The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

going to figure it out standing here. Regardless, they had to go through these doors and deal with what was on the other side. Figure out what the weapon was, and destroy it, even if that meant coming back out onto the landing and giving this pressure-sensitive warhead a swift kick like it was a Coke machine that’d stolen their last dollar. Whatever they were going to do, their time in which to do it was evaporating. Pilgrim probably knew they were opening the doors; if he was holding the Whisper right now, it was sure as hell telling him. Travis put his hand on the doorknob, then gave the warhead a last look.
    “Sure you don’t want to take a crack at disarming it?” he said.
    She glanced at it. “It’s not entirely impossible. Nukes aren’t like regular explosives. They’re complex machines. If you can disrupt that complexity without setting it off, you’re good to go.”
    “Disrupt it?” Travis said. That word sounded like it was warming a seat for an uglier one.
    Paige saw his expression and offered a smile. “Shove a grenade into it and pull the pin.”
    “How likely is that to work?”
    “A shitload less likely than what you’re about to do,” she said.
    He returned her smile, faced the door, and gripped the knob—
    “Wait,” Paige said.
    He met her eyes, and found her looking back at him with a strange expression. A look that didn’t know what it wanted to be.
    “I didn’t thank you enough,” she said. “Before, when you first got to Border Town. I know I said thanks, but I wanted to say more than that. I wanted—” She paused again. Frustrated about something. Then: “I just should have said more. What, I’m not sure. I’m sorry if this isn’t making sense.”
    Travis watched her eyes; she was looking down now, looking everywhere but at him.
    “You’re welcome,” he said, so quietly that for a moment he wondered if she’d heard it.
    She looked up at him. There was something in her eyes he hadn’t seen there before. Something vulnerable. The last pair of eyes to look at him like that had been Emily Price’s.
    Not a bad final moment, if this was it.
    Holding Paige’s gaze, he turned the knob and shoved the door open hard.
    They didn’t die.
    In the darkness beyond the doorway, more wires and circuit boards hung like vines, though not as densely as they did throughout the lower floors. Only a few here. Travis could see them silhouetted against a dim orange glow from somewhere ahead. Like the light of embers, but constant.
    A sound began to radiate from the room. A droning hum, so deep it was barely audible. He could feel it more than hear it.
    He pocketed the PDA and unslung the rifle from his shoulder. He stepped through the opening, Paige just behind him. The way ahead was hard to see; the orange glow barely helped. He moved toward what he thought was its source, though he couldn’t actually see it yet. As his eyes adjusted, he saw that the room around him was vast. It was all the remaining space of the ninth floor, wide open and uninterrupted.
    The hum was coming from somewhere ahead, the same direction as the light source.
    Twenty feet in from the doorway, Travis saw something on the floor ahead, maybe an obstacle to step over, maybe a strewn bunch of wire. A few steps later he saw that it was neither. It was another inscription written in the scratch language, carved right into the floorboards. This one had the note-to-self simplicity Travis had found lacking in the previous five.
    It read, TAGS ARE ESTABLISHED WHEN THIS ROOM IS OPENED.
    He translated it aloud for Paige. She stiffened.
    “Tagging,” she said. “The Ares.”
    Travis thought of the video she’d shown him. The orange cube tagging the man in the cage, making him the target for the rage it incited in those around him.
    He looked at the orange light ahead; there was no question as to its source now, even if he couldn’t see it yet.
    “It tagged us when we opened the door,” he said. “I thought you had to be within a couple feet of it.”
    Understanding came to him even as he finished the line. He saw it come to Paige as well.
    “Amplified,” she said. “The distances are amplified.”
    Travis stared at the light source and guessed that they were at least fifty feet shy of it.
    “If it can tag us this far away,” he said, “how far can it reach to turn people against us?”
    He saw the implication saturate her expression, saw her whole body react to it as if a ghost had traced its fingers up