“Looks like eight to me,” Caerleon said, leaning forward into the shaft and peering up.
“That’s one of the office floors,” Frollo observed. He still looked grim and Hallie wondered if he was also thinking that, if they’d managed to get into the lifts, Findo and Russet could be anywhere in the building by now.
“I don’t suppose you can get a fix on Findo, can you?” she asked Girard.
He was shaking his head almost before she’d finished the question. “Tried a couple of times. Both him and Welliver. I get nothing. There’s a lot of magic in this building which might be interfering.”
“Well, this part of the engineering section is empty,” Frollo said, the professional calm underlaid with something that sounded like the same tension Hallie was feeling. “We’ll finish the sweep here, then go to the next level.”
Following the others around the empty space of the lift shafts, the back of Hallie’s neck started to itch as if they were being watched. She looked around, seeing nothing but hard surfaces and shadows, but the feeling wouldn’t leave her. She’d worked through enough abandoned buildings over the years to know that feeling was not always reliable, so she sent a query to thezauber, which had been still and quiet since it and Hallie had completely drained their energy shielding themselves and Girard from bullets the day before. The artefact stirred, and she could feel its attention spreading out around them. After a moment of looking, she caught a sense of puzzlement.
“Hold up,” she called out.
“What is it?” Frollo asked, turning to face her. “Catch something?”
“I don’t know. Feels like we’re being watched,” Hallie said.
“Yeah, I caught that too,” Griff said. “Thought I was imagining it.”
“Everyone look sharp,” Frollo said. The tac team moved a little closer together, facing outward in all directions, even if a couple of them were facing a wall, and edged forward.
As they got to the end of the lift shafts, Hallie caught the faintest glimmer of a light that wasn’t orange, and called out again.
“Motion sensor,” Frollo said, voice grim. “A couple of them. They shouldn’t be here.”
“No reading of explosives here,” Tortain reported, before Frollo could ask. He was holding his gun in one hand, the sensor device in the other. “Not even a trace, which is odd.”
“Why?” Hallie asked.
“Well, engineering equipment can often give a false positive, depending on what chemicals are used,” Tortain answered.
“I do not like this one bit,” Modron said in a low voice. She sounded more annoyed than afraid. A murmur of agreement ran through her colleagues.
“One step at a time,” Frollo said. “Let’s check out these sensors and see if they are attached to anything.”
The sensors, faint red lights glimmering in the dark, turned out to be mounted on either side of a narrow metal door that, when Frollo opened it, led to a set of narrow metal stairs going up.
“Service stairs for the lifts,” Frollo said. He moved into the foot of the stairwell and looked up. “Can’t see a thing. Too dark, and the stairs turn back on themselves too tightly.”
“Let me try,” Hallie suggested, and moved through the group to the stairs. As she crossed the motion sensors, every hair on her body stood up and she hesitated. Nothing happened, so she kept going. “Whoever set the sensors knows we’re here,” she said, mostly to herself, as she stopped beside Frollo at the foot of the stairs.
“Nothing we can do about that now,” Frollo said.
To Hallie’s surprise, the air in the stairwell was fresh, rather than the humid, fetid air she’d been breathing in the machine section. “Someone’s been here recently,” she commented, and then asked thezauberif it could sense anything above them.
The artefact stretched its awareness out, spiralling high over their heads, and then let out a silent cry of warning that had Hallie clapping her hands over her ears in a useless attempt to shut out some of the sound.
“Back,” she called out, her own voice scraping through her skull. “Run.”
The team didn’t question her, just moved away from the stairwell as fast as they could, Hallie scrambling to keep up with them.
Frollo slammed the metal door shut behind them and brought up the rear as they ran past the lift shaft.
Not a moment too soon.
There was a scraping, rattling sound from the stairwell followed by a series of explosions, hard and loud in the confined space.
The metal door blew off its hinges at the first explosion, flying out and slamming into a concrete wall, followed by twisted, shattered fragments of metal that must have been the actual stairs. More explosions followed, the concussive effect throwing Hallie off her feet, face down onto the bare concrete floor, ending up in a pile of warm bodies, bruising across her body from the fall and the various bits of equipment and elbows that jammed into her as the tac team scrambled back to their feet, weapons up, on alert even as Hallie’s head was ringing from the noise.
