The shout came from the alley's far end—Kael's voice, cracking on the upper register like something had personally offended his understanding of physics. Rourke's followed half a second later, lower and angrier, the sound of a man who'd been standing guard in the rain for two hours only to have reality malfunction in front of him.
Their boots hit puddles in hard, flat slaps. Moving fast. Moving away.
"Go," Aaron breathed.
He didn't wait to see if Lara moved. He was already at the corner, pressing his back to the brick, reading the front entrance. The roll-down security gate had been cranked up about four feet—enough to duck under, not enough to suggest welcome. One of the sentries had been standing just inside the threshold. Now the threshold was empty, the sentry's absence a clean gap where a body used to be.
Aaron went under the gate at a crouch, the corrugated metal cold and slick against his knuckles as he cleared it. The smell hit him first: old electronics, the particular burnt-copper tang of fried capacitors, and beneath that something damp and organic that had been growing undisturbed in the dark for months. His boots found broken glass and he adjusted his weight immediately, rolling each step onto the outer edge of his sole to kill the crunch.
Behind him, the softest possible sound of Lara clearing the gate.
Then nothing. She was already gone.
The interior was a disaster in the way that natural disasters rarely were—too methodical in its chaos, shelves toppled in rows like dominoes someone had started and then lost interest in, the merchandise scattered in arcs that told the story of a panicked crowd moving in a specific direction. Emergency lighting had long since died. What came through the boarded windows was the gray-white bleed of an overcast Seattle afternoon, diffuse and sourceless, turning everything into shades of pewter.
Aaron moved left, skirting the main aisle.
Server racks. Back wall, right side. Standard commercial layout—they never change it.
He'd been in a Circuit Haven twice before the System arrived. Once for a GPU, once because the one near his apartment had been the only place open on a Sunday that sold a specific type of thermal paste. The layout was burned into him not from affection but from the particular resentment of a man who'd been forced to navigate it under fluorescent lights with a hangover.
The racks were where he remembered.
They were also half-gutted already, which was expected. Other scavengers had been here. The easy pulls—the consumer drives, the portable SSDs, anything with a visible label—were long gone. What remained was the stuff that required knowing what you were looking at: enterprise-grade data drives, high-density, the kind used in server clusters rather than personal machines, slotted into bays that didn't advertise themselves.
Aaron pulled his bag around to his front and got to work.
The first drive came loose with a quarter-turn and a firm pull. He checked the form factor by touch in the dim light—correct—and it went into the bag. Second drive, same motion. Third had been cross-threaded by someone who'd tried and failed to extract it; he felt the resistance, reversed his grip, and worked it free with the patience of a man who'd spent years coaxing broken software into admitting what it had done wrong.
Four drives. Five. Six.
His hands were cold enough that the fine motor work was starting to cost him. He could feel the individual ridges of each bay's retaining mechanism only imprecisely, which meant he had to slow down when slowing down was the last thing he wanted. Somewhere behind him, deeper in the store, he could hear Lara working—the careful sound of a wire being stripped, the soft clink of something metallic being coiled. Professional. Efficient.
The holographic display outside would hold for approximately three more minutes. He'd estimated the reconstruction fault's duration based on the Debug Point cost and the fault's depth in the error stack—it wasn't a precise science, but it was better than guessing. Kael and Rourke were smart enough to eventually stop staring and start thinking, and when they started thinking they'd circle back.
Seven drives.
The eighth bay was empty—someone had gotten there first. He moved to the adjacent rack, found three more viable slots, cleared them in sequence.
Eleven drives total. The bag's canvas pulled taut against his shoulder strap, the combined weight settling against his hip with the dense, satisfying gravity of things that were actually worth something.
He reached into the last bay.
The drive seated in it was different from the others. Older casing, no manufacturer label, a surface texture that had been sanded rather than molded. His fingers closed around it and held there for a moment, reading it by touch the way a doctor reads a pulse.
What are you?
He pulled it free.
His hand closed around the last drive, and the bag hung heavy against his side.
The last drive slid home into the canvas tote with a soft, final click.
Eleven enterprise-grade units, plus the unlabeled anomaly with its strange tactile signature—a faint ridge pattern pressed into the casing that felt less like a manufacturer's mark and more like something deliberate. Aaron's fingers lingered on it for half a second longer than necessary before he forced himself to let go. Later. Catalog it later.
He was already pulling the tote's drawstring when the light changed.
Not dramatically. Not with a horror-movie flicker. The ambient gray filtering through the store's shattered front simply... shifted. A new shadow fell across the debris field of stripped server racks and scattered peripheral cables, and that shadow had a shape that was wrong in a specific, deeply inconvenient way.
Aaron went completely still.
The figure in the doorway was tall—not in the rangy, post-apocalypse way where starvation had just redistributed someone's mass vertically, but tall in the way of someone who had been eating consistently since the System dropped. The armor confirmed it. Form-fitted plates, matte-black with subtle articulation at the joints, the kind of manufacturing tolerances that didn't come from scavenging a sporting goods store. No visible rust. No mismatched components cannibalizing different sets. A faint blue glow pulsed at the left pauldron, steady as a heartbeat, and Aaron didn't need his Error Logger overlay to read the insignia burned into it.
Hunter-class.
Oh, that's not ideal.
The Hunter stepped inside. He moved the way expensive machinery moved—economically, without wasted motion, each footfall placed with the casual precision of someone who had long since stopped thinking about terrain. His gaze went to the rear wall first.
Aaron couldn't blame him. The glitch-reconstruction was still cycling: the back section of Circuit Haven continued its slow, nauseating oscillation between digital static and the ghost of its pre-apocalypse self, holographic product displays bleeding in and out of existence over cracked drywall. A phantom advertisement for a laptop that no longer existed materialized above a pile of broken shelving, smiled its rendered smile, and dissolved. The Hunter studied it for three full seconds, his expression doing something that wasn't quite curiosity and wasn't quite alarm—a flat, professional assessment, like a technician logging an unexpected variable.
Then his head turned.
The rotation was unhurried. Methodical. It swept the left side of the store, catalogued the stripped display cases, moved across the central aisle with its carpet of cracked plastic and dead cable ties, and continued its arc until it reached the server rack alcove in the back right corner.
Where Aaron was crouched with eleven drives and one very suspicious unlabeled anomaly stuffed in a canvas bag.
Their eyes met.
Aaron felt the cold in his hands suddenly sharpen into something more focused, moving up his forearms. The Error Logger overlay was running its passive scan, and the thin diagnostic text scrolling at the periphery of his vision offered nothing useful—no system ID tag, no class-level readout, nothing it could parse. Whatever the Hunter's setup was, it wasn't broadcasting on standard channels.
He sees me. He definitely sees me.
The Hunter's right hand rose to his wrist. The motion was unhurried, which was somehow worse than urgency would have been. He pressed two fingers to a comm unit strapped there—sleek, integrated, also not scavenged—and when he spoke, his voice carried the particular flatness of someone delivering a data point rather than making a statement.
"Anomaly located."
Two words. Not intruder or thief or even survivor. Anomaly. Aaron's stomach registered the distinction with a specific, unpleasant lurch. Intruder meant someone had noticed his presence. Anomaly meant someone had been looking for something and found it, and was now verifying the coordinates.
The Hunter lowered his wrist comm without waiting for a response from whoever was on the other end. He didn't move toward Aaron. He didn't shout. He simply stood there in the middle of Circuit Haven's ruined floor, with the phantom laptop advertisement cycling behind him and the rain hammering the roof overhead, and watched Aaron with the particular quality of attention that a person gives to a problem they are already in the process of solving.
His right hand drifted—again, unhurried—toward his hip. The weapon there was holstered, but the holster's retention clasp was already unsnapped. The detail registered in Aaron's peripheral vision with the crystalline clarity of something his nervous system had decided was priority information.
The tote bag strap was in Aaron's left hand. The server rack was at his back. The Hunter was between him and the front door.
Aaron did not move.
The Hunter's unblinking stare held him exactly where he was.