Page 95 of Rupture

“Jesus Christ.” Liev’s curse cut through the desert air.

Luca went still. ”Just one?”

“One’s enough.” Her arms tightened around herself despite the heat. “Replication will already have started.”

“Well, shit.” Luca pulled off his sunglasses, his gaze scanning the horizon. “How long ago?”

“Hard to say exactly. We only found out forty minutes ago, but—” Rose stared at the empty desert, its vastness overwhelming. How far could they have spread? Calculations spun in her head.

“Your sister sure likes to complicate things.” Luca’s voice had lost all trace of humor.

“That’s one way to put it.” The magnitude of what Thea had done pressed against her chest. Somewhere out there, invisible in the desert air, the deadliest swarm ever created was loose.

“You caught them before.” Luca snapped his fingers. “That green gloop they couldn’t resist. The tank trap.”

“They don’t need Ceto bacteria anymore. They’ve got a whole desert full of organic material to consume.”

Liev’s face darkened. “Magnets. The little bastards hated magnets.”

Luca jabbed an agreeing finger at him. “Yes?—”

“If we could find them.” Rose let out a humorless laugh. “They could be anywhere by now. They might not even be in the desert anymore.”

“So we hunt them at night.” Luca’s tone was final.

She frowned. “What?”

“The lights.” He tapped his temple. “Our microscopic friends put on quite the light show in the tube, didn’t they?”

Rose went absolutely still.

Holy crap.

Of course.

Panic had scrambled her brain so badly she’d missed the obvious. She grabbed Luca’s face, kissed him hard, then pulled back.

“Luca, you beautiful genius.”

“Well, I always knew—” He beamed, cocky as ever.

“Those weren’t lights.” Her heart pounded . “That was the radioisotopes. We can track their radiation signature.”

54

Rose’s eyesburned from staring at the tablet screen, tracking the nanobots through the wild heart of the Kalahari. Each one capable of replicating itself a thousand times over.

Four hours of drone surveillance had led them here, deep into the wild heart of the Kalahari, where the air shimmered with malevolent heat. Her fingers flew across the digital keyboard, recalculating signal strength.

An alert flashed red.

Signal degrading at an exponential rate.

Rose rubbed a tender spot between her eyebrows, her skin gritty with desert dust that smothered her pores.

The numbers have to be wrong. We should have days. Not hours. If we lose them now...

Her fingers flew across the screen.

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