Hit List Read Free Page A

She couldn’t strategize without seeing how far back the miners had evacuated. Maybe they’d be so far away that she could just walk out the mouth of the tunnel and
head straight to the rendezvous.
    A vague glow stained the tunnel wall up ahead – she was getting closer to daylight. She reached up and switched the headlamp off. There was no way of telling how long it would be before a
hazard team got suited up and came down to search for the gas leak. If they rounded the corner further up the tunnel, Ash didn’t want them glimpsing her torch.
    She didn’t think it was likely to happen soon, though. It seemed quiet and still up ahead.
    Now that she was further away from the cavern, the alarm was growing fainter. “Benjamin,” she said. “I’m coming out with the box.”
    There was no response.
    “Benjamin?”
    Nothing – except rustling of static.
    Ash’s heart kicked against her ribs. Had something happened to Benjamin? Had the local cops found him? If that had happened, she told herself, then there’d be no static, just
silence. Right? It must be an equipment malfunction. Nothing to worry about.
    The light was brighter now. She was almost at the guard station. Hopefully the guard would have evacuated too. He was suspicious of her before, he’d be even more suspicious now...
    Ash rounded the last bend, and saw that the guard hadn’t evacuated. He was slumped halfway through the window of his booth, broken glass stuck into his belly, a chunk of his throat torn
out. There was a bullet hole in the wall behind him.
    Ash’s eyes widened. What the hell?
    Then she looked down. And stumbled backwards, stifling a scream.
    The miners were strewn all over the floor of the tunnel. Most had exit wounds in their backs. The rest had imploded heads. Ash could smell the blood, rank and coppery.
    Someone had opened fire from outside the mouth of the tunnel. At first Ash imagined a psychopath with a machine gun, sweeping it from side to side with his finger on the trigger – and then
she realized that the shooter’s accuracy was too good for that. Almost every shot seemed to have hit someone in the head or the heart.
    A sniper? No, too slow – a sniper wouldn’t have been able to hit them all before they realized they were under attack and started running.
    Then what the hell had happened here?
    “Psst!”
    Ash jumped. Jennings, the woman who’d been drilling, was crouched against the wall in the darkness. Her hand was covering a thigh wound – blood bubbled up between her fingers. Her
face was white.
    “Run!” she hissed at Ash.
    And then her head snapped sideways, a half-second before the sound of the gunshot reached Ash’s ears.
    She clapped her hands over her mouth to stifle a scream. Her mind was whirling. A sniper couldn’t do this, she realized. But a dozen snipers could.
    And even as Ash had this thought, she heard them. Boots thumping, ammo belts jingling. Sprinting towards the tunnel from outside.
    Her paralysis broke and she ran, heart in her mouth, back down into the darkness towards the cavern.
    As someone who existed outside the law – no, that was a cheap rationalization, she existed against the law – Ash was always living in the shadows of injury, prison and death.
These things sometimes happened to normal people, but they were a lot more likely to happen to her. She was a criminal. A thief. She used to steal from good people to keep her family above the
poverty line, now she stole from other thieves to atone – but it was still stealing.
    Whenever she returned priceless artefacts to their owners, and saw their smiles and tears and gratitude, she had no regrets. But every time she was on a job and danger slinked out of the gloom,
teeth bared, claws protracted, she wondered if the price was too high.
    Part of her mind was reflecting on this now, as she sprinted down a pitch-black tunnel with a troop of snipers behind her and the stench of blood still in her nostrils. But most of her