Shepherd by KH LeMoyne Page A

chuckle. Low and throaty, the sound froze him in his tracks. “So why did you pick Shepherd?”
    “Radar picked it for me, long time ago, after I’d been here a few months.” He refreshed the two screens at the edge of the Down Below market.
    “You sound like you don’t know why.”
    He glanced back briefly and then continued typing his messages. “He mistakenly thinks he has a sense of humor.”
    New relays transmitted in on a separate screen. Two code names requested backup and help removing guards on their tails. Clay tapped a series of commands. Noises and movement initiated in the requestor’s quadrant to provide distraction for the Regent guard squad after the two individuals.
    He frowned at the next request—help in searching for a missing child. He moved the request to a separate screen. If a child disappeared, he would assign other resources. Unfortunately, “child missing” messages were also a favorite Regent lure. He skipped to the last message, an alert of scouts on the perimeter of the Down Below marketplace. Shit, the guards were muscling into homes again.
    “That one inscription isn’t like the other ones.”
    Not pausing in his maneuvers, he slid the screen with the search request for the child her way. “Why?”
    “Hmm. No code name. My guess is the code names are confirmed against data records dispersed around your groups. Also no entry acknowledgement. I also gather you have a feel for who’s out there and which calls are legitimate?”
    “The Regents know of us and try to pull us out. It’s pretty routine. If that request was valid, I would never see a message. The activity on the screens would have already confirmed a child abduction situation.” He nodded toward the several live feeds of Down Below cycling on other screens. “They would alert me. We’d have people already looking.”
    “Alert you?” Her laugh was more full force this time. “You’ve got to be kidding that you don’t know why he named you Shepherd?”
    “He was being fucking cute, giving me a name to live up to.”
    “What, you’d rather have Ratter? I don’t even want to know how they got their code name.” She waved back to his screens with a scowl. “Radar didn’t give you something to live up to. I bet you watched over all these people the minute you set foot in Down Below.”
    “Don’t confuse penance for sainthood.”
    “You sell yourself short.”
    “What, five days and you’re an expert on my life and motivations?”
    She shrugged and turned away. The regret he felt at lashing out lingered, and once again he experienced a tight squeeze in his throat and fought it down. He’d lived here for the last five years; she hadn’t. This wasn’t her world. Yet she caught on quickly.
    He shook his head and turned back to work. His ease around her wasn’t an attachment he could afford. Especially since he would have to give her up. This was no place for a beautiful woman, and he was no catch either.

 
     
     
    Chapter 6
     
    Images shifted from one camera’s view to the next, cycling a new virtual screen to the foreground with each refresh. Esme frowned at the hypnotizing lack of variety in the sequence. “Nothing ever changes. How can you tell if something’s wrong?”
    Clay glanced up. His brows furrowed as he scrutinized the screens through one cycle. Then he pulled up a new screen, his fingers widening the rectangle of the market and sweeping the visual angle back and forth across the empty marketplace.
    She detected nothing, yet his motions grew faster and more intense. Surely she hadn’t missed something. “What’s wrong?”
    “The market runs like clockwork. Vendors should have unpacked an hour ago with customers crowding to get the bargains before the squads arrive to catalog their faces.”
    “Not today.”
    “No.” He shifted the view to a large mound of concrete rubble. A faint stream of sunlight escaped beyond New Delphi’s city platform near the ruins. The foreign