I ripped the mask away from my face, clawing at my right ear. There was a sharp, stabbing pain and the comm unit came away in pieces. I pressed a gloved hand against it as I stumbled up to my feet, blinking back one sickening wave of nausea after another. But when I turned to find Vida, to drag her back up the stairs and into the freezing Pennsylvania night, she was gone.
I spent two terrified heartbeats searching for her body through the gaping hole in the stairwell’s landing, watching as the tactical team streamed past. I leaned against the wall, trying to stay on my feet.
“Vida!” I felt the word leave my throat, but it vanished under the pulsing in my ears. “Vida!”
The door on my landing was mangled, dented, singed—but it still worked, apparently. It groaned and began to slide open, only to catch halfway with a horrible grating noise. I threw myself back against the wall, taking two steps up the fractured stairs. The darkness tucked me back under its cover just as the first soldier squeezed through the door, his handgun swinging around the cramped space. I took a deep breath and dropped into a crouch. It took three blinks to clear my vision, and by then, the soldiers were fighting through the doorway, jumping over the jagged hole in the platform and continuing down the stairs. I watched four go, then five, then six, swallowed by the smoke. A series of strange buzzing pops seemed to follow them, and it wasn’t until I was standing, swiping my arm over my face, that I realized it was gunfire from below.
Vida was gone, the tact team was now deep into a hornet’s nest of their own making, and Prisoner 27—
God dammit, I thought, moving back down onto the landing. There were upward of twenty or thirty soldiers staffing these bunkers at any given time. They were too small to house more than that, even temporarily. But just because the corridor was empty now, it didn’t mean the firefight below had drawn all of the attention away. If I were caught, that would be it. I’d be finished, killed one way or another.
But there was that man I had seen, the one with the hood over his head.
I didn’t feel any particular loyalty to the Children’s League. There was a contract between us, a strange verbal agreement that was as businesslike as it was bloody. Outside of my own team, there weren’t people to care about, and there certainly wasn’t anyone who cared about me beyond the bare minimum of keeping me alive and available to inflict on their targets like a virus.
My feet weren’t moving, not yet. There was something about that scene that kept replaying over and over again in my mind. It was the way they had bound his hands, how they had led Prisoner 27 down into the dark unknown of the bunker. It was the gleam of guns, the improbability of escape. I felt despair rising in me like a cloud of steam, spreading itself out through my body.
I knew what it felt like to be a prisoner. To feel time catch and stop because every day you lost a little bit more hope that your situation would change, that someone would come to help you. And I thought that if one of us could just get to him, to show him we were there before the Op failed, it would be worth the try.
But there was no safe way down, and the firefight below was raging in a way only automatic weapons could. Prisoner 27 would know people were there—and they weren’t able to reach him. I had to shake that compassion. I had to stop thinking these adults deserved any kind of pity, especially League agents. Even the new recruits reeked of blood to me.
If I stayed here, right where Rob ordered me to, I might never find Vida. But if I left and disobeyed him, he’d be furious.
Maybe he wanted you to be standing there when the explosion went off, a small voice whispered at the back of my mind. Maybe he was hoping…
No. I wasn’t going to think about that now. Vida was my responsibility. Not Rob, not Prisoner 27. Goddamn Vida the viper. When I was out of here, when I found Vida, when we were safely back to HQ, I’d play the situation out in my mind again. Not now.
My ears were still thrumming with their own pulse, too loud for me to hear the heavy steps coming from the lookout post in the Laundromat. We literally crashed into each other as my hand brushed the outside door.
This soldier was a young one. If I had been going on appearances alone, I would have thought he was only a few years older than me. Ryan Davidson, my brain filled in, coughing up all sorts of useless information from the mission file. Texas born and bred. National Guard since his college had closed. Art History major.
It was one thing, though, to have someone’s life printed in crisp black letters and laid out in front of you. It was something else entirely to come face-to-face with the actual flesh and blood. To feel the hot stink of breath and see the pulse jump in his throat.
“H-Hey!” He reached for the gun at his side, but I launched a foot at his hand and sent the weapon clattering across the landing and down the stairs. We both dove for it.
My chin hit the silver metal, and the impact actually jarred my brain. For a single blinding second, I saw nothing but pristine white flash in front of my eyes. And then, everything returned in brilliant bright color. The pain filtered through next; when the soldier tackled me and I hit the floor, my teeth sank into my bottom lip and it burst open. Blood sprayed across the stairwell.
The guard pinned me to the ground with his entire weight. The instant I felt him shift, I knew he was going for his radio. I could hear chatter from a woman; I heard her say, “Report status,” and “I’m coming up,” and the knowledge of just how badly I would be screwed if either of those things actually happened sent me into what Instructor Johnson liked to call a controlled panic.
Panic, because the situation seemed to be escalating quickly.
Controlled, because I was the predator in the situation.
One of my hands was pinned under my chest, the other between my back and his stomach. That was the one I chose. I bunched up his uniform the best I could, searching for bare skin. My brain’s wandering fingers reached out for his head and pried their way in, one at a time. They fought through the memory of my startled face behind the door, moody blue images of women dancing on dimly lit stages, a field, another man launching his fist at him—
Then, the weight was off, and air came flooding back into my lungs, cold and stale. I rolled over onto my hands and knees, gasping for more of it. The figure standing over me had tossed him down the stairs like a crumpled piece of paper.
“—up! We have to—” The words sounded like they were being carried along underwater. If it hadn’t been for the strands of shocking violet hair sticking out from under her ski mask, I probably wouldn’t have recognized Vida at all. Her dark shirt and pants were torn, and she seemed to be moving with some kind of limp, but she was alive, and there, and in mostly one piece. I heard her voice through the muffled ringing in my ears.
“Jesus, you’re slow!” she was shouting to me. “Let’s go!”
She started down the stairs, but I grabbed the scruff of her Kevlar vest and pulled her back. “We’re going outside. We’ll cover the entrance from there. Is your comm still working?”
“They’re still fighting down there!” she shouted. “They can use us! He said not to leave our post—!”
“Then consider it an order from me!”
And she had to, because that was the way this worked. That was what she hated most about me, about all of this—that I had the deciding vote. That I got to make this call.