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We’d run out of options. In less than a minute, they’d be shooting us down. Even if we could manage to take on all the guards in here, despite the fact that we couldn’t rely on any nearby equipment to prevent them from shooting us, by the time we’d accomplished that, the army Blaze had warned us about would be gathered outside.
We were all going to die.
I didn’t say the words out loud. They felt like a betrayal of everything the Chaos Crew had done to get me here. The risks they’d taken for a mystery that only really mattered to me. I swallowed hard.
“I think there’s another exit,” Blaze said, but his excitement vanished an instant later. “Only it’s on the other side of where the secure staircase has to be. All those guards are between you and it now.”
The answer came to me like a signal flare in the dark. This was my quest. I should be the one to make the ultimate sacrifice. I could dash over and draw the guards’ attention, get them to chase after me, and buy the men enough time to escape.
They’d done so much for me. Given me so much. They shouldn’t have to give their lives too, especially not when it was my fault we were here at all.
Who I was didn’t matter if I was dead, especially not if the men around me died too.
I gathered myself, preparing to race toward the sound of the stomping feet with an explanation shouted over my shoulder, and my gaze inadvertently caught on Garrison’s.
I should have known better than to look at him, the man who made a living out of reading people’s deepest secrets.
The moment my eyes met his, he narrowed them, detecting something in my expression that I hadn’t thought to keep hidden. In the time it took for me to push all my thoughts down, I was afraid he’d already seen what I was planning.
Garrison took a discreet step closer to the door and shook his head lightly—too lightly for the others to notice. I countered by shaking mine.
“You can’t—” he started, and then his attention jerked to something over my head. I might have made a break for it then if a hopeful light hadn’t brightened his expression.
“Paper!” he said abruptly. “Who’s got a piece of fucking paper?” He snapped his fingers, fishing something out of a pouch on his belt at the same time.
I had no idea what he was talking about, but the other men responded automatically, trusting that their comrade had a good reason for his request. Talon’s hand jerked to his own belt, but Julius was already thrusting a piece of folded notepaper from his pocket toward the younger man. Garrison scraped a match against its book, brought the flame to the paper, and held the now-flaming sheet up… to a sensor next to a sprinkler system fixture I hadn’t noticed mounted on the ceiling.
The first floor must be all regular offices, no high-tech equipment the government workers would be too worried about getting wet. And they’d wanted to protect the ground floor from any sort of fire that might spread upward to all those precious hard drives.
A different sort of alarm careened through the air, and a burst of water sprayed down over us. In an instant, I was drenched.
In the same instant, the steel security door began to whir open.
A bellow reverberated through the hall behind us. We leapt toward the front door as one being.
“Thirty seconds until the first cars reach the building,” Blaze called through the headset.
It took ten for the door to open all the way. Julius and Talon fired a few shots down the hall, and then we dove out into the night.
Our feet pelted across the pavement. We hurtled down the sidewalk and around the block, dove into the waiting car, and didn’t properly breathe until Talon was gunning the engine to tear down the road away from there.
I sagged into the back seat, drenched and chilled but giddy with relief. “Oh my God.” I glanced at Garrison next to me. “How did you know that would work?”
He shrugged, a pleased gleam in his eyes. “I didn’t know. I just guessed. It wouldn’t make much sense to allow the employees to be locked up in there if the place caught fire. Like Julius said, there’s always a failsafe.”
“Thank fuck for that,” Julius rumbled, a sentiment we all echoed with a round of exhausted laughter.
