Prologue

— The Sound They Hunt

Jax

The machine in my chest lies every twelve seconds.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

Then silence.

For one perfect breath, I can pretend my heart belongs to me.

The next tick shivers through the steel table beneath my spine, and Silas smiles from the other side of the glass.

“Still alive,” he says through the intercom. “How disappointing for you.”

White surgical light burns above me. Restraints bite both wrists, one ankle, and the base of my throat. Somebody has cut my shirt open and painted a black circle around the stabilizer beneath my sternum. The device is no larger than a coin, but the ugly little thing keeps my heart from tearing itself apart.

It also broadcasts my location whenever I panic.

Silas made sure of that.

I turn my head toward the observation window. His reflection floats over mine: silver coat, clean gloves, not one hair out of place. Sector Four could collapse into the Ashlands tonight and Silas would step from the wreckage without dust on his shoes.

“You know,” I say, “most employers offer dental.”

My voice cracks. I hate that he hears it.

His smile deepens. “Most employees do not steal a military-grade cipher from my private vault.”

“I was reorganizing.”

“You swallowed it.”

“Efficient storage.”

He nods to the technician beside the operating console.

Pain detonates behind my ribs.

My back arches against the table before I can stop it. The stabilizer shrieks at a frequency too high to be sound and too low to be thought. Every muscle locks. The room fragments into white panels, chrome instruments, and the red warning light reflected in Silas’s eyes.

Tickticktickticktick.

The technician cuts the current.

Air tears back into my lungs.

“Where is the cipher now?” Silas asks.

I force my teeth apart. “Check your personality. Something that small could hide there for years.”

He studies me with the patient disappointment of a craftsman examining damaged property.

That is all I have ever been in Sector Four. Property with useful hands. I learned to rebuild pulse rifles before I learned to shave. I learned the price of a synthetic kidney, a clean identity, and a child’s unmodified eyes. I learned that every piece of a person can be sold if the buyer is rich enough.

Silas taught me the final lesson himself.

Never let them know which piece you cannot survive without.

Unfortunately, mine ticks.

He enters the laboratory through the pressure door. The lock seals behind him with a soft hydraulic sigh. Two guards remain outside. The technician keeps one hand near the alarm. Silas approaches the table carrying a narrow extraction blade.

“The cipher contains coordinates to my reserve cache,” he says. “Weapons, implants, enough unregistered chrome to purchase three districts. You cannot decode it.”

“Then why are you sweating?”

His gloved hand closes around my jaw.

“Because Ryn can.”

The name lands harder than the current.

I keep my face blank, but my stabilizer betrays me.

Tickticktick.

Silas hears the change. Of course he does. The receiver is built into the black ring on his index finger. He taps it against my cheek like a metronome.

“There you are,” he murmurs. “The real Jaxon Thorne. Buried under all that noise.”

The blade touches the scar beneath my ribs.

“I can open you and retrieve the cipher. The question is whether I preserve the defective machinery around it.”

I look past him to the instrument cart.

Scalpel. Clamp. Bone saw. Injector.

And beneath a folded cloth, almost hidden, a cracked induction coil waiting to be discarded.

I repaired that model when I was fourteen. It stores enough residual charge to kill a room’s lights for six seconds.

Six seconds is a lifetime if everyone else is blind.

I smile at Silas.

“You should have hired a worse mechanic.”

I twist my right wrist.

The joint dislocates with a wet pop.

Agony flashes up my arm. My hand narrows just enough to slip the restraint. Before the technician can shout, I grab the coil and slam its broken contact against the steel table.

Blue light erupts.

The laboratory goes black.

The stabilizer in my chest misses a beat.

So does everyone else.

I roll off the table as a gun fires through the darkness. Glass explodes above me. Silas curses. I crawl beneath the instrument cart, seize the technician’s ankle, and pull. His skull meets the floor with a sound I feel through my palm.

Emergency lighting floods the room in crimson.

Silas is three steps away, extraction blade in one hand, pistol in the other.

I throw the clamp.

It strikes his wrist. The shot goes wide. I reach the pressure door, rip open the maintenance panel, and bridge two wires with the bloody tips of my fingers.

The seal releases.

One guard charges in. I duck, drive my shoulder into his center, and let his momentum carry him into Silas. The second guard reaches for me. I tear the shock baton from his belt and bury it against the chrome port behind his ear.

He drops.

I run.

Barefoot, half dressed, one wrist hanging uselessly, I sprint through corridors I helped wire. Alarms howl. Steel shutters descend one by one. I slide beneath the first, vault the second, and jam the third with the baton before it can crush my spine.

Behind me, Silas’s voice fills every speaker.

“You cannot hide the sound of your own heart, Jax.”

Tick. Tick. Tick.

I reach the waste chute at the western wall. Outside its corroded hatch, acid rain turns the night into silver knives. Beyond it lies the Ashlands: poisoned mud, dead machines, and miles of territory controlled by men who would sell me back for a battery.

Freedom has always had terrible marketing.

I wrench the hatch open.

Wind drives chemical rain into my face. My skin begins to burn at once.

Silas appears at the far end of the corridor, blood streaking one side of his immaculate coat. He lifts his pistol but does not fire.

He only raises the receiver ring and listens.

My stabilizer answers him.

Ticktickticktick.

“Run,” he calls. “I enjoy hearing hope exhaust itself.”

I jump into the storm.

The Ashlands swallow me whole, but the signal keeps screaming beneath my ribs.

Somewhere in the dark, something will hear it.