Page 24 of Enslak

For now.

The tunnels all looked the same—dark, wet, reeking.

Something that might've been moss covered the walls in thick patches, glistening.

Water dripped constantly and the sound echoed until it seemed like a thousand tiny waterfalls surrounded us.

And there were other sounds: scratching, skittering, things moving in the darkness.

Something splashed, closer this time.

I twisted in Enslak's arms, trying to see.

The darkness swallowed everything.

My implants showed shapes, vague and indistinct.

Might've been debris.

Might've been something else.

"It's nothing," I whispered to myself. "Just water. Just echoes. Just—"

A shape moved in the water ahead, big and easily six feet long. It surfaced briefly, something pale and segmented, before disappearing back into the filth.

I bit back a scream, my hand clutching Enslak's shoulder.

My heart hammered. Each breath came in short, sharp gasps I couldn't control.

Breathe. Focus. You're a cop. You've been in worse.

Except I hadn't. Not really.

The worst I'd faced in New York was armed suspects and the occasional knife fight. I'd never been carried through alien sewers by a tortured prisoner while things moved in the darkness beneath us.

Enslak's arms tightened around me, not painfully, but firmly. Reassuringly. His chest rose and fell with steady breaths. His heartbeat was a slow, strong rhythm I could feel against my side, and I focused on it the way I used to focus on my grandmother's voice during thunderstorms when I was small.

He wasn't afraid.

He'd been through worse. Had definitely been through worse. A century of torture, experimentation, pit fights against creatures that made the thing in the water look like a house pet. This was nothing to him.

The thought steadied me more than any pep talk could have.

If he could survive what he'd endured, I could handle some sewers.

I forced myself to breathe slowly, in through my nose and out through my mouth, counting the way they'd taught me at the academy. One, two, three, four. The panic receded, leaving behind cold, focused calm.

"Okay," I said softly. "I'm okay."

Enslak made that low sound again, somewhere between acknowledgment and reassurance. His head tilted slightly, listening to something I couldn't hear.

We kept moving.

The tunnels twisted and branched off in directions not on the map. Some passages were partially collapsed. Others flooded with water that rose to Enslak's knees, thick and viscous and smelling of things I refused to think about. Time became elastic, stretching and compressing in ways that had nothing to do with the datapad's readout.

Forty-three minutes elapsed.

It felt like days.