Diego crossed to the body and lifted the keycard from the coat pocket. He checked the hall in both directions, pulled back, and looked at me.
"You magnificent psychopath," he whispered. "I love you. Please never do that again."
"We're leaving," I said.
"Yeah." He pocketed the keycard. "I figured that out when you strangled the doctor."
I started for the door and Diego caught my arm.
"Wait." He kept his voice low. "We go out there unarmed and we're dead before we reach her room. You know that."
I knew it. I hated knowing it.
"The drawings on her wall," he said. "Her tactical diagrams. One of them had the compound layout. Armory's one floor down, east corridor." He tapped his temple. "I memorized it while you were solving puzzle boxes."
Of course he had. I'd been sitting on Mila's bed learning how to play, and Diego had been memorizing the compound layout she'd drawn in crayon on her wall.
"One floor down," I said. "How many are between us and the stairs?"
"The two in the hallway. After that, I don't know."
"Then we deal with the two in the hallway first."
I pressed myself against the wall on the hinge side, and Diego took the other side. I held up three fingers, then two, then one.
Diego knocked on the inside of the door twice. "Need a hand in here!"
The door cracked open and a rifle barrel came through first.
I grabbed the barrel and yanked. The guard came with it, stumbling forward off balance, and I drove my elbow into the back of his skull. He hit the floor face-first. Diego was already through the door. The second guard started to raise his rifle, and Diego closed the distance before he could shoulder it, got both hands on the weapon, and wrenched it sideways. The guard held on. Diego headbutted him, forehead to nose, and the crack echoed down the hall. The guard staggered back a step, one arm braced against his ribs, and his grip loosened. Diego ripped the rifle free and drove the stock into his temple.
I took the first guard's rifle and sidearm. The rifle wasn't a katana, but it was steel and purpose, and that was better than socks and nothing.
Diego checked the magazine on his with swollen fingers and racked the slide. "East corridor. Stairs at the end."
The hallway stretched ahead of us under carpet that swallowed our footsteps. For the first time all night, not having boots worked in our favor. The compound looked like a renovated government building, long corridors with institutional lighting, and expensive art hung on the walls to cover up the Soviet bones underneath.
The stairwell door was locked. Diego swiped the keycard, and the light went green.
One floor down, the architecture changed. The carpet gave way to concrete. The residential veneer dropped away, and the building showed what it actually was: a military installation under fresh paint. The east corridor ran ahead under fluorescent light that buzzed at a frequency designed to make everything look slightly dead.
Two guards in body armor stood in front of the armory door with sidearms and a locked steel door at their backs. We had two rifles, no shoes, and one keycard between us.
Diego and I stopped at the corner. He held up two fingers, pointed left, then tapped his own chest. I nodded.
The left guard yawned. I put a round through his partner's throat above the vest before his jaw closed. Diego's rifle barked beside me, and the left guard spun and dropped. The sound bounced off concrete and carried. Everyone in the building knew we were here now.
We sprinted. Diego hit the door first and swiped the keycard. Red light. He swiped again. It stayed red.
"Different clearance." He slammed his palm against the reader.
I pulled the guard's body away from the door and went through his pockets. A keycard was clipped to his vest. I swiped it. The light went green.
The door opened. The smell hit first: gun oil and cold steel and the chemical tang of ammunition stored in bulk. I stepped in and my grip on the rifle loosened.
Weapons filled every wall. Racks of rifles and shotguns and pistols, ammunition in stacked crates, tactical gear on hooks, blades in a glass case by the far wall. And there, racked between two assault rifles on the center display, sat my katana. I recognized the grip tape I'd wrapped myself, the scratch on the scabbard from Gdansk. Zeus had kept it like a trophy.
I crossed the room and pulled it from the rack. The weight dropped into my hand. My spine straightened. My shoulders settled into the stance they'd held for twenty years, and the tension that had been running through my arms since they stripped me faded. I drew the blade, and my shoulder screamed where the sutures had torn, but the steel caught the fluorescent light and threw it back clean. The edge was perfect. Nobody had touched it.
