I pressed myself against wet concrete, white fur matted with sewage slime and rainwater. The tunnel smelled like a dumpster made sweet love to a locker room.

  Awesome.

  My furry bare feet squelched through something I refused to identify. Above me, through the grating, boots. Heavy ones. Methodical.

  Crusher.

  Pandora Corp’s newest bounty hunter. Most of their hired muscle were stupid or slow. This guy? Neither.

  Handy’s voice burst from my wrist, a spray of static. “He’s circling. Thermal sweep active. You’ve got thirty seconds before he pinpoints your heat signature.”

  Thirty seconds. Fantastic.

  I shoved off the wall, sprinting deeper into the junction. Cold water splashed around my ankles. The maintenance tunnels branched three ways—left toward the industrial sector, right toward residential, straight into the old infrastructure nobody used anymore. Probably collapsed. Or flooded. Or both.

  “Right,” Handy said. “There’s a—”

  “No.” I veered left.

  “Dead end in two hundred meters.”

  “Yep.”

  “So running toward certain capture is your plan?”

  “He’ll expect me to run toward people. Toward help.”

  “Ah yes. The dead-end strategy. Much smarter.”

  My legs burned. My lungs screamed. Felt like I’d run the P.E. mile, if the P.E. mile was through a toilet and a cyborg was trying to kill you at the finish line.

  Their money was about to get flushed.

  The tunnel narrowed. Pipes jutted from the walls, dripping something viscous and chemical. I ducked under one, shoulder scraping rust. Metal shrieked behind me. He was prying the grate open.

  He was in.

  “Nikk—”

  “Quiet.”

  I slowed, ears swiveling. Water dripped. A generator hummed somewhere in the dark. My breathing rasped too loud. I clamped my hand over my muzzle.

  Splash.

  Splash.

  Footsteps.

  Closer.

  I wedged myself into an alcove—some kind of maintenance shaft—and held my breath.

  The footsteps stopped.

  The dripping stopped. The hum of the generator died. The only sound was the blood pounding in my ears.

  Five. Four. Three. Two—

  “Thermal offline,” Handy whispered. “He switched to motion tracking.”

  Perfect. Couldn’t move now.

  Stay still. Shallow breaths. Stay—

  Light bloomed in the darkness.

  I squeezed my eyes shut. The beam swept across the alcove.

  Paused.

  “There you are.” Crusher’s voice. Calm. Steady. The calm made my fur stand on end.

  I bolted.

  The sonic grenade hit the wall where I’d been crouching half a second earlier. The blast rattled my fangs. Concrete chunks rained down. I stumbled, caught myself, ran. The tunnel curved. I took the turn too fast and slammed into a pipe. My ribs screamed.

  “Dead end in fifty meters,” Handy said.

  “Yep.”

  “You have a plan?”

  Excellent question.

  The tunnel ended at a rusted blast door. Decades old, sealed shut, covered in layers of grime and failure.

  I skidded to a stop and spun.

  Crusher emerged from the darkness. Shoulder light. Rifle. Walking, not running. He had time.

  “No more running, Nova.”

  I bared my fangs.

  My claws screeched against the blast door as Handy shot a blue scanning beam across the surface.

  “Locked from the other side,” he said. “Hydraulic mechanism. No power. You’re not getting through.”

  Crusher raised his rifle. Smiled.

  My lip curled back from my fangs. “Bypass it.”

  “Ten seconds.”

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  Crusher fired.

  The round clipped my shoulder. I spun, checking the wound.

  Not a tranq. A tracker.

  Moron showed me exactly where it was.

  I clawed it off. A little blood seeped through white fur. I felt the skin beneath prickle and tighten, already starting to knit itself shut. Perk of the job.

  “Five seconds.”

  Crusher fired again. I dodged left. The round buried itself in concrete.

  “Three.”

  He adjusted his aim. I caught the glint of the round in the chamber—fat as my thumb. A tranq. I remembered the file Pandora kept on him. Sonic grenades. Ceramite nets. They didn’t want me dead, they wanted me caged.

  “Got it!”

  The door groaned. Hydraulics hissed. It cracked open—barely wide enough. I dove through and slammed it shut behind me.

  The door held.

  For now.

  I collapsed on the other side, panting. The room stretched out massive and dark. Some kind of control center from before Chicago went vertical. Dead consoles lined the walls, screens cracked, cables hanging like corpses. Dust everywhere. Thick enough to make me sneeze.

  “What is this place?”

  “Sub-level twelve,” Handy said. “Old transit hub. Decommissioned in 2070.”

  Ancient, by 2350 standards.

  “Exit?”

  “Searching.”

  Behind me, the door shuddered. Crusher was testing it.

  My legs shook. My shoulder throbbed where the tracker had hit me. Healing factor was kicking in, pain still sang through the nerves.

  The door shuddered from another impact, this one heavy enough to knock rust loose from the ceiling.

  “Handy. Anytime.”

  “North wall. Maintenance shaft. Leads to the old subway lines.”

  “Which are flooded.”

  “Not completely.”

  The door screeched open. Crusher muscled it aside, grunting. Was this guy human, or mainlining experimental steroids?

  I ran.

  The maintenance shaft climbed vertical, ladder bolted to the wall. I grabbed the rungs and hauled myself up. My shoulder screamed. Couldn’t stop.

  Up.

  Up.

  Up.

  The shaft opened onto a platform. Rusted rails stretched into darkness. Water pooled between the ties, reflecting blue light from my wristband. I jumped down, landed hard, sprinted along the tracks.

  Behind me, the blast door groaned one last time and crashed from its hinges.

  He was through.

  “He’s coming,” Handy warned.

  “How far to the surface?”

  “Half mile. There’s—”

  “There’s what? I hate ‘there’s.’”

  “Tunnel’s collapsed ahead. Dead end.”

  Of course it was.

  I kept running. Water rose to my knees. Cold, filthy, full of things I refused to think about. Muscles burned. Lungs burned. Everything burned. Ahead, the tunnel narrowed. Rubble blocked the entire passage. Concrete and rebar, a wall of collapsed infrastructure.

  Dead end.

  I stopped. Turned.

  Crusher stepped onto the platform, backlit by the maintenance shaft. He didn’t speak. Didn’t need to.

  I extended my claws. The wolf inside me roared, heat flooding my veins.

  He wouldn’t stop unless I made him.

  “Handy,” I whispered. “How stable is the collapse?”

  “What? Oh—my sensors can’t get a clear reading through all this rock, Nikk, but it looks bad. You hit that, the whole ceiling could go!”

  I grinned, fangs catching the light.

  “Guess we’ll find out.”

  I charged.

  Not for Crusher.

  Toward the rubble.

  My speed carried me through the cold, knee-deep water. Crusher raised his rifle, tracking my movement. First mistake.

  Boom.

  A sonic grenade blew ten feet behind me, kicking up a wall of water and debris. Didn’t slow me. The blast rattled my teeth and slammed into my already aching shoulder, the wolf-rage was a stronger narcotic.

  “Crap!” Crusher yelled. He saw my plan.

  He fired a burst of tranq rounds. They whistled past my head, impacting the concrete wall next to the collapse. Too late.

  I launched myself at the mountain of rebar and broken stone. All those years of clawing up the back of movie theater seats were about to pay off. My claws extended, needle-sharp, fueled by adrenaline and desperation. I ignored the blinding pain in my ribs and shoulder, focusing every ounce of strength into a single, devastating strike.

  SHRAAANK!

  The sound of claws tearing through concrete and rusted steel was deafening. I stretched the rebar snap under my attack, the entire mound of rubble shuddering like a living thing. Dust and stone blasted into my face.

  Handy’s voice was a tinny shriek from my wrist. “Don’t do it, Nikk! The ceiling will cave!”

  A low, terrible groan rumbled through the tunnel. Crusher ran, his boots pounding through the water as he tried to close the distance. He saw what I was doing.

  I hit the rubble again, my arms a blur of white fur and tearing metal. The ground beneath the tracks buckled.

  “Get out!” Handy ragged his voice with panic.

  I snarled at Crusher, watching the first fissure spiderweb across the ceiling directly above the bounty hunter.

  The world ended.

  The ceiling gave way with the sound of a thousand freight trains derailing. Water, earth, and pulverized concrete erupted in a massive, churning wave. Wasn’t a flood. Was a detonation.

  The force of the wave slammed into me like a collapsing building, driving the air from my lungs. I spun end over end, the freezing, filthy water—now thick with concrete dust and sewage—filling my nose and mouth. I tasted iron and rot. The tunnel became a dark, violent washing machine.

  I didn’t see Crusher or anything. I focused on pure instinct, fighting the water’s brutal current, paddling blindly, struggling toward where I thought the surface was. My ears popped from the pressure, roared with the noise of the collapse.

  My human thoughts frayed, washed away in a red tide of instinct. The roar in my ears wasn’t the water anymore; it was me. The world dissolved into pressure, current, and a single, driving need: up. The wolf was in charge now. My body elongated, hardened. The water became less like a threat and more like a dense medium I could fight. I drove my body upward, past chunks of floating debris, kicking off the falling rebar.

  I breached the surface of the rushing current in a chamber impossibly vast. Air—blessed, foul air—rushed into my lungs. The current was still violent, here, in what must have been an enormous, decommissioned storage tank or deep maintenance pit, I had room to maneuver.

  I scrambled onto a floating piece of metal—a broken door, maybe—and clung to it, shaking, coughing up water and bile.

  “Nikki! Report!” Handy’s voice was faint, heavily distorted.

  I forced the words out. “I’m… alive.”

  “Crusher?”

  I peered toward the source of the flood. Nothing. A churning, muddy torrent pouring into the pit. “Buried. Drowned. I don’t care. He better not come after me again.”

  I scanned the massive circular chamber. Rusted pipes the size of cars lined the perimeter far above the current water level. The only light came from a single, weak emergency lamp hanging from a cable somewhere high overhead, casting the entire scene in sickly orange.

  “Handy, new plan. Find an exit. Now.”

  “Working on it. My sensors are fried from the blast, half the transit lines are gone, and I think we’re thirty feet lower where we started. Give me a minute.”

  I nursed my aching shoulder and watched the dark water churn. I was safe from Crusher; I was deep underground, trapped in a rapidly filling subterranean reservoir. And Pandora had exact coordinates where the tracker had hit me. They understood I was in the industrial sector’s old underbelly.

  My temporary victory seemed like a trap closing.

  Least I’d still have time for school.