Chapter 233

Isaac swung onto the motorcycle, pressed the helmet down, drew one deep breath, then carefully eased on the throttle. In the silence, the soft exhaust note sounded like thunder. As he descended the gentle slope running along the high wall, he lowered his upper body to make himself smaller. Once he left Sun Haven, where the governor’s mansion stood, and entered the narrow underground road that connected to Nathan Riverside Road, he began to pick up speed.

The fluorescent lamps lined up overhead blinked like a pulse and vanished behind him beyond the edge of his sight. Following that stark-white trail of light felt like punching through the universe. He pushed the speed to a dangerous degree and shot out the far exit, merged onto the riverside road, and thought of the governor’s desk.

That old Art Deco desk, fashionable up through the early 1960s, had no framed photos, no sticky notes or crumpled memos, not even a receipt. It was like a stage set with all traces of real life scrubbed away. And on that stage set laid over a trap, there was bait to hook a thief.

A setup? The odds were high. Then why hadn’t they taken him alive? If they’d wanted to capture him, the governor’s home had offered countless chances. Isaac, accelerating, thought about when he himself would have struck. The moment he scaled the wall to the second floor and the brief instant right after he entered the pitch-black study before his eyes adjusted—he’d been completely defenseless. So why had they let those decisive instants slip by?

There was only one answer. Hybris wasn’t hunting Isaac. They wanted someone they could reach through him.

The two Asians Hybris was chasing. Isaac pictured Baekgyeong’s face and Manu Singh’s, one after the other. In his mind, Manu Singh’s face dissolved like fog, and Siron’s came into razor focus. The face in that black-and-white photograph that had seized him.

What if, by any chance, the one they were tailing was Yoon Siron?

Isaac clamped the brakes hard and pulled into the shoulder of the five-lane road. He dismounted and felt under the frame to find a tracker. Nothing. He checked the gaps in the frame and the saddlebag undercarriage, same result. He even ran his hand over the muffler, hot as a stainless-steel pan—no tracker.

Was he overestimating them? Or had they hidden a tracker so cleverly he couldn’t find it? Isaac couldn’t easily let go of his suspicion and looked down at the gloves, the heat having burned holes through them.

Just then, the faint exhaust of a motorcycle drifted from far off. Was that chill he felt—those neck hairs bristling—right?

Isaac mounted up to confirm whether Hybris was on his tail. He rolled out at reduced speed and took an exit ramp that linked to another road.

The downhill curve tightened sharply, short and steep. Beyond the guardrail, the river’s darkness drew close. He stopped the bike in the hatched triangular zone marked to block vehicle entry, pulled off his helmet and hurled it into the river, then, at once, hefted the motorcycle and flung it toward the water. Without hesitation, he vaulted the roadside barrier.

Suspended between the black river and the concrete bridge pier, he gripped a steel reinforcement beam with his fingertips.

“Goddamn it.”

A groan torn by pain slipped out with the curse. A shard of metal that had punched through his glove embedded in his palm like a thorn. He quickly shifted his weight to the other hand and hung there like a plumb bob, catching his breath.

Focusing, he swung his body and managed to hook the tip of one foot into a gap in the structure, then glanced back. His destination lay about seven hundred meters diagonally from the bridge: a boat dock. The distance was long, and the shapes were only a blur in the murk on all sides, but without a pause he dropped into the black water.

Soaked through, he piloted a boat out from the dock and cut the engine about 1.5 kilometers from where he had ditched the motorcycle. Minutes later, flashing patrol lights winked beyond the concrete guardrail. They had even brought in the police to chase him.

If the police were involved, they might deploy a helicopter as well. Before the search from the sky could begin, Isaac skimmed away over the black chop.

Lewis, piloting a jet boat that carved through the dark current, glanced at the city lights stretched long to the left and suddenly felt dizzy. As if peering down a hallway through a door’s peephole, the warped landscape came rushing at his eyes.

What was this strange sensation, as if he were shut in a room looking out at the world through a lens? Was he still dreaming? If so, was this a lucid dream? Was he repeating a nightmare he knew was a dream but couldn’t wake from? If so, then I—

“I have to wake up.”

Startled by the ominous words that had slipped out of his own mouth, Lewis lost his grip on the wheel. The jet boat, bereft of thrust and control, tipped to the left and spun a half-turn in a sickening yaw. He grabbed the wheel and hauled on the throttle; the boat slewed side to side, then found its heading and pushed forward.

“You crazy bastard! Are you out of your mind?”

In that instant of rotation, Ted Stone, flung to the floor, sprang up and shouted. His unpleasant metallic voice sounded distant and alien, like a caller patched in to a radio show.

He hated that voice. If he abandoned the man in this abyssal black sea and left him behind, would he never have to hear it again, as if the power to a waterlogged radio had been cut? The image of Ted drowning in lightless dark made Lewis’s heart hammer to the point of pain.

Lewis disliked Ted Stone for no reason. No—hate would be closer. Even he didn’t know why. For some reason, looking at the man made him think of Joseph Miller, the social worker he had killed.

His agitation cooled at once. If he killed Ted, Lewis himself would jeopardize the mission he’d been given. And he truly did worry about that.

Lewis had come to love Hybris. Once he had despised it, but no longer. For an alpha, Hybris wasn’t a choice; it was the premise of survival. If the few alphas were to live among the common mass of low-value humanity, they had to unite. Yet he couldn’t bring to mind the exact trigger of why he’d come to love Hybris. When he thought about Hybris, his head went cloudy, opaque. But the fuzzier his thoughts got, the clearer his conviction became—an odd paradox that ruled him.

And yet, when he snapped back to himself, some secret part of him was already sneering at the self who loved Hybris.

He gradually throttled down and brought the boat to a stop, then looked back. On the floor of the second row, a man with his arms and legs restrained lay curled like a shrimp. Seeing the unconscious man filled him with relief—and a rising intoxication.

He had kidnapped the middle-aged man an hour earlier. He knew only the exact description and the name; what job the man had or why he had to be taken, he did not know. But the Designer’s orders, relayed through Dylan, were to be executed without exception. That was the greatest truth Lewis knew. He cared about nothing else.

Running seaward with land off to starboard, Lewis realized he was passing near Melver Beach, where he’d been left brain-dead after an accident. The day he’d come out to surf the sea, he’d crossed death’s threshold, and by Anna’s choice had become an alpha.

Anna—Anna McCarthy. His only blood. Even though he’d thought of her name for the first time in a long while, surprisingly he felt nothing. He closed his eyes and drew a deep breath. Threaded through Ted Stone’s foul pheromones were faint traces of Siron’s and Baekgyeong’s.

Which meant the two abductees had reunited and returned to Baggers City. Lewis likewise felt nothing. His past held no interest for him. The feelings he’d once had felt flattened, as if he were watching the dull life of someone else.

He opened up the throttle again. Ted said something beside him, but his voice was swallowed by the spray and the engine and didn’t reach Lewis at all. He simply headed toward a city nightscape that felt as trite as a postcard from a tourist trap.

Long past midnight, at the city’s darkest hour, he reached the Nathan River dock in Baggers City. A weathered pier of concrete with iron posts driven in and scrap tires strung around it to keep boats from scuffing.

“McCarthy, what are you doing, not getting out?”

Ted climbed onto the pier and lashed the boat tight to a post, snapping the question, but Lewis didn’t answer. He stood blankly, picking up a scent. Like the faint blood-smell that lingers in a stain after it’s been sucked dry—an exceedingly subtle level of pheromone that no one else could catch no matter how they tried. But Lewis could sense it in the air, like the afterimage of a bloodstain: Isaac’s presence.

The wind was blowing hard, so he couldn’t be certain, but Isaac had paused here and gone. Most likely he’d taken a jet ski—or a jet boat—downriver to the sea.

Isaac Bazelli had returned to Baggers City. He who had been abducted by Hybris, from his hideout in the Secretas marshes. And Baekgyeong and Siron had returned to this city as well. Too cruelly entangled a snare of fate to call coincidence.