A door bursts open ten feet ahead of us.
More guards pour through. Not six this time, not eight. At least fifteen, maybe twenty, flooding into the corridor from some kind of ready room or barracks. And behind them, I can see the glint of something else—heavier weapons, maybe, or armor.
“Bloody hell,” I breathe.
“In here.” Nate grabs my arm, pulls me toward a door on the left. He doesn’t bother with the handle—just rips it off its hinges and shoves me through.
It’s a lab. Clean white surfaces, equipment I don’t recognize, that antiseptic smell that seems to permeate this whole facility. No windows. One door. The one we just came through.
Fuck.
We’re trapped.
“You didn’t know it didn’t go anywhere?” I say, starting to panic.
“I don’t have fucking x-ray vision.” He’s already moving, shoving heavy equipment in front of the doorway—a desk, a metal cabinet, something that might be a centrifuge. It won’t hold them long, but it’s something. “Get behind me.”
“Like hell.” I find a scalpel on one of the trays, then another. Not much, but better than nothing. “We do this together or not at all.”
He looks at me for a long moment. The red emergency lights make his face look carved from stone.
“Then we do it together,” he agrees.
The first guard hits the barricade.
It holds for about three seconds. Then Nate’s improvised barrier explodes inward, bodies pouring through the gap, and the room becomes a killing floor.
There’s no space to maneuver, no room to breathe. It’s all close quarters, brutal and ugly—elbows and knees and whatever you can grab. A guard gets his arm around my throat and I slam my head back into his nose, feel cartilage crunch, drive a scalpel into his forearm until he lets go. Another one swings at me with the butt of his rifle and I duck, let the momentum carry him past me, open his hamstring with my knife.
Nate is a hurricane beside me. He catches a guard by the face andsqueezes, and I try not to look at what happens next. He picks up another one and uses him as a weapon, literally swinging the screaming man into his colleagues. When someone gets a taser against his neck, Nate just shakes and absorbs it, taking the pain and turning into power, grabbing the arm holding it and twisting until I hear the snap of breaking bones.
But they keep coming.
For every one we put down, two more push through the door. The room is filling with bodies—some dead, some justincapacitated—and still they keep coming. I’m flagging now, the adrenaline no longer enough to mask the damage to my body. A guard lands a hit to my injured ribs and I nearly black out, only staying upright because Nate’s hand closes around my arm.
“Mia—”
“I’m fine.” I’m not fine. I’m very much not fine. “Keep fighting.”
A guard with a shock baton gets past Nate’s guard, driving the crackling weapon toward his chest. Nate catches his wrist, stops the baton an inch from contact, and I watch the guard’s face as he realizes just how outmatched he is.
“You first,” Nate says, and turns the baton back on its owner.
The guard convulses, drops.
More are coming through the door. I can see them stacking up in the corridor, waiting their turn, and I realize with cold clarity that we can’t keep this up forever. We’re winning every engagement but losing the war of attrition. Sooner or later, my body will give out. And then Nate will have to choose between protecting me and fighting them.
I won’t let that happen.
“Nate.” I grab his arm between attackers, make him look at me. “The ceiling. Can you?—”
He looks up. I see him calculating—eight floors of concrete and steel between us and the surface.
“I’ve never tried anything that big,” he admits.
“First time for everything,” I say.
A guard rushes him. Nate puts the man through a wall without looking, his eyes still fixed on the ceiling.
