Chapter 28 #2
I pulled the guard's body away from the door and went through his pockets. A keycard was clipped to his vest. I swiped it. The light went green.
The door opened. The smell hit first: gun oil and cold steel and the chemical tang of ammunition stored in bulk. I stepped in and my grip on the rifle loosened.
Weapons filled every wall. Racks of rifles and shotguns and pistols, ammunition in stacked crates, tactical gear on hooks, blades in a glass case by the far wall.
And there, racked between two assault rifles on the center display, sat my katana.
I recognized the grip tape I'd wrapped myself, the scratch on the scabbard from Gdansk. Zeus had kept it like a trophy.
I crossed the room and pulled it from the rack.
The weight dropped into my hand. My spine straightened.
My shoulders settled into the stance they'd held for twenty years, and the tension that had been running through my arms since they stripped me faded.
I drew the blade, and my shoulder screamed where the sutures had torn, but the steel caught the fluorescent light and threw it back clean.
The edge was perfect. Nobody had touched it.
Diego moved through the room, pulling weapons. He grabbed a sawed-off shotgun from the rack, broke it open to check the loads, and winced when the motion jarred his ribs. He snapped it shut, shoved a pistol into his waistband, and stuffed shells into his pockets.
"Better?" he said.
"Better."
Boots pounded toward us from the corridor. A lot of them, coming fast.
Diego racked the shotgun, and we took positions on either side of the door.
A flashbang came through the doorway. I kicked it back into the corridor before the fuse burned down and the blast hit on the other side of the wall.
Smoke canisters followed, two of them rolling across the floor and filling the room with a white chemical haze that burned my eyes and throat. Diego pulled his shirt over his nose. I held my breath and listened.
They came through the smoke in a two-man stack, rifles up, textbook entry. Diego's shotgun turned the front man inside out, and the second one stumbled over his body. I stepped through the haze and put the katana through his vest at the seam where the panels met.
The third came in high and fast along the right wall, adjusting faster than most Pantheon graduates managed.
He got his rifle around and I slapped the barrel sideways with my palm.
The muzzle flash scorched the hair on my wrist. I drove the blade up under his chin.
His teeth clicked shut on the steel. I kicked him off and he fell backward into the man behind him.
More came. The fourth one tried to flank left, and Diego put the sawed-off in his face at a range that left nothing to discuss.
The fifth slipped on the blood pooling across the concrete, went to one knee, and I opened him from shoulder to sternum before he could recover.
His body armor split along the cut like a zipper.
He looked down at himself. I'd already moved past him.
Every man Zeus sent through that door stood between me and Mila. I stopped reading faces after the fifth.
Diego's shotgun ran dry. He grabbed a pistol off the nearest body without looking, checked the chamber by feel, and started putting rounds through the doorway. A man screamed in the corridor. Diego shifted targets. He fired again. The screaming stopped.
"How many more of these assholes does Zeus have?" Diego said.
"Enough to be annoying."
Smoke still hung in the armory, thinning near the floor where the bodies let it pool. I stepped over two of them and into the corridor. The fluorescent light was worse out here, a flat buzz that turned the blood on the concrete black.
A guard came around the corner with a knife. I let him close, redirected the blade with the flat of the katana when he lunged for my ribs, and stepped past him. The katana opened his back on the follow-through. He hit the wall and slid down it.
The stairwell smelled like cordite and wet concrete.
A man with a shotgun had positioned himself at the landing, and the first blast chewed chunks off the wall beside my head.
Concrete dust coated my tongue. Diego leaned around the corner and put two rounds into him while the man racked his next shell.
He folded over the railing and hung there, boots swinging above the stairs.
A concrete shard caught my arm above the elbow as I passed the landing.
I wrapped the hem of my shirt around the katana grip where the blood made it slick and kept climbing.
Diego ran out of pistol ammunition and scooped up a fallen rifle without slowing down. His jaw was set and his knuckles were white on the stock. Three doors had turned into three floors. Every one cost us blood. I'd pay it again. I'd pay anything. She was up there.
We hit the residential floor, and I ran for Mila's room. The door stood open. Someone had made the bed, purple comforter smooth, stuffed animals in their positions on the pillows. The puzzle boxes sat on the desk. The drawings still clung to the walls.
But Mila wasn't there.
Diego moved past me. He yanked the closet door open and scanned it, then dropped to his knees and looked under the bed. He pulled open the desk drawers. He worked through the room fast and thorough, hands moving while I stood locked in the doorframe with my fingers dug into the wood.
"She's not here," he said. "But her shoes are in the closet and her coat's on the hook. She didn't leave in a hurry."
Then music reached us from somewhere below, a waltz scored for strings and piano.
I knew it before my brain caught up. Shostakovich's second waltz.
I knew it the way a dog knew the leash. Zeus had played it on loop in the training hall when I was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen.
Every drill had that melody underneath it, every punishment, every lesson about what a blade could do to a human body.
I straightened and brought the katana to center without deciding to, settling into the posture I'd learned to those same strings, drilled so deep that a decade away couldn't touch it.
My pulse locked to the tempo. Three-four time.
The pain in my shoulder and side went quiet the way it always went quiet when the waltz played, because Zeus had trained me to file pain under noise and noise under music and music under obedience.
Ten years of running and all he had to do was press play.
He knew I'd come. He knew what the music would do. He'd been sitting down there waiting for it to work.
I followed Diego to the window and went still.
A table stood in the center of the courtyard under the open sky. Zeus sat in one of the chairs with his legs crossed and his hands folded in his lap. He'd changed out of the cardigan and into a dark suit, and a sword lay across the table in front of him the way another man might lay down a napkin.
Mila sat beside him with a cup of tea in both hands. Her feet didn't reach the ground.
Diego and I looked at each other. His jaw was tight, and he gripped the rifle stock until his torn knuckles went white, and I could read every thought behind his eyes because I had the same ones. It was a trap. It didn't matter. She was right there.
I drew the katana. The blade caught the light from the window and held it as I headed for the stairs.