MasukThey came out of the annex into a night that smelled like wet gravel and smoke.Hale’s three black vehicles still sat in the lot with the doors hanging open, abandoned in a hurry. Nobody said anything about it. Adrian found keys in the ignition of the nearest one and held the door for Victor, who climbed in with the stiff, careful movements of a man who would rather die than be helped.“Front seat,” Vanessa said.“I’m fine in the back.”“You’re bleeding from your eyebrow and you’re missing a shoe.”“I’m aware of my shoe situation.”“Front seat, Dad.”He took the front seat.Nobody talked on the drive. Miriam fell asleep against the window within five minutes, her bound wrists finally free and her fingers still curled around a rifle bolt she’d forgotten she was holding. Isabella sat very straight in the corner of the back seat with her hands in her lap, like someone waiting to be asked to leave the car. Adrian drove with one hand on the wheel and the other resting on the gearshift, and
The corridor didn’t have a plan. It had teeth.“Left!” Adrian shouted, and Vanessa went left, and a hand that had been aimed at her hair closed on empty air.“Duck!” Victor shouted, and every Sterling in the corridor ducked. A thing in a torn lab coat sailed over their heads, hit the wall behind them, and slid down it like a dropped coat.“Why did that one jump?” Miriam yelped.“Some of them are athletes!”“That’s not a real category, Dad!”“It is now!”They tore down the passage in a clump, boots slapping concrete, Adrian at the front with the rifle and Victor limping hard at the back. The red emergency strips bled light along the floor and threw their shadows up the walls, huge and jerking, like a crowd of people running with them.Vanessa swung the crowbar at the first thing that came close enough, and the impact rang up her arms to her shoulders. She’d stopped counting kills somewhere around the vault. Counting felt like a luxury now, and she had a strong suspicion she’d regret ev
Hale moved first.He didn’t draw a weapon or shout an order. He simply stopped being a man who stood still. One second he was a silhouette in front of the tank. The next his hand had closed on Vanessa’s throat and lifted her off her feet.The crowbar clattered out of her grip. She kicked and connected with his shin, and it was like kicking a wall.“You,” Hale said, very softly, “have no idea what you’ve cost me.”She couldn’t answer. Black spots swam at the edges of her vision, and the room tilted sideways in a rush of noise: boots, shouting, a sound like a dropped tray as Adrian’s weapon hit the floor.Then Adrian hit Hale like a freight train.They went down together in a tangle of limbs, and Vanessa dropped to the concrete, choking, her hands clawing at her own collar. Through the haze she saw Adrian drive an elbow into Hale’s ribs and take a fist to the jaw in return. It was brutal and efficient and not at all like the clean, controlled fighting she’d watched him do for weeks. It
“The drive,” Hale said again, in the tone of a man asking someone to pass the salt.Nobody moved.The two guards had forced Victor and Miriam down onto their knees on the concrete, and each stood behind his prisoner with a rifle muzzle resting against the base of a skull. Victor stared straight ahead with his jaw locked and blood drying on his lip. Miriam was shaking. Vanessa could tell she hated it by the way her chin kept lifting, like she was trying to argue with her own body.Two more of Hale’s men stood in the doorway. Vanessa hadn’t heard them arrive.Adrian’s weapon was still aimed at Hale’s chest. It was also very clear that if he fired, two other triggers would be pulled at the same moment.“Here is how this works,” Hale said. “Miss Sterling the younger will hand the drive to her sister. Her sister will carry it across the room and give it to me. Nobody does anything creative. If anyone does, I start with Victor.”“I’m touched you’re starting with me,” Victor said.“I’m a tra
Adrian’s weapon came up so fast that Vanessa heard his sleeve snap.“Don’t,” Hale said mildly, and sipped his tea. “I’d hate for the vault’s last pleasant moment to be ruined by gunfire.”“Put the mug down,” Adrian said.“It’s a very good mug.”“Put it down.”“Someone left it here for me. It seems rude to waste it.” He lowered the mug a few inches, unhurried, and gave Vanessa a long, appraising look. “You look dreadful, by the way. You have something on your collar.”Vanessa glanced down. It was something she didn’t want to identify.“It’s a fashion choice,” she said.“It’s a bold one.”“You’re standing alone in a vault with two armed people who hate you, and you’re critiquing my jacket.”“I’m not alone.”“You look alone.”“Looks can be deceiving. I’ve built an entire career on that.” He smiled at her. It was the same warm, patient smile he’d worn at the dinner table, and it made her want to throw the crowbar at his teeth. “Though I’m touched that you made it all the way down here. I’
Adrian didn’t stop to think. He ran toward the scream.The corridor ahead bent and split and bent again, and the static in his ear rose and fell with every step, breaking her voice into pieces. He caught fragments between the gunshots. A cry. A thud. The flat, sharp crack of a pistol, and then three more, and then a silence that made his stomach turn over.He rounded the last corner at a dead sprint and saw them.The corridor was packed from wall to wall with dead things, all of them leaning the same direction, all of them crowding toward the open mouth of an elevator shaft. And at the edge of that shaft, her back to the drop, one boot already half over the lip, stood Vanessa with a crowbar in her fist and a face he would remember for the rest of his life.She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t pleading. She looked furious.He brought the rifle up and fired.The nearest one dropped. The next took two rounds and went down on top of it. Heads turned, and the whole mass of them shifted toward the







