Page 29 of Peak’s Code

Behind her, gunfire erupted, and the dull cough of rifles echoed through the chamber, followed by Peak's voice. "Down!" he shouted. Maeve dropped instinctively as rounds punched into the concrete wall where she'd been standing a heartbeat earlier. Stones exploded around her and dust filled the air.

She crawled behind an overturned crate and forced herself to breathe. She needed to think because she knew for sure that panic got people killed. Her instructor's voice echoed from years ago. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

She looked around the tunnel at the old shelves, rusted pipes, electrical conduit running along the ceiling, and the generator lines. Her eyes narrowed. It wasn’t a generator, but a power feed. She followed the conduit with her gaze. It disappeared into the wall beside the steel door. If she couldn't open the lock, maybe she could open the wall.

Another body hit the floor. Peak had taken down a second operator. He moved with controlled aggression, using the enemy's own cover against them. He wasn't military—she was certain of that now. But someone had trained him well, very well. One operator flanked left, and Peak anticipated it before the man cleared the shelving. Two shots and the operator was down. Now, one remained.

Maeve ignored the fight. She spotted a red emergency disconnect box mounted beside the conduit. It was locked, and she huffed out her breath. Everything was locked. She picked up a fallen operator's combat knife and jammed it into the latch. One twist and the cheap lock snapped. The metal door swung open, and inside, she found a heavy industrial breaker with three switches.

One was labeled: PRIMARY LOCKING SYSTEM.

Her pulse quickened because whoever installed this place had built redundancy. She threw the breaker, and nothing happened. "Come on." She flipped it again, and still nothing. Then she noticed the handwritten label beneath it was RESET REQUIRED. Of course, because nothing was ever easy.

"Maeve!" Peak shouted. She looked over her shoulder. The last operator had disappeared. He wasn’t dead, just gone.

Peak was scanning the chamber with the captured rifle. "Where'd he go?" she asked.

"I don't know!" he admitted. She hated those words, but Peak seemed to hate them more.

The room fell unnaturally silent. There were no footsteps, no voices, and no movement.

Maeve's pulse hammered. "Peak.”

His eyes swept every corner. "I know."

"He isn't gone,” she said.

"No, he's hunting us," Peak said as he slowly backed toward her without taking his eyes off the darkness. "You almost got the door?"

"Almost,” she said. A metallic clang echoed somewhere above them, and they both looked up at the catwalk she hadn’t noticed before. It was hidden in the darkness near the ceiling. The last operator had climbed into the overhead maintenance walkway.

Peak cursed. "Stay behind cover,” he ordered, but it was too late. The operator opened fire from above, and concrete exploded around them. Maeve dove behind the electrical cabinet and Peak rolled behind a stack of crates. The operator had elevation and cover, and from the way that he was stalking them, he had patience. He wasn't spraying bullets over them. He was hitting them with one precise shot at a time.

Maeve looked at the breaker panel again and then up to the catwalk again. The power conduit ran directly beneath it, and an idea formed—a dangerous one. She shouted across the chamber. "Peak!"

"What?" he asked.

"Shoot the conduit!" He looked where she pointed and seemed to immediately understand.

"You sure?" he asked.

"No, but do it anyway!" she ordered. Peak switched to semi-automatic, fired one shot, and missed. After the second shot, the conduit sparked, and the third shot made the metal pipe rupture. Thousands of volts arced across the exposed wiring, racing along the damaged conduit toward the catwalk. The operator barely had time to react as electricity exploded across the steel grating beneath his boots. He cried out as the current threw him backward. His rifle clattered over the railing before he followed it, crashing fifteen feet onto the concrete below.

Peak remained behind cover for several seconds—watching and waiting. He finally stood and looked over at her. "You okay?"

Maeve nodded. "I think so." He walked over to the fallen operator and carefully kicked the rifle away before checking for a pulse.

“He’s alive, but pretty beat up,” Peak said. He removed the man's helmet, and Maeve stepped closer. The man was in his forties, had close-cropped gray hair, and had a military bearing even while unconscious. It wasn't his face that caught her attention. It was the tattoo behind his right ear. A black serpent coiled around a dagger.

Her breath caught. "Oh, God."

Peak looked up immediately. "What’s wrong?"

She pointed at the tattoo with a trembling finger. "I've seen that before."

"Where?" he asked.

She swallowed hard. "On the man who took Wren."