Though the door is old and made of beach-weathered wood, a brand-new keypad entry system sits on its frame.
They had insisted on it. He told them no one would come down here, and if they did they wouldn’t even know what the building was. To put this kind of a lock on it singled it out as an outbuilding worth breaking into. They hadn’t listened, of course.
But it doesn’t matter. Joon-gi is the only person on-site with clearance to enter it.
He raises his palm to the panel and it blips.
Joon-gi frowns.
He tries again. The same blip. His clearance has been denied.
He pulls back from the door, and it is then that he notices the noise again. The hum is rhythmic and much louder now, almost like the sound of a chain saw or a propeller. Or a propeller motor.
Joon-gi’s eyes fly through the trees to the beach. Through the gaps in the branches the sea is just visible, and there beating through the waves along the coast he sees it. A speedboat, on the prow the unmistakable sight of black uniforms.
Joon-gi turns back to the door. He sizes up the beach-weathered wood and makes a choice. It doesn’t matter now if an alarm sounds, they’re coming, and even if he isn’t going to make it out of here alive this time, he is damn well going to save someone. And no one is going to take that away from him.
He hurls his weight against the chipped paint three times before it begins to give, then four sharp kicks to the splintered wood get him in.
He throws his bag in ahead of him, and right on cue the deafening alarm system begins to sound, first in the outbuilding, then as if in relay high above him in the distance back at the house.
Lucinda will know that he’s in, and that it won’t be long now.
He hopes the woman in the basement is still alive, that she is managing to avoid whatever strange torments they have sent her way.
Inside the outbuilding Joon-gi flips on his flashlight and inspects the generator, its hum now drowning out the sound of the boat approaching the beach outside. He looks at his hard work—the best work he has ever done —and wonders how he possibly could’ve not known all along that something bad was happening here. But in a sense, he did, didn’t he? He just hasn’t given his instincts the space they need to convert to action, he hasn’t listened to that little feeling inside him and asked himself what it’s saying. But perhaps his biggest crime is that he assumed the world was one way and it is not.
He looks at the power lever that connects the generator and stored energy to the house and without a second thought he heaves it back. The system lets out a cascading hum as it powers down. The rooms will shortly go dark in the basement, all power cut, in the same slow relay that the alarm took to kick in up there.
But turning the power off is not enough. Now that the generator’s hum is silenced, he hears them on the beach, perhaps four of them. He isn’t as young as he used to be, he doubts he could overpower even one of them. But he can run. He knows he should run, but then he looks back at the generator. If he runs, if he leaves the generator like this, they will come straight in here and flip the power lever back on and undo everything. The woman will die, he will die, Lucinda will die.
At speed Joon-gi bends to empty his equipment bag, tools rattling and clanging out onto the floor around him. He runs his hands quickly over them until he finds what he’s looking for: the largest and heaviest of his tools, an adjustable wrench. He rises and hefts it in his hands then takes his first swing at the now silent generator.
By the time the first guard reaches him, drawn to the sounds, Joon-gi has done all he needs to do, the generator now unusable. And when the first bullet hits his upper thigh Joon-gi is surprised that it does not hurt as much as he had always imagined things like that might.
He looks down as the dark-red blood bubbles from him and looks back out at the young man now taking cover behind a tree. Joon-gi thinks it strange that he should hide, as if he believes Joon-gi might have a weapon of his own. Joon-gi looks at the wrench in his hand, almost surprised to see a weapon in his possession. He does have one after all. It’s not ideal but it’s something.
And with that thought he runs full pelt at the man with the gun.
The second bullet he does feel. He drops the wrench and the forest floor rises to meet him.
CHAPTER 44
NINA
T he room flickers into darkness. Nina blinks in the black that suddenly envelops her. She isn’t in the center of the room anymore. She tried her hardest. She stayed in the ash until the pain, like white-hot blindness, overcame her and she scrambled back onto the raised platform and rested.
The temperature readout has continued, unseen by her.
She stayed out there until it hit fifty-six. Her knees, hands, shins, and feet are mottled red and white, the pain excruciating.
She did her best but she could stay there no longer. She knows the key is in the center of the room but she hasn’t covered enough of it yet. Her only hope is that the room will reach a certain temperature and then reset to forty once more. Though how long that might take and if she will stay conscious for that long, she does not know.
And now the room is in darkness.
Perhaps this is the end of the game, she muses, her breathing coming in slow deep pulls. Perhaps she will just be left in darkness. Across the space there comes a low hydraulic sound and then on her burnt legs the cool whisper of a breeze.
Nina looks up.
