Silver, meanwhile, was coordinating every facet of the rescue and security operation—because if this hadn’t been a lone radical or unhinged individual, and those behind them wanted to cause secondary casualties, now would be the time to strike. That in mind, she made a call. “This is Silver Mercant,” she said into the dot of the microphone mounted on her collar.
“What do you need?” an ice-cold voice responded.
“A security cordon at the site of the Moscow bombing.” The locals she’d put on the cordon were doing their best, but there weren’t enough of them, and she couldn’t request more officers without leaving other parts of the city vulnerable. “Possibility of a secondary strike.”
“Understood.”
Silver hung up, confident the deadly men and women of the Arrow Squad would respond to her request. Aden Kai, their leader, had made it known to Silver that EmNet could count on Arrow assistance. The only reason they hadn’t already appeared was because of the executive memo she’d sent out a month earlier, requesting that signatories to the Trinity Accord not independently respond to an emergency situation that wasn’t in their local area and where EmNet had a presence.
All our resources cannot be pooled in one place at one time, she’d written. Such a concentration makes it very difficult for EmNet to mobilize rescuers to emergencies in other areas. Give us time to assess the situation and send out a call for the help required.
Now that she’d sent out that call, however, the Arrows appeared in a matter of seconds. Vasic Zen. The only known Tk-V in the world, a man who wasn’t a teleport-capable telekinetic but a born teleporter, he wasn’t worn out by teleporting. For him, it was akin to breathing.
The black-clad men and women he’d brought in spread out on the perimeter, a small but highly effective unit. One Arrow, it was said, was worth twenty trained and experienced soldiers.
Ms. Mercant. A polite telepathic contact, Vasic Zen’s mental voice as clear as arctic ice.
She saw him in the distance, a tall form made distinctive in silhouette by his loss of an arm. It had been amputated after a failed biofusion experiment, the details of which were so classified that even Mercants hadn’t been able to find out much more. None of that concerned Silver right now. What mattered was that Vasic Zen was the Arrows’ second-in-command, with the attendant skills.
Do you have specific instructions for my team?
Do what’s necessary, she replied. You’re the security experts. That the Arrows had broken free of those who’d used them as a death squad didn’t change their lethal gifts and skills.
Three minutes later, she received an update. The cordon is now airtight, Vasic said. However, there may be devices planted inside that cordon.
Silver took in his deadly summation, while on the vocal level, she issued instructions to the traffic controllers to continue to block a particular roadway to general traffic: she needed that roadway for the emergency vehicles moving in and out of the site.
My changeling friends tell me there’s a specific scent to the most commonly used family of explosives even before they are detonated, Vasic continued. Something from that family appears to have been used in the initial attack. You should warn all changelings in the area to be on alert for that scent—if any of them need an exemplar, I’ve teleported in a sample and am now giving it to your runner.
Devi returned less than a minute later with a sealed container in the palm of her hand. Silver opened it to see a minute amount of an inert gray-white substance that, to her, had no scent. “Smell this,” she said to the girl.
Devi did, twisted her nose. “Ugh. It smells like the explosion but more . . . raw.”
“You can differentiate between the two?”
“No problem. It’s the difference between a hard green fruit and a ripe one.”
“I want you to run this to every single changeling inside the cordon, and tell them to shout an alert if they smell even a hint of it in the area. Understood?”
The girl’s nod was immediate. “You think there might be more bombs?”
“We have to assume the worst.”
A message popped up on Silver’s phone as Devi left on her task. It was an update on the first survivor they’d discovered after Silver’s arrival, a man who’d been rushed to the nearest hospital minutes earlier: Dead on arrival. Catastrophic percussive injuries, multiple loss of limbs. DNA identification unsuccessful. Prints unavailable. Image being forwarded.
Silver added that image to the file she’d already opened. Unlike Psy, humans weren’t always in a DNA database. That could pose severe difficulties when it came to identifying the injured and dead so their families could be contacted; many of the bodies were being pulled out in shattered pieces. Silver didn’t even have faces for several of the confirmed dead.
The bomber had achieved his or her aim of maximum damage.
VALENTIN had to grip his impatience in a tight fist as the engineer called out, step-by-tiny-step, how to safely remove the rubble from above the survivors Valentin had found. Neither the man nor the woman had spoken in the past five minutes. “Next!” he yelled out after passing down a chunk of a wooden beam to the person in the living chain behind him.
“The large piece at fourteen hundred ten hours!” the engineer called out, his eyes on the scanner with which he was mapping the ruin of the bar. “Can you move it?”
Valentin didn’t bother answering back. He just reached out and hauled off the piece in a single move. The problem came when he went to pass it to the next person in the chain. It was a changeling—but not a bear. The wolf thought fast. “You and you!” he called to the next two people in the line.
The three of them took hold of the piece with a grunt, started to carry it down. Valentin didn’t watch except to make sure they could handle it. If they dropped it, it could crash through the rubble, collapsing it onto the survivors. When he saw that the wolf was managing to take at least half the weight, with the other two supporting effectively, he turned back to the hole he’d created.
“Three seventeen!” the engineer called out.
Valentin shook his head. “It’s big enough! Get me some rope!”
That rope was sent up with alacrity. He asked two burly human construction workers who’d moved up the line when the wolf and the other two began to head down, to anchor the rope. “Got it, boss,” one of them said, his beard short and orange and his build close enough to Valentin’s that he might’ve been a bear if not for his scent.
Valentin fed the rest of the rope down into the hole, while the two construction workers set their feet apart and gripped the rope tight. “Ready?”
Both men nodded.
Valentin took a grip on the rope and began to lower himself. He could’ve easily jumped down. He was no feline—they were fucking “bouncy” when they landed—but he was solid. However, when he’d looked into the hole, his bear’s night vision penetrating the darkness as if it didn’t exist, he’d seen the survivors almost directly below.
He managed to bring himself down to the left of their tangled bodies, the construction workers holding strong even when he swung off to the side. “Chert voz’mi,” he muttered when he saw the woman’s dress.
It was all pretty and flowy and white.
The bride was a broken doll in the wreckage, her father’s hand tight on hers as he lay at a right angle to her, his lower body crushed so badly that it was a miracle he’d survived even a minute. Valentin’s gut twisted. He knew what he was going to find even before he knelt and checked the gray-haired man’s pulse.