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the table. “Here. Go ahead and do my job. Frees me up to get thirty minutes’ shut-eye.”
    The table was silent, bar Doyle’s amused snort.
    “Oh, and don’t forget to go down to quarantine processing to pick up our refugee clothes,” Miller added, standing and stretching. “I got a few of the staffers to delouse a couple of boxes for us.”
    He felt the weight of Hsiung’s glare as he drifted out of the room. After a moment, he heard her softly chuckle.
    At least it was a start towards cooperation, Miller told himself. Before the famines, she’d have slugged him for pulling that.

 
    4
     
     
    “P EACEFUL, ALMOST, ” DU Trieux said from the railing.
    Miller wanted to agree with her, but the boat crossing the East River felt more vulnerable than anything else. The sun wasn’t quite up yet, but the eastern horizon was painted in blood and gold, a smattering of silver in the clouds. He thought he’d seen something churning around in the water under the Astoria compound’s docks, like an oversized eel, and he wondered what the Archaeobiome had in store by way of marine life. The thought wasn’t doing him any good. Neither was worrying about drones spotting the boat, alone on the water.
    The pilot boat wasn’t particularly big, a little like a converted tugboat, but it was more than big enough for a dozen crates of the Rats’ gear, shipped down the coast from Boston. The captain had been happy to move Cobalt across the river before making the return trip home. It turned out that through a byzantine tangle of financial alliances, Schaeffer-Yeager owned a controlling stake in the port authority he worked for. Not that he knew who Cobalt were, or what they were up to. With their guns wrapped up in rags, the EMP parts hidden in backpacks and satchels slung over their shoulders, and wearing the stinking clothes that had been stripped off refugees during quarantine, for all the captain knew they were just another group of refugees heading out to look for their families.
     
     
    O NCE THE NEW Cobalt-2 team—Miller, du Trieux, Morland, Doyle, and Hsiung—had disembarked back onto land, Miller eyed the NYC skyline. It lacked the character of pre-dawn Manhattan, and wasn’t at all what he remembered.
    The new wildlife had settled in and taken ownership. The city’s towers and skyscrapers shaded the streets to night black at this hour, a dark forest compared to the relatively open skies of Queens bordering the Astoria Compound.
    They hiked further into the city, huddling under high apartment blocks. The city’s natural sounds—the blares of impatient taxi cab horns, the roar of constant foot traffic on the sidewalks—were missing everywhere they went, replaced by distant animal cries and the hiss of the wind.
    It was like a wasteland.
    With Morland and du Trieux on point, scouting corners before the others reached them, Hsiung and Doyle followed Miller, who checked every angle around him and covered the two in front with his M27. Miller’s immediate concern wasn’t military ambush, but being hunted by New York’s wildlife.
    Much of it had migrated into the city after the dust storm. Big animals, some Miller recognised and some he didn’t. They’d scavenged on the dead left behind the storm, pacing along a few days behind its trailing edge, growing to monstrous size. They’d found safe haven within the city. And food. It didn’t matter how many people the city had bled from famine, how many had fled Manhattan, there were always more hiding on some stockpiles of food, crowding the safer parts of the Bronx or Brooklyn, staying put and waiting in hopes that the aid trucks would come through. At night, anyone alone tended to wind up prey for the ancient predators trying their luck in the streets.
    Biologists with any understanding of the Archaeobiome were in short supply, or at least outside of Miller’s easy reach, but he knew enough to get the others to shine flashlights down alleys they approached, to keep