Read Online The Apocalypse Ocean by Tobias S. Buckell, Pablo Defendini - Free Book Online

eyes widened. He might be from Palentar, but he knew about the rain. “So in about an hour, or so?” he asked.
    “Or so,” Tiago said. “I still need to pick the lock on the bars.” He reached into the seam of his pants, ripped at it, and slipped a few metal wires out.
    He shouldn’t have attempted to smuggle them into Dekkan, if they’d been found he could have gotten into more trouble.
    But he’d been too terrified to not get sent in there without something he might need.
    Now he was grateful for that motivating terror.
    “Go stand by the door,” he told June. “Warn me if you hear footsteps.”

Chapter Eleven

     
    For Kay sometimes it felt good to melt into a crowd. To walk around, anonymous, without the tendrils of power needing maintained and twitched. That itch in the back of her brain that insisted on decoding every intonation of voice, the sum of all one’s movements, the smell of a person, all that was overwhelmed by the crowd.
    Maybe there were older versions of her kind that could manipulate an entire crowd. Maybe she could, one day, she mused.
    But for now, she was a drop in the sea of human activity and bustle, slipping here and there as she made her way across the square, the sun hot on her face.
    She’d secured the asset. She’d seen promise in the pickpocket. The Doaq had been frustrated yet again, and soon she’d find out whether Nashara had done it any damage.
    There were new weapons already being handed out to the Ox-men that Nashara had delivered in those wooden packing crates, as part of the deal.
    And Kay had a super weapon. A small nuclear weapon. Large enough to destroy three miles of the entire island. And the Doaq with it.
    Kay had limited access to the worlds of information outside of Placa del Fuego. She’d been free of Okur for two years. She’d barely understood what the worlds outside Okur were when she’d first landed on the docks of Placa del Fuego.
    She sure as hell hadn’t understood what a wormhole was, and had screamed the first time a ship sailed through one, thinking it was a portal to the afterlife.
    Ignorance.
    She’d been a mewling infant before all this.
    Worse. She’d been a tool. An empty mind to be wielded by Lord Sassamich and his entire flock. She’d been little more than a well-trained dog, she thought as she paid the fare to ride a cable car toward the Back Circle. A dog to shepherd all the other human animals on the Sizit estate.
    Today she’d faced down someone powerful. One of the great manipulators of the Forty-Eight worlds. Nashara herself. Kay smiled. She’d played it right. With this bomb she would rule the island. Not just the criminal underworld, which had been the slow and bloody struggle she’d set herself on for the last two years.
    No, she’d turn this island into a fortress of safety, with herself deeply ensconced at the very heart of it. And she could maybe finally relax.
    Her moment of calm and release faded when she approached the current headquarters. She’d remained here a bit long, three days instead of her usual two.
    But she liked the pit in the basement. That had worked really well with Nashara.
    She saw the miasma of fear and nervousness on the spotters outside as she walked up the road. They were supposed to look like they belonged on the street out here, but almost everyone had a weapon.
    “You all might as well be holding signs that say ‘Criminal Operation Inside’ the way you are acting,” Kay hissed. She cornered one of her lieutenants. “Hide those weapons, and get them to calm down, damn it.”
    The moment she stepped inside, a wide-eyed Runner, towering over Kay by what seemed like several feet, rushed over. “Bakeem sends you a note from the lookout position at the end of Tracy Street.”
    The Runner half bowed and presented Kay with a hastily scrawled note. She reeked of sweat, Kay thought, and the note she’d handed over was crumpled.
    Kay smoothed it out on a table.
    “You were there?” she asked.