The first round takes a man in the shoulder.
He spins and goes down.
The second shatters a drone lens.
Then the floor erupts into panic.
People stampede.
The attackers drag Kimberly sideways into a service corridor mouth hidden behind a digital ad panel that slides closed behind them like a guillotine.
“Kimberly!” I roar.
Gone.
The bond snaps taut inside my rib cage, a hot, tearing sensation that feels like someone just ripped out a piece of my nervous system with pliers.
I sprint for the corridor.
Security slams into me.
I plow through them.
Someone clips me with a stun round that skitters across my back like ice.
I don’t slow down.
The ad panel is locked.
I tear it off the wall.
The service corridor behind it yawns narrow and dark, lit by flickering maintenance strips and crisscrossed with exposed conduit and coolant piping that drips slow, luminous drops onto the floor.
Her scent is still here.
Her heat.
The echo of her panic vibrating through the bond like a live wire.
I bolt into the corridor.
My boots slap against damp ferrocrete.
The air is cooler down here, heavy with the metallic tang of rust and the faint chemical sweetness of coolant leaks and the stale breath of old infrastructure that hasn’t seen daylight in decades.
They’re fast.
Professional.
I can hear them ahead of me, their footfalls muffled by distance and walls, their breathing hard but controlled.
“Stay with me,” I whisper into the empty tunnel like she can hear me. “Stay with me.”
The corridor forks.
Left drops downward.
Right climbs.
