Chapter 212: Fire in the Alley

The residential streets of the locked-down district were a canyon of shadows. Without streetlights, the world was rendered in varying densities of black, the only illumination the sullen, cloud-obscured moon and the intermittent, frantic sweep of a drone’s searchlight high above. The air smelled of damp earth, diesel from idling emergency vehicles in the distance, and a sharp, metallic tang of fear.

They moved like ghosts, sticking to the deepest pools of darkness, their breathing shallow and controlled. Every parked car was a potential ambush. Every darkened doorway is a threat. The prototype in Anton’s pocket felt less like a prize and more like a cursed artifact, broadcasting their location to some unseen, malevolent radar.

Sabatine led, his senses stretched to their limits. He’d disabled the GPS in their burners, but he knew Kaine didn’t need electronic pings. He was a hunter who read patterns, pressure, and human desperation. Their very movement through the static, locked-down landscape was a signal.

“We need to get off the street,” Sabatine murmured, his eyes scanning the row of elegant, silent townhouses. “Find a garden wall, a cellar access. Somewhere to hole up until Leon can get a fix on us.”

Anton nodded, his jaw tight. The pain in his shoulder was a constant, grinding companion, but he pushed it down. Adrenaline was a better analgesic than any drug. He trusted Sabatine’s instincts implicitly, but the oppressive, engineered darkness was getting to him. It felt like a sensory deprivation tank designed to induce panic.

They turned into a narrower lane, a service alley that ran behind a row of grander houses. It was lined with high stone walls topped with broken glass or wrought-iron spikes, and dumpsters for the now-powerless kitchens. The relative cover felt like a small blessing.

Leon’s voice hissed in their earpieces, barely audible through the interference of the drone signals. “...thermal is sporadic... I can't clean... they’re using the power outage as cover for movement... be advised, I’ve lost visual on Kaine’s primary team. They’ve gone to ground.”

“Understood,” Sabatine whispered back. “We’re in an alley off Rue de la C….” He paused, his foot scuffing against something. Not garbage. Something solid, metallic.

He froze, his entire body going rigid. Anton, right behind him, almost bumped into his back.

“What?” Anton breathed.

Sabatine didn’t answer. He slowly crouched, his fingers reaching out in the near-total dark, not touching, but feeling the air. He could just make out the shape—a rectangular metal box, wired, tucked snugly between a dumpster and the stone wall. It was too deliberate, too placed. A cold dread slithered down his spine.

“Tripwire,” he whispered, his voice deadly calm. “Laser filament. Across the alley at ankle height.” He traced its invisible path with his eyes, now knowing what to look for. It was a professional job, meant to catch someone moving with purpose in the dark. A hunter’s snare. “Back out. Slowly. The way we came.”

They began to retreat, each step measured, silent. The alley seemed to stretch, the darkness pressing in. The faint hum of the distant drones felt like the buzzing of flies waiting for carrion.

They were ten steps from the alley’s mouth when Sabatine saw it. A parked delivery van, unremarkable in the gloom, across the narrow street from the alley’s entrance. His trained eye caught the anomaly—its tires were slightly deflated, as if it had been sitting for days, yet the antenna on its roof was new, sleek. And there was a faint, almost imperceptible glow from a tiny LED near the grille. A status light. For a receiver.

His brain connected the dots with lightning speed. The tripwire wasn’t the trap. It was the trigger. A proximity sensor. They hadn’t tripped it, but they’d gotten close enough. The van was the payload.

“DOWN!” he roared, the sound tearing from his throat.

He didn’t think so. He acted. His body became a weapon of pure protection. He pivoted, his shoulder driving into Anton’s chest with brutal force, launching them both sideways and back into the alley. They weren’t going to make the street. He saw a heavy, concrete traffic bollard at the alley’s corner, a relic from some bygone street plan.

He shoved Anton behind it, using his own body as a final shield, pressing them both into the scant cover.

The world erupted.

The blast was not a deafening boom of Hollywood, but a deep, visceral THUMP that punched the air from their lungs. The van disintegrated in a sun-bright flower of orange and yellow fire, a thousand fragments of metal and glass becoming shrapnel. The shockwave hit the alley like a physical wall, a roaring, hot fist of compressed air that shattered windows in the houses above and turned the dumpsters into booming, crumpled drums.

Heat, intense and blinding, washed over them. Sabatine felt a searing pain across the back of his neck and his hands where they covered Anton’s head. The sound was apocalyptic—a rending, screaming cacophony of tearing metal, shattering stone, and the whoosh of ignited fuel.

Then came the rain. A hail of debris—jagged metal, chunks of asphalt, sparkling glass—pelted down around them, clanging off the bollard and the stone walls. The dumpster they’d passed was now a twisted, burning wreck, belching black, acrid smoke that stung their eyes and clawed at their throats.

Silence did not follow. Instead, a high-pitched ringing filled Sabatine’s ears, a tinnitus shriek overlaying the crackle of spreading fire, the groan of stressed metal, and the first, distant screams of alarm from awakened residents.

He was on top of Anton, his body a rigid arch. He forced himself to move, to assess. His own body felt bruised, battered, scorched. His clothes were smoldering in patches. But he was whole. He pushed up, his arms trembling.

“Anton. Anton!” His own voice sounded muffled, far away.

Beneath him, Anton stirred, coughing violently, a racking sound that spoke of inhaled smoke and shock. His eyes, wide and stunned, blinked open, focusing on Sabatine’s face hovering above him in the hellish, flickering light of the burning alley.

“S-Sabe?” he choked out.

Relief, sharp and painful, lanced through Sabatine. He rolled off, quickly running his hands over Anton’s torso, his legs. “Are you hit? Your shoulder?”

Anton sat up gingerly, wincing as he moved his injured arm. “I’m… I’m okay. You?” His eyes widened, taking in the smoldering tears in Sabatine’s jacket, the angry red burns on the back of his neck. “You’re on fire!”

Sabatine slapped at his own shoulders, extinguishing the last embers. “I’m fine. Can you stand?”

With Sabatine’s help, Anton got to his feet, leaning heavily against the scarred, hot concrete of the bollard. The scene around them was a vision from a war zone. The alley entrance was a maw of flame and twisted wreckage. The van was a blackened skeleton. Fires licked at the stone walls and gutters. The acrid stench of explosives, melted plastic, and burning rubber was overpowering.

The trap had been exquisite. Not a direct attack, but an environmental kill switch. Kaine had predicted their need for cover, for the hidden route. He’d turned the alley into a funnel and placed a bomb at its mouth. He hadn’t needed to see them; he’d known the darkness would herd them.

“He’s not trying to capture us,” Sabatine said, his voice raw from smoke and fury. He pulled Anton away from the intense heat, deeper into the alley, away from the roaring fire at its entrance. “He’s trying to erase us. To make this look like a tragic accident in a chaotic blackout. A gas main explosion. A terrorist bomb. Another clean story.”

The ringing in his ears was subsiding, replaced by the growing wail of approaching fire engines and police sirens, converging on the new, spectacular crisis. The lockdown would now be absolute. No one would be moving in or out. And in the chaos of the response, Kaine’s hunters would have perfect cover to finish the job.

Anton stared at the inferno, his face a mask of soot and shock, but his eyes were hardening into chips of flint. The bomb hadn’t broken him; it had forged something colder, harder. “He just declared total war.”

Leon’s voice was a frantic crackle in their ears, cutting through the residual ringing. “—thermal flare in your sector! Report! Sabatine! Anton! Report!”

“We’re alive,” Sabatine gasped into the mic. “Car bomb. The alley is blocked. We’re pinned. Kaine’s cleaning house.”

A string of vicious curses in three languages came through the comms. “The response is chaos. Fire, police, ambulances. It’s a wall of noise and light. I can’t get to you.”

“Don’t try,” Anton ordered, his CEO voice cutting through his own pain. “They’ll be watching the approaches. They’ll pick you off. We need an alternative.”

Sabatine’s mind, reeling from the blast, clawed for options. The fire behind them was spreading, eating towards the dumpsters, cutting off their retreat deeper into the alley. Soon, the heat would be untenable. They had one direction: forward, through the fire? Impossible. Or up.

He looked at the stone walls. High, smooth, topped with glass. But one, about twenty meters down, had a sturdy-looking drainpipe. And above it, a wooden balcony on the second floor of the townhouse.

“There,” he pointed, his voice a hoarse croak. “We go up. Over the wall, into the garden of that house. Then through the house if we have to. We use the interior spaces. Get off the street-level grid.”

Anton followed his gaze. The drainpipe looked solid, but the climb, with his shoulder… “I can’t pull myself up.”

“You won’t have to,” Sabatine said, already moving. “You’re going to stand on me.”

They reached the pipe. Sabatine braced his back against the wall, his burned hands gripping the rough stone. He interlaced his fingers, creating a stirrup. “Now. Foot here. I’ll boost you. Grab the balcony railing.”

There was no time for debate. Anton placed his good foot into Sabatine’s hands, steadied himself against the wall with his other hand, and pushed. Sabatine straightened with a grunt of effort, lifting Anton upward. Pain screamed through his scorched back and shoulders, but he held a human ladder.

Anton’s fingers scrabbled, catching the ornate ironwork of the balcony. He hauled himself up, his face white with agony, and tumbled over the railing onto the small deck.

He immediately turned, lying on his stomach, reaching back down. “Your turn!”

Sabatine jumped, catching Anton’s outstretched hand. Anton pulled, his own muscles straining, tears of pain streaking through the soot on his face. Sabatine found a foothold on a joint in the pipe, pushed, and half-climbed, half-was dragged over the railing.

They collapsed together on the cold wooden planks of the balcony, gasping, their bodies a symphony of new and old pains. Below and behind them, the alley roared with flame, casting their hiding place in a flickering, demonic light.

They were out of the immediate kill box. But they were now trespassers in an unknown house, in a locked-down district, with hunters closing in and the entire city’s emergency apparatus descending on the fire they’d just escaped.

Sabatine rolled onto his side, looking at Anton in the pulsating glare. Soot blackened his face, his jacket was torn, but his eyes burned with a defiant, alive fire. He had saved him. Again.

Anton reached out, his hand finding Sabatine’s soot-stained, burned one. His grip was fierce. “Next time,” he coughed, “I’m saving you.”

A ghost of a smile touched Sabatine’s cracked lips. “Deal.”

They had survived the fire in the alley. But the night was young, and Elias Kaine was just getting started.

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