The Society (A Broken World Book 1) (31 page)

"What's the plan?"

Victoria gave me an amused look. "I thought you were the one with the plan."

"Sure. Make my way to Piter's headquarters and then shoot my way inside. It's doable but I'd be stupid not to pay attention if you've got a way to get us inside the building without having to fight enforcers every step of the way."

"Normally I could guarantee being able to get you at least to the building without being spotted, but everything's too much in flux right now. If you're right about Piter having most of his people crammed inside of the buildings along the border, that could mean that things will be easier, but I suspect that what few people he still has out and about will be under orders to move around a lot more than his goons normally do."

I nodded. "Okay, I buy that. What kind of options does that leave us?"

"If I thought we could guarantee that the men armed with rifles would be at their normal spots, then I'd say job number one would be to ambush them so that I can arm the rest of my people, but realistically speaking that's not an option either. Instead I'm going to send out runners to gather the rest of the resistance and the bulk of us will go attack the buildings along the border while you and a small team will go after Brennan during the distraction. Just try not to start shooting people too soon or you'll bring Piter's entire army down on your heads."

"It's a deal."

Things continued to go much more smoothly than I'd been expecting. Once we arrived at the doors up into the ground floor of the building, we all formed a long human chain and passed the lanterns forward so they could be stowed next to the door. Victoria then doused the lights, and we made our slow, careful way through the door.

The other side of the door was so dark that I wouldn't have been able to see my hand in front of my face—even assuming I'd been willing to let go of the hands I was holding onto and break the human chain—but I got the impression that I was being led through a twisted warren of metal and garbage that had been carefully staged to appear impassable from the outside.

The fact that the insurgents knew the path well enough to navigate in the dark was a testament to both their dedication and preparedness. Time and time again, Victoria leaned back to caution me with a whisper about some obstacle or another that I otherwise would have blundered into.

We moved more slowly than I would've liked, but still made remarkable time considering the nature of the obstacles we were trying to navigate around. Just over fifteen minutes after the lanterns went out, we got close enough to the exterior of the building for me to be able to start seeing shapes inside the darkness.

Still communicating via whispers, Victoria made assignments. She split off three of her shooters and two of her other people to accompany me, and then told us to wait until everyone else had been gone for at least fifteen minutes before starting off towards Piter's headquarters.

I followed one of the three shooters in my new team over to a vantage point where we could watch as the rest of Victoria's people trickled out two or three at a time.

"How long do you think this is going to take?"

There was just enough light coming from a small fire burning inside an oil drum out in the middle of the street for me to confirm that my companion was a big redheaded guy I'd noticed back inside the parking garage. He looked like he could've been the brother of the guard I'd knocked unconscious back inside the compound in order to get out of my room.

All I got in response was a grunt. Apparently this guy didn't share the same love of yelling that his twin had expressed. I considered pushing him for an answer, but realized that there was no real benefit to making him dislike me. It was going to take however long it was going to take.

"Can I at least get a name out of you?"

"Jasper."

We passed the next twenty minutes in silence and then he motioned for me to follow him back over to the door where the rest of our team was waiting for us. Five minutes later it was our turn to exit the building. Rather than going out into separate groups, we all left together, guns hanging unobtrusively from our shoulders.

With every block we crossed I half expected for gunfire to break out behind us, but we made it three blocks without running into any enforcers or hearing any evidence that Victoria had started her attack. Jasper was in the lead and stepped around the corner that he'd indicated would give us a straight shot to the triangular building Piter was using for his headquarters, but before I could follow him he reversed course, nearly knocking me off my feet.

"Enforcers, three of them. I don't think they saw me."

I crept forward, trying to get far enough around the corner that I would be able to see what we were up against. "Can we go around them?"

"Sure, but there's no guarantee that's going to be any better. The streets to either side get a lot more foot traffic. That's why I chose this one—less chance of someone seeing the guns and raising some kind of alarm."

He was right, the path he led us on had been remarkably empty of other people, but apparently Piter knew that too—it was probably the reason he'd chosen to station enforcers there.

"So what do we do now?"

"We don't have any choice but to wait until Victoria creates the distraction we need."

I'd been trying not to focus on the clock I could feel ticking away in the back of my mind, but the urgency to find Brennan hadn't ever disappeared. That probably would've been enough all by itself to force me into motion, but I could also feel unseeing eyes watching us, wondering why we'd stopped where we'd stopped.

"It's too risky. You just said it yourself, all it would take is the wrong person walking by close enough to realize that we're armed and we'll have dozens of enforcers pouring out of the woodwork."

I stood back up, but Jasper grabbed my arm before I could move. "I'm not letting you ruin this, Skye. If you open fire on those three it will be just as bad. We'll have swarms of enforcers coming after us and it will ruin things for Victoria and the rest of our people—my people. They'll get massacred."

"So we don't use guns."

Jasper chuckled like he thought I was joking and then frowned when I didn't join in. "Yeah, right. They'd take us apart in seconds. With guns, if we're far enough away then we have a chance of taking out a group several times that size. If we let them close though, all of the advantages shift to the other side. We've been training for two months with our rifles, but they've been training for years with their knives and swords."

I lifted the sling attached to my rifle off over my head and handed it to the guy carrying the ammo case. I debated for a second and then slipped out of my vest as well. If things went poorly Jasper and the others were going to need my spare magazines—besides, the uniform Jax had designed was distinctive enough that I couldn't risk it tipping Piter's men off.

I gave Jasper a humorless smile. "If I don't succeed, then go ahead and wait for Victoria to open the ball. There's still a chance you can make it to Brennan and get him back to the parking garage. Just remember that his ribs are all broken—you'll probably have to carry him out of there."

I slipped away before anybody could stop me and walked casually towards the enforcers. They weren't very good guards—I made it to within five feet of them before anyone bothered to challenge me.

"If you're hoping for some companionship you're going to have to wait for a few hours—we're on duty."

I put a big pout on my face. "Surely it doesn't take all three of you to watch this one little stretch of road."

The closest guard, a massive guy wearing nothing under his leather vest, stepped towards me as though planning on grabbing me. I didn't wait to see whether his intent was hostile. I grabbed his arm and slammed my palm into his elbow, shattering the joint and triggering the start of a pain-filled scream that I interrupted a split second later with an elbow to his throat.

I'd targeted the top of his throat. Unlike when I'd been forced to fight Brennan's guards, I had no qualms with killing any of Piter's men. He went down and I was positive he wouldn't be getting back up.

The next closest guy was thinner and shorter—only barely taller than me—and it shouldn't have been a surprise that he was so fast. I should've known that he would have some offsetting advantage to have earned a place among such a brutal group of men. The adrenaline surging through my system meant that my nanites were once again moving signals up and down my nerves at six times normal speed, but even so the second guard got a knife out and slashed at me before I managed to close the distance between us.

I leaned back and spun slightly to the side in an effort to avoid being cut, but I couldn't risk reversing course—if I didn't keep the pressure on both of the remaining enforcers, that they would realize they should be yelling for help rather than just trying to kill me by themselves. Even as my upper body swayed backwards, my right leg shot forward and hammered my foot into the second guard's ankle.

He nicked my arm, drawing first blood, but I felt the smaller bones in his ankle crunch as they lost the battle against my combat boot and the nanite-infused bones inside it. A split second after his knife flashed past me I grabbed his forearm to control his weapon, stepped in close, and went up on my toes as my elbow came up and slammed into his chin. The force of the blow threw him back into the last enforcer at the same time that it snapped his neck.

The last guard was still unlimbering a big mace from his belt when his partner collided with him. He abandoned his efforts to get his weapon out as the second guard careened off of him, but by then it was too late. I crossed the distance between us in a split second and threw myself into the air, clearing the punch he'd just thrown at me.

It was a kind of attack my instructors would never have approved of, the kind of attack that was only possible for someone who grossly outmatched their opponent, but my nanites made it child's play to wrap my legs around his neck a split second before I slammed into him and threw him over backwards.

I had just enough leverage to break his neck as we hit the ground.

Chapter 25

Jasper and the rest of our team arrived at my side a few seconds after I disentangled myself from the last guard.

"How did you do that? I didn't think something like that was humanly possible."

I shrugged uncomfortably as I slipped my vest back on. "You'd be amazed what's possible with the right training and enough adrenaline flowing through your system. Now let's get moving before somebody shows up and sees all of these bodies."

We made it two more blocks—nearly all the way to Piter's headquarters—before the sound of gunfire tore through the darkness. All six of us dove into the deepest set of shadows we could find and watched as more than two dozen enforcers came running out of the headquarters building and hurried off towards their northern border.

We waited four more minutes to see if there was going to be another wave of Piter's men leaving the building, and each second made me more and more jittery.

"We need to move now, Jasper. There's no telling how long Victoria and the rest can stand up to whomever Piter has hiding in those buildings. If we wait too long there's a chance we'll have to fight our way back out through everyone headed back from that other battle."

Jasper grunted. "Yeah, but if we move too soon then all the guards left in the building are going to be on high alert still. Besides, once we shoot the guards outside the building we're going to have enforcers popping up all over."

I gritted my teeth and then moved further to the left, leaving the deepest part of the shadows, so I could get a better look at what we were up against. Whoever was running Piter's security detail had left two men behind to guard what Jasper had indicated was the only exterior door into the building.

I'd already proved several times that under the right circumstances I was more than capable of taking down two enforcers with my bare hands, but these didn't look like the right circumstances. They were too far apart for one thing, and they both looked much more on-the-ball than the last group I'd taken out. Not only that, both of these guys were equipped with rifles—the fruit of Piter's trades with Brennan.

The lighting was pretty bad or we never would've been able to hide this close to them. There was a chance that I could sneak up on one of them and neutralize him before he got a shot off, but that wouldn't do anything to stop the second guy from raising an alarm. I could see one plan that seemed like it might work, but it wasn't playing to my strengths. Even worse, if I failed not only might I die, I would be depending on Jasper and the rest to stop the second guard.

I scooted back over next to Jasper. "Who's the best shot out of the people we have here?"

"Me. Why do you ask?"

"I'm going to work my way closer to the guy on the right. I'm pretty sure I can take him before he even knows I'm there, but I may not be able to take down the second guy. Go ahead and put your sights on him. When I make my move you'll know, and if it looks like I'm not going to be able to take him out quickly enough, put a single shot into him. There's still a chance one shot will bring down the wrong kind of attention, but we're a heck of a lot more likely to be able to blend in with the commotion coming from the north with just a single shot."

I moved off before Jasper could respond, but I honestly couldn't have said if my abruptness was to stop him from raising objections or if it was to stop me from talking myself out of what I was about to do. Going up against people with swords and knives was bad enough, but facing down men armed with high-velocity rifles was a step beyond even that.

My nanites meant that I could conceivably dodge most melee attacks, but nobody was capable of dodging a bullet. I was just going to have to hope that I was fast and quiet enough to survive what was coming. It sure would've been nice to be wearing body armor.

I crept forward, moving slowly and trying to stay low enough that the flickering light from the oil-drum fires wouldn't outline me. The closer I got to my target the more likely it was that I was going to be able to take him and his partner out quickly enough to avoid alerting the people inside the building, but with each inch I moved forward, the odds of being seen went up drastically.