The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

and Bethany.
    He thought of flight time, and search time, and shit-happens time. Five hours. Was it even close to enough?
    “You’re wasting your time thinking about it,” Finn said. “I’m not giving this to you. Not now that I’ve seen this place.” The man took another step back. “I’m sorry,” he repeated.
    “So am I,” Travis said, and pulled the trigger the rest of the way.
    Nothing happened.

Chapter Forty-Four
    The MP7 didn’t even click. It wasn’t empty—Travis had loaded it himself and chambered the first round. When he applied the last two ounces to the trigger, the mechanism simply froze.
    He squeezed harder. Nothing.
    His eyes dropped from Finn and focused on the MP7’s action. There was a stress ripple in the metal, where the weapon had hit the paver blocks earlier.
    He looked back up at Finn.
    The man knew. Even without a click, Travis’s body language had said everything.
    Finn advanced two steps, his eyes narrowing. The .38 trembled a little in his hand, but he held it tightly.
    “Put it down,” Finn said. “Then turn around and get on your knees.”
    Travis exhaled, the breath almost a laugh. “Why the hell would I do any of that? If you’re gonna shoot me, just do it.”
    Finn made no move to come closer, but he took a breath and the gun went still in his hand.
    “I hope you don’t feel it,” Finn said, and Travis saw his forearm tense for the pull.
    Then Finn’s head came apart, the sides of his skull blowing out like a shaped charge had gone off inside it. A split-second later the flat crack of a high-powered rifle broke across the plaza, and Travis flinched against his will and turned toward the sound.
    Thirty yards away, a figure dressed in white rose from concealment behind another planter box.
    In his peripheral vision, Travis saw Finn crumple to the ground. The .38 hit with a soft clink and didn’t fire. The cylinder rolled out of his other hand and settled gently onto his abdomen, as if his body’s last impulse had been to protect the thing.
    Travis dropped the MP7 and raised his arms at his sides, and kept his eyes on the shooter.
    The newcomer held the rifle at ready without aiming it, and for a moment simply stared, assessing the situation. Travis could make out no detail of the face: the body was covered in white from top to bottom, including a loose hood with some kind of mesh screen at the front. The outfit seemed designed to reflect away sunlight while letting in the breeze. Probably a necessity in this place.
    The figure stared a moment longer, then slung the rifle on a strap and stepped out from behind the concrete box. It strode across the plaza toward Travis, its movements measured, unhurried.
    Travis could only stare. He felt too numb to even be afraid.
    The figure came on, twenty yards away now. Ten. It stopped just out of handshake range and stared at him. Through the glare of light off the mesh fabric, Travis could just get a hint of the face. But he’d stared at it for only a second when something else drew his gaze: a bright red disc on the back of the newcomer’s hand, just visible past the edge of the sleeve. The disc was the size of a quarter, and stuck to the skin somehow. Travis looked closer and saw what he already knew would be there: near-microscopic tendrils, binding the disc to the hand.
    He looked at the face again, and recognized it through the mesh half a second before the figure lifted the hood.
    The eyes were the same as he’d always known them—huge, brown, intense—but everything else had aged a bit, to somewhere between fifty and sixty years.
    “Travis,” the newcomer said.
    Travis swallowed and found his voice. “Paige.”

Chapter Forty-Five
    For the next five seconds they said nothing. Travis heard the sound of waves breaking, the soft crashes echoing through the highrise canyons.
    Then a voice crackled over a radio, somewhere on Paige’s body, the words inaudible. She reached to her waist and drew the device from a fold of her cloak.
    She keyed the talk button. “I missed that. Say again.”
    A man spoke, his tone all but lost to static. “I asked what you’re shooting at.”
    “I’ll explain when I see you,” Paige said. “I’m safe.”
    “Did you find out what the smoke came from?”
    “Not exactly. Let me get back to you.”
    “Be careful.”
    The man clicked off, and Paige stowed the radio. By then, Travis realized he’d recognized the voice, even without discerning its tone. Its rhythm and cadence