I start to protest. Frost cuts me off.
"Go. Now."
He turns back toward the breach.
Wyatt grabs my wrist.
"Stay with me. Don't stop moving."
We run.
The strobe makes the corridor a nightmare of red and black. Plaster blows off the wall six inches from my shoulder as we hit the east corridor at a full sprint, Wyatt's body angled to cover mine, the safe house tearing itself apart around us.
The storm cellar door is steel, set into the floor. Wyatt wrenches it open. We go down.
The tunnel is raw concrete, barely four feet wide, lit by a single strip of emergency LED that flickers with every impact shuddering through the walls above us.
We run the length of it.
The exit hatch at the far end opens into the timber.
We come up into the dark and the wind takes us.
Wind like a physical wall — solid, immovable, rocking me backward on my feet. The air smells wrong. Charged. Electric.Ozone and something ancient and enormously indifferent to the small human bodies stumbling through it.
The sky above the timber line isbruised— deep purple-green, alive with continuous, branching lightning that illuminates the clouds from inside, like something burning behind a curtain.
Wyatt steps in front of me, blocking the worst of the gust. The trees thrash overhead. A branch the diameter of my forearm shears off somewhere to the left and disappears into the dark.
My ears pop.
The pressure drops so fast my stomach lurches.
"Wyatt—"
"I know." He's already scanning the tree line. He grabs my hand and presses it to his belt at the small of his back. "Hold on. Stay low. Don't let go."
Behind us, gunfire. Frost and his team holding the line.
Ahead, in the valley below the timber, a roar begins to build. Low, then louder, then world-ending — a freight train eating the sky, barreling toward everything in its path.
A tornado touches down in the valley below us.
And we're in the trees.
NINE
The Washout
WYATT
The world turns to noise.
It isn't just sound. It is a violent, physical, vibrating wall of atmospheric pressure that completely strips the breath from my lungs the moment I drag Addy out of the storm cellar tunnel and into the freezing air.
The wind hits us like a derailing freight train, carrying the sharp, metallic stench of electrified ozone and pulverized earth.
Heavy automatic gunfire chatters aggressively behind us, sounding faint and entirely ridiculous against the apocalyptic roar rapidly building in the valley below. Frost and his team will hold the breach. They're bleeding to buy us time.
