13 — Deprecated

A common error of economic liberalism was the equation of morality with preservation. A rational economist understands that the preservation of the system is the highest moral good. To sacrifice a single component to ensure the function of the whole is not a failure of compassion; it is the ultimate expression of systemic utility.

—Naomi Feld, The Economic Renewal Fallacy: A Theory of Replacement

The phantom sensation of Santo’s hand tearing from his grasp looped throughout Ari’s fitful REM cycles like a corrupted feed. Each time he would awaken just enough for every bruise and sprain to add another reminder of the previous day’s ordeal.

A sharp rap on the door jolted him fully awake. “Feld. 0700 hours. Get up.” Alene’s voice, clipped and efficient, cut through the quiet. On the nightstand, where nothing had been the night before, sat a steaming mug of black coffee and two nutrient bars. She must have come in, set the food down, and then left to knock on the other side of the door. Discreet. And a little odd.

The silence of the safe house room felt like the unnerving quiet of a system powered down, waiting for a command it couldn’t execute. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, the movement sending jolts of pain through his hip and shoulder.

Dressing was slow and agonising, each stretch and twist reporting new damage from the beating he’d taken. He downed the coffee and choked down the nutrient bars, pure function over flavour, just like everything else in this debugged world. The coffee warmed him and the bars gave his stomach something to process.

He stepped out of the small bedroom. The DCI stood by the room’s single window, waiting. She wore civilian trousers, a dark high-necked tunic, and a light gilet, unzipped. The change was unnerving. Without the uniform’s structured authority she looked like a normal person, although one who radiated a tightly controlled intensity.

“Lost the work suit?” Ari asked, gesturing towards her clothes.

She turned from the window, her expression unreadable. “We need to be less conspicuous moving through the city,” she said.

She held up the polymer cuffs towards him, the movement exposing the sidearm that hung in a shoulder holster under her gilet.

“Right,” Ari said, as he turned and offered his wrists. “Just a regular bloke wandering about cuffed by his ginger dominatrix. Sure to blend in perfectly.”

“Protocol,” she said.

As the cuff on his left wrist locked, the unyielding polymer pulled on his shoulder. He couldn’t stop an involuntary hiss of breath. The second cuff clicked shut.

The Mono glided silently through the early morning rain, an island of automated calm, until a chime sounded.

“Rerouting. System blockage detected at Trafalgar Square.”

The car banked smoothly, diverging from its optimal path. Even the Mono, this symbol of perfection, was failing. On the greenways, fear and suspicion showed in people’s faces. Ambulances were a constant part of the traffic flow, their white shells like antibodies in a sick bloodstream.

“Where are we going?” Ari asked.

“To see your co-conspirator, Dr Feld, at her lab,” Alene said.

“I’m not the one who gave her the data, remember? If anything she’s your co-conspirator now.”

Alene looked away from him. She was done talking. Ari guessed she was still annoyed with him for not cooperating the night before.

She scanned the city, her hand resting on her lap close to the sidearm he assumed she was frighteningly proficient with. With her he was no longer an operator—he was cargo.

“So this is what protection feels like?” he muttered, unable to help himself.

Alene’s gaze snapped to his, cold and analytical. “This is control of a variable. You, Mr Feld, are the variable.”

“Right,” he said, turning back to the window. “I foolishly forgot that I’m a variable.”

“Anomalous variables are my speciality,” she added. “Try not to be a predictable one.”

He had no reply for that. He looked down at his cuffed hands resting in his lap. An unfamiliar tremor moved through his fingers, a signal jitter he couldn’t route away. He quickly clenched his fists, hiding it. He glanced up. Alene was watching him. She didn’t comment, just a slight head-tilt. He looked away, back at the passing rain-slicked city.

The Mono docked at the King’s College London Guy’s Campus stop. Alene led him through the campus, a strange anachronism of old stone and new-build polycarbonate. Early-morning sunlight peeked through the rain clouds, warming him and illuminating the green ivy and red brick of the Hodgkin Building. New Hunt’s House threw its shadow across the courtyard and the old college walls. Ornate lampposts lining the walk flickered off one by one.

Alene badged them through a high-security door. The sign on the wall read MOLECULAR BIOLOGY AND GENETICS.

The lab itself was a stark mix of Victorian brick and twenty-first-century polycarbonate, a hybrid system he found unexpectedly beautiful. Holos shimmered displaying biology models. Benches along the wall supported equipment he didn’t recognise. One bench held the cellular imaging scope he had built for Sharon years ago, the housing scuffed, the optics clean. This wasn’t a workshop for reclamation, like his chaotic graveyard of broken tech. This was a state-of-the-art laboratory for creation and discovery.

Sharon approached, her lab coat a sterile white. Her face had settled into cool professionalism, but her eyes moved to the door, to Ardone, to the bench, to a holo, never quite settling.

“This is impressive,” Ari said.

“What do you mean, ‘this is impressive’?” Alene asked, her voice clipped. “Haven’t you ever been here before?”

A short, humourless laugh escaped Sharon’s lips. “Ari?” she said, not looking at him, her attention on Alene. “Don’t be silly. Ari was never interested in my work.”

The truth in it stung. He had tried to treat the end of their marriage like a system cutover and assumed that Sharon had put their past behind them. The sharpness in her voice exposed every old failure at once.

Alene took a deliberate step back, enough to clear the blast radius and study them both. Her eyes narrowed as if a new file had opened. He looked away, at a complex sequencer, anywhere but Sharon.

“You’ve never been to my work, either.” The moment he said it, he heard the pathetic deflection, a subroutine from a thousand of their failed arguments.

“You work in a high-security facility I don’t have clearance for,” Sharon said. “Even if I’d wanted to… never mind.” She finally turned to him. “Have you rung Francis yet?”

Ari hadn’t even considered it. As a high-level technician, he should have checked in. “I’ll… I’ll go ring my boss,” he said, the word tasting strange. He held up his cuffed wrists to Alene. “Do you mind?”

Alene hesitated, her gaze analytical, weighing the risk. Then, with a quiet sigh, she pressed her thumb against a small, unmarked sensor on the cuff. The right cuff split open, the left remained attached.

“My office,” Sharon said, pointing to a glass-walled cube in the corner. “It’s quiet.”

The office was neat, almost clinical. From inside, Ari could see Sharon and Alene through the glass, their heads close together. They were already talking, both brilliant and formidable, their expressions intent with the same problem. They were doing the work. He had brought them a mess and little else. He was faulty hardware in this new system. Obsolete, even.

He activated the holo. As the system initiated, his eyes scanned her desk. Orderly, but not tidy, of course. A stack of scribbled notes and a framed photo he hadn’t seen in years—the two of them on the South Bank, before the distance had set in. She was laughing, her hair covering half her face, her hand on his arm. He remembered that day. He’d just explained some complex piece of engineering, and she’d listened, really listened, and then called him a ‘beautiful, mad genius’. It was before he’d started reducing her feelings to faulty code. A pang sliced through him, for the connection he had allowed to corrode until it was severed.

The holo chimed, pulling him from the memory. Francis’s image coalesced, and the sight of her jolted him. She looked older, more tired than he had ever seen her, her vitality siphoned off by a dying world.

“Ari!” she exclaimed, her voice flooding with relief that made his throat tighten. “Oh, thank God. We’ve been… I’ve been so worried. Are you hurt?”

“It could be worse,” he said, though worse would mean dead.

“Listen to me,” she said, her voice dropping, urgent and pleading. “This… whatever this is, it’s over. You’re safe now. Just come back to the office. We can sort this out. Together.”

It was her come home protocol, the one she used to patch his grief when he was a teenager. “That’s a kind offer, Councillor,” he said. “But I’m currently in DCI Ardone’s custody. I’m assuming this is your containment protocol?”

A flicker of hurt crossed her face, quickly replaced by the politician’s weary resolve. “This is protection, Ari. Protection you forced my hand to arrange. If you had come to me first, if you had trusted me, none of this would have been necessary. I would have taken care of you.”

“Taken care of me or the variable? That’s what DCI Ardone called me.”

She let out a tired sigh. “You’re my family, Ari. Don’t let this… this situation make you forget that. I have the entire world on fire, and I’m still making time to find you.”

The words went through him with their usual double charge of love and obligation arriving together. He wanted to connect, to operate within the safety of a closed network. Then a memory came up of his real mother, her hand warm on his cheek as she ruffled his hair, her laugh simple and unconditional. Francis’s love had never felt like that. It always came with routes laid down in advance. He could no longer tell where her concern ended and her management began.

He looked through the glass at Sharon and Alene. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “I’m at my wife’s… ex-wife’s… I’m at Sharon’s lab. With DCI Ardone.” He held up his cuffed left hand. He needed this to end. “You should go deal with all the dying.”

He terminated the call. The holo dissolved, leaving him in the silence of the office, staring through the glass wall at his reflection with Sharon and Alene behind it. He stood, took a breath, and pushed the door open.

He stepped out of the glass cube back into the custody of his prison officer and his judge. The two women stopped talking. Their gazes were heavy, expectant.

Alene broke the silence. “Right. Now that the family reunion is over…” She looked pointedly at Sharon. “Dr Feld, tell me what you found.”

Sharon gave Ari one last look, quick and full of old history. She turned from Ari, her focus shifting entirely to Alene. The ease of it was immediately apparent—the fit between Sharon’s precision and Alene’s perception. He had become nothing more than an inductive ballast, limiting the current in their circuitry.

---

Sharon watched Ari go into her office and activate the holo. He looked worse than the harried man she had last seen at the Elephant and Castle Saloon—battered and bruised, close to spent. She remembered, fleetingly, the focused energy he’d had when building her the scope, the way his hands had moved with such confident precision. That man, full of potential and sharp intellect, had almost no relation to the figure standing in her office.

Sharon hadn’t thought about him at all in the past few days, not since she’d spoken to Alene and known the DCI was on the case. She had buried herself in the work. She’d known he was missing, that he was in danger, but it had all felt abstract. Alene’s message that she had recovered him and was bringing him in had been a relief, but a cerebral one. She had thought he’s safe, but had not felt it. Seeing him now, seeing the familiar face knocked into this state, she felt like she had rough gravel grating her throat.

“You alright?” Alene asked.

“Fine. Tired,” Sharon said. She pulled her focus back to Alene. “I’ve made progress. Significant progress. First, though…” she nodded towards Ari. “What happened to him? Why does he look like he tangled with a centrifuge?”

“Details are fragmented,” Alene said. “From what I can piece together, he escaped an abduction attempt, and then fell in with the Walkers who worked him over before they turned him over to me. He hasn’t elaborated.”

Alene gave Sharon an assessing look. “It impacts you differently when it’s someone you cared about, doesn’t it? Even when they’ve caused you pain.”

The DCI’s perception was unnerving.

“It’s complicated,” Sharon admitted. Resentment and residual affection sat in her chest like unstable compounds. “He made his choices. I made mine. We were incompatible systems.” She hated how much she sounded like him at that moment.

Alene nodded slowly, her eyes softening. “Sometimes the incompatibility is the worst part. Knowing it couldn’t work, even if you both wanted it to.”

The gentle empathy caught Sharon off guard.

Ari stepped out of her office. The man who had entered was a wreck, but still recognisably Ari—tense, defensive, retreating behind his usual walls. The man who emerged looked smaller. His jaw sagged and his shoulders stooped. She knew his relationship with Francis was difficult, but she had never seen him so hollowed out. His bearing was flat, unnervingly so. Shock, she told herself, or something else?

A pang made her flinch. Here was the man she had fallen in love with. The careful walls she’d maintained around her own hurt crumbled.

No, a colder part of her snapped back, remembering the sting of his dismissal, the countless nights staring at his back as he retreated into the Imager. He doesn’t get that. Not after everything.

Alene’s voice cut through the lab’s steady hum, pulling Sharon’s attention back. “Right. Now that the family reunion is over…” She looked pointedly at Sharon. “Dr Feld, tell me what you found.”

Sharon took a steadying breath, grateful for the DCI’s practical focus. She gave Ari one last look, old pain and fresh pity knotted too tightly to separate, then turned back to the work. The pathogen was the priority.

“Come with me,” she said, leading Alene towards the main holo display above her primary workbench. Ari trailed behind them.

She reached the workbench and turned. With a few deft commands, accompanied by a harmonic chime from the projector, she brought up a complex, three-dimensional model of the human brain and cardiovascular system. It shimmered in the air, a web of cool electric-blue and white light, casting shifting shadows on Alene’s face.

“I’ve been looking into this pathogen,” Sharon said. “The primary symptom, the hyperhidrosis—excessive perspiration—is a side effect. It’s driven by a massively increased metabolism. The body literally burns itself out, consuming energy faster than it can replenish. Eventually, the cardiac system overloads.”

“How much time?” Ari asked from behind them. He wasn’t looking at her, but at the holo, his eyes fixed on the schematic’s blue-white pathways. “From symptom onset to… termination?”

“It’s difficult to determine the exact infection point without knowing the vector,” Sharon replied, keeping her tone clinical. Even without looking, she was aware of his stillness behind her, the unnerving quiet of him processing the horrifying data. “But from the first visible signs—tremors, sweating, fever—to fatal cardiac arrest… three to four days. Sometimes more.”

“The pathogen itself—” Sharon continued, pulling up an intricate chain of amino acids, its appearance marked by the faint high-frequency whine of the hard-light emitters, “—isn’t a virus or bacterium. It’s a prion as I suspected.”

“A prion?” Alene asked, stepping closer, her focus absolute.

“A protein,” Sharon clarified. “A naturally occurring protein that’s misfolded. It becomes… corrupted. Malignant.”

“So, it’s an infiltrator,” Alene said. “It hijacks the body’s own logic to make it self-sabotage.”

“For the most part. Diagnostic scans wouldn’t flag it, as proteins are everywhere in the body. You have to know exactly which misfold you’re looking for.” Her fingers moved through the light itself, the air crackling with static as she pinched and expanded the neural pathway on the holo brain. “This specific prion insinuates itself into the autonomic nervous system, primarily where it interfaces with the cardiovascular regulatory centre and the cerebral cortex.”

She initiated a simulation. The holo-prion, a jagged corrupted shape, attached itself to a cluster of neurones. Instantly, sparks of light shot down a series of pathways.

“It floods the sympathetic nerves with stress signals, tricking the sinoatrial node, the heart’s natural pacemaker, into accelerating.”

The holo heart began to beat faster, the rhythm escalating frantically. “The node keeps firing, pushing the heart rate higher and higher, demanding more oxygen, more energy, than the body can possibly supply. It creates a feedback loop…”

On the display, the heart muscle strained, shuddered, and then ruptured in a bloom of corrupted light, accompanied by a sickening digital tearing sound. “…until catastrophic cardiac failure.”

“Nice touch,” Ari rasped.

Sharon glanced at him. The corner of her mouth twitched. “Thanks.”

“So the brain tells the heart to destroy itself,” Alene summarised, her voice grim.

“Yes,” Sharon confirmed. She sighed, rubbing her temples. “I need more data. Comparative genomic sequences from victims across different regions, cross-referenced with distribution logs for vaccines, food…”

“I can’t generate another key,” Alene said, her voice slightly lowered. “The risk of detection is too high now. I’ll have Councillor Herbert requisition the data through her channels. It will be slower, but safer. In the meantime… is there a cure? A drug to neutralise the prion?”

Sharon met Alene’s hopeful gaze, hating the answer she had to give. The blue-white light from the holos turned the lab sterile as a prep room.

“It’s a protein. Embedded in the neural tissue. Sterilisation by extreme heat is the only proven method, autoclave temperatures, terminal biohazard disposal.”

“So, you have to burn it,” Alene murmured, the hope in her eyes dying.

“To neutralise the prion, you’d kill the patient first,” Sharon said.

“Not an option, then,” Ari said. His voice was flat and raspy. He pinched his brow. “Why don’t you just sever the connection?”

Sharon and Alene turned to stare at him. For a moment, neither of them answered.

“Sever the…?” Sharon started, but trailed off as Ari’s logic, however insane, began to percolate.

“The nerve pathway,” Ari clarified, pointing at the holo again. “The prion’s in the brain, right? It’s executing a DDoS down the sympathetic nerves, flooding the node with so much noise the heart is vibrating instead of beating, right? If you air-gap it… erect a firewall that blocks the noise… the heart never gets the accelerated signal. It can’t overload.”

Alene looked at him as if he were a particularly dense child. “You do know the heart requires a signal from the brain to beat, don’t you? Filter the signal, the heart stops. Patient dies. Problem solved, I suppose, but not quite the cure we’re looking for.”

“It’s madness,” Sharon breathed, though she remained facing Ari, caught between Alene’s dismissal and the disturbing pull of his idea. He saw data packets to block, while she saw nerve tissue, hormone cascades, oxygen debt, a heart left beating without instruction.

“You can’t just… mess with a primary nerve bundle like routing network data.” But even as she said it, a part of her scientific mind acknowledged the brutal logic. “Still,” she murmured, more to herself than to them, “it circumvents the prion entirely.”

She looked at Alene, her expression a mixture of scientific horror and grudging intellectual curiosity. “The heart has intrinsic automaticity. It will keep beating if severed from the brain, but at a fixed and unchangeable rate. The patient would die from the slightest exertion because the heart couldn’t speed up to match the need.”

“What about replacing the signal with a local server?” Ari said. “Install something to monitor the required heart rate and produce the rhythm offline.”

“I don’t know about that.” She understood biology at the cellular level. This was medicine.

“Okay, never mind me. Glitch in the old logic board.” Ari tapped his head, turning away from the holo, his shoulders slumped.

“No, Ari,” she said, her voice softer. “It’s ugly and likely lethal, but the underlying logic applies. Isolate the corrupted node to protect the network, right? It’s not a terrible idea.”

His eyes went briefly to her face—an unguarded second, jaw loose—then he looked away.

Sharon placed a hand flat on the cool metal surface of her workbench, grounding herself. She took a deep breath. “Alright, I’ll explore if it’s even theoretically possible to isolate the sinoatrial node without… well, without immediate termination.” She turned fully to Alene then, meeting her gaze. “What’s your next move?”

“My priority is identifying these developers,” Alene said. “Tracing the source of the prion and the infection vector. With Mr Feld’s assistance, of course.” She glanced at Ari. “I need his expertise on CGS network architecture. That is, if you are ready to be part of the investigation.”

Ari nodded. “Fine.”

Sharon understood what Alene was doing. Inviting Ari to be an active participant was exactly what he needed to recover. It didn’t matter that she was manipulating him to get what she needed for the investigation, Sharon just couldn’t stand seeing him like this any more.

Alene turned to Sharon. “What about you? You look like you need some rest. Go home. Sleep.”

“I’ll stay,” Sharon said. “I want to run some initial simulations on isolating the SA node while the concepts are fresh.”

Alene nodded, accepting the decision. “Very well. Mr Feld, let’s go.”

Ari held up his wrists for her to refasten the cuff.

Alene’s hand hovered over the cuff, then disengaged the second one and put them away in her belt.

“That won’t be necessary. Not anymore. You’re part of the team now.”

Sharon met the DCI’s eyes and nodded once.

---

Outside Sharon’s lab, the rain had slicked the walks through Memorial Garden with small grey puddles that reflected the overcast sky. Alene and Ari moved together down the wide pavement, Alene half a step ahead, keeping him slightly behind and to her left—optimal placement for protection and control. The pale stone underfoot felt cold and unforgiving and a damp chill rose from the lawn with the smell of grass and leaf mould.

Alene scanned the campus traffic. Two students sauntered towards Guy’s Hospital, their forms indistinct in the gloom. A lone figure sketched Guy’s Memorial Arch. Mono cars glided along Newcomen Street between the buildings. Ari, however, was fixed on a young woman collapsed on a bench near a large bio-engineered planter, her body racked with the violent tremors of advancing illness.

“Glad I could offer some input back there,” Ari murmured beside her, “but let’s be honest. This is beyond me now, isn’t it? I’d just… I’d like to go home.”

“That’s not an option,” Alene stated. “Your flat isn’t safe.”

She tracked a figure detaching itself from a small queue at a Sup café stand. Unremarkable clothing, nondescript face, but moving with too much purpose. The subject simply adjusted his pack and walked on.

“You’re the primary link to the developers,” she said. “As long as they’re hunting you, we have a chance to identify them. You’re staying with me.”

He finally looked at her, his expression unreadable beneath the bruising and exhaustion, shadows dark in the hollows of his face.

“So I’m bait.” His mouth tightened. “Suppose it could be worse,” he conceded, his breath pluming slightly. A tremor ran through his hands before he clenched them into fists at his sides, the knuckles white.

Alene sensed a subtle discordance in the campus’s rhythm. Four men in black field garb detached from the morning foot traffic, same pace, same angle of approach. Not police, not Walker. Their boots were military-grade, their suits a nonstandard cut. She’d seen reports of gear like this… captured from Free-Zone raiders.

Knives appeared, incongruous against the backdrop of London’s enforced placidity, the dark metal barely noticeable. She began to reach for her sidearm, but stopped. Too risky with that many people around.

She felt Ari tense beside her, an indrawn breath catching. “Jack.”

Alene’s gaze didn’t leave the approaching men, cataloguing their positions, vectors, potential weapons. “Who?”

“From my flat. The leader,” he whispered, his voice tight.

No sound, no warning, just lethal intent materialising from the mundane. The blond man Ari named Jack was at their head, stark intent in his gait.

Alene spun right, intercepting the closest attacker. A block redirected the pistol arm, the impact jarring her forearm. She twisted, leveraged his momentum and snapped his wrist with a contained crack. His weapon clattered away onto the pale stones, skittering into shadow under a bin. A palm strike to the throat drove into cartilage and he collapsed onto the slick stones, breath caught in a wet choke.

Simultaneously, Ari stumbled back, his body slamming into a lamppost. A ping rang off the metal pole near his head.

The campus crowd scattered. The sketching artist shrieked before dropping their pad and colours with a clatter and scrambling away. The strolling couple froze, then fled towards the hospital, their panicked footsteps loud on the pavement before fading.

Ari flung himself away from the lamppost and clear of the second man’s lunge. The thrust missed him and the man’s forearm slammed the metal post, breaking his grip on the knife.

The knife spun across the pavement and came to rest near a stone bench where Ari had fallen, its blade flat and dark against the wet pavement. Ari scooped it up, fumbled it for a split second, then fixed his grip. He held it like a precision tool rather than a weapon, awkward but committed.

Alene engaged the third attacker, slamming him backwards over a bench. Fabric scraped the coping as she drove an elbow into his ribs. He staggered up, a dark shape against the ivy-covered Hodgkin Building. She finished it with a precise strike to the temple.

The few remaining bystanders had vanished, swallowed by pathways and buildings.

She turned, expecting to find Ari subdued, and found him locked in a desperate grapple by the edge of a large planter. The attacker was younger, all twitch and force. Their forms bucked across the paving. Synthetic leaves rattled. The man lunged. Ari moved inside the attack in one desperate burst. A wet gasp cut through the damp air. The attacker stumbled back into the planter, his hands bloodied where they grasped his chest.

“You stabbed me,” the man gasped, the accusation laced with disbelief, his voice thin. He crumpled into a bush.

Ari stood panting, his breath misting, staring at the fallen man, the knife still in his hand, his weight forward, not moving.

Jack bypassed the downed attackers and closed on her fast. Her attention snapped back to the threat too late. He slammed into her and drove her across the stones into a low retaining wall. He half pitched her over it, her head striking grass.

The impact knocked the breath from her lungs. Pain lanced through her side. Jack drove her ribs against the rough stone, scraping her skin raw through her tunic. His hands found her throat, thick fingers digging in and cutting off her air. The edges of her vision sparked. His face, inches from hers, was contorted. His breath came hot and foul, smelling of sickly-sweet nutrient paste. She kicked and struggled, legs scrabbling for purchase on the smooth stones, but his thumbs kept pressing into her windpipe. She tore clumps of grass and tried to shove them into his mouth and nose. Her airway narrowed, consciousness fraying into static.

Then Ari was shouting, charging towards the fight instead of running as she’d half-expected, his footsteps slapping hard on the wet pavement. He came at Jack from the side, the found knife raised, glinting wetly. He brought the blade down in a vicious arc, slashing a deep line across Jack’s face, from cheekbone to forehead, through the eye beneath. The sound was a sickening slice and grind as the blade met flesh and bone, shockingly loud in the sudden pause.

Jack roared, high and thin, and let her go to clutch his ruined face. Alene dragged in a tearing breath. Her throat was like a bruised apple, tenderised and collapsed. Her ribs burned. Instinct took over. She kicked out and caught him hard in the stomach.

“Police! You’re under arrest, you bastard!” she choked out, the words mangled, tasting blood in her mouth.

Jack staggered, blood and vitreous fluid leaking between his fingers. He glared at them through one eye. A growl rose from his chest. “Fuck you,” he spat, the word thick with blood and pain, then turned and stumbled away, a lurching figure escaping.

Ari stumbled back, shaking. He stared at the bloody blade in his hand, his face bleached white, before letting it fall from numb fingers with a clatter.

Nearby, a small disc-shaped sanitation drone whirred softly onto the scene, its sensors registering the spilled blood as organic waste, and began its cleaning cycle.

Alene pushed herself up, every muscle screaming, her throat raw and swollen. Her ribs protested. The cold damp from the retaining wall seeped into her clothes. The metallic taste in her mouth sharpened, and her vision blurred at the edges. Procedure shoved her upright before sense could catch up. She pulled out her gun, but she was too dizzy to aim.

She started after Jack, her legs unsteady. “Stop! Police!”

“Ardone!”

Ari’s voice came thin and strained, barely audible over the blood pumping in her ears.

She ignored it. Jack was escaping. Procedure dictated pursuit. Secure the suspect.

“Alene!” His urgency cut through, pain sharp in his tone.

She stopped, turning back.

“What?” The word was a harsh croak.

Then she saw him. He wasn’t standing. He was sprawled on the pavement near the bench where her third attacker lay, clutching his side. His shirt, already filthy, was now stained with a darkening patch of wetness, looking blacker than the surrounding fabric.

“Oh, bollocks,” she breathed.

She sprinted back to his side, ignoring the fire in her ribs, her own injuries momentarily forgotten, her boots loud on the now-empty pavement. He looked up at her, his face pale and slick with sweat in the weak light.

“My thoughts exactly,” he whispered, a pained attempt at a smile twisting his lips, before his eyes rolled back.

Alene dropped to her knees beside him, the hard pavement biting through her trousers. Her fingers went automatically to his neck. Pulse thready, fast. Too fast. She carefully pulled his hand away from his side. The dark stain was spreading, soaking through his clothing. Gunshot. Exit wound? Couldn’t tell. Too much blood, too dark.

Her mind catalogued the tactical situation while her hand shook around the comms unit. “Dispatch, this is DCI Ardone. Officer needs assistance. King’s College, Guy’s Campus outside the Hodgkin Building. Gunshot wound, potential internal bleeding. Requesting priority medical, Code Black, discreet arrival.”

“This is dispatch. Priority medical, Code Black, confirmed. We have your location.”

She paused, her thumb hovering over the secure channel link to Francis Herbert, then withdrew it. No, not yet. Control the variables first. Contain the scene. She took a deep breath, the scent of blood in the cool damp air.

“Dispatch, ETA?” she asked.