Seven
Brice was on the firing range, down in the training rooms, when Murdoch appeared. He’d just scraped through a sixty percent hit rate with fifty percent distractions—not his best, even without his lattice connecting to the lash, but Brice put that down to the way his arm still ached.
The lash—the closest thing to a decent weapon the company allowed, if you ignored knives—was useless against shades, so there was no practical purpose in training with it. But it helped settle Brice’s mind. When he looked along the twin sights—no more pulling up crosshairs in his lenses, or syncing the lash to his eyes—it was like blinkers came down, and nothing else mattered. There were no shades, no puncture wounds on his arm, and no infected in quarantine. The only thing that mattered was t
