The Gender Plan (The Gender Game #6)(69)

I kept my eyes on the building on Alejandro’s side, just in case, but there was no movement in any of the windows. As I reached the corner, I knelt down, and then slowly peeked around the side, staring at the building across the street. The gray concrete building Alejandro had noticed rose above the small park, the windows dark and eerie. I watched it for a long moment, knowing I was exposed from either side, and then moved back to the shadows.

“It’s too good an ambush spot,” I admitted to Mags. “We need to go around.”

Mags crossed to me with quick, silent steps, pulled out her map, and spread it open on the hood of one of the many broken cars nearby, using a penlight with a red glow to illuminate the large piece of paper. I bent over it to find our location while Mags pulled the handheld from her satchel, flicking it on and searching through camera feeds.

“Mulbury and Doxit?” I asked, tapping on the intersection back and to the north.

Mags began speaking into her radio on the other channel, asking Henrik about the camera numbers for the intersection, and I continued to examine the map, feeling more and more dejected as I studied it. If Mulbury and Doxit weren’t clear, then we’d either have to head four blocks back or two blocks to the east before we could start another trajectory, easily losing half an hour in the process.

“Viggo?” I turned and found Tim standing there.

“Hey, buddy. What’s up?”

The lanky young man looked over my shoulder at the intersection. “What problem?”

I frowned. “You’re not supposed to break rank, Tim,” I said. He gave me a sardonic look, and I sighed. “The fires in the intersection might be bait meant to draw people out, and there’s a building that has a good view of the street. If we move into the open, and there are people in there with guns, they could easily kill a lot of us.”

He frowned and tossed his hair. “Take out lights?”

I glanced down the road at where he was looking, studying the barrels. They weren’t secured by anything, but I didn’t see a good way of putting the fires out. They were too large, too spread out, and too likely to cause chaos if they tipped. Maybe someone could get one, but if there were shooters in the building, I doubted very much that whoever went in would be coming back out.

Opening my mouth to explain this all to Tim, I was interrupted by Mags snapping her fingers at me to get my attention. I followed the line of her arm up to her face. “Main channel,” she said, turning her handheld around and showing me a strangely dark screen.

Clicking over, I came in on the middle of Thomas saying, “—hacked. It’s only a matter of time before the Matrians—ninety percent chance it’s the Matrians—get into our system.”

“What’s getting hacked?” I asked, straightening in alarm.

“The cameras!” he practically shouted, and I could hear the stress in his voice. “I’m hacking her back, but she’s good, and she’s clearly got better equipment than I do.”

“How long do we have, Thomas?”

“A lot longer if you’d all stop bugging me,” he bristled. “So stop bugging me!”

I switched back over to our channel and moved over to Mags. “How did that other intersection look?” I asked.

“Not good,” she said as she turned the handheld around and held it out to me. Two of the cameras were out and a third was transmitting upside down—presumably having been torn from its mount—but it only showed a small fraction of the street, the remaining screen filled with the blank surface of a pole the lens was facing. The last camera was upright, but the angle was bad on that one, too.

In the view from that camera, two dark shadows were grappling with each other in the orange flicker of a fire burning just off screen. One man’s face was visible, and I could see wet blood coating half of it. They pushed against each other, the man’s mouth opening in a roar, and then something cut in from the side and tackled them both, pulling them down and off screen.

“I’ve seen at least four different people since Henrik gave me the numbers,” she said softly. “I think we gotta risk it.”

“Viggo, what’s going on?” Alejandro cut in over the team channel, and I turned to see his dark form still pressed against the building.

“The other route is a no-go,” I informed him and everyone who was listening. “People are rioting in the streets. We need a minute to decide how to get past this intersection without attracting any attention.”

“No, Viggo. I mean why is Tim heading into that intersection carrying all that stuff?”

I turned and gaped as I watched Tim enter that red-orange halo of light, holding several big, flat objects against his side, under his arm. He looked around the intersection for a moment, then moved over to the first barrel, his pace calm and confident.

“Everyone get guns on that building now!” I ordered into the link, taking quick steps toward the intersection. Clicking off the safety to my rifle, I jogged down the sidewalk and then knelt by the wall, using the corner for cover as I sighted down at the building. There was no movement that I could see.

I heard the sound of thin metal flexing, and turned to see Tim standing fifteen feet away, holding a piece of metal that looked like it might have come from the hood of a car at some point.

He lay the metal down over the rim of the barrel, his face going from orange to shadow. “Clever boy,” Alejandro praised him through the earpiece, but I found it hard to agree. Tim was out in the open, exposed to anybody who might be looking. While his idea to smother out the fires might have been clever, his execution was—