The Tidal Games (The Mating Games #5)

1. Rhaek

RHAEK

“ D amn the Creator to ka’vaal!”

The alert came in at four forty-seven. I was already moving before I finished reading it.

The intercept window I'd built over the past three days — the timing, the approach vectors, the clean corridor through the Grassmarket I'd identified on my third walkthrough — none of it applied anymore.

The team had adjusted their schedule by forty minutes.

Forty minutes doesn't sound like much. It was everything.

I came out of the close onto the Canongate and turned north. Edinburgh was doing what Edinburgh did at this hour, the end of the working day bleeding into early evening, people moving in both directions without urgency, nobody paying attention to anything.

The sky had gone the color of old pewter and the streetlamps were coming on along the Royal Mile. Twilight. Good cover, normally. Right now just another thing to account for.

She should be in the classroom still. End of term. Helsa packed slowly, said her goodbyes, always the last one out. I'd watched her do it twice through the window of the building opposite. A methodical girl. Patient. I'd counted on that patience being mine to use.

Four minutes, thirty seconds at a run. Maybe four fifteen if I pushed it.

I scratched my forearm and ran.

The synthetic skin itched in all its usual places. Inner arm, the crease of the elbow, the webbing between my fingers. I'd been wearing it for years and it had never stopped. You didn't get used to it. You just stopped complaining about it to yourself.

Lothian Road was thick with foot traffic and I threaded through it at a pace that was too fast for a human.

A delivery van was pulled up onto the curb thirty meters ahead, rear doors open, blocking the pavement completely, two men moving boxes through it without any speed.

I didn't slow. I planted my left hand on the van's roof and launched over it in a clean arc, landed on the balls of my feet and kept moving. Behind me I heard someone say, What the—?” but I was already past them.

They'd spend the next ten minutes trying to decide if they'd seen what they thought they'd seen and conclude probably not.

Three fifty-three.

The problem was the math. I'd done the math for a different set of conditions and it had been fine.

Now the math said the team would reach the school in four minutes and ten seconds, and I would reach it in three fifty, assuming no further obstacles, which was not an assumption I was prepared to make.

Forty seconds of margin. Enough. Barely.

I cut left through a gap between parked cars and took the side street at full stride. A man stepping out of a pub doorway pulled back against the wall and watched me go past with his pint held sideways. I didn't look back .

On Bread Street I felt them for the first time.

You develop a sense for it. Not a smell exactly, more a pressure, a kind of wrongness in the air at the edge of your range. The Malquarans used sub-contracted crews for this kind of work — species I could identify by that pressure alone if I concentrated. I didn't concentrate. I ran.

They were in the alley off Bread Street, moving parallel, about sixty meters west. A second signature caught the edge of my range from the direction of Candlemaker Row.

They were funneling in from two directions, which meant coordinated entry, which meant they were further along in their approach than the alert had suggested.

I did the math again. It came out worse.

I growled.

Three twenty.

I'd kept Helsa safe for many years. Not that she knew that.

She wasn't supposed to know anything. The arrangement was that she lived her life and I made sure certain things didn't happen to it.

Small interventions. Course corrections.

The kind of work that left no evidence of itself when it was done well, and I'd done it well.

Twenty-one years and she'd never once looked over her shoulder and seen me there, which was the whole point of the job, and which now seemed like something worth reconsidering.

I vaulted a concrete bollard outside a closed shopfront without breaking stride and heard a cyclist behind me brake hard and swear. I was already past the corner and accelerating.

There had been two occasions, in all those years, where the margin was thin enough that I'd had to count my own pulse to keep from thinking about it. Thin but not gone. I'd come through both of them. This was the third.

The difference was the team. The other two times I'd been working against individuals, opportunists, people who changed their minds when the situation changed on them.

The Malquaran used contracted crews and contracted crews didn't change their minds.

They had a job, they had a timeline, they had a destination, and they executed until someone stopped them.

I was going to stop them. That was not a question.

The only question was whether I was going to stop them before or after they reached the school, and if the answer was after, then I needed to get into a good position first. That meant the forty seconds of margin I'd started with was no longer a margin, it was a problem.

Two forty.

Usher Road was quieter and I opened up fully, the human approximation falling away in the effort, my actual stride bleeding through.

The speed was not something a real human could do.

Two women waiting at a bus stop watched me go by and one of them said something to the other.

I didn't hear it. Ahead of me the school building came into view at the far end of the road, Victorian sandstone dark against the pewter sky, classroom windows lit on the upper floor. One window.

I told myself that now, running, because the alternative was to think about what the team would do when they reached her.

Where they would take her. What her life would look like afterward, if you could call it a life at all.

The Malquarans used people. That was their business. They were very good at it.

I put my head down.

The gate was thirty meters. Twenty. I could feel the team's approach behind me like a current in cold water, both signatures converging, the pressure sharper now. One of them was close enough that I could have turned and engaged them. I didn't turn.

I glanced up at the school. And almost missed a step. Her window was lit. She was no longer inside.

Blast!

She’d already left… or else had already been snatched.

Shit!

Failure was a word I understood conceptually but had never had occasion to use in reference to myself and was not going to start now.

If she was still on Earth, she would be heading home now. And I knew the route better than I knew my own face.

I shifted direction and prayed to the Creator I wasn’t already too late.