Rohan tries to pull away from me when I wrap his arm around my neck and encourage him to let me take half his weight, but I refuse to release him. "Come on, lean on me, you're too fucked up to do this one on your own; don't be a bitch about it."
The lack of food or water, or hell, maybe just the lack of sleep, has taken its toll on him, and now we're going to have to deal with the consequences.
"Heroes aren't meant to call their damsels a bitch," Rohan mumbles to me irately although he gives in and allows me to take on some of his weight in aid of keeping him semi-upright.
I snort, moving us slowly towards the exit. "Yeah, well, I'm no hero, and you're definitely no damsel."
"Mean," Rohan gasps sarcastically, pinching my side. "Notblondandmurderyenough for you, am I?"
"You're a beautiful fucking flower petal, Rohan," I huff, amused despite myself and the dire situation we're in. "I never meant to imply otherwise."
He pinches my side again but doesn't respond, which I think says more about his tiredness than anything else I've seen so far.
Rohan hangs onto me as I take him out into the level-three corridor, where an alarm suddenly blares to life, piercing my eardrums. Rohan sucks in a sharp breath of pain. He buries one ear against my shoulder and uses a free hand to cover the other one. I wince in sympathy. Enhanced senses must be a nightmare sometimes.
It seems the alarm is part of an official evacuation protocol for the facility, as seconds after it goes off, doors all along the corridor open and people start spilling out. There are more than I originally thought given it's the middle of the night. None of them are OI guards, just scientists in white coats and some other people who might be technicians or clerical assistants and the like.
The storm team is probably taking up all the OI agents' attention down at the front of the building. Hopefully, it will take them some time to work their way up here, and I can use the staircase to go up to the top floor and then out onto the roof. I noted there's a fire escape accessible from the roof, which goes down the side and then winds around the back of the facility. Using that should make it easier to avoid the fight between the OI guards and FISA agents and keep us hidden until either FISA has taken over the facility, or we find some means of getting out, maybe through the back fence. I'll have to wait and see how things pan out as we go.
Still, I'm hardly in a position to defend myself and Rohan if we’re overrun. I reach behind me and take out the gun North provided me with that I had stuffed into my waistband.
A few of the OI workers catch sight of me and Rohan almost immediately, their eyes widening in confusion. Many of them clock the gun and freeze, the typical civilian reaction upon seeing a firearm. Some other workers who haven't seen us, further down the corridor, are making their way to the door that leads to the staircase. It's likely their evacuation procedure to leave the building via the stairs rather than the lifts.
I raise my gun and fire off a shot to get the attention of everyone in the corridor. The bullet hits the ceiling, and dust comes raining down on Rohan and me. I don't bother to look up and see the crack in the ceiling where the bullet has likely lodged itself.
Despite the loudness of the alarm, the gunshot still cuts through it with all the promised violence of a hunting knife plunging into a tree next to someone's face, and it has all the OI employees in the corridor swinging around to look in my direction.
Putting on my bestdo not fuck with meface, I bring the gun down and aim it at no one in particular, calling out the order, "Get back inside the rooms you came from and stay there!"
No one moves at first, and I sigh internally. Civilians and their deer-in-the-headlights reaction to lethal weapons is the bane of my existence. It isn't like in the films, where everyone screams and makes a mad dash for it once they canseethe gun right in front of their faces. If there's one thing I like about missions in America, it's their numbness to guns. Those fuckers run in a no-shit zigzag formation, like birds flying south for the winter.
I change the angle of my gun so I'm aiming at a short, middle-aged man who's standing close to me in a white lab coat. He does a reverse gasp at having my gun trained on him but doesn't back up, fear overtaking him and kicking his fight-or-flight instinct to death.
"Now!" I shout fiercely. "Move!"
When the man jumps into action and scrambles to comply, it seems to have a domino effect, everyone else rushing to follow his lead and returning to their respective workrooms or labs or whatever the fuck they've got up here.
I wait until the OI employees are safely hidden behind closed doors again before half dragging Rohan down the corridor towards the lifts. If all the OI employees are taking the stairs, then we should be safe to use the lift to get upstairs. The facility only has four floors, including the main lobby, and the fourth floor should hopefully have some way of getting to the roof.
"What's the plan here?" Rohan asks once we're inside the lift.
Like he was waiting for the perfect moment to chime back in, North's voice comes through the comm unit in a pissed-off rush. "I would also like to know what the hell it is you think you're doing, Agent Snow?"
I'm not sure if he was just too busy with the storm team to realise I'd disobeyed his orders and had left the containment cells with Rohan, or if he genuinely took that long to stop being angry enough that he could finally speak.
"Get to the roof," I tell them both bluntly. "Then climb down the fire escape and hope no one shoots us in the meantime."
"Great. Simple. Love it. Especially the not-getting-shot idea. That might be my favourite part," Rohan drawls, head rising from my shoulder to give me a surprisingly intense look. "But first, we need to make a stop in a room on the fourth floor where the OI database files are kept."
"What?" I ask, furrowing my brows, ignoring the furious ranting from North, telling us to stay where we are and not do anything insane. "Why?"
"We need to steal their backup drive," Rohan explains quickly. "There's information on it FISA needs about the blue drug that Roth told us about. Trust me, we don't have time for me to explain everything now, but wecan'tleave here without it." Rohan looks adamant, ready to push away from me and go get it alone if he has to. Whatever he's learned in his time here must be big if he's willing to risk his freedom and possibly our lives for it.
In another situation, I might try to argue that the most important thing is getting Rohan out of here. That's the mission, like Jack said. But Jack and I are not the same in that I do believe it's possible to care about things outside the mission and still get the job done. Plus, if this is as important as Rohan is implying, I want to help him.
"Okay." I nod in agreement. "We'll stop off to grab the drive."
North, having heard everything both I and Rohan said, doesn't bother to argue. He knows me well enough by now to understand when I've made up my mind about something. Instead, he offers begrudgingly, like it's some kind of threat all its own, "I'm sending Jack to the fourth floor. He's already on the stairs."
