Page 86 of Psycho Obsession
I step in front of Hallow, my rifle levelled at the light. “Resist? I’m going to melt your fucking faces off.”
“Jex, wait,” Ryker says, his eyes fixed on the boat. He reaches into his vest and pulls out the leather folder. “They don’t want us dead. They want the ledger. They can’t scrub the data if we have the hard copies.”
“They don’t care about the data, Ryker,” Hallow says, her voice suddenly cold and distant again. She looks at the cutters, then at her own hands. “They want to see if the tracker works under fire.”
She turns to us, the orange light of the burning city making her look like a ghost made of embers.
“They’re not here to retrieve me,” she says, a terrifyingly calm smile spreading across her lips. “They’re here to see if you’ll killeach other to keep me.”
The spotlight is a physical weight, blinding and hot, turning the world into a stark white void where only the three of us exist. I can feel the salt spray hitting my face, mixing with the soot and the copper-tang of the blood I’m still wearing.
“Jex, don’t,” Ryker warns, his voice tight.
I don’t listen. I can’t. My finger is a twitch away from turning that spotlight into a shower of glass. Every instinct I have is screaming war.
“They’re baiting us,” I growl, my eyes fixed on the silhouette of the man behind the cutter’s rail. “They think we’re just another set of lab rats they can poke with a stick to see which one bites first.”
Hallow steps closer to the edge, her toes hanging over the lip of the concrete ledge. The wind off the harbour whips her hair into a frantic halo of black and red. She doesn’t look like she’s afraid of the fall. She looks like she’s considering the water as an escape—or a baptism.
“Jex, look at me,” she says.
I turn my head just enough to see her. The light from the cutter is washing her out, making her skin look like translucent porcelain. She’s smiling, but it’s the kind of smile you see on a person who’s already seen the end of the movie.
“The voice in my head… it’s not just humming anymore,” she whispers. “She’s giving me instructions. She’s telling me that if I jump, you’ll follow. And if you follow, they’ll have all three of us in the net before we hit the current.”
“I’m not letting them take you, Hallow,” I snap. “I’ll sink every one of those boats before they get a hand on you.”
“With what, Jex?” Ryker’s voice is a cold splash of reality. He’s looking at the cutters, his mind already calculating the trajectories, the firepower, the impossibility. “We have small arms and a half-empty magazine. They have high-frequency acoustic cannons and a reclamation team that doesn’t feel pain. We aren’t winning a firefight on a ten-foot ledge.”
“So what? We just give up? We hand her over?” I spin on him, the barrel of my rifle dipping dangerously. My chest is heaving, the adrenaline turning into a poisonous sludge in my veins. “I didn’t tear that ballroom apart just to watch her walk back into a cage.”
“Nobody is walking back,” Ryker says. He reaches into his tactical belt and pulls out a small, heavy cylinder—a thermite charge we pinched from the Choir’s armoury. He looks at the leather folder in his other hand. “We have the only thing she actually fears. The proof that her global ‘empire’ is built on the bones of her own children. If we burn the ledger, we burn her leverage.”
“She’ll kill us the second the first page catches fire,” I say.
“Maybe,” Ryker says, his eyes shifting to the cutters. “Or maybe she’ll realise that a dead prototype and a charred ledger is a net loss she can’t explain to her investors.”
Suddenly, the acoustic device on the boat let out a sharp, high-pitched chirp. The sound hit my eardrums like a physical blow, making my vision blur.
Hallow let out a strangled cry, her hands flying to her head. She lurched, her balance failing, her body tilting back toward the black water.
“Hallow!”
I lunge for her, my rifle clattering onto the concrete. My fingers caught the sleeve of the heavy black coat, the fabric straining as I hauled her back from the brink. She collapsed into my arms, her body rigid, her eyes rolling back into her head as a fresh seizure took hold.
“Retrieval initiated,” the voice from the boat boomed, no longer professional—it was mocking.
A second spotlight snapped on, this one focused on the pylon just a few feet from us. A heavy, magnetic tether shot out from the lead cutter, the metal cable hissing through the air before it slammed into the concrete with a bone-shattering crack.
They weren’t waiting for us to surrender. They were reeling us in.
“Ryker, the charge! Now!” I scream, pinning Hallow to my chest as the concrete under our feet began to vibrate with the pull of the winch.
Ryker doesn’t move. He’s staring at the lead cutter, his face a mask of pure, unadulterated shock.
“Ryker!”
“Jex,” he whispers, his voice failing. “Look at the deck.”
