The GDF unit at the Ninth Street processing plant was smaller than Ray had expected from two days of distant observation. Eleven soldiers. Two were too injured to walk without assistance. One was very young maybe sixteen and was trying hard to look like she wasn't.
Their commanding officer was a man named Kaspar von Rhein.
Ray knew who Kaspar was the same way everyone in Harlan's Gate knew: by reputation and by sight. The Iron Wall Captain stood six-foot-three in his battered Bastion suit a suit that had taken so much damage its plating had been field-repaired with components from at least three other suit classes, giving it the look of something stitched together from the parts of dead machines and he had the particular stillness of a man who had made peace with every possible outcome of his current situation. Not resignation. Calculation.
He looked at Ray and Dayo for exactly three seconds.
"You came from the market district."
"Yes, sir."
"You passed through the Connelly Street intersection?"
"We went around it. Through the drainage access under the pharmacy on Sixth."
Kaspar's expression didn't change. He looked at the youngest soldier the sixteen-year-old, whose name Ray would learn was Petra and then back at Ray.
"We've been trying to find a route to that drainage access for four days. What's blocking Connelly?"
"Stage 3 Brute. It's been nesting in the collapsed section of the parking structure on the corner. It moves predictably northeast to southwest, roughly every six hours. The window is forty minutes."
Silence. All eleven soldiers in the room were looking at him now.
"You've been tracking a Stage 3 Brute. Alone."
"I was looking for him."
He indicated Dayo, who had found a section of wall and was currently using it to hold himself upright with the focused determination of someone who had decided that collapsing would be embarrassing.
"Name."
"Ray Lexmix."
"Rank?"
"I don't have one."
"I can see that."
Kaspar looked at him for another three seconds. Ray had the feeling of being measured by something that had very precise units.
"Can you draw the route?"
"Yes."
"Then draw it."
The route Ray drew got eight people out of Harlan's Gate two days later.
Not eleven. The two injured soldiers could not move quietly enough to safely traverse the drainage access and make the six-kilometer run to the emergency extraction zone on the city's southern boundary. The youngest soldier Petra refused to leave them. The remaining eight, Ray, and Dayo made the run in the gray pre-dawn of the forty-third morning since the breach.
The Brute was not where Ray's timing predicted.
He'd known, mathematically, that a pattern held for four observed days wasn't guaranteed for a fifth. He'd known it and not said it because the certainty was necessary for the others to commit to the route and the truth was that there was no better option.
The Brute came around the corner of Connelly Street at the twenty-two-minute mark of what should have been a forty-minute window. It was huge eight and a half feet of bone-plated mass, moving with the rolling, ground-eating gait of something that knew nothing alive could outrun it. It saw them immediately.
And then Ray stepped out from the side of the group, raised his rebuilt flare gun the second and last solid-burn round chambered and fired it directly into the Brute's face from twelve meters.
The Brute's roar was a physical event. Ray felt it in his back teeth. One of the soldiers behind him stumbled and fell. But the Brute reeled backward, its bone-plated fists swinging at light that it couldn't hit, and in the forty seconds of white burning glare, eight people and one teenager ran.
Ray ran last.
He ran with the sound of the dying flare behind him and the Brute's roar ahead of him and the absolute zero of the empty gun in his hand, and he ran with something in his chest that was not fear exactly but was close to it a high, clean frequency, like a wire pulled too tight, that sang through him and made everything sharp-edged and immediate and real.
He didn't know what that feeling was yet.
He would.
The extraction zone was a hardpoint in the open land south of Harlan's Gate a reinforced bunker position manned by a GDF relay team that had been waiting for exactly this kind of survivor extraction. There was a transport vehicle. There was a medic. There was, to Dayo's visible emotional devastation, actual food.
Kaspar supervised the loading with the efficiency of someone who had done this before and hated that he'd needed to. When everyone was aboard, he turned to Ray, who was standing at the edge of the bunker's light watching the northern horizon.
Harlan's Gate was on fire. Three distinct columns of black smoke against the coming morning.
"You're not GDF."
"No."
"But you tracked a Stage 3's behavioral pattern solo for four days."
"I'm good at watching things."
"You walked into Striker range and didn't break cover."
Ray didn't answer. He was still looking at the smoke.
"You fired on a Stage 4 with a civilian flare gun."
"It was all I had."
"Most people, given that situation, make peace with their god instead."
Ray finally looked at him.
"I'm not interested in peace."
Kaspar was quiet for a moment. Then he said something Ray would think about for the next six months.
"No. I don't think you are."