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I go. I get down behind the table at the far end and point my light at the door.

The first sound is a grinding, like rock dragged over rock. The second is the steel itself.

Then the door jerks outward. The frame groans, and dust falls from the concrete around it.

Another pull. The latch tears loose, and the whole door shifts toward the corridor.

I hear metal snap. One of the hinges gives, then the other, and the door comes free with a crash.

Light pours into the vault.

William stands in the opening.

His wings are folded tight against his back, the tips brushing the ceiling, because the corridor is too narrow for him to spread them. His hands are stone, all the way up past his wrists to the middle of his forearms, gray and grainy and huge, his claws hooked and cracked at the tips where they bit into the steel. There's concrete dust on his chest and in his hair.

If you were the person who did this, I think, you'd want to be very, very far away from him right now.

He sees me. He comes through the ruined doorway, ducking his head, and crouches in front of me behind the table. Up close, I watch the stone in his hands go slowly back to skin.

"Are you hurt," he says again. It isn't a question this time. He's looking at my hands, my face, the way I'm breathing.

"No." I stand up, and my legs are mostly fine. "Your building's security sucks, William."

The corner of his mouth moves. It isn't a smile.

"Yes," he says.

Then his eyes go past me to the wall, to the red box with its door hanging open, and he goes perfectly still.

He walks over to it. He looks at the empty clips, the cut zip tie on the bottom. He doesn't touch any of it. He looks at it for a long time.

"I photographed it," I say. "Before you got here. The screws, and the strap."

He turns his head and looks at me.

"Good," he says quietly. And then, so quietly I almost don't hear it, "Good."

He takes out his phone and photographs it all again, closer, under his own light. Then he makes two calls.

The first is to Pell. He tells her she has the back corridor. Nobody comes down. Nobody touches the vault door, the box, or anything in this corridor until every inch of it is photographed, and then she bags the release linkage and the strap herself and brings them up to him. "And pull every keycard that's touched a back-corridor door since Wednesday night," he says. "Every one. I want the list in an hour."

The second is to Lenart. "She's safe. She's with me. Pell has the scene. Get Merek to the security office. I'll bring her up shortly." He listens for a second. "I know. I'll tell you everything when I get there."

He hangs up and looks at me.

"You were supposed to be on the roof," he says.

"I know."

"I waited five minutes. Then I went to look for you. Grady said he'd seen you come down here." His jaw tightens. "The corridor lights were out. The board in the security office shows this door as closed and secured and the air handler as running." He looks at the dead vent in the ceiling. "It isn't."

"Somebody did this."

"Yes."

"Somebody did it to me again."

"Yes," William says. His voice doesn't change at all. That's what scares me most. "I know."