Ryder

He'd never watched a sector burn.

When Eden bombed Three, he only saw the aftermath, the plumes of smoke that had risen from behind the city's shining towers for days. When they blew up Two, his view had been obscured by Sector Four.

But Six? Six was right in his fucking backyard—and it was in flames.

The wind shifted, blowing acrid smoke across the large balcony that ran the length of his private quarters. Mac Fleming had used this penthouse as a playground, a place to bring women, snort whatever, and survey everything he commanded. Mac's successor, Logan Beckett, hadn't used it at all. He never had the chance.

Ryder used it as his home, but not because he liked it. No, its overstated opulence served as a reminder—and a warning.

He lifted the receiver beside him and waited. The internal line rang through directly to his second-in-command, a man he'd handpicked from a factory in Eight. The job would have gone to Finn, if he hadn't up and joined O'Kane's merry band of brothers. But he had, so Ryder had been left to look elsewhere.

It wasn't that he didn't trust any of the men he'd worked with in Five to get shit done, he just didn't trust them to get his shit done. Every one of them had an agenda, mostly involving money or drugs or fucking over the guys ahead of them in the hierarchy of power. They were selfish, and that was one thing Ryder couldn't stand.

Hector answered, his voice heavy with sleep. “Sir?”

“The city has taken Six.” He gave the man a moment to process that before continuing. “They'll be headed this way next. Get as many men as possible on the western border. And tell the factory supervisors that it's time to switch to full wartime production.”

“You got it.”

War. The word should have filled him with terror, but there was no room in his heart for fear. It was too full of anger, loss. Vengeance.

He wasn't Dallas O'Kane, a man sitting at the top of a pretty little empire filled with people he was desperate to protect. Ryder had always been a soldier with a mission—take down the Eden-sympathetic leaders of Sector Five. Controlling the manufacture and supply of essential medications was the first step in Jim's eventual plan to bring down the city itself.

A plan that had almost died with him.

Ryder walked inside, secured the sliding door behind him, and reached for the tablet on his desk. With a few swipes, he sent a brusque message to the other sector leaders. It wasn't flowery, but it would tell them what they needed to know.

Because their sectors weren't in immediate danger. No, his was the one sitting between Eden's forces and their target—Dallas O'Kane. And it was just as well. He belonged on the front lines of this conflict. It was part of his destiny, his legacy.

Ryder hesitated, then pulled up a photo on the tablet. It was decades old, older than him, from a time before the Flares. It had been copied from device to device more times than he could count. One bad transfer had corrupted the image, left the upper right corner a mess of gray blocks instead of the vivid hues in the rest of the picture.

But he could still see the faces of the three people featured in the photo, and that was what mattered. Two young men, beaming and regal in their crisp blue uniforms and white gloves, flanked a smiling woman in a simple, flowered dress. His father. His mother. And Jim.

His father stood on the left, his dark skin a sharp contrast to his white shirt and the golden braids decorating the shoulders of his uniform jacket. He looked so damn happy, proud to be wearing that badge. Ryder's mother had tried to explain it to him, how there was a time before the Flares when the military and the police had been separate entities, but he could barely wrap his head around the idea.

How would they have reacted if someone had tried to tell them, on that pleasant spring day, that the world would end in less than two years? Laughter, maybe. Disbelief, certainly. Anger, that anyone would dare suggest their reality was so fragile that it could be ripped away at any moment.

Over the years, Ryder had tried to see pieces of the people he knew in this picture. He didn't bother with his father—he'd only ever known him secondhand, through stories and fond reminiscence. His mother, that was easy. She never lost that spark, her belief that good would always prevail. She even looked the same—the smooth, unlined cheeks were the ones he'd kissed as a child, the ones he'd watched grow sunken and hollow as she neared the end of her life.

Jim was the opposite. The carefree glint in this young man's eyes was foreign to Ryder. His earliest memories of Jim were of a harsh man—not unkind, exactly, but hard, like tempered steel. Surviving the power shift after the Flares—and the death of his best friend—had cost him the contented ease that shone from this photograph. He became a man ruthless enough to survive, and broken enough not to bother.

Except he had. Ryder asked him why once. Why did he fight so hard, work so much, when he didn't really care if he lived or died?

It had taken him a long time to answer. When he did, it was in a gravelly voice thick with memories. “Because I made a promise. And I plan to keep it.”

A promise to Ryder's mother, or to the father he resembled but never knew? And was it a promise to see this uprising through to the end, or to prepare Ryder to do it? Whatever those answers were, Jim had taken them to his grave.

Ryder locked the tablet screen and tossed it aside. His men would be gathering soon, and he needed to be there to explain the situation, and to fight alongside them.

Because he'd made a few promises of his own—and he planned to keep them.