“We came prepared,” Andrei said as he passed Kara several charges that he had attached to his belt. He and I had tried to think of everything before we’d come.
“Show me where to put these,” Kara dictated.
I led her down the aisle. She placed each explosive at the power base of each set of hard storage units. Dmitri shadowed her protectively. Roman handled the back row like a kid in a candy store. Lev stood guard.
Within seconds, all the charges were set.
Kara rushed back to us, breath a bit ragged, fingers trembling with adrenaline. “We’ll probably have about fifteen seconds once we trigger them.”
“Then we go,” Dmitri said.
I hit the final command on the console, shutting down whatever remained of the servers, freezing the last processes in place. The lights flickered one last time.
“Now,” I said. “Run!”
We burst into the hallway just as Revenant guards rounded the far corner, shouting orders that turned into gunfire.
Lev returned fire immediately, dropping two. Roman surged forward, reckless as always, tackling another guard into a wall with so much force that the plaster cracked.
Viktor grabbed my wrist and yanked me behind a structural pillar as bullets tore through the space where I’d just stood.
Andrei moved like a dark blur, slamming one guard into a window, shattering it with his head and disarming him in a single fluid twist.
Dmitri stepped calmly between us all, firing quick, clean shots that turned the firefight into a metronome.
Kara ducked low and threw her knife directly into the throat of a guard whose gun was aimed toward Dmitri. An arc of bullets tore through the ceiling as he went down gurgling and choking.
When all the guards in this desperate batch were on the floor, I hit the remote trigger.
The building shook.
The explosion inside the server room wasn’t loud, it was deep. A rippling, roaring collapse that sounded like the entire floor exhaled and then caved inward, metal snapping, plastic vaporizing, heat crawling through the air like a living thing.
The walls reverberated.
The lights dimmed.
“Move!” Dmitri barked. “They’ll flood this level with guards any second!”
We fell into a sprint, boots pounding against tile, breath sawing through our lungs, the air thick with smoke. Roman took the front, smashing the butt of his gun into the face of a Revenant soldier who tried to block our path. Lev grabbed another by the collar, pulling him off balance and sending him tumbling to the floor.
Kara darted between us, nimble and focused. Andrei kept pace easily, his hand brushing my back occasionally to steer me clear of falling debris.
Viktor stayed at my side, too close, too intense, like he was making sure I didn’t vanish again.
“Left!” I shouted over the alarm’s wail, pointing toward the emergency corridor I remembered from the old schematic. “Service wing!”
We turned sharply. The floor here dipped downward, walls narrowing, temperature rising. Pipes ran exposed along the ceiling, humming from the strain of overheating coolant systems. And somewhere far behind us, a voice over the intercom shouted an unintelligible tangle of words before the line cut out mid-syllable.
Ahead, the hallway split.
Right side led toward a locked-down section of the building. I watched as a heavy set of doors descended like jaws, blocking it off.
Left side veered into a dark, low passage, unmarked. No lights. No signage. Just an ugly industrial corner no one ever thought to beautify.
I grabbed Andrei’s arm. “Back there. That’s the maintenance wing.”
He looked. “How do you know?”
