The Society (A Broken World Book 1) (11 page)

Del was there, struggling to get valves open, but she lacked both Jerome's size and my nanite-infused muscles. Her gloves were smoking, but she was gamely hanging onto the superheated metal in an effort to get the flow of water moving more quickly.

I joined her at the valve she was working on, throwing everything I had into it, but it refused to budge. I grabbed her by the shoulders. "The heat made the valve expand—we're not going to get it to move without more help. Open up the rest of the valves—hopefully that will be enough to cool it down too."

I got two more valves opened up before a terrible, unearthly groan brought me around. The pipe we'd been working on was starting to deform under the pressure of all that hot water. I traced the path the water was going to take when the bulge finally gave way, and realized that Del was standing directly in the space the stream was going to hit.

She'd never done anything nice to me, never even acknowledged me as being worth talking to other than to tell me off. Even more than that, everything that was happening was her fault, but I still couldn't just let her die. I raced over to her, heedless of the fact that I could feel my bare skin getting tight from how close I was getting to the other pipes, just as the bulge started to give way.

It was too late to get her out of the way—too late to save either of us. Instead I bent down and grabbed the edge of one of the metal plates from the floor, lifting it up as I yelled her name.

The stream of superheated water hissed as it left the pipe headed towards us like a living organism. The sheet of metal shook from the impact of all that pressurized water, but I managed to keep it from coming back over on top of us. My efforts had been enough to stop the water—and bits of shrapnel—from hitting us directly, but not enough to stop all of the ricochets that were hitting nearby pipes.

I'd grabbed Del with one hand once I had the floor plate levered up to provide some protection, but she was further back, which meant that she was further outside the pocket of protection I'd created. She screamed in agony and collapsed against me as a shard of metal took her in the right side of her chest, but already things were cooling down.

The cool water being flushed through the rest of the pipes had come too late to stop my section from overheating, but it had been enough to make sure that only the first couple of moments of the breach had been potentially lethal.

A split second later Jerome picked Del up off of the ground and carried her towards the control room. I dropped the metal plate back into place in the floor and followed him—I could already see that the temperatures in my section were starting to drop.

Beth and Billy met us at the door. "We need to get the bleeding stopped. Jerome, you get her on the table. Skye, grab the first-aid kit."

I grabbed the first-aid kit and turned back around just in time to see Billy disappear back into the pipe room. Beth saw my questioning glance. "He'll make sure that all of the valves in your section are all of the way open—we can't afford to just leave them be and hope that the rest of the system can soak up the extra heat."

Beth snatched the medical supplies out of my hands and set to work taping up Del's wound with a surprising amount of skill. It wasn't going to be enough to keep Del alive—not unless we got her somewhere they could stitch her up soon—but it was more than I'd been expecting out of a grubber. More importantly, she'd bought us time to transport Del through several hundred yards of tunnels in the hopes of finding real medical assistance once we got to the surface.

"You two grab the stretcher and bring it over here."

Jerome and I were moving to comply when a group of men barged into the control room. "What's going on?"

The guy asking the questions looked too young to be in charge of anything, but based on the way that Beth all but saluted, he was important. Maybe he was one of Brennan's favorites. Jerome and I carefully shifted Del onto the stretcher while Beth responded.

"We had a pipe burst on us, sir. We got the order to ramp up power production and started slowing down the flow of water, only to have the foundry report a malfunction in one of the voltage drivers for the heating process on the steel they were melting down."

The guy in charge waved to two of the men who'd arrived with him—big, well-armed men—to pick up the stretcher. "Get her up to the hospital and make sure that she gets treated."

He pointed the other two guards toward the pipe room. "You two get some gloves on and make sure that everything is under control in there. The last thing we can afford right now is to have one of the pipes in the walls burst—that would set us back months."

It was odd. By that point I'd had time to get a better look at the younger guy—the supervisor—and he was every bit as young as I'd originally thought. He might be eighteen, but given how quickly living inside the city aged someone, that was a long shot. More astonishingly, he was surprisingly attractive with short, dark hair and a build that wasn't starved like most of the grubbers I'd met so far. Unlike the shapeless bulk so common to enforcers like Bash and Jerome, this guy looked like he had well-defined muscles underneath the clothes he was wearing—clothes that were light years better quality than what I'd been given upon arriving in the compound.

His eyes were remarkably clear for someone in a position of authority. Piter and his men had all looked like they spent half of their time drugged out of their mind. This guy looked like he'd never touched anything at all mind-altering. His eyes weren't dull, bloodshot holes in his face; they were hard, brown orbs that right then looked like they could stare holes in sheet metal.

He didn't look like a spoiled dandy, and all four of the bigger, older men with him hopped into motion like their lives depended on obeying instantly. It was an interesting response. I'd seen very few people move with that kind of speed since I'd moved into the city. Whoever this guy was, he'd either earned his team's respect or he had carte blanche from Brennan and wasn't afraid of dishing out punishments at the drop of a hat.

Jerome and I stepped back as the guards picked up the stretcher and hurried towards the tunnels. Jerome made as though to follow them, but before he could take more than a couple of steps the supervisor resumed talking.

"Damn it, Beth, how did this even happen? Were you guys asleep down here?"

For the first time since I'd arrived down at the geothermal installation I saw Beth actually get mad.

"This is your fault! You can't leave Billy and me here with no other help than a trio of untrained workers who are so new they don't even know how to operate a shower. Not and still expect us to make everything function the same way it did when you and Tyrell were down here with half a dozen men. I told Simms that it was a mistake to pour steel with a crew this green, but he insisted."

"Beth—"

"Don't you 'Beth' me. I did everything by the book. The damn girl didn't fall asleep at the switch, but she was too stupid to tell the difference between a command for more power and a warning from the foundry that they had a runaway voltage regulator. This is squarely on your shoulders, Brennan. You were a damn fool to think that you could get away with pouring steel at the same time that you demanded more power out of us."

The revelation that the 'supervisor' was actually
Brennan
, the guy with the power of life and death over everyone living inside the compound, rocked me back on my heels. Maybe that was why I didn't anticipate what happened next.

Jerome had nearly made it to the tunnel by the time Beth finished up with her rant. Unfortunately he was still well within hearing range, and he moved with a suddenness that proved he'd worked as an enforcer at some point in the past.

He turned and shot towards Brennan like a bullet out of a gun, and one look at his eyes told me that he wasn't going to be satisfied with anything less than death.

"This is your fault! You're the one who stuck us down here hoping we would die."

I reacted without thinking, but my reaction time wasn't what it should have been. Jerome brushed past Beth with enough force to send her windmilling toward a wall, and then grabbed Brennan's throat with both hands.

This was the reason that the warlords—large or small—all had enforcers and bodyguards. Unfortunately, all of Brennan's guards were out of position, too far away to protect their charge.

I stepped into Jerome and slammed a punch into the side of his neck in the hopes that it would shock him into letting go. He did—at least with one hand—but only so that he could try to backhand me into last week.

I ducked, but he was a lot faster than I'd been expecting. I turned the blow into a glancing one rather than the monstrous attack that would have snapped my neck, but it still hit with enough force to almost make my knees buckle.

Brennan was grabbing at his throat, clawing at Jerome's left hand, but he didn't have any leverage—even assuming that he knew the first thing about fighting with his hands. Beth was probably smart enough to grab some kind of club before she joined in the fight, but she'd hit the wall with enough force that I'd heard something snap.

The guards inside of the pipe room couldn't have possibly heard what was going on, and the ones from the tunnel were still several seconds away even if they'd realized that their leader was under attack. It was all up to me.

Jerome's arm was headed back my way, but now I had enough adrenaline coursing through my system for my nanites to be enhancing my reaction time. I stepped forward and slammed a punch into his left arm, targeting a nerve cluster that I hoped would render it useless, and then spun and checked the blow from his right arm with my elbow.

I couldn't stop him—not a blow with that much windup, not when he was so much bigger and heavier than me—but somehow I managed to keep my feet under me, and then it was my turn to really go on the offensive. I bent my knees, lowering my center of gravity a split second before exploding upwards with an uppercut that started from down at my calf and involved every muscle in my body from my legs up through my shoulders and arms.

My fist hit his crotch with enough force to pick him up off of the ground. Even my nanite-reinforced bones weren't up to transmitting that much force into something as hard as his pelvis. I felt my hand break in three or four places, but I did even more damage than I took, and I had the pleasure of seeing him hit the ground and not get back up.

It was only then that I realized what I'd done. I'd just saved Brennan, the single most dangerous man in the entire city, the very person I'd been sent in to stop.

Chapter 9

My instructors back at the capital would have reacted without thinking. Elbow strike to the neck to finish off Brennan, break Beth's neck, and then grab one of the big wrenches off of the workbench and use it to kill Jerome.

It wasn't guaranteed—no plan ever was—but it had a near perfect chance of killing Brennan at the same time that I eliminated all of the witnesses. Unlike my instructors, I hesitated. I looked Brennan in the eyes and the hard, flinty orbs had been replaced by something else, something more vulnerable.

He'd been shocked by what happened, but he wasn't responding with the bluster of a tin god. He looked like a real person, one who'd had their mask stripped away, and what I saw didn't justify murder. My orders had been to find the location of the new power source and report back in. It was still possible that I would have to assassinate Brennan before everything was said and done, but those weren't my orders—at least not yet. The fact that another operative might have taken him out right then didn't mean that I had to do the same.

I hesitated, gave myself a chance to connect with him on a human level, and suddenly my chance was gone. His guards came running back down the tunnel, guns drawn, and it was too late to do anything other than just help him to his feet—hoping the entire time that he hadn't seen death in my eyes when he'd looked at me.

One of the guards made as if to club me away with the butt of his rifle, but Brennan stopped him. "I'm fine—she's the last person you need to worry about protecting me from. Without her you would have arrived to find that guy over there standing on my corpse."

The bigger guard slammed his rifle into Jerome—knocking him unconscious—while the closer guard lowered his weapon without taking his eyes off of me.

"Are you sure that you're okay, sir? We should probably get you up to the hospital. You've got a nasty set of bruises around your neck already and we need to get you checked out."

Brennan shook his head. "You and I know that there's very little the hospital could do if I've got a broken hyoid. I'm still talking and breathing, which means that there's no point in trekking all the way up to the surface. Especially not given that I'll just be coming back down here to check out the damages. Get that lady up to the hospital while there is still time—that's an order."

The guards shot each other dissatisfied looks and Brennan sighed. "Leave me your sidearm. If the big bruiser over there wakes up before help gets here, I'll shoot him."

It was obvious to me that I was the unknown quantity who had the two of them so worried. Beth was an old woman, and she'd been around Brennan any number of times before now without attacking him. I, on the other hand, had just taken down a guy more than twice my size. I didn't blame them for being worried.

I took a couple of slow steps backwards and then turned towards the pipe room. "I'll go tell the guards in with Billy that you need them back out here. Given that the pipes are all wide open by now, there's no reason for both of them to be in the pipe room. Billy and I can handle monitoring stuff in there until you can send down more help."

I heard grumbling from behind me, but by the time I picked up my gloves from the floor where I'd dropped them while grabbing the first-aid kit, there was a presence at my back. I tucked the gloves under my right arm and reached for the door with my left, but Brennan was already pulling it open. He had a sleek black pistol stuffed down his waistband, and a pair of heavy gloves in his free hand.