Gunpowder (Gunpowder #1)

18. GET OUT

18

GET OUT

Blair stood with his elbows propped on the bar, staring down at the innocuous but daunting Complete Order button on his screen. He scrolled back up to look at what he was buying and his stomach flip-flopped with nerves.

“Looks nice,” Spencer commented, looking over his shoulder.

Blair jumped, remembering that he was supposed to be helping, and made himself busy emptying one of the ashtrays off the bar. “It’s, uh, not for me.”

“I didn’t think it was.”

“Oh.”

Spencer chuckled but had enough mercy not to say anything else about it. Paper began shooting out of the printer under the bar, rows of numbers and percentages that were all jibberish to Blair, but were just another foreign language Spencer was fluent in: money. Blair took them out as they printed so the tray wouldn’t overflow into the floor. All of it looked the same until it spat out one last page that had Blair squinting curiously.

“What’s this? Doesn’t look like the blueprint for the bar,” he said, sitting down his stack of papers to better inspect the grainy image.

Spencer looked over. “Ah, Wren came through. He said he could get it.”

Blair waved the piece of paper at him. “Yeah but what is it?”

“The blueprints for the warehouse. Wren said with it being in the city limits of College Point that there should be blueprints on file with the Queens County building inspector. I can’t imagine how he got his hands on them but these will be a lot of help.”

“Y’know, he kind of scares me sometimes,” Blair said, looking at the blueprints.

“Good thing he’s on our side.”

Blair didn’t bother correcting him that Wren was on his side, not Incindious’, even though Blair felt they were one and the same. He didn’t want to give them any reason to question Wren’s loyalty when everyone was already so far on edge. They had just started making plans the night before and he wasn’t going to shake the fragile trust they had established.

The next few days went by too fast. He cooked Wren dinner at his apartment, he went to Wren’s place a couple times with coffee. One night Wren fell asleep with his head on the coffee table. The other nights, though, all ended the same way—on a couch or a bed where Wren could make Blair forget everything else, at least for awhile. The changes over those days were gradual. The closer it got to Wednesday, the more desperate their touches became, the longer he stayed with Wren before he went back to his own apartment.

Tuesday night, Wren laid to one side of the bed. He didn’t say anything, but Blair accepted the silent invitation, climbing in next to him. Blair switched the lamp off and heard Wren shifting next to him. He turned towards the sound, reaching out, and found Wren’s hand laying on the bed, fingers loosely curled around nothing. Blair took it, tangling his fingers with Wren’s.

“Blair,” Wren said softly.

“Yeah?”

“Incindious. You’ve explained it before, but it still doesn’t make any sense. I know you didn’t fit in with your family anymore, but… a gang? You told me once that you hung out with nerds in highschool. Turning to crime and risking your life seems like a pretty big leap to make over some family drama.” Wren traced the lines in Blair’s palm, voice dropping even lower. “Couldn’t you have picked a less dangerous way to get out of the house?”

Blair huffed a quiet laugh. He usually got defensive when it came to Incindious, especially if his belonging there was being questioned, because he wondered that too often already. But Wren’s words were absent of their usual sarcasm, replaced by petulance steeped in concern that Wren would never admit to. “It wasn’t just about getting out of the house. Before mom remarried, they depended on me. Her, and my little brother and sister. My whole life revolved around taking care of them. Protecting them. Then one day… they just didn’t need me anymore.”

“You were lost.”

“I was lost,” Blair agreed, resting his forehead against their joined hands. “I never realized how much I depended on them, too, to give me a purpose. Then I met Felix, Spencer and Julian. Ran into them on the streets and thought they were gonna beat my ass. One thing led to another, and Felix offered me a place with them. It was hard, the first few times I had to threaten someone or beat them up, but the rest of the gang was always there to pick me back up. They gave me something to dedicate myself to again, and letting go of my morals was a small price to pay—which I guess means my morals weren’t all that great in the first place.”

Wren sighed. “Did you ever consider just living for yourself? You having a purpose isn’t directly equated to what you’re providing for other people.”

Blair opened his mouth to respond but found himself without an answer. His silence must have been answer enough, as Wren ended the conversation by pulling Blair toward him. Blair tucked his face against Wren’s neck and threw an arm over his waist. He was used to waking up with Wren in his arms or vice versa, but he’d always assumed they just gravitated to each other throughout the night. Wren usually only initiated affection like this after sex. Aftercare, he called it.

On the edge of sleep, Blair thought of what Wren had said to him. Even if Blair left Incindious—not that he planned to—he couldn’t do what Wren suggested and live only for himself . Incindious wasn’t the only thing Blair lived to protect anymore.

They didn’t sleep through the night. Blair didn’t know what time it was when he woke up, but there was no light showing around the curtains. He blinked into the darkness and tried to figure out why he was awake.

“Get out,” Wren muttered, his back tense against Blair’s chest.

Blair drowsily raised his head to look down at him, realizing Wren had turned on his other side at some point. “What’s wrong?”

Wren jerked suddenly, and though Blair couldn’t make out much of his face in the shadows, he started to wonder if Wren was talking to him after all. He stayed propped on his elbow, waiting, and Wren kept repeating himself, his voice getting louder but also less coherent.

“Wren?” he said. Wren’s repetitions fell off into hoarse whispers, and Blair moved the arm he had around Wren’s waist to shake his shoulder. “Hey, wake up.”

Wren started thrashing against him. Blair caught his arm before it could swing back and connect with anything and pinned it along with the other one against Wren’s chest, both arms wrapped around him to keep them in place before one of them got hurt. Wren shoved back against him with considerable strength but he was still no match for the thickly corded muscle in Blair’s arms.

“Wren, hey, you’re fine,” he said as close to Wren’s ear as he dared, with the risk of Wren throwing his head back and breaking Blair’s nose.

Wren made a wordless sound of protest and started trying to twist away again. It would have been easier to let him go but Blair wasn’t sure he was coherent enough not to smother him with a pillow the second he was free, or worse, fall off the bed and hurt himself.

“Wren!” he shouted.

He heard a sharp intake of breath and Wren went still.

“Blair,” he said, voice cracking with sleep.

Blair relaxed his grip and felt Wren’s arms fall limply to the bed. He ran his fingers through Wren’s hair, pulling loose the damp strands that clung to his nape. “It’s okay, it was just a dream.”

“He was here.”

Blair had heard that tone of voice before, one that seemed to be reserved for a single subject. “Your dad?”

“I’m sorry I woke you,” Wren said. He didn’t acknowledge the question. He didn’t have to for Blair to know.

“It’s okay,” Blair said, rubbing Wren’s shoulder until the tension there started to loosen.

Wren sighed. “Now you know why I don’t bother trying to sleep.”

“This happens a lot?”

“The night the bar reopened was the first time I’ve been that drunk. And that was the first time in… years, probably, that I don’t remember the dreams waking me up.” He turned onto his back and Blair could feel his eyes on him. “So, yeah. A lot.”

Blair reached for the shadowed contours of Wren’s face, found his cheek cold and tacky with cooling sweat. He could feel the faceless image of Wren’s father warping in his mind, from the normal shitty dad he had pictured from the way Wren talked about him, to something worse. Blair held his tongue for a few minutes until he finally had to ask.

“Wren, what did he do to you?”

Wren’s jaw tightened under his hand.

“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” Blair added. Maybe it was selfish to let his curiosity get the best of him while Wren was still shaken from a nightmare, but dammit he couldn’t help if he didn’t know.

The silence extended until he was sure that Wren wasn’t going to answer him, but then Wren’s voice split the empty darkness. “He’s always been paranoid. Enough that he moved us across the country. All he’d ever say was that they were coming. Crazy fucker wouldn’t even tell me who they were.”

“Did anyone ever… well, come?” Blair asked.

Wren snorted. “Of course not. But that didn’t stop him from drilling it into my head every day that they would, and I needed to be ready. No distractions. No attachments.”

“No emotions,” Blair finished, nausea turning the words acrid in his mouth.

“God no, anything but those,” Wren said with a joyless laugh.

“What was he so obsessed with teaching you how to do, anyway?”

The silence returned and it was even louder than before. If Blair’s arm wasn’t around him, he wouldn’t have felt the tiny increment by which Wren stiffened. Pieces were falling together in Blair’s mind. There were still some missing, and some pretty fucking big ones at that, but Wren’s belief that he didn’t have emotions was starting to make sense. He really seemed to believe that his father had trained them out of him. Blair’s nausea churned into a simmering anger.

Then Wren whispered his answer to Blair’s question. “Survive.”

Until that moment, Wren had recounted his upbringing in little more than a monotone, but there was a different kind of emptiness in that single word. It sounded as though it had been wrenched from the pit of desolation his father had opened inside him and then choked out with his last breath. It raised more questions than it answered, but Blair didn’t ask any of them.

He kept his arms around Wren and his fingers moving through Wren’s hair until the breaths against Blair’s neck evened with sleep, and only then did he let his attention shift to the new confusion pressing at the front of his mind.

Who was Wren’s father, and what must his teachings have consisted of for Wren to still have nightmares about him?

Another question nagged at the edge of Blair’s consciousness, no matter how many times he tried to ignore it with the insistence that it didn’t matter, but the closer he came to falling asleep the louder it resonated.

Who was Wren ?

Wren slept soundly the rest of the night, or seemed to. He was laying in the same place when Blair woke up. Blair sighed, disturbing a few long, black hairs just under his nose. It would have felt like the beginning of a good day. Wren had opened up to him and he counted that as a good sign for them. I wonder if it’s because he wanted to or because he feels the same way about today that I do, and thought it might be his last chance to share his burdens with someone. He wanted Wren to trust in the promise he made to keep him safe, but Blair could hardly blame him for being nervous when he himself couldn’t stop imagining countless ways their mission could go wrong. He traced his fingers down the ridges of Wren’s spine. Tiny bumps rose in their wake, but Wren didn’t stir.

He carefully unwrapped Wren from himself and went to the bathroom. Once his bladder was relieved, he went into the kitchen. There was as little food in the fridge as last time, and opening the freezer didn’t reassure him since he didn’t consider a couple of microwavable dinners to be food. He let the double doors fall shut with a grunt. It was a goddamn miracle Wren hadn’t shriveled up and been blown away by the wind. Honestly, what did his body function on, if not nutrients? Spite?

The cafe he brought Wren coffee from would probably have breakfast. Plus, he felt like waking Wren up with food and coffee was a safer option than waking him up with just food.

Blair grabbed enough of his clothes from where they lay scattered around the couch that he wouldn’t be arrested for going out in public, and left the apartment. Manhattan loomed high on either side as he jogged across to the cafe.

No one paid him any mind as he stood in line, which was weird and nice all at the same time. People tended to give him a wide berth when his insignia was visible, or a fist bump as they passed by. He was a whole bridge and a river away from Flushing. Here, he was just a guy with a tattoo. No one knew his shirt fit loose to conceal the pistol at the small of his back, or that he leaned his weight on one leg because he’d been shot in the other one. He was nobody and he kind of liked it.

Soon, he was on his way back out the door of the cafe with a rolled up paper bag and the largest coffee they would sell him. He felt a surge of guilt for his thoughts—a feeling that got more familiar every day. He couldn’t be more proud to wear Incindious’ mark on his chest. Maybe it was the pending war or the healing wound in his leg, then, that made those inked flames feel like they were starting to burn into him.

Blair pushed those thoughts aside as he opened the door to Wren’s apartment, refusing to let them distract from the time they had left together before they moved on the warehouse later that night. A tuft of black hair stuck up from the back of the couch, so Wren was already awake. Blair pushed the door shut with his foot and went over to join him. Wren reached out to grab a pen from the coffee table and Blair’s eyes widened at the flash of a familiar red sleeve. Wren didn’t even look up, too busy circling a line in his notes, wearing only his underwear and Blair’s hoodie. Like the sight of him in it wasn’t making Blair feel like he’d swallowed a colony of butterflies.

Blair remembered to sit down, though he felt like he was going to be carried away by the fluttering in his stomach. Last night may have thrown him into a world of confusion about Wren, but Blair’s feelings were still there, as persistent and dangerous as ever.

“I got you coffee,” Blair said dumbly, as if it wasn’t obvious.

Wren looked down at it and blinked. His face remained stoic, but Blair could see the smile twinkling in the sapphire depths of his eyes as he slowly took the cup from Blair’s hand. “Thank you.”

They got to the bar at dusk. He had questioned bringing the Audi since they needed to approach the warehouse quietly, but Wren made a point that his bike wasn’t much quieter. He got out of the car and looked up at the bricks that made up Incindious’ unassuming fortress. It had taken a beating from the shootout with Phantom, but if everything went according to plan, then his home away from home would finally be safe again. He held the door for Wren and followed him inside, feeling like he was leaving a more peaceful world out there on the sidewalk, even if he knew it was a false sense of security when Phantom was just waiting to tear them down.

“Reymond?” Wren said, stopping so abruptly that Blair ran into his back.

Blair peered around him and echoed, “Doc?”

Reymond Garrett sat next to Felix on the couch like he belonged there as much as anyone else, one ankle crossed over his knee and a serene smile on his face. “Should someone get injured tonight, I’ll be here to help but my greatest hope is that my skills won’t be needed.”

“Blair, I need to borrow you for a minute,” Spencer said, and nodded to the narrow stairs tucked at the end of the bar.

“Are you good to stay here with Doc?” Blair put his hand on Wren’s back.

Wren clicked his tongue. “I would be fine anyway.”

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll probably just be a minute.”

He followed Spencer upstairs to his apartment. It was maybe the third or fourth time he had been up there since joining Incindious but it was always a treat. Spencer’s apartment had a calming effect on Blair, like it had taken on the same energy as its occupant.

Blair leaned against a panel of old, striped wallpaper. He doubted Spencer would ever replace anything in the apartment his dad left him until there was no other choice, and maybe not even then.

“So what’s up?” he asked once Spencer closed the door.

“There’s something I need to give you.”

He didn’t offer any further explanation, just went over to the double row of bookcases stocked with everything from creased paperbacks to pristine leather bound volumes, and pulled a black case off the top. It looked like hard plastic. Blair’s eyes widened as the emblem came into view. Memories rose up in the back of his mind, of a similar case being put in his hands when his age still ended with teen. When Spencer gave him his 92.

“Blair, do you remember our first trip to the shooting range?” Spencer asked, putting the case on the kitchen counter.

He never uses my first name. Blair went to stand on the other side. “Yeah. Kinda hard to forget.” He’d barely been more than a rookie member when he walked into the range that day, and by the time he left, Spencer was planning to make him their first line of defense. And offense, when needed.

Spencer took his glasses off, looking gaunt without the tinted shades to hide the shadows under his eyes. “I’d never seen anyone like you.”

“I don’t think you called me up here just to make me blush.”

Spencer laughed, but it rang hollow. He pushed the case across the counter.

Blair opened the two clips and raised the top. Inside was what he expected but much more beautiful and a lot more terrifying. He picked up the Beretta, all black save for a red slide. He turned it and watched the lights play on the crimson finish. It was an M9A3 but it felt just as natural in his hand as the 92. He ran his thumb along the edge of the grip, leather like his other one.

“This gun had to run you over a grand even before you had it customized,” Blair said.

Spencer didn’t take his bait to lighten the mood. “I know it’s hard on your body but if the time comes—”

“I’ll use them. Don’t worry.” He dropped his other hand to his leg. “Hesitating is what got me a hole through my leg in the first place. I won’t do it again.”

Spencer lowered his head in a short motion like he wanted to nod but decided against it. He looked down for a long moment before saying, with resignation, “Let’s go get the bastards.”

Blair flipped the gun and put it next to his 92 in his waistband with both grips facing out. He wiped what he knew had to be a solemn look off his face on the way back downstairs. Felix was at the center of the room when they returned with Julian to his right and Marie on his left. His keys already dangled from his fingers.

Blair held out his arm, and Wren muttered what was likely a halfhearted attempt at goodbye to Reymond before shouldering his laptop case and crossing the room. He hooked his fingers into Blair’s belt loops. “Let’s go.”

They parked on the side of the road and walked the last quarter mile to the shopping center. Marie had come with Felix in his car, and Spencer brought Julian in the Lexus. Better to have too many potential getaway cars than not enough. Wren opened his laptop on one arm and took a thumb drive out of his jeans pocket. His face glowed above the screen, his fingers on the keyboard unnervingly loud on the empty sidewalk. He looked up at the building, typed something in, and nodded to Julian. “The security system is disabled.”

“This place is abandoned, why would there be an armed security system?” Blair asked softly, as though Phantom could somehow hear them from the warehouse further up the hill.

“Whoever owns it now probably maintains one to protect it against squatters and vandals,” Spencer said.

Julian crouched down and took two picks out of his lockpicking set. The quiet was making Blair anxious, the silence so absolute that he could hear the tinny scrape of metal on metal as Julian moved the tumblers inside the lock.

A louder snick sounded as the lock disengaged and Julian smiled. “There it is.”

Blair entered first with one of his guns drawn. Felix followed him and went left as Blair went right.

“Empty,” Blair called, his voice echoing in the barren room even as he tried to keep it low.

The rest followed except Marie, who stuck her head in from outside. “I’m going to go get my things from the car and find the entrance to the roof,” she said.

“Yell if there’s trouble,” Felix said.

She nodded and vanished from the doorway. Blair looked around, wondering what used to be there. No signs were left on the windows to give him an idea. Probably a loan company or some kind of office setting, going by the counter in the front and the empty space that lay behind it with plenty of outlets in the walls. Wren went to the other side of the counter and slid down to sit behind it. Blair followed and knelt next to him, putting his weight on his good leg. The last thing he needed was the bad one giving him hell later.

The lines of code on the screen didn’t mean a damn thing to him but they were rapidly disappearing as Wren’s fingers flew over the keyboard. In seconds, only one string of numbers remained. “That’s their signal,” Wren said, and with a tap of the enter key, the screen blacked out.

A new but equally confusing screen opened and he handed Blair three small earbuds. “I’ll give Marie and Julian theirs, you take care of the rest. I’ve already isolated the signal so I don’t jam it along with the security system.” He looked up at Blair. “Time for you to go.”

“Yeah.”

Blair pulled him forward and kissed him hard. His breath hitched as Wren’s thumb stroked over his cheekbone.

“Blair,” Wren said against his lips. “Be careful.”

“I will. I’ll talk to you as soon as we hook up to these things,” Blair said, and kissed him one more time.

Wren was slow to let his hand fall from Blair’s face as they parted. He could say whatever he wanted about not having feelings, but Blair saw the concern in his eyes, illuminated by the light reflecting from the laptop screen. Blair forced his feet to move, to go and join Felix and Spencer by the door. It was everything he could do not to go back behind the counter and drag Wren far, far away from it all, protect him from Phantom and the echo of his father in his nightmares.

“Now or never,” Spencer said.

Julian unlocked the back door. “I’ll make sure Marie has her earpiece before you guys are inside. Go ahead.”

“Careful on the roof,” Spencer called after him.

Julian stuck his head back in just long enough to stick his tongue out. “I’m a thief, silly. I’ve been on plenty of them.”

He disappeared back out of the doorway and Felix led them out the front. Blair looked over his shoulder but he couldn’t see the light from Wren’s laptop over the counter. He didn’t like leaving him there alone, no matter how short of a time it would be. If anything happens, we’ll hear, he reminded himself.

They made the short walk from the shopping center up to the warehouse. A couple of numbers had fallen from above the first bay door, leaving its address a mystery, but Blair bet it had been awhile since the place had seen any legitimate owners. There was graffiti on the outside too old to belong to Phantom. Besides, they had taken too much care in staying hidden to give themselves away like that. Blair pressed his back against the wall next to the narrow door used for staff instead of shipments, the one he had seen the motorcycle rider use the night Wren followed him there. Felix and Spencer split up to check around the sides for anyone keeping watch.

“Nobody outside,” Spencer said, low but audible through the earpiece. “Same plan, Felix?”

Felix came back around and stood on the opposite side of the door from Blair. “Yeah. Me and the kid are gonna go in, you stay out here in case any of ‘em run.”

The access panel suddenly flashed green and both their hands went to their weapons until they heard Wren say in their earpieces, “It’s disarmed. Go.”

Felix nodded to him and pulled the door open. Blair went in first, the 92 drawn, doing a quick sweep from left to right before gesturing forward with his gun. Felix was surprisingly quiet behind him and one long stride put him at Blair’s left again. Blair didn’t wait for a signal as they approached the doorway that opened up into the receiving bay, according to the blueprints. He swung right and Felix did the opposite.

Empty. The only thing in the room were rows of towering steel bunkers, but the shelves were too widely spaced to provide cover. Blair started forward again. He wanted to mention how strange it was to have not ran into anyone yet but he knew his voice would echo under the high ceilings in the mostly barren receiving bay. They cut down the center aisle of bunkers and stopped in the middle of the room. There was a balcony that ran the perimeter of the room with doors that probably went to old offices, again with widely spaced railing that made it easy to see there was nobody on the walkway.

Felix tapped his shoulder and pointed up with his gun. He had his other index finger raised. Watch. Blair nodded. He did, and after a beat, saw a flash of green under one of the doors. He took out his phone, not quite trusting that his voice wouldn’t carry up there with no other sound in the warehouse to mask it.

He sent a text to Wren.

Did you just access something on the second floor?

He had muted his phone on the way over but he saw the reply come up immediately.

No.

He turned his phone to show Felix, and they made their way to the stairs on the far left of the room. There was no avoiding the clang of their steps on the metal stairs. He couldn’t see the door from their current position but he kept his eyes on the walkway and his ears open to any movement that wasn’t their own.

“There’s a camera at the top of the stairs, I can see you but I’ve killed its feed to their control panel,” Wren said.

Blair probably came close to giving away their location with how hard he jumped at having the silence broken. He gave the camera a thumbs up as they stepped onto the walkway. No sooner than they started toward the door, there was a clattering sound from below. He drew his gun and aimed between the bars in the railing. He couldn’t see anyone, or what had made the sound, but there was no denying it had been made with the faint echo still fading from the bay.

The smell of cigarettes and expensive cologne overwhelmed his senses as Felix leaned into his ear. “Go check it out, I’ll see who’s up here,” Felix said, just barely audible.

Blair didn’t like the idea of splitting up but he didn’t give the orders. He nodded, and the fur from the collar of Felix’s coat that had been brushing against his neck disappeared. Blair went back the way they came and crouched on the bottom step to look around. He couldn’t do it for long, his right leg protesting immediately, but it gave him long enough to determine that the bay was empty as far as he could see from there.

“We’ve got movement outside,” Spencer said.

Blair didn’t answer in case he was lucky enough for their visitor not to know his location yet. He started through the maze of bunkers to look for the source of the noise. There was only one more entrance to the receiving bay other than the stairs and the one he had entered from with Felix. He approached the service door, gun first. There was a scuffle to his left and he spun toward it, flicking his thumb across the back of the slide to disarm the safety.

The lights flashed. For a moment the warehouse was plunged into darkness, and the comm blasted static into his ear.

“Blair,” Wren said when the connection returned with the lights. “They know you’re there. They’re targeting everything electronic, even their own systems to make sure no signals get through. We’re going to lose connection soon. Be careful in there, they have the advantage.”

No longer seeing the need to stay quiet to protect his location, Blair asked, “But how did they know we were using these? You’re operating them off-site.”

There was a strangled cry that Blair recognized in an instant and he heard Spencer’s voice in tandem with his own: “Julian?”

The lights went out for ten long seconds this time, and when Wren’s voice came back over it was hard to make out over static and background noise. “They know we’re here, too.”

Spencer’s words from earlier came back and hit him hard. We’ve got movement outside.

He heard a commotion on the balcony and the rapid popping of the MAC-10. His heart shuddered out of time as he realized they had been made from the start or close to it. The light under the door, the sound from below. They had split them up on purpose. He just knew it in his gut.

The warehouse went black again and the comms went out. This time, the lights didn’t come back on.

“Wren!” he cried, but there wasn’t so much as a whisper from the bud in his ear. His hands shook around his gun. “Julian? Marie?”

There was only the silence and the dark.

Doors came open above him on the balcony, and then the service door in front of him. A man’s face glowed green from an illuminated pair of goggles. They’re using them to see in the dark. Adrenaline steadied Blair’s hands. They planned this. But how did they know? There wasn’t time for that. He pushed down his questions, and Julian’s distressed voice, and Wren telling him they had been found before—

No . Blair didn’t know for sure what had happened down there, he couldn’t start imagining worst case scenarios.

What he did know was that Wren and the Incindious members they’d left behind were in danger, or worse, and Blair was now face-to-face with a member of Phantom.

The man coming out of the service room was quick in reaching for the holster on his hip, but his hand hadn’t even made contact with a weapon before Blair let off two shots and took out both of the man’s shoulders. Blair flipped the Beretta and struck him in the temple. Before the man had even fully collapsed to the ground, more masked figures started to emerge. A gunshot rang out and a bullet just barely missed Blair’s arm.

The combined glow from their masks gave him just enough light to see. There was half a dozen of them closing in already and he heard the burst of fire from Felix’s Glock on the balcony above. He shot the person directly in front of him while his other hand went to his back. Spencer’s instincts were never wrong. He couldn’t have known how terribly their plan would fall apart, yet he had prepared Blair for that very thing. The feeling of the M9A3 in his left hand took him back to the shooting range when he had first raised two guns at the same time.

Spencer had taken his glasses off to stare at the paper target and the matching holes going down each side. Blair’s arms had ached from the recoil of Spencer’s 22 in one hand and the practice gun the range had loaned them in the other, but it was worth it to hear the awe in Spencer’s voice when he said, “Ambidextrous.”

There was no time to look around and decide who to shoot first. He listened for the nearest footsteps, and pointed to either side. He pulled two triggers and blood splattered his face from the one standing closest to him. They’ve got me in a corner, I have to get to better ground. He made a path through them, the burn in his forearms negated by the hatred blazing much hotter in his chest.

“I swear to god,” Blair growled, spinning on his heel when he heard someone coming from the rows of bunkers. He took him out along with the one he saw approaching from the left. “You better fucking hope you didn’t hurt them.”

He had been counting his rounds and crouched in an aisle of bunkers to reload. He stood up as soon as he locked the slides back in place. More green masks came toward him and he held a gun out to either side, muscles on fire but body steeled with resolve.

Wren has to be okay , Blair decided as he pulled both triggers. He couldn’t accept the alternative.