The corridor opened into a junction. Left: toward the kitchen. Right: toward the underground access.
Ahead: a fire door marked PARKING.
A masked figure appeared at the far end of the right-hand corridor, moving fast.
Both Tav and Alistair locked onto it simultaneously.
The figure saw them.
And opened fire.
They split left and right by the same instinct, Tav behind the junction wall and Alistair through the kitchen entrance, bullets sparking off the corridor wall between them. Tav counted the shots — three, semi-automatic, controlled spacing — and came around the corner as the figure retreated, firing twice.
One hit. Non-fatal by the gait of the retreat.
Alistair reappeared from the kitchen entrance and they were moving together again before Tav had consciously decided to move, their pace matching without communication.
"Not Ablation," Alistair said, low and certain.
"No." Tav agreed. The operative's movement was wrong — too aggressive, too visible. Ablation trained for precision and invisibility. This was suppression fire, designed to clear a path rather than eliminate a specific target.
"External actor," Tav said.
"Using Voss as a trigger event."
Which meant the shooting wasn't about Voss at all. Voss was a means — a way to create chaos that served a different purpose.
"They wanted us here," Tav said.
Alistair found his face sharply. "What?"
"The schedule change. The timing." Tav kept moving, his voice quiet and even. "Voss's schedule was altered tonight. We were both brought here. And now there's a third party with weapons."
"You think we were set up."
"I think we were positioned."
They rounded another corner and found the service corridor's end: a fire door, heavy and industrial, standing two inches open. Beyond it, the sound of retreating footsteps on concrete stairs.
Underground access.
The masked operative was running.
Tav pushed through the fire door and registered, in the same moment, the shot that passed through the space where his head had been half a second earlier. He moved without thinking, grabbing Alistair by the jacket and pulling him sideways and down as a second shot chipped the concrete doorframe exactly where Alistair had been standing.
They hit the floor hard behind the first concrete pillar of the carpark structure.
Silence, brief, then the distant sound of a vehicle.
The shooter was escaping.
Alistair was breathing hard against Tav's shoulder, their positions close in the narrow cover of the pillar, and then he turned his head and watched Tav with an expression that was stripped of everything except the immediate.
"You moved before the shot," he said.
"I heard the angle."
"I didn't."
