“Sylvie?” Maddox asked.
“There’s a bomb strapped to her chest. I’m on it.”
Feet pounded on concrete, and Eli kept working, mumbling to himself. Numbers. Counting wires? I had no clue.
I wanted to ask him to take the blindfold off, but the thing on my chest beeped again. Another thirty seconds gone.
I wanted to see him one more time before I talked him into leaving. Eli wasn’t going down with me.
“How much time?” I asked. Fuzzy-headed from fear and the taser, I couldn’t keep track.
“Enough,” Eli said, pulling at one of the straps. There was a click and a satisfied rumble in his throat.
“Eli,” I urged, “you need to get out.”
“I’m not leaving you here,” he said. “Not a chance.”
“Eli, no, if you can’t get it?—”
“Hey, don’t you remember?” I heard the strain as he forced confidence into his voice. “I’m the best. I’m going to get it, and we’re going to walk out of here, okay?”
“But Eli, if you can’t—you have to go. Promise me you’ll go.”
“Stop distracting me. I’m not leaving you, so shut up and let me disarm this bomb.”
I shut up. I couldn’t stand the idea of Eli dying beside me. But maybe if I kept my mouth closed, he could get this thing disarmed, and nobody would have to die.
“Hold on, baby,” he said again. “Got one.” He tugged at something else. “Got another. Got—oh fuck.”
“What?” I spit out, my mouth dry.
“There’s a secondary device. If Mad hasn’t caught him, he’d better get his ass back here. I don’t have time to hit both.”
For the first time, I heard stark fear underpinning Eli’s words.
“How much time?” I asked, my voice harsh in my ears.
Eli didn’t answer. “Got one more,” he said instead, his hands working at a strap that crossed my ribs to the left.
“I couldn’t find him,” Maddox said over the sound of his feet pounding down the stairs. “Sylvie clear yet?”
“Working on it,” Eli said.
“You got no time left, man.” Maddox’s voice held a heavy warning. “Two forty-five. We have to thinkabout?—”
Eli cut him off. “There’s a secondary device up in the corner.”
I couldn’t see what they were talking about, but Maddox spotted it immediately.
“Fuck me,” he said. “I’ll see if I can get to it.”
I heard something being dragged, a clatter of wood and metal, then creaking as I imagined Maddox climbing up.
“One more,” Eli said under his breath. “Almost there, Syl. Then we’re going to run like hell, okay?”
I wasn’t sure I could stand, much less run. But I said, “Okay.”
“Eli, this is a fucking work of evil genius,” Maddox’s voice drifted down from across the room. “He’s got the wires buried in the wall and a timer that matches the one on Sylvie.”
