“You okay down there?” whispers Piper. She’s paused, and my fingers almost collide with her ankle as I reach upward. I hesitate.
“Yes, why?”
“Your breathing is getting kind of loud,” she says.
I swallow. There are a thousand lies I could tell her. But she deserves better.
“I died trapped in a car,” I say quietly. “An SUV crashed into us—there was an issue with our autopilot, so the other car didn’t know we were there. Our car was pushed off a bridge. So I don’t like heights.”
“Oh,” she says. “I didn’t know.”
“I didn’t tell you.” I press my forehead to the metal of the elevator shaft. “Normally, I don’t tell anyone.”
There is a moment of pause. “What happened to the other person?”
I flinch. “What?”
“You said ‘we.’” Piper looks down in my direction, even if she can’t see me in the dark. “You weren’t alone in the car, were you?”
Damn, this kid really is too smart for her own good. “He—he didn’t make it.”
“Is that why you’re so determined to save everyone?”
I let out a shaky laugh. “Yeah, maybe. But it’s not why I came for you. You’re worth saving, regardless of my guilt issues. Never forget that. You and your brother—you don’t deserve what happened to you. We don’t choose our families. Except for when we do.” My sweaty fingers flex on the handhold. “Now, we keep moving. All right?”
“All right,” Piper says, but then a shudder goes through the elevator shaft.
At first, I think that the dumbwaiter has given out and fallen.
I feel it through my fingers and my shoes: a thrum of sound. And then I realize that it’s not the dumbwaiter. The sound isn’t even in the elevator shaft.
The fire alarm. It shrieks for perhaps ten seconds before it cuts off.
“What’s going on?” Piper whispers.
“No idea,” I reply.
And then Vale’s voice booms through the walls.
She must be using her ringware’s control over the mainframe to speak through every VA and speaker in the building. “Augusta Pine,” she says. “You have exactly ten minutes to bring me Persephone.”
“I’ll get right on that,” I mutter. She can’t hear me, of course. But my mouth has a mind of its own.
Vale continues, “If you don’t comply, I start killing people.”
I bite back a curse.
“I’ll suffocate one apartment for every minute that you fail to appear. I’ll be broadcasting the deaths live. Just so the world can know how badly you failed. Here, just a taste. Apartment 103—you will be first. I suggest you start begging.”
There’s a moment of quiet. And then over the speakers comes a man’s voice.
“Please, please,” he says frantically. He stumbles over his words in a panic. “Don’t—don’t do this. I have kids in here. Three of them. I don’t know who you are, but don’t do this—”
I try to block out the pleading. The raw, unvarnished terror is hard to hear.
“Augusta.” Piper sounds as horrified as I feel.
Damn it. Damn it. I should have realized. Vale has been pushed into a corner.
