Sofia had stopped moving, and Arlo was still in the same spot, just past the structures across the street.
Crouching, Michael waited for another howl, but nothing broke the dead calm. He held up his wrist computer and tapped the surface to pull up a bigger map. To the south, he saw two new beacons outside the range of the smaller map on his HUD.
He smiled for the first time today.
Magnolia and Rodger had landed and were making their way into the city. That meant he needed to get moving.
“Alexander, you take rear guard; I’m on point,” Michael said. “We need to move fast and stay low.”
Alexander nodded back, and Michael led the way around the corner. The rotted hull of a car remained parked on the broken sidewalk, providing some cover. He decided to risk using the road and took off in a sprint for the vehicle.
Halfway to the first building, he spotted movement on the sidewalk.
With his chin, he bumped the night vision off to look at the blackened concrete with his own eyes. Fire ants the size of his thumb formed a long river of red from their den under the broken street. Several carried insects many times their own mass back to a hungry colony.
Michael decided to stick to his plan and took off running again. Leaping over the line of ants, he continued to the building and hugged the brick wall. Alexander and Edgar quickly joined him.
They stopped at the corner, and Michael looked around the wall. A listing metal fence blocked off a courtyard between the structures.
In the center, thick purple vines grew down the sides of a chipped fountain.
Michael considered crossing the open area, then thought about the hundreds of windows looking down into the courtyard.
Instead, he led the divers past the metal fence, to the next building. Remarkably, the scratched and dented metal door remained intact.
Michael kept low past the row of empty window frames and stopped at the end. Across the road loomed another building. Red vines spilled down from a huge hole in the side, like entrails from a gaping wound.
He did a scan unaided, then again with his infrared. Seeing nothing, he checked around the corner to the left, in the direction Sofia and Arlo were each hunkered down.
The street passed in front of two more buildings, then abruptly disappeared. A few more steps showed him why. A sinkhole had swallowed the entire city block.
He had a bad feeling that Sofia and Arlo had landed inside the cavernous hole.
Another hand signal, and the three divers were moving at double time. They didn’t stop until he got to several overturned vehicles on the buckled pavement.
There were two ways to the sinkhole ahead: straight down the road or through the two high-rise buildings fronting it. Since Arlo and Sofia were not in the same location, he decided to break off.
He sent Alexander to the building on the left before following Edgar to the right. They ran fast and hard on the uneven concrete.
A large stone statue stood in a concrete alcove in front of the building. It reminded Michael of the huge god he had seen on the dive in, though this one still had its head.
Edgar moved behind a sunken stairwell where Michael joined him.
They stopped to listen and check their HUDs. Sofia was somewhere to their left, and Arlo was somewhere right ahead of them.
Michael wasn’t eager to go inside the ruined building, but he wasn’t sure he had a choice.
Thinking over his options, he looked back at the statue and suddenly recognized it.
This wasn’t just an angel or a god. It was a sculptor’s depiction of Jesus.
Edgar crossed himself. Like some sky people, he was a follower of Christianity. Michael had never been religious, but he did hope it would bring them luck. And if someone was watching over them, well, he would take all the help they wanted to give. So, he crossed his chest as Edgar had done, and gave the “advance” signal toward the stairs. The front door was gone, and sections of at least two lower floors had collapsed in a jumble of plasterboard, furniture, and twisted pipes.
Edgar took point, and Michael followed him over the broken tiles.
The first two rooms on the right were filled with debris, and in the second, Michael found skeletal remains. He stopped and angled his tactical light inside, playing it over as many as five scattered sets of bones. They were oddly free of mummified skin or other soft tissue.
A surprised grunt came from down the hall, and Michael turned to see Edgar with his hands in the air as if someone had him at gunpoint.
Shining his light on the unmoving diver, Michael suddenly understood. He slung the laser rifle, unsheathed his knife, and hurried over. Edgar was caught in a thick, translucent spiderweb. Michael sliced through the finer filaments, then sawed through the thicker radial cables. With one arm free, Edgar began pulling the sticky strands away from his armor.
“Thanks,” he said quietly.
“Got to watch where you’re going,” Michael whispered. “And keep an eye out for the thing that made this web.”
Edgar nodded, and the divers pushed on toward the end of the hallway. An opening in the wall gave them a window into the sinkhole. The bowl outside was the size of a large old-world sports stadium.
Five buildings surrounded the rim, and one other had lost the battle with gravity to spill a cataract of debris down the slope, all the way to the bottom.
Detecting movement in his peripheral vision, Michael looked left to find Alexander, waving from a second-floor balcony.
He wasn’t alone.
Michael breathed a sigh of relief when he saw Sofia. She waved, too, and then pointed into the sinkhole. Edgar edged forward to take a look down.
“Not too close,” Michael whispered, stepping up behind him.
They shined their tactical lights into the hole. Michael raked his back and forth, then stopped when the light captured a black canopy of a chute.
Sure enough, Arlo had parachuted into the sinkhole.
Their beams found him perched on a jutting shelf of sidewalk below. He waved at them frantically, and Michael quickly realized why.
“Shut off your light,” he said.
Edgar did as ordered.
Michael turned on his infrared. A section of the pit lit up with red contacts, almost all of them roughly the size and shape of a human.
“Fuck a mutant’s mother-in-law!” he whispered.
The Siren hive Timothy had noted on the map wasn’t the only one. Dozens of bulbous nests lined the sloping walls of the hole. Even more of the beasts slept at the bottom, in a writhing mat of intertwined bodies.
Arlo had fallen right into their lair.
Team Raptor had a major problem on their hands, and Les wasn’t sure how to help them. Standing on the bridge, he watched Cricket’s video feed. Since the entire team seemed to be lying prone, he had decided to deploy the robot for a better look. Now he saw why.
The robot hovered below the clouds, using its advanced optics to see into a sinkhole quite literally crawling with Sirens. The beasts were sleeping right below the area where Arlo had fallen. Somehow, they still hadn’t detected him. But time was running out.
Michael, Edgar, and Alexander had linked up with Sofia, and they were right above the sinkhole, no doubt trying to devise a plan to get Arlo out of there before fifty Sirens tore him to shreds.
“If only I could mount a missile to Cricket,” Les said.
“Sir, that’s actually not a bad idea,” Eevi said. “What if we turn Cricket into a missile and slam it into the bottom of those nests? It could provide a distraction, at least.”
“We also lose our only eye in the sky,” Layla said. “And you destroy Michael’s friend.”
“Timothy, got any bright ideas?” Les asked.
“I have been tinkering with one, Captain.” The AI walked over, scratching his perfect beard as if deep in thought. “Perhaps we could use the drone as a distraction, but not quite in the way that Eevi suggested.”