No. No, no, no.
“Talk to me.” Hellhound’s voice was a hiss.
“Vision. White-out.”
“How bad?”
“Total.”
A second passed. Then two. The sound of Havoc shifting nervously above us.
“We have fourteen minutes,” Havoc whispered. “If he’s blind, he’s dead weight. We scrub.”
“No,” I growled.
The sheer panic of the darkness threatened to swallow me. If I couldn’t see, I couldn’t fight. If I couldn’t fight, I couldn’t get the codes. If I didn’t get the codes, I died.
And if I died, Clare would blame herself. She would carry my ghost like she carried her sister’s.
Not an option.
I forced my breathing to slow. In. Out. I visualized Clare’s face. Not the memory, but the future. I visualized walking back through that door in Lyon. I visualized dropping the drive on the table. I visualized living long enough to learn how to touch her without wondering if I was going to break her.
Anchor. She is the anchor.
The static began to recede. It didn’t clear, but it fragmented, turning into snowy grain. Then shapes. The railing. The steps. Hellhound’s boot.
It took four seconds. It felt like four years.
“It’s clearing. I have it.”
“Can you continue?” A tactical question. Are you a weapon or a liability?
I looked up at him. The trembling rattled the watch on my wrist. I clenched my fist.
“Yes.”
“Calculated risk,” Havoc muttered. “Emphasis on the risk.”
“Move.”
We climbed.
We bypassed the second floor. The third. The fourth.
At the sixth landing, we shifted to the elevator shaft. I pried the maintenance doors open with a combat knife, another motion my hands knew perfectly. The shaft was a dark throat going down into the bowels of the earth and up to the executive heavens.
Cables groaned in the darkness. The smell of grease and stagnant air hit us.
We climbed the maintenance ladder inside the shaft. Hand over hand. Rung by cold, greasy rung.
Twelfth floor.
We reached the service hatch. Hellhound checked the feed on Havoc’s tablet.
“Clear. Cameras are looping for ninety seconds left on the cycle.”
Hellhound popped the hatch.
