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TWENTY-SEVEN
Decima
“Shit, shit,”I muttered to myself over the alarm’s siren wail. Around me, the men’s hands flew to their weapons.
Blaze could obviously hear the alarm on his end without us needing to tell him that something had gone wrong. He mumbled a curse of his own. “Get the drive, and get out. Now.”
I yanked out the flash drive and shoved it into my secure pocket. We whirled toward the doors—just in time to see another metal door slowly sliding out over them to seal us in. It’d already covered a quarter of the second door’s surface, including the handle.
“There’s a secondary door, steel, closing over the first,” Julius said into his mic. “There’s got to be a failsafe to shut it off somewhere.”
Blaze swore again. “I don’t know what it’d be without more information than you have time to give. There’ll be at least a dozen guards coming at you. Can you get past it by force?”
I threw myself at the glass pane on the door, but it only jarred in its frame. The thunder of racing footsteps carried through it. Talon motioned me aside and hurtled past me, taking a few shots at the glass to crack the thick layer before slamming his elbow into it with the full impact of his body weight behind it.
The pane shattered. Talon burst through, and the rest of us charged after him, Julius dragging Garrison the last few inches before the automatic security door pinned him to the frame.
We didn’t have any time to appreciate that narrow escape. Squads of guards burst into view at both ends of the hallway.
We ducked low instinctively. My fingers closed around my gun. We didn’t want to kill anyone just doing their job, but if it was us or them, we wouldn’t have much choice. We’d agreed that we’d shoot to injure rather than kill if that would be enough, but it was going to be hard with this many opponents.
“Stay close to the data storage equipment!” Blaze shouted through my headset. “They won’t want to risk damaging the machines.”
We all flung ourselves upright and pressed tight against the towering machines with their blinking lights. The guards slowed as they approached, their guns drawn but silent. Blaze had been right.
“Hands up!” one in the lead barked at us. “Drop your weapons. You’re surrounded and outnumbered.”
That might be true, but I’d be willing to bet that these men hadn’t been in quite as many tricky situations as I had. I’d never let the hopelessness of a fight stop me from giving it my all before, and I wasn’t going to start rolling over now.
As my pulse thudded behind my ears, my vision narrowed down to the most important details of the figures around me—how they were spaced around each other, which hands each had on their guns, what sort of protective gear they wore that could deflect a bullet. Then I sprang into action.
Keeping my back against the computer equipment, I fired into the squad of guards closest to me, hitting a wrist, a hand, a bicep, a thigh. Weapons clattered from fingers that could no longer hold them; arms sagged, and legs staggered. Julius started shooting at the bunch in the opposite direction, and Talon squeezed his trigger too, adding to the injuries on both sides.
A couple of the guards farther back that we hadn’t been able to hit immediately took a few shots at us, but they were so careful about the machines and their colleagues across from them that we managed to dodge. Then they barreled straight toward us, barging past their wounded comrades—but that gave us time to deal out a few more shots precise enough to crumple them to the ground without outright killing them.
“Come on!” Garrison yelled, motioning for us to leap over the slightly smaller squad and get out of there.
I thought a silent mental apology at the men I’d had to shoot—and who I now kicked and stomped on to fend off their snatching hands and waved batons as they tried to stop us even in their blood-soaked state. Someone was hollering into a radio that Julius shot out of his hand to a yelp of pain, but we had to assume that more backup was on the way.
We dashed down the hall the way we’d come—only to discover that another steel security door had already snapped into place over the entrance to the stairwell. There was no escaping that way. But the alarm’s wail had faded away, maybe so the security officers could track us easier, and more footsteps were pounding toward us. The guards must have had another route through the building.
“Blaze,” I hissed. “The main stairwell is sealed. How do we get out of here?”
“I’m trying to find—the blueprints must have been altered after the version I have—shit.” He was typing frantically enough that the clatter of the keyboard sounded over the headset.
“Get out of sight,” Julius ordered the rest of us, jerking his hand toward the utility room we’d used to disable the floor alarm.
We dashed into the room and tugged the door shut. Only seconds later, guards stomped by outside. I had a brief moment of hoping that they’d forget about this room, but the government didn’t hire any slouches for their top-secret facility. Someone grasped the handle and turned. There was no way to lock it from the inside.
Talon grabbed the inside handle and hauled backward, holding the door shut with his considerable strength. Unfortunately, the men on the other side had clearly figured out that someone was in here. There were more shouts, and a couple of shots rattled the handle. They were less concerned about sending bullets in here. There must have been backup elsewhere in the building for the vital electrical systems. Maybe we’d have been safer staying in the hall.
And now we were trapped in a box of a room, hardly bigger than a coat closet, with a horde of furious armed men on the other side.
As my gaze darted around the dark room searching for some kind of answer, an uncomfortable knot formed in my stomach. We’d ended up here because I’d wanted so badly to know who I really was—to figure out what family I’d been stolen from and why. But had it really mattered so much that it’d been worth putting not just myself but the men who’d supported me in this much danger?
I could have decided I was simply Decima and walked away. Focused on taking down anyone who tried to capture me again until they gave up. Instead, I’d gone chasing danger with the only men I’d really cared about—the only people who’d ever really cared about me—by my side, and now we could all be screwed. I was good, but even I knew that maximum security prisons weren’t a piece of cake to break out of.
Julius had braced himself with his gun ready. I supposed we had a small advantage from the fact that we had a wall at our back and only a narrow doorway that our enemies could come at us through. Our enemies who were now managing to jostle Talon in his rigid position despite the strained bulging of his arm muscles.
