Not confusion.
Recognition.
A sharp, visceraloh shitthat flashes across his face before he masks it.
“Hold your breath.” His voice cracks with an urgency I’ve never heard from him—not even in gunfire. He grabs my arm hard enough that I feel bone. “Don’t breathe.”
He knows exactly what’s coming.
And the fear in his eyes isn’t for himself.
It’s for me.
A violent ROAR detonates from the ceiling nozzles—compressor-driven, concussive, a cannon blast that punches the air out of my chest. The walls shudder.
White fog erupts in a dense sheet, slamming downward like a waterfall and flows across the floor. It spreads instantly, thick and unnatural, a chemical tide swallowing the room.
The smell hits next—metallic, bitter, wrong.
Jackson curses under his breath, low and vicious. “Halon.”
He spits the word like it’s a death sentence.
Because it is.
It doesn’t burn.
It doesn’t choke.
It steals the oxygen right out of the air.
The temperature plummets so fast my teeth ache. My skin prickles in violent waves. My eyelashes frost. The cold cuts through my clothes like they aren’t even there, turning every patch of sweat on my body to ice.
Jackson yanks me tighter against him, one hand covering my mouth like he can physically keep the gas out of me. His own breath is locked behind clenched teeth—chest straining, eyes already watering from the chemical sting.
“Just hold it,” he grinds out. “As long as you can.”
The fog climbs higher, curling around our legs, our hips, our waists.
A ghost, a predator, a suffocating tide.
I clamp my mouth shut, but the shock—the cold, the dryness, the instinct to inhale—makes my breath catch hard in my throat.
And Jackson’s grip tightens like he knows how fast this kills. Like he’s seen it before.
Because he has.
Ten seconds.
The air grows thin. It’s not just cold; it’s empty. It feels like altitude sickness slamming into me at sea level.
My chest tightens. A cold burning sensation claws at the back of my throat. I taste copper.
“You calculate probabilities, Talia,”the voice says. But the timbre shifts. It warps, softens, losing its command cadence and adopting a tone that makes my blood freeze faster than the gas.“Calculate this.”
“You’re exhausting,”the voice says.“You analyze everything instead of feeling it.”
Nathan.
