Gideon grew weaker with every step Bruno took, his breathing hoarse, legs buckling.
But he walked, gritting his teeth.
"One more… block…" he whispered.
Flash nodded.
"Hold on, we're almost there."
In the sewer, in the dry compartment as Flash had promised, they finally stopped.
Bruno opened the laptop, connecting the chip. Data flared across the screen: coordinates, names, schematics.
"Here it is," Bruno said.
"Someone continued her work. And it's not her partner,there's a rat inside, cleaning everything up instantly…"
The laptop screen glowed with cold blue light in the half-darkness, reflecting off the wet concrete walls and the puddles under their feet.
Bullet suddenly jumped up.
The fur on her scruff stood on end; her low growl turned into a sharp, warning bark. Her eyes burned in the darkness, ears erect, body tensed and ready to spring.
She stared upward, at the ventilation shaft grate they had just closed behind them.
A thin red beam,apparently an infrared scanner,slipped through the crack. A drone. One of those that had been circling above.
It hadn't followed the decoy signal. It had simply hovered over the collector entrance on East 10th Street and methodically scanned the heat trail, like a spider checking every thread of its web.
The beam slid across the ceiling, then downward,slowly, confidently and stopped on the back of Gideon's head.
Gideon sat leaning against the wall, pale, hair wet from sweat and rain plastered to his forehead.
His head was slightly tilted forward from weakness, shoulders slumped. And it was exactly this silhouette, tall, lean, with that characteristic shoulder curve and slight head tilt, that the drone locked onto as a threat.
Instantly the signal went out.
The entire swarm synchronized.
Somewhere above, in the night sky over the Lower East Side, the rest of the drones received the update.
Their propellers screamed louder, shifting from patrol mode to pursuit. The swarm had scented its prey.
They still hadn't seen faces,hoods, rain, red light, and grime hid the details. But the heat profile, the recognizable outline recorded in the database after incidents across the city, had already been flagged as high priority.
After Maria's murder and the others,the entire area from East Village to Alphabet City had been switched to heightened nighttime surveillance mode.
The drones received a firmware update: any heat silhouette matching those who had been near a victim or returned to a crime scene in the 72 hours before death automatically received "Level 4 Threat Object" status.
Gideon had been there.
He had come to Ethan two days after the funeral, stood at the entrance on 10th Street between avenues A and B, talked, left.
One of the patrol drones had logged his silhouette at the door.
Now it worked against them.
Flash raised his head, eyes narrowing to slits.
"They've got us," he said quietly.
"Gideon's silhouette,they matched it with mine. Now the whole swarm knows our profiles."
Bruno slammed the laptop shut in one motion; the screen went dark, but the blue afterglow still hung in everyone's eyes like after a flash.
"How much time do we have?"
"Three minutes, five at most. They're already calling backup.
The street where Ethan lived East 10th between A and B is already locked down.
Full perimeter: drones, ground patrols, thermal imagers on rooftops, checkpoints at the intersections with 1st Avenue and Houston Street.
After Maria's death they pushed the system to the limit.
Now anyone who matches a witness or accomplice profile is an automatic drone target.
These are all police protocols…"
Ethan felt cold sweat run down his back,not from the rain anymore, but from sheer terror.
"So… we're not surfacing?"
"No," Flash cut in sharply.
"We go deeper through the catacombs. Abandoned subway lines, 19th-century collectors, underground passages under East Village and the Bowery.
The Blind Man lives in one of them, under an abandoned building on 9th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues.
He's got a whole complex down there: jammers, Faraday cages, even a generator running off an old steam boiler from Civil War times.
If we reach him, the drones lose us. They don't fly underground below ten meters, propellers can't handle the pressure and they explode."
Gideon lifted his head, voice weak but stubborn.
"I… will slow you down… Leave me…"
"Shut up," Flash snapped.
"You're coming with us!"
Bruno was already hauling Gideon to his feet. He stood, swaying, but gripping the giant's shoulder. His face was ashen, lips blue, but his eyes burned with stubborn fire.
Ethan scanned the compartment.
Concrete walls, rusty pipes, a narrow passage ahead sloping downward at about 15 degrees. Water dripped from the ceiling, gathering into a thin stream.
"Where… exactly?"
Gideon spoke through a haze, fighting to stay conscious.
Flash pointed to the dark corridor on the left,low, ceiling barely one meter eighty, walls covered in moss, limestone deposits, and traces of old 80s graffiti.
"No Sleep Till Brooklyn", "RIP Basquiat".
"There.
It's the old collector under 2nd Avenue. It runs beneath the entire East Village and connects to the abandoned tunnels of former lines.
The exit to the Blind Man is three hundred meters down and two turns.
But it's dark, wet, and narrow. Stay in a chain.
Bullet goes first. If she hears movement, you already know what to do."
They moved out.