Chapter 31 · The Line He Burns

"Ninety seconds, Ward." The voice came out of my own board, easy as a weather report. "After that it's not a countdown. It's a delivery."

My hand went for the send key on instinct. Dean's fingers closed around my wrist before I got there, hard enough that the bones ground together.

"Don't," he said. Blood from his split lip had gone tacky at the corner of his mouth. "You touch that key, you confirm every scanner in the city's already listening."

"So what, we just sit here and let him push it?"

"We don't sit anywhere." He let go of my wrist and went back down on one knee at the panel, screwdriver in his teeth for half a second while he ripped the last screw free with his fingers. "I'm killing the feed."

"That feed's the whole board, Dean. You cut that line, this whole precinct goes dark, not just his little push."

"Then it goes dark."

He wrenched the cable housing open and yanked. Sparks jumped off the connector, small and orange, and every external readout on my console dropped to dead gray at once — city feed, precinct relays, the mutual-aid band I'd been running since 1997. Gone.