Smoke. Heat. A high-pitched whine that Lincoln realized, after several disoriented seconds, was coming from inside his own skull. His ears weren’t working right. Everything sounded like it was underwater, muffled and distant and wrong.
He was on his back. No—on his side, half-buried under something. Debris pressed against his ribs, his shoulder, his leg. When he tried to move, pain lanced through his entire left side and he had to bite down on a groan.
Think. Process. What happened?
The gunfire. The smoke grenades. He’d been moving toward Morgan’s position when the world turned white and loud and then nothing.
Lincoln forced his eyes to focus through the haze. The corridor had become something else entirely—a collapsed nightmare of twisted metal and shattered concrete, lit by the orange glow of spreading flames.
The industrial freezer unit he’d dove behind rose beside him like a steel monument, its surface blackened and dented but intact. Solid construction. Built in an era when equipment was meant to outlast the buildings that housed it.
That freezer had saved his life.
He pushed against the debris pinning him, ignoring the protest from his body. A chunk of drywall shifted. A section of ceiling tile crumbled. Inch by inch, he worked himself free until he could drag his legs clear and roll onto his hands and knees.
The movement made his head swim. Blood dripped from somewhere above his left eye, tracking warm down his cheek. His shoulder screamed when he tried to put weight on it—wrenched, maybe dislocated, definitely useless for anything requiring finesse. But his legs worked. His right arm worked.
Functional. Damaged but functional.
“Lincoln.”
The voice rose above the ringing in his ears. Bear. Lincoln turned, squinting through smoke that burned his eyes, and found his cousin pulling himself from a pile of rubble near a concrete support column. Bear’s face was amask of dust and blood, one arm hanging at an angle that suggested something was very wrong with it, but he was moving. Alive.
“Status,” Lincoln managed. His throat felt scraped raw.
“Been better.” Bear staggered upright, favoring his left leg. “Then again, been worse. You?”
“Functional.”
Bear almost laughed—a rough, pained sound. “That’s one word for it.”
Lincoln forced himself to stand. The corridor stretched in both directions, but one end was completely impassable—ceiling caved in, support beams jutting through the wreckage like broken bones. Fire licked along the edges of the collapse, feeding on decades of accumulated debris and old wooden framing. The heat pushed against them in waves.
Morgan.
The thought cut through everything else. She’d been ahead of him. Running for the exit corridor while he provided cover fire. He’d told her to go. He’d promised he’d be right behind her.
“Morgan was heading for the east exit.” Lincoln’s voice came out steadier than he felt. “We need to?—”
He took two steps toward the corridor she’d taken and stopped.
It wasn’t there anymore.
Where the exit corridor had been, there was only rubble. Fire. A wall of destruction that radiated heat so intense he could feel it searing his skin from fifteen feet away. The blast had taken out the entire section—collapsed it into a burning tomb.
No.
Lincoln moved toward it anyway, some irrational partof his brain insisting he could find a way through, could dig past the wreckage, could reach her?—
Bear’s hand closed on his uninjured shoulder. “Lincoln. Stop.”
“She was going that way. She was?—”
“I know.” Bear’s grip tightened. “But that path is gone. We find another way.”
Lincoln’s mind raced, pulling up the building schematics he’d studied before the operation. Floor plans. Exit routes. Structural supports. He could see the layout in his memory, could trace the corridors and doorways, could calculate which paths might still be passable?—
And then understanding hit him like a second explosion.
