Chapter 12 And We Meet Again

• Rainwater streamed down my face like tears I couldn’t shed, mingling with the mud and Cruz’s blood drying in stiff patches on my stolen scrubs. The recorder was a cold, hard weight in my fist, its casing slick with riverbank filth, the red LED extinguished – drowned, silenced, like Anya and Cruz. Behind me, muffled shouts and the grinding screech of metal on concrete echoed from the waste tunnel as Archer’s hunters fought the bars. They’d find Cruz’s body soon. They’d come for me.
• Instinct, raw and primal, overrode grief. Move. Hide. Survive.
• I scrambled up the slick concrete embankment, away from the river’s churning blackness, towards the skeletal underbelly of the Williamsburg Bridge. The storm lashed the city, turning streets into rivers, but beneath the massive iron girders, a different world existed – a shantytown of tarps, cardboard, and desperation huddled against the relentless downpour. The air hung thick with woodsmoke, damp wool, urine, and the underlying sour tang of poverty and neglect. The Camp.