Badge of the Death Game

Chapter 009

The plan, as Soren had worked it out, was straightforward enough in outline.

Tomorrow he would be put in a vehicle headed for Port Morrow. Somewhere on that road, far enough from the compound that the response time would be unmanageable, he would activate the Delta Team Support Card and let Delta Team intercept the transport. Clean extraction, minimal variables, maximum firepower on his side.

The problem was the variables he couldn't account for. He didn't know how the card worked in practice. He didn't know whether Delta Team would materialize in the vehicle, beside it, or somewhere else entirely. A moving vehicle at highway speed introduced a dozen ways for the plan to come apart, and if the team appeared fifty yards behind a truck doing sixty miles an hour, the two-hour window would be half gone before they closed the distance.

He was still turning it over when Evan's voice pulled him back.

"Don't worry about being overheard," Evan said, glancing toward the door. "I checked when they brought me in. Every other room on this corridor is empty."

Soren looked at him. "Do you know what Port Morrow is?"

"Sure. It's the provincial capital of Morrow Province. Decent-sized port city, fairly busy. I actually have a cousin who lives there." Something wistful crossed his face and was quickly suppressed. "Before all this, I was planning to visit him if I ever made enough money. I even put together a travel itinerary."

A port city. A capital. Population density, local law enforcement, potentially a consulate or embassy within reach. The possibilities were better than Soren had expected, and worse in one specific way he'd been trying not to think about.

He was a fugitive. Whatever the original host had done to end up here, it was serious enough that going home wasn't a straightforward option. Walking into a Morrow Province police station and asking for help could solve one problem and immediately create another, depending on what was waiting for him on the other side of a background check.

He'd need to know more before he made that call. The original host's crimes, the specifics, the severity. Without that information, every exit route had an asterisk attached to it.

He filed it and moved on. First things first.

"Do you know how to get out of the country from there?" he asked. "Unofficially."

Evan's expression shifted. "Unofficially? Not personally, no. But my cousin has been there for years. He knows people." He paused, reading the direction of the conversation, and then something in his face changed entirely. "You're actually planning to get out of here, aren't you."

It wasn't quite a question.

"Tomorrow," Soren said, "they're sending me to Port Morrow. If you want to come, tell them you're going with me."

The hope that crossed Evan's face lasted approximately two seconds before the practical reality caught up with it and knocked it back down. "What if they don't let me? What if they say no?"

"Then you stay here and wait out your three months."

"I can't stay here." The easy sociability had dropped away entirely now, and what was underneath it was younger and considerably more frightened. Evan's voice had gone quiet, the kind of quiet that came from trying very hard not to show how close to the edge he was. He dropped to his knees without apparent self-consciousness, hands clasped, and looked up at Soren with the unguarded desperation of someone who had run out of other options. "I know Port Morrow. I know the streets, I know the layout, I did research before I came out here. And my cousin, he's been there long enough to know people who know things. Unofficial routes, contacts, the kind of connections you can't find through normal channels. I can be useful. I promise I can be useful."

Soren looked at him for a long moment. "Get up."

Evan got up.

"I want to help you," Soren said. "But I can't make them release you. If they say no, I'm not waiting three months. That's the reality."

Evan's jaw tightened. Something resolved behind his eyes, the calculation of a man who had decided that a bad plan was better than no plan. "Then I'll make sure they say yes," he said. "Leave that part to me."

Soren studied him for another moment, then closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the wall.

He needed sleep. The body he was in had been beaten, malnourished, and run ragged for months, and the reserves it was operating on were nowhere near what the next twenty-four hours were likely to demand. The instance had given him skills. It hadn't given him a better physical baseline, and there was nothing he could do about that tonight except rest and hope it was enough.

He let the room go quiet and focused on his breathing until the darkness behind his eyes stopped moving.

________________________________________

Seven hours later, at four in the morning, the footsteps came.

Soren heard them before the knock, the particular cadence of someone who wasn't trying to be quiet because they didn't think it mattered. The rubber baton hit the iron-barred door three times, hard enough to make the frame rattle.

"Rise and shine. Time to move."

The man in black filled the doorway with the expression of someone who had been doing unpleasant work for long enough that it no longer registered as unpleasant. He looked at Soren with the flat, proprietorial contempt of a man who considered the people in this room to be inventory.

Soren drew breath and started to rise.

Evan moved first.

He came off the floor like a spring releasing, crossed the small room in two steps, and hit the man in black with his full bodyweight before the guard had finished processing that the new arrival was doing anything other than waking up. The impact carried both of them through the doorway and into the corridor, the guard going down hard with Evan on top of him, and then Evan's fists were moving with a focused, repetitive fury that had clearly been building since before he'd walked through the door the night before.

"You want to send my brother somewhere?" The words came out between blows, raw and breathless. "You want to ship people off like cargo?"

The guard's training eventually reasserted itself over his surprise. A surge of leverage sent Evan skidding across the corridor floor, and the man hauled himself upright with blood running freely from his nose and a look in his eyes that had gone well past anger into something considerably more dangerous. The rubber baton came up.

Soren stepped out of the room and put his boot squarely into the man's lower back.

The guard went down face-first and stayed there for a moment, working out whether anything was broken.

"They're rioting!" he bellowed from the floor, voice carrying down the corridor with impressive volume for a man in his position. "Someone get up here!"

Three guards came at a run from the stairwell, batons in hand, and formed up around the downed man with the readiness of people who had handled this kind of situation before. They looked at Evan, who was already bleeding from a cut above his eye. They looked at Soren, who was standing in the doorway with his hands at his sides.

The moment before it turned bad was interrupted by a voice from the floor below.

"Are we doing this today or not? I'm not hauling corpses."

The man in black stopped, chest heaving, one eye already swelling shut. He looked at the guards, then at Evan, then at the ceiling, running some internal calculation about what the consequences of beating two people to death in a corridor would cost him professionally.

"Nate!" one of the guards called down.

Footsteps on the stairs, and then a lean, sharp-faced man appeared on the landing. Nathan Mercer took in the scene with the quick, assessing look of someone who managed problems for a living, and his expression settled into the particular displeasure of a man whose morning had already gone off-script.

"What's the damage?" he said.

"The new one started it," the guard said, pointing at Evan.

"I can see that." Nate looked at Evan, then at the man in black, then briefly at Soren. "Can they walk?"

"Yes," the guard said, with visible reluctance.

"Then they walk. We're behind schedule." He turned and went back down the stairs without further comment, the matter apparently resolved to his satisfaction.

The guards hauled Evan upright. Another pushed Soren toward the stairwell. The man in black spat blood onto the floor, stared at both of them for a long moment with his one good eye, and then turned away, the violence in him redirected somewhere private.

They went down.

Soren counted floors as they descended. Each landing had a security post set into the wall beside the stairwell door, and each post held three or four men, with additional personnel visible on patrol through the corridor windows. Five, maybe six guards per floor. The g*n lockers in the corners of each post were closed but clearly stocked, long weapons racked in rows, the silhouettes visible through the mesh panels. Automatic or semi-automatic, he couldn't tell from this angle, but the volume of hardware was not in question.

He'd been right not to use the Delta Team Support Card impulsively. A building this size, this staffed, this armed, would have turned a two-hour extraction window into a running battle with no guaranteed exit. Delta Team was good. They weren't invincible, and they weren't infinite.

When I get out of here, he thought, I'm coming back with something considerably larger than a support card.

The ground floor opened onto a courtyard, and beyond the main gate, a silver-grey cargo truck sat idling with a seedling logo stenciled on the side panel and Frontier script printed beneath it. The driver and two armed escorts were standing beside it, finishing cigarettes with the unhurried ease of men who had been waiting longer than they'd wanted to.

"Finally," the driver said, in accented Mandarin. He looked at Soren, then at Evan, who was still bleeding steadily from the cut above his eye. "Don't tell me the second one's dead."

"He's fine," the escort guard said flatly. "He walks."

"Good enough. The Blake family pays by the head, not by the condition." The driver walked to the rear of the truck and pulled the cargo doors open.

The smell hit first.

Soren's eyes adjusted to the dim interior, and what he saw made something cold settle in his chest. The cargo bed was packed with people, a dozen or more, all men, most of them in states that went well beyond disheveled. Torn clothing, visible wounds, the particular stillness of bodies that had been through things they hadn't recovered from. Two of them were missing limbs. The rest were conscious, or close to it, but the eyes that turned toward the open doors held nothing that resembled hope. They had moved past hope into something quieter and more permanent, the expression of people who had stopped expecting the next thing to be better than the last.

Soren stood at the doors and looked at them, and did not look away.