She slips once.
I catch her wrist instantly, steadying her without breaking stride.
“Sorry,” she breathes.
“Don’t be,” I murmur. “You’re doing great.”
We pass a junction where light flickers briefly from the left—flashlights sweeping past an opening.
Too close.
I yank her into a recessed maintenance alcove just as boots thunder by, voices barking commands in a language I don’t need to understand to recognize urgency.
We press flat against the wall, bodies barely breathing.
The guards pass.
I wait.
Three seconds.
Five.
Then we move again.
The tunnel curves sharply, then splits into parallel maintenance corridors—one wide, one barely shoulder-width.
I take the narrow one.
Always the one they don’t want.
The alarms change pitch—higher now, more insistent. That means someone escalated the alert.
Which means Malenkov knows.
The woman glances at me, fear flashing briefly in her eyes. “Are we heading out?”
“No,” I say honestly. “We’re headingthrough.”
Escape isn’t a straight line.
It’s a spiral.
We move fast now, breath coming harder, muscles burning. My ribs are killing me but I push through the pain. The tunnel opens briefly into a cavernous rail junction—old switching hub, rusted signal arms frozen in place like skeletal hands.
I scan fast.
Left: collapse.
Right: active conduit—too bright, too obvious.
Straight: darkness.
We go straight.
The darkness swallows us whole.
The sound of pursuit grows louder—boots, radios crackling, the distant whine of powered doors sealing off sections behind us.
