implants was going to come out.
4
Shit. The sirens were getting closer.
Reese kept walking away from the transit station, forcing herself to maintain a steady pace despite the adrenaline coursing through her system. Behind her, chaos was building… emergency responders, news crews, and crowds of onlookers drawn by the smoke and flashing lights… the perfect cover for someone who needed to disappear.
Her left leg was starting to betray her, the muscles cramping in irregular spasms, which made her gait uneven. She couldn't afford to look injured or draw attention to herself, but the neural implant was choosing the worst possible moment to remind her of its presence. Each step sent shooting pains up her thigh, and the telltale numbness crept toward her knee.
Three blocks from the station, she ducked into a public restroom in a small park. The facility was grimy and poorly maintained, exactly the kind of place people avoided unless they were desperate. Perfect for what she needed to do.
She locked herself in the largest stall and pulled out her emergency kit. Inside were items that had nothing to do with her official identity: hair dye capsules, colored contact lenses, areversible jacket, and enough cash to survive for weeks without using traceable credit accounts.
She cracked the first capsule and worked the temporary dye through her brown hair, watching it darken to black in the cracked mirror above the sink. The darker hair, combined with contacts that changed her eyes from brown to green, made her look different enough to fool casual surveillance. The transformation was crude but effective.
A reversible jacket completed the change. What had been navy blue civilian wear was now a gray maintenance worker's uniform, complete with name patch and corporate logos. Not perfect, but good enough to blend into the background of urban workers who were invisible to most people.
Reese studied her reflection. She looked older, harder, with the kind of face that belonged to someone who cleaned office buildings or repaired infrastructure somewhere. Anonymous. Forgettable.
The next phase was movement.
She couldn't go home… they'd be watching her apartment. Couldn't use her regular routes or frequent the places where she was known. Everything that defined her previous daily life was now off-limits.
Exiting the restroom, she began walking toward Sector 12, taking a circuitous route to avoid main thoroughfares and surveillance clusters. Her leg was getting worse, the cramping spreading up into her hip, but she forced herself to maintain the steady pace of a worker heading to her shift.
The crowds helped. Mid-afternoon foot traffic was heavy enough to provide cover without being so dense that she'd stand out. She moved with the flow of pedestrians, another anonymous face in the urban river of humanity.
