My radio was dead.
I’d tried it twice during my flight, keying the emergency frequency, hoping for any response. There was nothing but static. Either the Order was jamming our communications or my unit had been damaged.
Either way, I was alone.
The extraction point was a bridge over the Limmat, two kilometers northeast. Bisch would be waiting there with a car.
Two kilometers.
In normal conditions, I could cover that distance in fifteen minutes.
But these were anything but normal conditions.
I crept through the district, moving from shadow to shadow, listening for pursuit.
The shouts had faded, but that didn’t mean they’d given up.
It meant they were being smart.
They were spreading out, covering exits, and waiting for me to make a mistake.
I couldn’t afford mistakes.
At the edge of the district, I found the drainage ditch. It was little more than a concrete channel, half filled with ice and stagnant water that ran beneath a road and out toward the river.
It was tight and dark.
It was also the only path that didn’t cross open ground.
Behind me, another beam speared the darkness.
Voices drew closer.
I had maybe thirty seconds.
I lowered myself into the ditch.
The cold slammed into me; nearly frozen water drilled deep into my bones and tried to stop my heart. Water flooded into my boots, soaked through my trousers, and climbed toward my waist.
I gasped while trying to bite down on the sound.
The cold was beyond anything I’d ever experienced. It wasn’t the clean cold of mountain air or fresh snow, but something rotten that had been waiting in this concrete tomb for months. It wrapped around my legs like withered hands, squeezed the warmth from my core. It whispered that I should stop and rest, to let the darkness take me.
But I kept moving.
The channel was maybe a hundred meters long. In the absolute blackness, it felt infinite.
I waded forward with one hand on the slimy wall for balance while the other clutched the camera to my chest. The photographs, seventy-two exposures of the Order’s operation,hadto survive.
Even if I didn’t.
If I lost them now—if the water destroyed the film—then everything I’d done tonight meant nothing.
I held the camera higher and kept moving.
Something brushed against my leg.
I froze.
