“SHIT, SHIT,” I muttered to myself over the alarm’s siren wail. Around me, the men’s hands flew to their weapons.
Blaze could obviously hear the alarm on his end without us needing to tell him that something had gone wrong. He mumbled a curse of his own. “Get the drive, and get out. Now.”
I yanked out the flash drive and shoved it into my secure pocket. We whirled toward the doors—just in time to see another metal door slowly sliding out over them to seal us in. It’d already covered a quarter of the second door’s surface, including the handle.
“There’s a secondary door, steel, closing over the first,” Julius said into his mic. “There’s got to be a failsafe to shut it off somewhere.”
Blaze swore again. “I don’t know what it’d be without more information than you have time to give. There’ll be at least a dozen guards coming at you. Can you get past it by force?”
I threw myself at the glass pane on the door, but it only jarred in its frame. The thunder of racing footsteps carried through it. Talon motioned me aside and hurtled past me, taking a few shots at the glass to crack the thick layer before slamming his elbow into it with the full impact of his body weight behind it.
The pane shattered. Talon burst through, and the rest of us charged after him, Julius dragging Garrison the last few inches before the automatic security door pinned him to the frame.
We didn’t have any time to appreciate that narrow escape. Squads of guards burst into view at both ends of the hallway.
We ducked low instinctively. My fingers closed around my gun. We didn’t want to kill anyone just doing their job, but if it was us or them, we wouldn’t have much choice. We’d agreed that we’d shoot to injure rather than kill if that would be enough, but it was going to be hard with this many opponents.
“Stay close to the data storage equipment!” Blaze shouted through my headset. “They won’t want to risk damaging the machines.”
We all flung ourselves upright and pressed tight against the towering machines with their blinking lights. The guards slowed as they approached, their guns drawn but silent. Blaze had been right.
“Hands up!” one in the lead barked at us. “Drop your weapons. You’re surrounded and outnumbered.”
That might be true, but I’d be willing to bet that these men hadn’t been in quite as many tricky situations as I had. I’d never let the hopelessness of a fight stop me from giving it my all before, and I wasn’t going to start rolling over now.
As my pulse thudded behind my ears, my vision narrowed down to the most important details of the figures around me—how they were spaced around each other, which hands each had on their guns, what sort of protective gear they wore that could deflect a bullet. Then I sprang into action.
Keeping my back against the computer equipment, I fired into the squad of guards closest to me, hitting a wrist, a hand, a bicep, a thigh. Weapons clattered from fingers that could no longer hold them; arms sagged, and legs staggered. Julius started shooting at the bunch in the opposite direction, and Talon squeezed his trigger too, adding to the injuries on both sides.
A couple of the guards farther back that we hadn’t been able to hit immediately took a few shots at us, but they were so careful about the machines and their colleagues across from them that we managed to dodge. Then they barreled straight toward us, barging past their wounded comrades—but that gave us time to deal out a few more shots precise enough to crumple them to the ground without outright killing them.
“Come on!” Garrison yelled, motioning for us to leap over the slightly smaller squad and get out of there.
I thought a silent mental apology at the men I’d had to shoot—and who I now kicked and stomped on to fend off their snatching hands and waved batons as they tried to stop us even in their blood-soaked state. Someone was hollering into a radio that Julius shot out of his hand to a yelp of pain, but we had to assume that more backup was on the way.
We dashed down the hall the way we’d come—only to discover that another steel security door had already snapped into place over the entrance to the stairwell. There was no escaping that way. But the alarm’s wail had faded away, maybe so the security officers could track us easier, and more footsteps were pounding toward us. The guards must have had another route through the building.
“Blaze,” I hissed. “The main stairwell is sealed. How do we get out of here?”
“I’m trying to find—the blueprints must have been altered after the version I have—shit.” He was typing frantically enough that the clatter of the keyboard sounded over the headset.
“Get out of sight,” Julius ordered the rest of us, jerking his hand toward the utility room we’d used to disable the floor alarm.
We dashed into the room and tugged the door shut. Only seconds later, guards stomped by outside. I had a brief moment of hoping that they’d forget about this room, but the government didn’t hire any slouches for their top-secret facility. Someone grasped the handle and turned. There was no way to lock it from the inside.
Talon grabbed the inside handle and hauled backward, holding the door shut with his considerable strength. Unfortunately, the men on the other side had clearly figured out that someone was in here. There were more shouts, and a couple of shots rattled the handle. They were less concerned about sending bullets in here. There must have been backup elsewhere in the building for the vital electrical systems. Maybe we’d have been safer staying in the hall.
And now we were trapped in a box of a room, hardly bigger than a coat closet, with a horde of furious armed men on the other side.
As my gaze darted around the dark room searching for some kind of answer, an uncomfortable knot formed in my stomach. We’d ended up here because I’d wanted so badly to know who I really was—to figure out what family I’d been stolen from and why. But had it really mattered so much that it’d been worth putting not just myself but the men who’d supported me in this much danger?
I could have decided I was simply Decima and walked away. Focused on taking down anyone who tried to capture me again until they gave up. Instead, I’d gone chasing danger with the only men I’d really cared about—the only people who’d ever really cared about me—by my side, and now we could all be screwed. I was good, but even I knew that maximum security prisons weren’t a piece of cake to break out of.
Julius had braced himself with his gun ready. I supposed we had a small advantage from the fact that we had a wall at our back and only a narrow doorway that our enemies could come at us through. Our enemies who were now managing to jostle Talon in his rigid position despite the strained bulging of his arm muscles.
Then my eyes caught on the edge of a rectangle on the ceiling, mostly hidden by the shadows and the top of the cabinet beneath it. My breath caught.
“Blaze, are there air vents that reach the utility room?”
On the other end of our connection, he sucked in a breath. “That isn’t shown on the blueprint I have either, but it’d make sense for them to add one. Every room with a door should have adequate ventilation. It’d be a tight fit for Julius, though.”
“I’ll make it work,” Julius said grimly. “I’ve squeezed through tight spaces before. It’s all a matter of angles. But we have to get up there without getting shot on the way.”
“Move the cabinet,” Garrison said quickly.
We heaved at it together and managed to shift it toward the door. Julius gave me a boost toward the ceiling, and I unscrewed the grate covering the vent in less than a minute. Talon let out a grunt where he was still pulling back the door with all his might.
“You and Garrison get up there,” Julius ordered. “I’ll knock the cabinet over, and it’ll block the doorway long enough for me and Talon to jump off it to follow you. Just keep moving.”
“I think once you’re in there, you just need to head left and you should find a connecting vent that’ll take you down to the first floor,” Blaze said helpfully in my ear. “One good thing about it being narrow is that you should be able to brace yourself against the sides and scramble down without falling. Just don’t get stuck.”
“No fucking kidding,” Talon muttered.
I grasped the edge of the vent and dragged myself up into it on the left-hand side. Immediately, I crawled forward on my hands and knees. I didn’t think Julius would be able to manage more than an army crawl in this tight space. Good thing he’d have gotten professional training at that.
There was a thump as Garrison clambered up after me. Then a clang resonated from below as Julius must have shoved the cabinet in front of the doorway. With a grunt, the other two men hauled themselves into the vent in quick succession.
Gunfire rang out below as I scuttled forward as fast as I could go. But the cabinet must have blocked the entrance long enough to shield Julius and Talon, because I heard three sets of breaths in the passage behind me, terse but not pained.
“Everyone okay?” I murmured, just to be sure.
“I’ve had more enjoyable nights,” Julius retorted. Talon simply snorted. I decided to take both of those responses as a yes.
“Stop joking around and get the hell out of there,” Blaze chided us. “I’ve just picked up on transmissions in the neighborhood—there’s going to be a whole army on the doorstep if you don’t get out in the next five minutes.”
My heart hiccupped. I pushed myself forward even faster and nearly toppled right into the downward vent before I realized I’d found it. In the total darkness, the only warning was a slight ripple of the metal lip around the opening.
There was no time for negotiating who’d go first. I wedged myself around the corner so I could drop my legs in and then slid the rest of the way, balancing myself between my back and my feet with my knees brushing my chest.
With little hitches of jumps, I careened several feet at a time, catching myself and then doing it all over again. The rasping and thudding above told me the men were following me using the same strategy, although the bigger guys wouldn’t be able to move as swiftly.
Blaze was already planning our next steps. “It bottoms out over the first-floor ceiling. You’ll want to go back in the same direction you reached the vertical vent from. About twenty feet along, you should find a grate that’s just a short dash from the main entrance.”
“Perfect,” I said around a gasp for breath.
With a few more jumps, my feet smacked into a metal surface below me. A metallic clunk rang out, making me wince. I couldn’t hear any voices filtering through the ceiling of the hall below me, but it was only a matter of time before the guards who’d swarmed us upstairs figured out our strategy and caught up with us.
Contorting my body, I squirmed around until I could crawl through the horizontal vent passage and hurried onward. Garrison, Talon, and Julius followed me with a soft grunt for each landing.
“I could hear the guards rushing down through the wall,” Julius reported. “They’ve got to be at least to the third floor by now.”
Crap. I shoved myself farther and spotted a glimmer of light just up ahead. There was the grate.
I caught hold of the metal rectangle and brought my tools to bear on the screws. My fingers flew, and in a matter of seconds, I was tossing it aside. I poked my head into the hall below to look around, and my heart all but stopped.
“We can’t get out,” I said, jumping down into the open, currently empty hall so I wasn’t blocking the men’s way. I stared at the door we’d come through—which was now completely sealed off by another one of those steel security doors. No handle, no clear controls. And we only had a minute or two before a mass of guards would be surrounding us from both sides.
Garrison dropped to the ground and came over to stand beside me. “There’s got to be a way to get it to retract.”
“Do you see any panels in the walls nearby that you could open up?” Blaze asked.
I stared at the walls around us. “There’s nothing.”
Talon and Julius leapt down and studied the door in turn. A distant thunder reached my ears—the thudding feet of the multitude of guards who’d be on us in mere seconds now.
We’d run out of options. In less than a minute, they’d be shooting us down. Even if we could manage to take on all the guards in here, despite the fact that we couldn’t rely on any nearby equipment to prevent them from shooting us, by the time we’d accomplished that, the army Blaze had warned us about would be gathered outside.
We were all going to die.
I didn’t say the words out loud. They felt like a betrayal of everything the Chaos Crew had done to get me here. The risks they’d taken for a mystery that only really mattered to me. I swallowed hard.
“I think there’s another exit,” Blaze said, but his excitement vanished an instant later. “Only it’s on the other side of where the secure staircase has to be. All those guards are between you and it now.”
The answer came to me like a signal flare in the dark. This was my quest. I should be the one to make the ultimate sacrifice. I could dash over and draw the guards’ attention, get them to chase after me, and buy the men enough time to escape.
They’d done so much for me. Given me so much. They shouldn’t have to give their lives too, especially not when it was my fault we were here at all.
Who I was didn’t matter if I was dead, especially not if the men around me died too.
I gathered myself, preparing to race toward the sound of the stomping feet with an explanation shouted over my shoulder, and my gaze inadvertently caught on Garrison’s.
I should have known better than to look at him, the man who made a living out of reading people’s deepest secrets.
The moment my eyes met his, he narrowed them, detecting something in my expression that I hadn’t thought to keep hidden. In the time it took for me to push all my thoughts down, I was afraid he’d already seen what I was planning.
Garrison took a discreet step closer to the door and shook his head lightly—too lightly for the others to notice. I countered by shaking mine.
“You can’t—” he started, and then his attention jerked to something over my head. I might have made a break for it then if a hopeful light hadn’t brightened his expression.
“Paper!” he said abruptly. “Who’s got a piece of fucking paper?” He snapped his fingers, fishing something out of a pouch on his belt at the same time.
I had no idea what he was talking about, but the other men responded automatically, trusting that their comrade had a good reason for his request. Talon’s hand jerked to his own belt, but Julius was already thrusting a piece of folded notepaper from his pocket toward the younger man. Garrison scraped a match against its book, brought the flame to the paper, and held the now-flaming sheet up… to a sensor next to a sprinkler system fixture I hadn’t noticed mounted on the ceiling.
The first floor must be all regular offices, no high-tech equipment the government workers would be too worried about getting wet. And they’d wanted to protect the ground floor from any sort of fire that might spread upward to all those precious hard drives.
A different sort of alarm careened through the air, and a burst of water sprayed down over us. In an instant, I was drenched.
In the same instant, the steel security door began to whir open.
A bellow reverberated through the hall behind us. We leapt toward the front door as one being.
“Thirty seconds until the first cars reach the building,” Blaze called through the headset.
It took ten for the door to open all the way. Julius and Talon fired a few shots down the hall, and then we dove out into the night.
Our feet pelted across the pavement. We hurtled down the sidewalk and around the block, dove into the waiting car, and didn’t properly breathe until Talon was gunning the engine to tear down the road away from there.
I sagged into the back seat, drenched and chilled but giddy with relief. “Oh my God.” I glanced at Garrison next to me. “How did you know that would work?”
He shrugged, a pleased gleam in his eyes. “I didn’t know. I just guessed. It wouldn’t make much sense to allow the employees to be locked up in there if the place caught fire. Like Julius said, there’s always a failsafe.”
“Thank fuck for that,” Julius rumbled, a sentiment we all echoed with a round of exhausted laughter.
