Riggs POV

  The air outside the shack tasted of ozone and wet ash, but to Riggs, it smelled like incompetence.

  He stepped out of the transport and his polished boot sank an inch into the grime of the street. He frowned as he looked down at the synthetic leather. He had paid good credits for these, imported from the mid-tiers with clean lines and no rust, and Sector 4 was already trying to ruin them. He adjusted his high-collared trench coat which was a heavy ballistic weave that hid the bulk of his frame and looked at the scene with cold and heavy eyes.

  His squad of Cleaners stood in a semi-circle around Jory’s shack. They looked like statues of composite armor and uncertainty.

  "Report," Riggs said. He didn't raise his voice because he didn't have to.

  The squad leader stepped forward with his helmet tucked under his arm. "Perimeter secure boss. The thermal sweep confirms a heat signature in the foundation. He’s burrowed in the crawlspace. We have mag-locks on the front and back. We can gas him out or burn the structure."

  Riggs looked at the shack. It was a pile of rusted corrugated metal and rot barely held together by structural fatigue.

  "And damage the merchandise?" Riggs asked. His voice was smooth but carried a dangerous edge. "The crystal that boy took is worth more than your lives. If you cook his brain I peel your lungs."

  He walked past the soldier and dismissed him with a wave of a gloved hand. He approached the front of the shop where two guards were holding Jory.

  The old man looked pathetic. His shopkeeper’s apron was torn to reveal the thin starved frame beneath. His face was already bruising as a map of purple and red bloomed across pale skin. He was trembling not just from fear but from the bone-deep vibration of the mag-locks sealing his home.

  Riggs stopped in front of him. He loomed with his broad silhouette blocking out the dim streetlights to cut a jagged hole in the haze. He looked at Jory the way a butcher looks at a dull knife, annoyed by the inefficiency.

  "He is... a boy," Jory wheezed with blood flecking his lips. "Just a boy Riggs. You remember what that is like?"

  Riggs smiled. It didn't reach his eyes. "I remember that weakness is a disease. And I cured myself."

  He reached out and his thick scarred hand grabbed a fistful of Jory’s greying hair. With a sharp and brutal jerk he dragged the old man away from the guards. Jory stumbled and cried out as he was hauled into the center of the street directly in front of the shop’s entrance.

  Riggs threw him down. Jory hit the dirt hard and a puff of dry dust rose around him.

  "He is listening," Riggs said, pitching his voice to carry. He looked at the floorboards of the shack knowing the acoustics of these rotted buildings. Every sound outside would amplify in the hollows beneath. "Rats are curious creatures. But they are cowardly. You have to give them a reason to bite."

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  He didn't draw a weapon. He didn't need one. He raised his boot, the polished one now streaked with mud, and brought it down on Jory’s ribs.

  Crunch.

  It was a calculated strike. Not a frenzy. Not a loss of control. It was a rhythmic application of physics to biology designed to make a particular sound.

  "Don't..." Jory gasped as he curled into a ball. "Mike... stay... down..."

  Riggs struck him again. It was a backhand this time, heavy with the weight of his reinforced glove. The sound was wet, meat against synthetic leather.

  Thud.

  Riggs adjusted his cuffs and smoothed the expensive fabric of his coat. He looked at the silent shop with a bored face and hard eyes. "I know you can hear me Sifter. I am going to take this man apart. Piece by piece. Bone by bone. And I am going to do it right here while you hide in the dirt."

  He grabbed Jory’s arm and twisted it until the shoulder joint strained at the limit of its socket.

  "Come out," Riggs whispered to the air. "Or listen to him break."

  Mike POV

  The silence in the crawlspace was shattered.

  For Mike the world had been a delicate balance of suppression, holding his breath and holding his mind and holding the spiders in a trance of false calm.

  Then came the sound.

  It vibrated through the packed earth and the wooden joists above his head. It wasn't the metallic clang of boots or the hum of machinery. It was the wet and dull thud of violence impacting flesh.

  Mike flinched. The movement was involuntary, a spasm that sent a ripple of alarm through the spiders crawling on his skin. The connection he had maintained with them snapped. They skittered away in sudden confusion sensing the predator in their midst was no longer dormant.

  Above him Jory screamed. It was a ragged and stifled sound quickly cut off by another blow.

  Thud.

  Logic tried to assert itself. Stay hidden. If you move you die. If you die Jory dies anyway. Survival is the only rule.

  Thud.

  The logic dissolved. It burned away in a flash of white-hot heat that started in his chest and flooded his veins. The fear that had paralyzed him and the desperate need to be small and invisible evaporated.

  Mike opened his eyes in the absolute darkness.

  He wasn't a victim hiding in a hole anymore. He was a sovereign in his domain.

  He pushed his senses outward. He ignored the fleeing spiders because they were too small and too fragile for what he needed. He drove his mind past the wood and past the dirt reaching into the walls of the shack and into the insulation and into the deep hidden runs where the filth accumulated.

  [Sense Vermin] expanded like a sonar pulse.

  He found them.

  Roaches.

  Not just one or two. A nest. A colony. They were huddled in the hollow spaces between the interior and exterior walls agitated by the noise with their hearts beating in a rapid fearful staccato. They were fat on trash and insulation and their bodies were dense with muscle and disease.

  Mike didn't ask them for permission. He didn't soothe them with lies of safety.

  He seized them.

  He grabbed their primitive minds with a psychic grip that was iron-clad and furious. The roaches chittered in the walls with a sound only he could hear as the crushing weight of his command overrode their wills.

  Mine, he projected. You are mine. You are weapons.

  He felt their biological potential. The fluid sacs in their bellies. The unstable chemistry of Sector 4 that ran through their blood.

  In the darkness of the walls dozens of small bodies began to heat up. Their heart rates spiked from fear to a chemically induced overdrive. The fluid in their abdomens began to boil and turn volatile glowing with a faint sickly internal light as the redness of their heat signatures flared in his mind's eye.

  The ambient noise of the sector faded from Mike’s ears. The distant machinery and the wind and the heavy breathing of the soldiers fell away.

  It was replaced by a chorus.

  A thousand tiny claws scratched against wood. A thousand teeth gnashed in anticipation. A collective chittering scream grew louder and louder in his mind swelling into a symphony of impending violence.

  Above him Riggs laughed. It was a low and cruel sound.

  Mike’s hand clenched in the dirt and his fingernails dug furrows into the earth. His eyes, unseen in the blackness, began to glow with a faint toxic green luminescence.