“Good,” I said. “Let’s head east.”
“East is storage, fuel, and piping.”
“Even better.”
She shot me a quick look, half confusion, half dawning realization.
“You really do want to burn it all down, don’t you?”
“I want to leave nothing for Revenant to salvage,” I answered.
She grinned. “I like the way you think.”
A big set of double doors led into a huge warehouse type space. We slipped in and shoved the door closed behind us. The room reeked of gasoline, oil, and rust. There were rows of industrial shelving packed with barrels, tubing, spare parts, machinery, tools, and boxed equipment. A maintenance workstation sat in the center, wires spilling from the drawers like veins.
Katya scanned the room. “There’s enough accelerant here to cook the whole structure.”
“Help me find a way to light it.”
We rifled through drawers until she pulled out a handheld torch, the kind used for welding small parts. She held it up with a wicked little smile. “This will do it.”
I rolled a barrel to the doorway.
“Stand back,” I warned, cracking the seal on the large drum of fuel.
The air filled with the sharp tang of fumes. Tipping it, I let the liquid pool into the hallway, creating a stream that ran down the corridor and around the corner. Katya grabbed another, rolled itover to me, and did the same, watching it flow through the space like a river of impending disaster.
She kept her voice low. “They’ll be able to smell it.”
“Perfect.”
We emptied two more barrels before Katya pointed toward the ventilation shafts overhead. “If we can direct it upward, the fire will climb through the ducts.”
“You want the roof to go too?”
“If we’re going to burn this place,” she said, “we’re going to burn it properly.”
I smirked. “I really like you, princess.”
“I know.” She had the audacity to grin at me. “Once we’re done here, we return to the warehouse, light it, and escape out the rear exit from the bays there. Fast.”
We each rolled a barrel up the next hallway, mine leaving a trail of fuel, hers still sealed. We stopped only when we reached a dead end with a grate in the floor that dropped into an open shaft leading toward the lower levels. Katya cracked open her barrel, crouched down, and poured a stream of fuel over the edge.
“That should give us a nice backdraft,” she said.
“And light the lower floor on fire.”
“Exactly. Fire burns upwards.”
“Perfect.”
Pounding footsteps drew closer, as well as the sound of guards shouting. They were spreading out.
We didn’t have long.
We sprinted back to the warehouse, weaving between shelves and barrels. Katya held the torch in her hand, thumb resting on the ignition trigger.
“Light it,” I said, hearing heavy boots clatter against concrete.
