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If this was H.R.A., and Nick definitely thought it was, they’d be setting up a perimeter to keep him inside the Cauldron by now. According to protocol, if their search went more than nine hours, they’d extend that perimeter to the entire Protected Area. They’d push alerts to all train stations, airports, metros, access roads, shipping ports, and even to all walk-in entrances and exits to the dome, since Nick was known to venture outside to surf.

He chanced a look out at that road only once.

At the time, he was crouched behind the back end of one of those ancient pick-up trucks, a tall one on bent rims and rotted wheels that had once been painted bright gold. He kept his arm that used to have his ID implant and tat behind the steel tailgate.

He saw flashlights flickering back and forth among the rusted out cars, but they weren’t moving as fast as he was.

They were still close to the gate.

They hadn’t even reached his blood trail yet.

They would soon.

They must have seen roughly where he fell.

Nick suspected they were remaining close to the gate more to keep him inside until they could get enough back-up around the Cauldron to feel safe leaving it.

Once that happened, which could only be minutes away, it wouldn’t take them long to start following his trail for real. The blood, the dent, would make it obvious where he’d landed. Nick had a lot more to worry about from their back-up, however, which meant a lot more people, including on the South Gate, and, more worryingly, including drones.

Nick had to get the fuck away from the part of the wall and the car where he fell, that was priority number one. His long-term prospects beyond that were a lot hazier.

He had no idea where to go.

He didn’t know anyone inside the Cauldron, certainly no one who might hide him.

He continued to make his way along the wall, but now he was thinking seriously about what options he truly had. He could burrow in somewhere, just hide. It wouldn’t solve his problem for long, but it would buy him time. If he found the right place, he could bandage up the worst of his cuts, maybe even feed.

Those two things would at least keep himself from passing out.

He also needed to deal with his arm.

He needed to know if the implant was still on him, and if it was, he needed to remedy that. At the thought, he started feeling over the gash with the fingers of his other hand. He grimaced in agony as he did, but never stopped moving south along the wall.

Nick remembered his headset then, and ripped it out of his ear.

He hesitated only for a split second, lost in a suspended instant of regret, of worry about how he’d get in touch with Wynter or anyone else, then he chucked the thing as far as he could, back in the rough direction of where he’d first landed.

He didn’t see where it fell.

He started moving faster, still grimacing in pain, mostly from the hole in his side from the plasma rifle, and the cut along the side of his throat and face. He didn’t want to know how fucking bad he looked. He knew it was bad.

His fingers never found the implant.

With his headset gone, he had no way to scan for it, but he was pretty sure it was gone. It could be on the other side of the wall, for all he knew.

He glanced down at his mutilated arm and remembered the long scratches from his fight the night before, the ones he’d worried so much about Wynter seeing. The thought was laughable now, given what he’d done to himself in the past hour.

If he was human, he’d be dead. The relatively small cut on his wrist likely would have killed him, much less what he’d done to his implant arm and his throat. Either one of those injuries would have killed him in minutes.

Together, they would have killed him in seconds.

Then again, he would have already died when he fell off the wall.

Lucky for him, hewasn’thuman.

As it was, he probably looked like a horror movie monster right now, with his face cut from his temple to his jaw and down his throat, his mutilated arm and hand, the hole in his side, and another long slice from the razor wire down his thigh, past his knee, to his calf. His face didn’t swell like a human’s would have, but he struggled to see past the blood that ran from under his hairline and into his left eye.

He knew the blood would stop eventually.