Devi did, twisted her nose. “Ugh. It smells like the explosion but more . . . raw.”

“You can differentiate between the two?”

“No problem. It’s the difference between a hard green fruit and a ripe one.”

“I want you to run this to every single changeling inside the cordon, and tell them to shout an alert if they smell even a hint of it in the area. Understood?”

The girl’s nod was immediate. “You think there might be more bombs?”

“We have to assume the worst.”

A message popped up on Silver’s phone as Devi left on her task. It was an update on the first survivor they’d discovered after Silver’s arrival, a man who’d been rushed to the nearest hospital minutes earlier: Dead on arrival. Catastrophic percussive injuries, multiple loss of limbs. DNA identification unsuccessful. Prints unavailable. Image being forwarded.

Silver added that image to the file she’d already opened. Unlike Psy, humans weren’t always in a DNA database. That could pose severe difficulties when it came to identifying the injured and dead so their families could be contacted; many of the bodies were being pulled out in shattered pieces. Silver didn’t even have faces for several of the confirmed dead.

The bomber had achieved his or her aim of maximum damage.

• • •

VALENTIN had to grip his impatience in a tight fist as the engineer called out, step-by-tiny-step, how to safely remove the rubble from above the survivors Valentin had found. Neither the man nor the woman had spoken in the past five minutes. “Next!” he yelled out after passing down a chunk of a wooden beam to the person in the living chain behind him.

“The large piece at fourteen hundred ten hours!” the engineer called out, his eyes on the scanner with which he was mapping the ruin of the bar. “Can you move it?”

Valentin didn’t bother answering back. He just reached out and hauled off the piece in a single move. The problem came when he went to pass it to the next person in the chain. It was a changeling—but not a bear. The wolf thought fast. “You and you!” he called to the next two people in the line.

The three of them took hold of the piece with a grunt, started to carry it down. Valentin didn’t watch except to make sure they could handle it. If they dropped it, it could crash through the rubble, collapsing it onto the survivors. When he saw that the wolf was managing to take at least half the weight, with the other two supporting effectively, he turned back to the hole he’d created.

“Three seventeen!” the engineer called out.

Valentin shook his head. “It’s big enough! Get me some rope!”

That rope was sent up with alacrity. He asked two burly human construction workers who’d moved up the line when the wolf and the other two began to head down, to anchor the rope. “Got it, boss,” one of them said, his beard short and orange and his build close enough to Valentin’s that he might’ve been a bear if not for his scent.

Valentin fed the rest of the rope down into the hole, while the two construction workers set their feet apart and gripped the rope tight. “Ready?”

Both men nodded.

Valentin took a grip on the rope and began to lower himself. He could’ve easily jumped down. He was no feline—they were fucking “bouncy” when they landed—but he was solid. However, when he’d looked into the hole, his bear’s night vision penetrating the darkness as if it didn’t exist, he’d seen the survivors almost directly below.

He managed to bring himself down to the left of their tangled bodies, the construction workers holding strong even when he swung off to the side. “Chert voz’mi,” he muttered when he saw the woman’s dress.

It was all pretty and flowy and white.

The bride was a broken doll in the wreckage, her father’s hand tight on hers as he lay at a right angle to her, his lower body crushed so badly that it was a miracle he’d survived even a minute. Valentin’s gut twisted. He knew what he was going to find even before he knelt and checked the gray-haired man’s pulse.

Nothing, his skin cold.

“Come, milochka,” he murmured to the bride, “tell me you made it.” He pressed his fingers against her skin. Cool, but not cold. A fluttering heartbeat.

“She’s alive!” Sliding out his phone, he snapped a photograph of her amidst the rubble. He sent it directly to the number he’d been forwarded for Vasic Zen.

The bride disappeared a second after he’d sent the photo. An instant later so did her father, though Valentin had tagged the man as deceased. The father had only been in the image because Valentin had wanted to be sure the Arrow had enough visuals to do the remote teleport. The teleporter was only supposed to be asked to retrieve survivors, not the dead.

“You’re a good man, Vasic Zen,” Valentin murmured before gripping the rope and hauling himself up and out.

“We got a survivor?” one of the construction workers asked with a hopeful smile.

“We got a survivor!” He yelled it loud enough to carry to the engineer and others below. “The bride!”

A huge cheer went up. The construction worker who hadn’t spoken wiped away a burst of tears. “Fuck, man,” he said in American-accented English before switching to Russian. “There’s just been too many dead.”

Valentin clapped him on the shoulder. “Let’s keep going. We don’t know who else is trapped below.” Even as he started to do exactly that, he had to battle the urge to check in on Silver.

His Starlight should’ve been in bed, resting. Instead, she was here, fighting to clean up a mess of violence, fighting to save lives. Because she was Silver Fucking Mercant, and she was as tough as any bear in StoneWater.

Including its alpha.

The Unknown Architect

THE ARCHITECT OF the Consortium looked at the raw footage feeding out of Moscow. It was being reported as a terrorist strike undertaken by a lone individual, for which no group had taken credit.

The Consortium didn’t take credit for its actions, but they also didn’t cause violence without significant thought as to the advantages of any such action. They weren’t fanatics or ideologues. Their entire reason for being was built on cold, hard thinking that led to political or financial gain.

They weren’t anti-Trinity, as often reported. That implied an ideological stance. No, it was the peace fostered by Trinity that was an impediment to their goals. From a purely financial perspective for certain members of the Consortium, there was far more profit in instability and war. For others, like the Architect, peace offered no path to power. War and panic did.

It was all about the cost-benefit ratio.

Whoever had hit the wedding reception in Moscow had undertaken no such rational calculation. If their aim had been to destabilize the city, they’d failed in a spectacular fashion. The media had highlighted Kaleb Krychek in the footage, as well as the problematic-to-the-Consortium Silver Mercant.

A changeling alpha, Valentin Nikolaev of the StoneWater bears, had also been identified by the media, along with wolves from the BlackEdge pack and nonpredatory changelings, including mountain ponies. Human medical staff, engineers, and Enforcement officers were working side by side with their Psy and changeling compatriots.

The rapid, coordinated response was a poster child for Trinity.

As it would be in the city called home by the director of EmNet and by the most powerful telekinetic in the world. Not only that, but the violently powerful StoneWater and BlackEdge changelings also had an open line of communication, offering no room for sowing discord. Moscow was simply not a good target for anyone who wanted to cause maximum damage.