Page 52 of Make Them Pay

Twelve steps per flight. Landing four feet wide. Handrail on the left going up. I guide Poe with one hand and keep the weapon ready with the other. Behind us the others follow the sound of my boots, a chain of people moving through pure dark on trust alone.

First flight. Landing. The firefight is louder now. I catch Diaz’s voice, calm and sharp, directing her people.

“Coming up,” I call over the radio. “Friendlies in the stairwell. Hold fire.”

“Copy,” Diaz answers. “Three hostiles on the upper landing. They’re disoriented. Window’s open.”

I take the second flight faster than Poe can really handle and just take more of his weight. Arrow stays right behind us. Gage and Ozzy are slower but still moving.

Upper landing. The remaining guards are stumbling around in the dark, their advantage gone. Diaz’s team presses them from above. Caught between operators and the people coming up the stairs, the guards do the only smart thing left.

They pull back.

“Path is clear,” Diaz says. “Move now. Generators in twenty seconds.”

We push through the upper level in a tight group. Arrow takes Poe’s other side and the two of them move together in that awkward, stubborn rhythm that only comes from twenty years of carrying each other’s weight.

Outside the cold night air hits like a gift. The exit opens onto the cleared ground between the buildings and the fence. Knight is already there, silhouette dark against the distant lights of the industrial district.

“All hostages out,” I report. “Moving to the fence line.”

Knight falls in with us. He’s got Orchid, and I feel something shift in Poe’s weight. Like he sees Orchid and now he can relax more. Knight’s hand finds Lark’s in the dark and they lock fingers for exactly one second before operational habit takes over and they separate to cover different angles. One second. That’s the entire reunion after two weeks.

“Enley,” I say as we push through the gap in the fence. “We’re out. All six. The team is clear.”

Her voice comes back, and this time it’s not the operator version. It’s the real one. It’s the one that carries everything she’s been holding since the container.

“Copy. I see you.”

The vehicles are staged a hundred yards out—two armored SUVs with engines already running. We load the injured first: Poe, Ozzy, Arrow who’s moving but clearly hurting. Then the rest. Lark. Gage. Orchid peels off to make a call on a phone she produces from somewhere.

I close the door on Poe’s SUV. Through the tinted glass I can still see his face in the interior light. It looks bad. Swollen, cut, bloody, and underneath it is the same stubborn face of the kid who called me after Arby died and said, “I need you. Come now.”

I came then. I came now.

BRAVO sweeps the monitoring station on the way out. They find Ross sitting at the main terminal with the camera feeds still running. His sidearm is on the desk, not in his hand. He watched the whole thing and never triggered a single extra alarm. When the operators come through the door he stands up, puts his hands behind his head, and says, almost calmly, “Orchid’s in the general holding area, sub-level one.” He gives them her location before anyone asks.

He doesn’t fight. He just waits.

I leave him to BRAVO and walk the two hundred yards through the dark toward the utility shed.

She’s there. Standing beside it with the tablet under one arm and the antenna collapsed against her side. She’s been crying—I can see the tracks on her cheeks in the weak amber glow of the emergency lights that have finally kicked on.

I stop three feet away. “He’s alive,” I say.

“I know. I heard.”

“It worked. The plan worked.”

“He’s really okay?” she asks, voice thin and threadbare.

“He’s banged up. Thin as hell. But he’s alive and talking shit already. Same old Poe.”

She lets out a breath that sounds like she’s been holding it for eight days. The tablet is still under her arm. Her eyes are shiny, but the look in them isn’t guilt anymore. It’s pure relief mixed with something warmer.

I step in closer. “You kept the whole thing together from out here. Every time something went sideways you fixed it. That’s why we’re all standing here right now.”

She shakes her head a little, but she’s not arguing. She’s just looking at me like she’s still making sure I’m real. “I kept thinking about the storage unit,” she says. “About the promise. About you saying you’d come back.”