Day Zero (Page 17)

My notorious temper redlined like a straining turbine engine. “How can you not?” Rumor held that Papai had gotten his start as a criminal, running his own crew before he’d married Mamãe. If I were him, I’d be drawing on my roots to avenge her. “They murdered your wife. By your reaction, I have to wonder if you loved her at all.”

Fury flashed in his eyes. “I worshipped her.”

Everyone had. After her passing, my grandmother had died of grief, my grandfather drinking himself into an early grave. The last thing he’d told me: “If you want justice for your mother, you’ll have to deliver it yourself.” I’d been fourteen.

I would make the Olivera clan pay for all three deaths.

Papai said, “If you continue to go after them, sooner or later they will strike back against my only child and heir. Then I would retaliate, and this war would last forever, until we’re all destroyed.”

“I wish they would come after me.” Even now I had a Glock in a holster on my back and a tactical blade tucked in my boot.

My handpicked crew and I had already taken out two Olivera sons. Now I hunted for the rest of that generation, but especially for Bento Olivera, their father.

He was the one who’d slit my mother’s throat—after Papai had paid the ransom.

My hand drifted to my pistol. Merely touching the weapon cooled some of my fury, focusing it. “I’m not getting into this with you again. I just stopped by to tell you I’m leaving.”

The fire alarm blared to life.

I stood, wary. We were fifty floors up. I only liked fire when it didn’t threaten me. “What’s happening?”

“I don’t know.” Papai pulled up security feeds on his computer screen. Employees were filing out downstairs. The investors had boarded on the helipad, were about to dust off.

Papai assessed the feeds. “No sign of fire. Perhaps we should get to the safe room.”

“Which one?” We had two—one at ground level for fires or natural disasters and one on this floor for an enemy incursion or attack.

“My instinct tells me to get low.” Papai had a sense for such things. He glanced toward his bookcase. Behind it was the entrance to this floor’s safe room and the private elevator. “We should chance the elevator.”

I nodded. “Let’s go—” Bam! Something had crashed into the glass wall.

A bird? It’d left a smear of blood and feathers. Then another one hit the glass. And another. Half a dozen birds had flown straight into it. “How weird.” Above the blood, I spied brightness. “Papai, look!” The most beautiful bands of light wavered in the night sky. They shimmered green and purple over the mountains.

He turned to the glass wall and sucked in a breath. “Extraordinary.” Side by side, we watched the lights.

I murmured, “I could look at them forever.”

The Dragão copter with the investors had taken off and now hovered just in front of us, blocking my view of the lights, irritating me. I supposed the pilot was just as entranced.

Another copter drifted toward it. Those pilots were going to tangle if they weren’t careful. They coasted even closer. The Dragão pilot made no move to evade. Closer. “Papai?” Closer.

He didn’t answer, completely caught up in the lights.

Closer! “Papai!”

Their rotor blades snarled. Turbines whined as the copters pitched toward this building. Toward this wall.

One was coming in nose first, the other tail first. “Look out!” I shoved Papai out of the way just before the impact—

Rotor blades hit; glass shattered in a deafening crash.

Shards of it plugged the walls. One spike shot past me, missing my throat by a hairbreadth.

“Zara!” Papai had gotten to the door.

I was trapped between live blades! One copter’s tail boom swung through the office, its smaller rotor like a mower. It chewed up anything in its path; paper and debris sailed in a vortex, my hair whipping my face and eyes. Can’t see!

Something nailed my side. “Ahh!” The force knocked me off my feet—onto my front, punching the air from my lungs. A sharp stake of wood clattered to the floor beside me.

I wasn’t gored? The wood had struck my gun! I flung myself over and scuttled backward till I met the wall.

All at once the air cleared—because that tail rotor was upon me! No time to make it to my feet. To run. Trapped.

As if in slow motion, the tail boom swept toward me.

“Zara, get down!” Papai yelled from the doorway.

I pressed myself flat on my back and turned my head a split second before the rotor blades floated above my face. Whirring metal skimmed my ear by millimeters. I screamed and screamed, my voice distorted by the rotation.

Then . . . clear. I stared in shock as the tail continued past me.

“Come, Zara! Run now!”

He held open the door with one arm, cradling his side with the other. Injured? Blood soaked the side of his button-down and streaked down his face.

I struggled to my feet, lungs heaving smoky air. The smell of aviation fuel reeked; the wasted blades still spun. I glanced at the bookcase, at our exit; blocked by the Dragão copter’s fuselage.

Survivors were trapped inside. They yelled, begging us for help. They should be afraid—what was left of the blades might catch the floor and lever them out the window, like a tire jack. Or the engine could ignite all that fuel.

I lurched toward Papai, following along the wall. Shards of glass jutted from it like a porcupine’s quills.

We limped away from the crash, heading toward the far side of the floor’s soaring atrium.