The machine yard held its breath.
Sunlight slashed through broken roof panels, laying hard white rectangles across wrecked forklifts and heaps of twisted rebar.
Every breeze set dangling chains chiming faintly, a wind-bell orchestra for rust and ruin. Beneath a buckled gantry crane, Ethan's hand hovered in the air, palm down, fingers splayed, the silent order that meant wait.
Pike stepped into view with four survivors in a diamond around him. Soot and blood had turned his field jacket the color of old ash. The scar that the Behemoth's heat had carved along his jaw had puckered into a permanent snarl.
But despite all these, he walked like a man who still owned the ground, gray eyes quartering the yard with a hunter's patience.
Then, he suddenly stopped.
His head tilted, not to a sound but to a wrongness in the air that no one else but him could have detected. Predator's Instinct tightened the lines at the corners of his eyes.
He frowned, then…
"Spread," he murmured.
