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Because he knew that weapon. He knew it the way I know a blood pressure cuff. This was who he was at his core. A trained killer, through and through. He had been a patient I cared for, who had let me take his pulse, and stayed perfectly still as I stitched up his wounds. Now here he was in a blacked-out corridor with a rifle in his hands and a team of men doing everything he ordered them to do.

This was never a prisoner.

This was a predator lying in wait.

And I was his prey.

I knew that for certain when he said one last thing before they moved.

“We do not leave this building without her, remember that. Now go!” he commanded sternly and it was enough to get boots moving away from where I remained hidden. But I knew it wouldn’t last long and my best chance at escape was getting to that tunnel.

Despite this, I still stayed in that cart long after the sound of them had gone. Long enough that my hip went numb and my jaw ached from how hard I was holding it shut. Then when I finally got out of it, I did it in about four movements, none of them graceful, and stood there shaking in the dark with the smell of hospital laundry all over me.

Then I started forward, in the same direction the men had gone. It was the last place they would look for me, and it was the only way down to the lowest level of the hospital, where the tunnel was.

I got about forty feet before I heard a shout.

“Erin!”

And I kept going, as the name didn’t register at first. Six weeks of practice, and a name I have signed for I don’t know how many times, and somebody shouts it down a corridor in the dark and my feet don’t so much as change rhythm.

Because Erin Shaw is a laminated card and a set of documents made for me. She has never once been a person. And in that corridor, with my heart trying to pound its way out of my chest and my hands shaking, there was not one part of me that was her.

I was running as myself. The way I always have done. I was running as Anna. Not Erin, not Shaw, not Vale and not as any of the other last names I had claimed as being my own.

Which meant it took her grabbing my sleeve to get me to stop.

“Jesus, Erin, didn’t you hear me calling your name? I have been shouting at you since the stairs,” Roz said with just as much panic written all over her face as there was on mine. She looked out of breath, with her hair half out of its clip and her lanyard gone. But she looked so pleased to see me that it went through me like a knife. As I felt like everything that was happening now was all my fault.

“What the hell is happening?” she asked. “Karen says it’s a riot. Danny reckons it’s a raid. Somebody’s cut the power and there are men in the building who I thought at first were a SWAT team or something. But then I saw two of them put Mackie on the floor. Are you okay, where were you?”

“I… I…” I stammered as I couldn’t say one truthful word of where I was. Not one. Not the treatment room, not Briggs, not the phone, not the twenty minutes I sat on a couch while a man cleaned another man’s blood off my face.

Which meant I was left standing in front of my only friend in that entire state and every single thing that was happening in that building was happening because of me. Which was why I opened my mouth again and found nothing coming out.

“We have to get to the front,” she said, already pulling at me, no longer waiting for an answer.

“Everybody’s evacuating.” This finally got a reaction out of me.

“No,” I told her giving her cause to whip her head back at me over her shoulder.

“Erin, we need…”

“They are on the stairwells.” It came out of me in a rush and she finally stopped pulling. “The men in the tactical gear, they are searching for something. If we go that way, they will find us,” I told her and I could see her wanting to argue. To ask how I knew this but the second we heard footsteps, I grabbed her arm and told her,

“Please, you have to trust me. I know another way out,” I said. “On the bottom floor, there’s a door at the end of the lower corridor and it goes out under the gardens and comes up past the fence line. Roz, it comes up outside.” Her eyes widened in shock.

“Outside the wire?”

“Outside all of it, please Roz… we have to go and we have to go now!” I hissed urgently. She stared at me in the dark for about a second and a half.

“How on earth do you know that?”

“Now’s not the time,” I told her as we started running.

We took the back stairs down. Two flights, with one of those dim green lights over each landing and not much of anything in between them. Roz’s hand fisted in the back of my scrubs the whole way. And then we were on the lower level, and the cold hit us both. The type that comes up out of the bottom of a building as old as this one. I turned us toward the far end of it and we got about halfway down that corridor before a man came around the corner ahead of us.

Black, helmeted, the light on the front of his weapon coming up and hitting us head on. Roz made a sound behind me, and I did the only thing I could think of.