Remember your training.
Inhale. Good. Exhale. Relax. Aim.
Fire.
Blood and brain matter exploded against the blue wallpaper behind the desk.
Noam stood there, watching the blood drip down toward the wood floor. He felt nothing. That shadow-self had its hands on his shoulders, cold comfort.
He edged closer, crouching down just enough to get a good look at the entrance wound. It was small, a round void surrounded by black powder residue. There was hardly any blood on Brennan’s face.
Shouldn’t he be horrified? All Noam could think about was training.
He and Lehrer had talked about this.
Leave the bullet and shell wherever they are, because they’ll trace to this gun, which we’ll plant in Hornsby’s house. Wipe your hands on your pants to get rid of powder residue. Hide the gun, not in Brennan’s office, and someone from the Ministry of Defense will retrieve it later.
Noam’s face was still too close to Brennan’s. Blood trickled from Brennan’s nose, his ears.
Reality crashed back in like a summer storm.
Noam stumbled back and turned roughly away, gulping in several breaths of air.Don’t puke at the goddamn crime scene.
Get out of here. Right now.
Brennan’s gun got kicked under the desk somehow while Noam was dragging the body around. He tugged it out with telekinesis, wiped it with a microfiber cloth, then put it on the desk again. Just to be safe, he wiped down the spot he’d grabbed the desk earlier one more time.
Then the... the murder weapon.Unscrew the silencer. Clean the prints; drop it in a plastic bag. Tie the bag off; tuck it back into trousers.
Through it all, Brennan’s eyes watched him with glassy interest. Noam couldn’t stop thinking about that, or the tick of the clock on the wall. He kept glancing over his shoulder to be sure Brennan was really dead, half-certain each time that he’d find the corpse hovering there with its hollowed-out skull.
The last moments, standing there looking at that scene and trying to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything, were the longest in Noam’s life. There could be fibers. Hair. Noam had no way of being sure. Lehrer said he’d make sure any such evidence got buried in the investigation, but that assumed Lehrer had power after this to bury anything at all.
Couldn’t worry about it now.
Noam waited at Brennan’s door, listening to the movements in the hall outside. Cell phones. Tablets. Wristwatches. As soon as the hall was clear, he reached out and plunged his power into the security cameras again.
It was clumsy. The wires fried.Fuck.Someone was gonna notice that.
Noam darted into the hall, shutting Brennan’s door and heading toward the staircase as fast as he could without outright running. Fear was a constant fire at his back. He couldn’t think straight. He knew he’d forgotten something—he must have. His blood roared in his ears.
He made it three steps before a door at the end of the hall swung open.
Shit, shit—
Noam spun on his heel and started walking in the opposite direction. He ducked his head, eyes trained on the ground five feet in front of him and hoping the most anyone saw of him was the back of his neck.
“—talk to Barbara about getting those papers signed before the end of the day,” a female voice said behind him.
“She should still be in her office,” someone replied. They were at least a few yards behind Noam but between him and the way he came in.
Any second now, he thought. Any second someone would call out to him, and he’d have to choose between showing his face and running.
An exit sign glowed over a door at the end of the hall. Alarmed, though, emergency exit only. There wasn’t a biometric reader, not that Noam could sense, no way to tag Hornsby’s presence here a second time. No turning around either. This had to be good enough.
Noam cut the alarm signal as he shouldered the door open. The stairs were dimly lit and narrow, concrete walls bowing in on either side. When the door slammed shut, that first gasp of air gusted into his lungs so fast and cold his chest ached.
Of course, he wasn’t free yet. These stairs seemed to stretch on forever.
