The tunnel opens into a larger chamber, and suddenly I understand. An underground stream, probably fed by snowmelt from the mountains above. The water is black and cold, moving with a current strong enough to carry debris downstream.
Kane stands at the chamber's edge, flashlight illuminating a narrow stone path that follows the stream toward what might be daylight in the distance.
"Five hundred meters," he reports. "Comes out behind the treeline where Tommy arranged backup vehicles."
"They're behind us." Stryker is breathing hard, favoring his wounded leg. "Three minutes, maybe less."
Kane's eyes find mine. He sees the injury. Sees the way I'm holding my side. His expression doesn't change, but something shifts in his posture. Acknowledgment that we might not all make it out of this tunnel.
"Then we move fast." He turns to Reagan. "Stay between Dylan and Khalid. Don't stop for anything."
We run.
The stone path is slick with moisture, treacherous in the dim beam of our flashlights. Reagan stumbles twice, and both times Khalid catches her with reflexes that shouldn't belong to a fifteen-year-old boy. Behind us, echoes of pursuit bounce off the tunnel walls, footsteps and shouting and the occasional crack of gunfire that goes wide.
The wound is slowing me down. My vision narrows at the edges, and every step sends fire through my side that threatens to drop me where I stand. Lisa's face flashes through my mind, then Maya's, smiling at me from that photograph I keep on every nightstand.
Not yet. Not like this.
"Stay awake." Reagan's voice cuts through the fog threatening to swallow me. "We're almost there."
Daylight appears ahead, a pale slice of gray cutting through the tunnel. Kane increases his pace, and somehow my legs keep moving, carrying me toward that light.
We burst out of the tunnel into a clearing surrounded by pine trees. An SUV waits on a dirt road thirty feet away, engine already running. Tommy coordinated this from Echo Base. The kid thinks of everything.
"Go!" Kane barks the order while Stryker covers our rear. "Dylan, Reagan, Khalid. Move!"
Reagan's hand finds mine. She pulls me toward the SUV, stronger than she looks, refusing to let me fall. Khalid is already in the back seat, his knife disappearing back into wherever he keeps it.
The door closes behind me. The engine roars. We're moving.
Through the rear window, I watch the tunnel entrance. Three figures emerge, weapons raised, but we're already out of effective range. One of them fires anyway, and the round punches through the rear glass, missing Reagan's head by inches. She doesn't flinch. Just reaches over and presses her hand against my side, applying pressure to the wound.
"Stay with me." Her voice carries command rather than request. "Dylan, stay with me."
"Kane." I force the words out. "Safe house status?"
"Gone." Kane's voice from the front seat is flat. Professional. "They'll burn it. Standard Committee protocol. No evidence left behind."
Gone. Everything we built there. The command center, the secure communications, the maps and planning documents. All of it reduced to ash.
But the exposé still exists. We didn't get to send it, but we didn't lose it either.
"Secondary location?" I ask.
"Hunting lodge. Forty miles north. Off-grid, no paper trail connecting it to any of us." Kane checks his mirror, watching for pursuit. "Tommy dispatched Willa from Echo Base the second our perimeter alarms tripped. She's got a twenty-minute head start on a direct route while we were fighting our way out."
Reagan leans closer, her hand still pressed against my wound. The pressure is helping, slowing the flow. She looks at me with eyes that hold exhaustion and fear and a stubborn refusal to quit.
"We didn't send it," she whispers. "Dylan, we were so close. My finger was on the button."
"I know."
"All that work. Everything we need to expose them. And now?—"
"Now we find another way." I force my eyes to focus on her face. On the woman who refused to run when running would have been smarter. "The files still exist. The journalists are still waiting. We regroup, find secure communications, and we try again."
"What if they find us first?"
