“We have a problem? I wasn’t aware,” I reply, my voice suddenly hushed and whispery.
“Don’t do that,” he groans, closing his eyes and tipping his head back. The dim light catches and caresses the line of his jaw.
“Don’t do what?” I breathe back, injecting a note of innocence into my tone.
“You know.”
“Am I doing something you haven’t also been doing?”
Our bodies are barely an inch apart, hovering on the brink of forgetting what we’re supposed to be doing now. I watch too closely as he wets his lower lip, the movement of his eyelashes as his eyes fall to my mouth.
His forehead presses to mine, and he makes a quiet noise of frustration. “I wouldn’t rely on my willpower to keep us focused, if I were you.”
I sigh and pull back. He’s right. We shouldn’t waste this time getting distracted, even if I don’t know when I’m going to see him again after this. I turn and keep moving on down the tunnel.
Clayton never let me tag along on a recon mission like this. When I insisted I could be of more help, he’d always stress that it was better if he worked alone. Like constantly getting kidnapped meant I was unreliable or something.
It wasn’t something I knew how to bring up to him, that when he reached me, sometimes he forgot to untie me until after everything was finished.
I don’t know how I would tell Clayton about what I’m doing. He’d likely think I was betraying him.
And wasn’t it a betrayal? Did I really owe that to him?
It does feel like cheating. I didn’t speak out loud the idea of inviting Ellis over to finish what we started, but it hovered in the air. I don’t know how I would keep it from turning into one more time, again, and again, and again.
The door at the end of this maze is unimpressive, to say the least. A couple concrete stairs and a steel railing lead up to the plain metal frame, rusty and painted with the same dull industrial gray everything else down here is. There’s a grate a few feet from the door, overwhelmed with the ooze. Every few seconds another little piece breaks free from the rest, sliding downstream with the current.
Ellis hangs back at the last corner before the door. “I hate to show you another dead end, but this is as far as I’ve gotten with it before.”
“Maybe I can pick the lock,” I say, with probably still too much confidence, pulling a bobby pin out of my hair from where it was holding my winter hat in place.
“Maybe you’ll gain the ability to pick locks within the next few minutes.”
“I was hoping it’s a cheap enough lock that sticking a hairpin inside would work.”
“We’re pretty close to the east side of Goethal. I don’t know if you’ve seen inside the buildings up there, buuuut...”
Even as he says that there’s the low rumble of the subway racing under the city, not too far off.
“You mean I drove an hour out of the city just to crawl back to a couple blocks over from where I started?”
“It took you an hour to get out of the city?”
“Yeah, rush hour is no joke. The bridge floods with commuters at 4:45 every weekday because everyone suddenly thinks if they change lanes enough times they’ll get around everyone else.”
Approaching the door, it quickly becomes clear that it doesn’t even have a door handle or even its hinges exposed. A small panel on the wall next to the door is just as impassive, with no discernible brand, just two LED lights blinking red and green on its side.
“So, you know what street we’re under?” I ask, distracted as I look for anything I can work with.
“Street, building, basement, the works. We could order a pizza if we could figure out how to get upstairs from here,” he jokes.
I blow a wisp of hair out of my face and crouch down to better look at the sliver of space between the door and the frame. Turning my phone’s flashlight on, I can see the bolt holding the door shut. I feel silly with my hairpin in my hand, thinking I’d be able to do anything with it. Still, I look closer, trying to shine the light better on it. My phone bumps the electric lock panel, and the lights on its side turn blue, a mechanism whirrs and something clicks. I stumble back to stand as the door falls away under my palm.
“Oh shit, you actually got it? Awesome,” Ellis congratulates me as the door swings open on slow, well-oiled hinges.
I stare blankly at what just happened. Why did that work? I didn’t do anything. Was there a button I missed?
“Did you see that? The lights on the side just turned green and the door unbolted.”
