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Then my eyes caught on the edge of a rectangle on the ceiling, mostly hidden by the shadows and the top of the cabinet beneath it. My breath caught.
“Blaze, are there air vents that reach the utility room?”
On the other end of our connection, he sucked in a breath. “That isn’t shown on the blueprint I have either, but it’d make sense for them to add one. Every room with a door should have adequate ventilation. It’d be a tight fit for Julius, though.”
“I’ll make it work,” Julius said grimly. “I’ve squeezed through tight spaces before. It’s all a matter of angles. But we have to get up there without getting shot on the way.”
“Move the cabinet,” Garrison said quickly.
We heaved at it together and managed to shift it toward the door. Julius gave me a boost toward the ceiling, and I unscrewed the grate covering the vent in less than a minute. Talon let out a grunt where he was still pulling back the door with all his might.
“You and Garrison get up there,” Julius ordered. “I’ll knock the cabinet over, and it’ll block the doorway long enough for me and Talon to jump off it to follow you. Just keep moving.”
“I think once you’re in there, you just need to head left and you should find a connecting vent that’ll take you down to the first floor,” Blaze said helpfully in my ear. “One good thing about it being narrow is that you should be able to brace yourself against the sides and scramble down without falling. Just don’t get stuck.”
“No fucking kidding,” Talon muttered.
I grasped the edge of the vent and dragged myself up into it on the left-hand side. Immediately, I crawled forward on my hands and knees. I didn’t think Julius would be able to manage more than an army crawl in this tight space. Good thing he’d have gotten professional training at that.
There was a thump as Garrison clambered up after me. Then a clang resonated from below as Julius must have shoved the cabinet in front of the doorway. With a grunt, the other two men hauled themselves into the vent in quick succession.
Gunfire rang out below as I scuttled forward as fast as I could go. But the cabinet must have blocked the entrance long enough to shield Julius and Talon, because I heard three sets of breaths in the passage behind me, terse but not pained.
“Everyone okay?” I murmured, just to be sure.
“I’ve had more enjoyable nights,” Julius retorted. Talon simply snorted. I decided to take both of those responses as a yes.
“Stop joking around and get the hell out of there,” Blaze chided us. “I’ve just picked up on transmissions in the neighborhood—there’s going to be a whole army on the doorstep if you don’t get out in the next five minutes.”
My heart hiccupped. I pushed myself forward even faster and nearly toppled right into the downward vent before I realized I’d found it. In the total darkness, the only warning was a slight ripple of the metal lip around the opening.
There was no time for negotiating who’d go first. I wedged myself around the corner so I could drop my legs in and then slid the rest of the way, balancing myself between my back and my feet with my knees brushing my chest.
With little hitches of jumps, I careened several feet at a time, catching myself and then doing it all over again. The rasping and thudding above told me the men were following me using the same strategy, although the bigger guys wouldn’t be able to move as swiftly.
Blaze was already planning our next steps. “It bottoms out over the first-floor ceiling. You’ll want to go back in the same direction you reached the vertical vent from. About twenty feet along, you should find a grate that’s just a short dash from the main entrance.”
“Perfect,” I said around a gasp for breath.
With a few more jumps, my feet smacked into a metal surface below me. A metallic clunk rang out, making me wince. I couldn’t hear any voices filtering through the ceiling of the hall below me, but it was only a matter of time before the guards who’d swarmed us upstairs figured out our strategy and caught up with us.
Contorting my body, I squirmed around until I could crawl through the horizontal vent passage and hurried onward. Garrison, Talon, and Julius followed me with a soft grunt for each landing.
“I could hear the guards rushing down through the wall,” Julius reported. “They’ve got to be at least to the third floor by now.”
Crap. I shoved myself farther and spotted a glimmer of light just up ahead. There was the grate.
I caught hold of the metal rectangle and brought my tools to bear on the screws. My fingers flew, and in a matter of seconds, I was tossing it aside. I poked my head into the hall below to look around, and my heart all but stopped.
“We can’t get out,” I said, jumping down into the open, currently empty hall so I wasn’t blocking the men’s way. I stared at the door we’d come through—which was now completely sealed off by another one of those steel security doors. No handle, no clear controls. And we only had a minute or two before a mass of guards would be surrounding us from both sides.
Garrison dropped to the ground and came over to stand beside me. “There’s got to be a way to get it to retract.”
“Do you see any panels in the walls nearby that you could open up?” Blaze asked.
I stared at the walls around us. “There’s nothing.”
Talon and Julius leapt down and studied the door in turn. A distant thunder reached my ears—the thudding feet of the multitude of guards who’d be on us in mere seconds now.
