00:18:59
00:18:58
Calista claps like it’s a party trick. “Oops.”
They leave laughing, hand in hand like the world’s sickest Bonnie and Clyde.
The moment they’re gone, I swallow a sob. “Cole, what do we do?”
He’s quiet for a long, impossible beat, swallowing hard like he is gathering something fierce inside of him. I can feel his shoulder press against mine as he flexes and works on something I can’t see.
“They tied us sloppy,” he says, a rough edge to his voice. “Idiots. Rope’s not cinched right. They tried to make it tight so we couldn’t move, but they left too much slack on the knot.”
I focus on the cords binding my wrists because it’s the only thing that feels like control. I can feel Cole’s fingers moving behind me, working at the knot where his own hands chafe against the ropes. He’s been hit. He’s in pain. He smells like blood and diesel and something feral that makes the hair on my arms rise.
“How long?” I ask, and the numbers over the LED glow like a countdown to my soul. 00:18:03.
“I’ll get you loose,” he whispers. “Hold still.”
He’s so steady, even when he’s bleeding, kicked and beaten—there’s a set to his jaw that says he means it. I let him work, let the panic climb, and then settle because it has to; there’s no other option.
His fingers are clumsy but deliberate. The rope scrapes my skin raw. At one point, he mutters something about the knot; his breath is hot against my ear. I wonder how the man who builds bridges with his hands learned to unpick knots under pressure, and I think how many times he must have practiced gettinghimself out of tough spots for work, for the field. He always did things with his hands.
00:10:12.
He finally frees his right hand and works to get behind me. For a second, we’re both just breathing, existing in the middle of the dark like two halves of the same thing. Then his hand, slick with blood, grazes mine, and for a sliver of a second, I forget the beeping, the lights, the cruel words. He hooks his fingers into the rope at my wrists and works the knot.
“It’s… almost—“ he hisses.
I grab at his wrist to give him something solid to hold. He answers by working faster. Sweat slicks his brow. Blood trickles into the hollow at the base of his throat.
00:05:41.
My chest squeezes. I’d thought there were so many ways to die when you stand in the middle of a life you planned. This isn’t one I imagined. Not like this—so intimate and small, so ridiculous to die at a construction site for reasons that smell like hate and small-town grudges.
He gets my hands free at last. The ropes bite red circles into my skin. My palms are raw and shaking, but I move with a new animal speed, ripping at the vest strap that presses the bomb to my torso. There’s an access buckle, one they figured to be hardy but careless. Cole’s free hand is working on his own harness,metal scraping in the dark, and he grunts when a part finally gives.
00:02:58.
It’s a scramble that makes me dizzy. We’re rending cloth, clawing at snap releases, fingers numb with cold and blood and adrenaline. Every rustle sounds like an accusation. Every time something pops free, it’s a small, miraculous thunder.
“Cole—“ I gasp as we manage one vest, then another. Our hands are slick; salt and blood mix on our fingers, and I feel like I’ll throw up with relief and fear.
00:01:16.
He yanks the last of his harness loose, and we scramble to our feet, legs wobbly and useless from the ropes and the blows. We don’t waste a second. He grabs my hand, and we run like we belong to each other, because in that moment, that’s all that matters. The houses loom like sleeping beasts. Behind us, the timer screams into single digits as if it can sense our movement.
“The lake,” he says, panic brightening his eyes into something like belief. “We need to get into the water.”
My lungs burn, chest a tight fist of terror. “Don’t leave me,” I plead, and I mean it with the kind of rawness that tastes of everything we survived and everything we risked losing.
“I’m not leaving you,” he replies, and I catch the crack in his voice.
We run faster—all crooked steps and stuttering—heading toward the ragged line of the lake where the moon scatters itself thin and silvery.
The ground underfoot jerks me, knocks my feet out as an explosion blooms behind us like a dying star flaring one last time. Heat thwacks my back even as the deafening roar lifts us off balance. I stumble, and Cole’s arm is there, iron-strong, to shove us both onward.
Debris rains down. The air fills with the stench of burning wood and something chemical and wrong. For a terrifying second, I worry the whole world will crack open and eat us. We leap into the lake together. The water hits like salvation.
