Lip saw it in his mirror and snapped before Cameron even finished parsing the profile, something was hanging off them: ‘We got kamikaze drones incoming—hit the gas!’ he barked in an accented English, the last word climbing in pitch, and Charles dropped a gear and punched it, unleashing 500 horsepower on tap. ‘Deek, we are on grounding duty. Shoot the fuckers when they get close, we have 50 meters now... Lip ordered as he folded his seat down to get to the rear passenger end, and Cameron, feeling the exact tension soldiers in the Russo-Ukrainian war feel when seeing an FPV with a funny appendage at the bottom, brought the Tavor up and rolled his window down ahead of time. Lip now at the same cabin end as Cam did the same. And they all felt exposed. ‘Fuuuck me!’ Cameron yelled while leaning out of the car door: pure irritation when he realized the Mepro wasn’t throwing a dot anymore—dead optic, blank sight picture, button presses did nothing—and that meant the drones would be twice the more difficult to ground. Worse, Lip had grabbed the wrong gun to pillage for Cam; if anything should’ve been lifted, it was the Derya semi-auto with an AR-15 shape that he had clocked on the Mirador bodies. The wind was pushing Cameron’s head hard and any longer it would introduce neck strain, and non-subsonic ammo from Lip’s UMP introduced a acoustic jab against Cameron’s left earhole when he took a first shot against the drones that were gradually inching closer, but still looked as if they were holding distance from Cameron’s perspective even as their advance continued.

SECURITY ISSUE - The Transgressive Crime Novel extract

ACT 1: UNPROVEN ANTIDOTE FOR DESTRUCTION

16/02/2026

ACT 0 RELEASING MARCH / APRIL 2026