“Cute,” Bones mutters. “I love it when they go for horror movie staging.”
Snow’s breathing hitches again. “Maybe…maybe they all went inside,” he offers. “A meeting. A?—”
“Shut up,” Bones says without heat.
Hatchet steps in, gloved fingers nudging the coffee cup. The liquid inside wobbles. It’s cool. Not cold. Recently abandoned, then. My jaw tightens.
We move toward the main entrance. Someone left the door on the latch; it opens under my hand with a soft hush. Inside is worse. Too bright. Too clean. Too quiet. The reception desk stands empty, computer humming, a stack of files fanned out like someone stood up and never sat down again. Chairs in the waiting area. A wilting plant. A half-read magazine splayed open on the seat. No voices. No footsteps.
“She’s gone,” Bones says, again, more to himself than to us. “They moved her. They fucking moved her. We’re too late.”
He’s wrong. He has to be wrong.
My pulse is steady. It shouldn’t be. The last time we lost her, it felt like someone had ripped my ribs apart and scooped the insides out. This time there is only a cold, hollow place where panic should be. Outrage will come later. Rage will come later. Right now there is a job.
“Upstairs, corridors, basement,” I say. “We clear methodically. No splitting up alone. No heroics. If she’s here, we’ll find her.”
“And if she’s not?” Snow’s voice is very small.
I turn my head just enough to look at him. His eyes shine in the too-bright light, wide and haunted. He looks young again. Before blood. Before bone. Before all of this.
“If she’s not,” I say, “we take apart whatever we find until someone tells us where she went.”
That seems to steady him, a little. Hatchet’s shoulders ease down a fraction. Bones rolls his neck, a sharp crack, and mutters, “Now we’re talking.”
We move deeper into the building. The fluorescent lights buzz overhead. Every door we pass is shut. No voices bleedthrough. No machines hum. Even Ghost stops trying to fill the silence.
I am halfway down the first corridor when the smell hits me.
It comes in thin at first, just a faint iron edge cutting under the antiseptic. Old blood smells stale, heavy, cloying; this is fresher, sharp and metallic and wrong. It slams into me so hard I stop walking. Bones almost ploughs into my back.
“Night?” he says, hand going to my shoulder. “What?”
Snow’s head jerks up. “What is it? Is it her? Can you?—”
I inhale again, slow and deep, cutting past bleach and air-conditioning and the flat, dead sweetness of whatever they clean this place with. The blood is there, clearly now. Lots of it. Too much for a nosebleed, not enough for a bomb. It’s smeared into the air like someone painted with it. My vision narrows for one long, dizzy second.
For a heartbeat I can’t tell if it’s hers.
If they hurt her in here, if they opened her up, if they laid her out on one of these beds and picked her apart the way they always wanted to, if we are too late and all that’s left of her is stains on the floor and some neat little report in a folder?—
“Nightshade?” Ghost’s voice comes from somewhere far away. “Talk to us.”
I blink, bring the corridor back into focus. There are streaks on the linoleum further down, faint rusty skids that catch the light differently. Bones sees them at the same time.
“Blood,” he says. “There. On the floor.”
My hands clench. “Move,” I say, and this time I don’t pretend to be calm. “Split up. Now.”
We head toward the stains, following the scent down the corridor and around the corner, deeper into the quiet, into whatever waits, my mind running ahead of me in the worst possible directions, every step heavier with the thought thatwe’re too late, that she’s gone, that all we’re going to find at the end of this trail is the proof that we failed her.
As we break apart, I don’t let myself slow down. If there’s a body here, I need to see it. If they killed her, I need to know.
If they didn’t?—
I don’t let myself think about that part yet.
VERY CLEARLY NOT DEAD
