Chapter 10 - The Rusting Sanctuary
The cruiser skidded diagonally across the pavement, coming to a halt against the rusted guardrail of an abandoned industrial canal. Smoke curled from under the scorched hood, smelling of burnt wiring and melted rubber.
“Out! Move!” Vance barked, kicking his driver door open and unbuckling Leo in one violent motion. He slung the toddler onto his back, holding him securely with one forearm, while Maya grabbed the titanium drive and shoved it deep into her inner boot lining.
The neighborhood around them had deteriorated rapidly. They had crossed the municipal line into the old railway district—a maze of decaying warehouses, overgrown freight tracks, and silent loading docks that had been abandoned when the manufacturing sector fled the state twenty years ago. The suburban sheen of manicured hedges and clean asphalt was gone; here, the only lighting came from flickering sodium-vapor streetlamps and the relentless spotlight of the tracking drone hovering above.
“Down there!” Maya hissed, pointing toward an old freight maintenance shed whose corrugated metal roof had partially collapsed under decades of ivy. “The metal roofing will shield our thermal signatures from the drone’s infrared sensor!”
They scrambled down the rocky embankment, Vance’s fake dress shoes slipping on the loose gravel. Leo buried his face into Vance’s neck, his small hands clutching the fake brass collar pins of the uniform. He wasn't crying now; the absolute novelty of real terror had driven him into a stunned, quiet vigilance.
Inside the shed, the air was thick with the scent of damp rust, machine grease, and dead leaves. Vance set Leo down behind a stack of rotted wooden pallets. The child immediately sat cross-legged, his little yellow raincoat glowing faintly in the dim moonlight filtering through the cracked ceiling.
“Are we in baby jail now?” Leo asked, his voice trembling like a leaf in the wind.
Vance knelt before him, his chest heaving as he caught his breath. He reached up, tore the tin badge from his chest, and threw it into the darkness of the warehouse.
May you like
“No, kid,” Vance said softly. “You’re not in baby jail. You were in it before this. We’re breaking out.”
A shadow blocked the sliver of moonlight entering through the doorway. Clarissa’s lead operative stepped onto the gravel floor, his electroshock baton humming with forty thousand volts of pale blue electricity.
