“No,” Emma breathed. She turned back to the panel and started tapping the ground floor button like a slot machine.
Nothing.
Just the groaning hush of an old building and two quiet people in a very stuck elevator.
“Well.” Darren clicked his tongue. “Those twenty minutes are starting to look a bit more challenging.”
Emma took a slow breath through her nose, then reached for the bright red button markedEmergency. Normally, she would’ve hesitated—she hated asking for help, hated making a scene. She preferred her drama safely confined to fiction.
Today, all those instincts went out the window. Or would have, if there were any windows. God, there were no windows. Was the ventilation even working? The heat seemed to rise quickly.
She pressed her palm down on the emergency button, bracing for the shrill, old-fashioned ring it seemed to promise.
Silence answered her. She gaped.
“Are you serious?” She punched it again, harder.
Still nothing.
With a frown, she hooked her fingers around the edges and gave it a tug—and the whole button came off in her hand with a sad little pop.
“What the...” she said flatly, holding it up. “That’s not supposed to happen.”
Darren leaned in to examine it. “Did you just break the emergency button?”
“I didn’t break it!”
“You are holding it in your hand after pulling it off the wall, so in my professional opinion, you did break it.”
“Well, your profession is lying for a living, so I wouldn’t give that too much weight,” Emma hissed. It slipped out before she could stop herself, her mind too busy to moderate. She froze, glancing up to gauge his reaction.
His lips twitched.
She exhaled, relieved and annoyed. “This isn’tfunny, Darren!”
To his credit, he almost managed to hide his smile. He pulled his phone from his pocket, entirely unfazed.
“Alright, let’s just call someone. They must have a service number.”
Emma unlocked her own phone. “Good, you do that. I’ll call Leah. She’s probably—” She cut herself off mid-sentence.
Her signal bar was gone.
She turned in the cramped space, lifting her phone like it might catch a signal if she just...offered it to the gods.
It didn’t.
Darren frowned at his screen. “No signal. That can’t be right.”
“We’re in the middle of downtown San Diego,” Emma said, exasperated. “Therehasto be reception.”
Refreshing the screen again did nothing. It was as if her phone didn’t know the outside world existed.
“Great.” She slumped against the wood-paneled wall, letting her head fall back with a dull thunk. “On top of everything else, this elevator is a goddamned Faraday cage.”
Darren blinked. “That’s surprisingly technical.”
“I researched electromagnetism when I wroteThe Bonds of Light,” she muttered, looking down again at her useless phone. “Never made it to the page, but a few things stuck.”
