Chapter 16 Brecca
"You're a flashlight," I whispered.
"I am aware."
"A six-foot-three alien flashlight walking into enemy territory. Can you turn it down?"
"I am trying. The luminescence responds to—" He paused. "—emotional state. It is difficult to suppress when I am concerned about someone's safety."
"Stop being concerned about my safety and start being concerned about being visible."
The glow dimmed. Not entirely — a faint silver sheen still clung to his forearms and the sharp angles of his face, the residual light of a biology designed for the dark cliffs of a world he'd never seen.
But it was enough. In the pre-dawn murk of the Los Angeles streets, we were shadows moving through shadows.
Our strike team was four. Rael on point, the only one who could sense Lucian positions through the network.
Alek behind him, blade drawn, moving with the fluid silence of a Vampyren warrior who had been killing things in the dark for centuries.
Me in the third position, medical kit on my back, a handgun on my hip that I hoped I wouldn't need and knew I would.
And behind me, a Mojave fighter named Torres, a wiry, quiet woman who'd been a Marine before the invasion and hadn't forgotten any of it.
Front One had engaged twelve minutes ago.
We'd heard it start: the distant crack of gunfire, the unmistakable sound of Kal's war cry splitting the night, and then the deeper, more resonant clash of Vampyren blades on Lucian steel.
The sound carried through the empty streets of downtown LA like thunder through a canyon, bouncing off the dead high-rises and the abandoned parking structures and the burned-out shells of restaurants where people had once argued about the quality of the sushi.
The plan was simple. Front One draws the perimeter fighters. We slip through the gap. Get to the high-rise on Figueroa. Go up. Kill Tyvor. Come back.
Simple plans were the ones most likely to go wrong. I'd learned that from three years of field medicine: the straightforward procedure was always the one that developed complications.
Rael held up a fist. We stopped.
I crouched behind the rusted shell of a delivery truck, my hand on my gun, my pulse hammering at a rate Rael could definitely feel.
The streets of downtown LA at four in the morning were a landscape I'd never seen before.
An alien geography of shattered glass and collapsed awnings and the dark mouths of buildings gutted by fire or looting or both.
Somewhere above us, a piece of sheet metal shifted in the wind and made a sound like a blade being drawn. Every muscle in my body went rigid.
"Two," Rael whispered. "Ahead. Sixty meters. They are moving east — toward the main engagement."
I couldn't see anything. The street ahead was a corridor of darkness, office towers on both sides, their glass facades shattered, their lobbies open to the elements like wounds in the face of the city.
Somewhere in that darkness, two Lucian were moving at a speed my eyes couldn't track.
I strained to hear the buzzing, the high-frequency vibration I'd documented in my notes, and caught nothing.
Either they were too far or they were moving at a speed where the sound hadn't reached me yet.
Alek's hand found my shoulder. Not a comfort — a command.
Stay down. Stay quiet. His eyes were fixed on the darkness ahead, jaw set with the focused patience of a hunter who'd been tracking prey for centuries.
Torres was a shadow beside the truck, her breathing controlled, her weapon angled at the ground, military discipline encoded in every line of her body.
"They've passed," Rael said after ten seconds that felt like ten minutes.
"East, toward Front One. Tyvor has called his perimeter forces in to reinforce.
" I felt his calculation — the mix of relief and concern.
Fewer Lucian between us and Tyvor, but more Lucian hitting Loren's front line.
The math of war: every advantage here was a cost somewhere else.
"Move."
We moved. Through the intersection, past a toppled bus that had become a planter for weeds growing wild through its broken windows, down the center of Figueroa Street toward the high-rise that Rael had identified as Tyvor's command post. It was visible now.
A forty-story tower with its upper floors still intact, dark against the slightly-less-dark sky, a monument to the architectural ambitions of a civilization that had been replaced by aliens who used it as a radio antenna for psychic warfare.
"I can feel him," Rael said. His voice had changed, tighter, the harmonic undertone compressed.
I felt it too: a pressure at the edge of my awareness, like a headache forming.
Tyvor's psychic presence, broadcasting from the upper floors, a beacon of rage and command that pulsed through the network like a heartbeat made of pain.
"He knows we are coming. He can feel my dampening — the absence of my signal where it should be. "
"Does he know our exact position?" Alek asked.
"Not yet. But he will."
"Then we move fast."
We entered the building through the parking structure, the same approach Crystal had mapped.
The ground floor was a maze of concrete pillars and abandoned vehicles and the kind of deep, mineral darkness that made you feel like you'd been swallowed.
Rael navigated without hesitation, his network awareness painting a picture of the building's interior that my human senses couldn't replicate.
The stairwell was at the northwest corner. Fire stairs — concrete, narrow, designed for evacuation. Nobody had imagined a strike team consisting of an alien, a seven-foot warrior, a medic, and a soldier.
"How high?" Torres asked.
"Thirty-second floor. The highest floor with intact structural support." Rael looked up the stairwell. Thirty-two flights of concrete steps spiraling upward into darkness. "His guard will be positioned on the floors below. We cannot avoid them."
"We don't need to avoid them," Alek said. He adjusted his grip on his blade. In the darkness, his eyes glowed with the predatory gleam of a species evolved to hunt at night. "We need to go through them."
We started climbing.
* * *
The first guard was on the twentieth floor.
Rael felt him before we saw him. A psychic signature, he said, burning hot with combat readiness, positioned in the stairwell two flights above. A single Lucian, stationed as an early warning. Rael's hand closed on my arm — a brief squeeze, the bond pulsing with a single command: stay behind me.
The Lucian came down the stairs at combat speed.
The buzzing hit first — that high-frequency vibration I'd documented in my notebook a hundred times but had never heard in person at full intensity.
It filled the stairwell like an electrical hum amplified to the point of pain, and then the pale shape was there, blade already swinging, moving so fast my eyes registered only a blur.
Rael met the blur with his own speed. The two Lucian collided in the stairwell.
A sound like two cars hitting, the crash of body against body, and then the shriek of blade on blade that sent sparks flying in the dark.
I pressed against the wall. Torres pressed beside me, her weapon up, waiting for a clear shot that never came because the two Lucian were moving too fast for a bullet to find anything but the wrong target.
Alek waited. Patient. The Vampyren general stood three steps below the combat, blade ready, gold eyes tracking the movement with a predator's focus. He was reading the fight. I could see it in his stillness, the way a chess player watches the board before committing a piece.
The guard overextended. A lunge, a fraction too far, the blade passing over Rael's shoulder as Rael twisted — and Alek struck. One step up, one swing, the Vampyren blade taking the Lucian across the back of the neck with a force that ended the fight before the guard understood he'd been flanked.
Black blood on the concrete. The guard fell. Rael stood over the body, breathing hard, his skin pulsing bright with adrenaline.
"Move," Alek said. No ceremony. No hesitation. This was a man who had been killing for centuries and treated death the way I treated wound closure: a necessary step in a larger process.
We moved. The stairwell was close and dark and smelled like concrete dust and something else, the metallic, ozone-clean scent that I associated with Lucian biology.
The pheromone signature that had once seemed alien and now smelled like Rael.
The dead guard's scent was already fading.
Lucian bodies didn't linger the way human or Vampyren bodies did.
The cooling happened faster, the iridescent quality of the blood dulling to a flat black within minutes.
I made a mental note for the notebook, then realized what I was doing — cataloguing clinical observations during a combat operation — and decided that was exactly the kind of person I was and there was no point pretending otherwise.
We climbed in silence. Ten floors. Fifteen.
The burn in my legs intensified with every flight and I cursed my human biology.
Two hearts and Vampyren endurance would have been useful right about now.
Torres kept pace beside me, her breathing controlled, her face showing nothing.
Ahead, Rael moved without visible effort, his Lucian physiology designed for sustained speed, and Alek climbed with the relentless mechanical efficiency of a machine that didn't know how to be tired.
The second and third guards were together on the twenty-sixth floor. They'd heard the fight below. The stairwell carried sound upward like a chimney. They were waiting. Two Lucian in full combat stance, blades drawn, the buzzing filling the air with a frequency that made my teeth ache.