Chapter 32 Thomas
Thomas
My lungs were on fire.
The industrial district was a maze of warehouses, shipping containers, and chain-link fences. I vaulted one barrier, then another, my shoulder exploding with each impact. Behind me, I heard shouting.
First one voice.
Then another.
Then a chorus of anger and purpose.
They’d mobilized fast.
Too fast.
The nervous kid must have had backup nearby, or maybe the whole district was crawling with Order operatives. Either way, I had multiple pursuers now, and they knew this terrain better than I did.
I ducked into the shadow of a loading dock and pressed myself against the cold concrete.
It was a fight to control my breathing.
My heart was a jackhammer.
My shoulder was wet. Blood seeped through the bandages from a reopened wound I’d never let heal properly.
Footsteps.
They were close.
And getting closer.
I held my breath.
A flashlight beam swept across the loading dock a few inches from my position.
I watched it pass, a bright finger probing the darkness.
I willed myself to become invisible.
The beam moved on.
The footsteps receded.
I counted to thirty.
Then I moved again.
My radio was dead.
I’d tried it twice during my flight, keying the emergency frequency, hoping for any response. There was nothing but static. Either the Order was jamming our communications or my unit had been damaged.
Either way, I was alone.
The extraction point was a bridge over the Limmat, two kilometers northeast. Bisch would be waiting there with a car.
Two kilometers.
In normal conditions, I could cover that distance in fifteen minutes.
But these were anything but normal conditions.
I crept through the district, moving from shadow to shadow, listening for pursuit.
The shouts had faded, but that didn’t mean they’d given up.
It meant they were being smart.
They were spreading out, covering exits, and waiting for me to make a mistake.
I couldn’t afford mistakes.
At the edge of the district, I found the drainage ditch. It was little more than a concrete channel, half filled with ice and stagnant water that ran beneath a road and out toward the river.
It was tight and dark.
It was also the only path that didn’t cross open ground.
Behind me, another beam speared the darkness.
Voices drew closer.
I had maybe thirty seconds.
I lowered myself into the ditch.
The cold slammed into me; nearly frozen water drilled deep into my bones and tried to stop my heart. Water flooded into my boots, soaked through my trousers, and climbed toward my waist.
I gasped while trying to bite down on the sound.
The cold was beyond anything I’d ever experienced.
It wasn’t the clean cold of mountain air or fresh snow, but something rotten that had been waiting in this concrete tomb for months.
It wrapped around my legs like withered hands, squeezed the warmth from my core.
It whispered that I should stop and rest, to let the darkness take me.
But I kept moving.
The channel was maybe a hundred meters long. In the absolute blackness, it felt infinite.
I waded forward with one hand on the slimy wall for balance while the other clutched the camera to my chest. The photographs, seventy-two exposures of the Order’s operation, had to survive.
Even if I didn’t.
If I lost them now—if the water destroyed the film—then everything I’d done tonight meant nothing.
I held the camera higher and kept moving.
Something brushed against my leg.
I froze.
My heart slammed against my ribs.
In the darkness, my mind painted horrors of bodies dumped in the channel or ghostly hands reaching up from the muck.
Whatever it was brushed against me again.
It was smaller this time.
And quick.
Rats.
It was only rats disturbed by my passage. They swam past me toward whatever hole they called home.
I let out a shaky breath and kept moving.
The water was at my chest now.
The channel had dipped, or I had.
Suddenly the cold was everywhere.
It pressed against my lungs, making each breath a battle. My teeth chattered so violently I could hear them over the flowing water. My fingers had stopped hurting, which meant they were going numb, which meant frostbite, which meant I was definitely running out of time.
Ahead, I caught a faint gray smear.
Light.
The end of the channel.
I pushed toward it, fighting the water, fighting my own body’s desperate desire to stop.
Ten meters.
Five.
The gray smear resolved into a concrete lip, a culvert opening crowned by a slice of star-filled sky.
I hauled myself up onto the lip and collapsed. I lay there shivering, gasping, feeling nothing below my waist.
Get up, a distant voice in my mind urged.
I couldn’t.
Get up, or die here.
My head fell back and rested against icy stone.
Get up or never see Will again.
Will.
Dusty hair and bright blue eyes filled my mind’s eye. He smiled, and his lips moved as though he spoke. I could almost hear his voice, hear him calling my name, hear him saying, “I love you,” over and over.
Then something in my mind shattered, and I heard him wail, a terrible, agonizing echo in my head. “Thomas, please.”
The sound of his grief nearly crushed my soul.
“I’m coming,” I said to the night. “Will, hold on. I’m coming home.”
I planted my palms against the frozen ground and pushed to my feet.
The Limmat stretched before me, black and glittering.
Across the water, Bern was dying.
Whole sections of the city had gone dark. The Order’s sabotage spread through the power grid, shutting down whole neighborhoods one by one. From where I stood, I could see the gaps in the lights spreading like plague.
I could just make out the bridge upstream. It was half a kilometer away, maybe less.
I could make it. I had to make it.
I staggered forward.
My legs didn’t want to cooperate. They’d gone stiff and clumsy, the muscles spasming with each step.
My shoulder was a wall of needles filled with wet, stabbing pain that told me the bleeding was worsening.
I was leaving a trail.
Blood on the snow and footprints in the frost.
Anyone following would find me easily.
So don’t let them follow, my mind insisted.
I moved faster and pushed through the pain.
The bridge grew closer with each agonizing step.
Two hundred meters.
One fifty.
Then I heard the car.
Engine noise, loud and enraged, somewhere above.
I threw myself flat before I’d consciously registered the threat.
It was all instinct and training, the kind of reflex that had kept me alive through a dozen missions that should’ve killed me.
I pressed into the frozen mud of the riverbank, making myself part of the landscape.
Above, headlights swept across the darkness.
A car moved slowly along the road that paralleled the river.
Then it stopped.
A door opened.
Then another.
“Spread out,” a man ordered in German, clipped and professional. “He’s somewhere along the river. Find him.”
Footsteps on gravel.
Three sets, fanning out, descending toward the bank.
Swords of light cut through the night, probing the reeds, sweeping across the mud.
I closed my eyes.
The beams came closer.
I heard them talking—terse exchanges, the language of a coordinated search. They were good. They knew what they were doing.
The voices grew closer.
Thirty meters.
Twenty.
Ten.
Someone stopped directly above me.
I opened my eyes to find boots—heavy, military grade—planted in the frozen grass at the top of the bank. The man’s flashlight beam swept down, tracking across the mud where I lay.
It passed over my legs.
My torso.
My face.
I didn’t move, didn’t so much as blink.
The beam moved on.
“Nothing,” the man called. “Move upstream.”
The men turned.
Footsteps receded.
Voices faded.
I counted to sixty before I dared to breathe.
Counted to sixty twice more before I dared to move.
It materialized out of the darkness like something from a fever dream. Its stone arches spanned the water, while its streetlamps stood dead and dark.
The extraction point was on the far side.
A small parking area.
Bisch would be waiting.
If he was still waiting.
If he hadn’t been taken.
If this wasn’t a trap.
I approached from the riverbank, crouching low and scanning for movement.
The bridge looked empty.
The parking area beyond was lost in shadow.
I was halfway across when I heard an engine.
Damn it.
A car roared to life on the far side.
Headlights flicked on, bright and blinding—and pointed directly at me.
I froze in the glare, pinned to the bridge like an insect, suddenly visible to anyone within a quarter mile.
I had no cover, no weapon.
No options.
The car jerked forward.
It stopped at the foot of the bridge.
The engine idled, a lion’s growl that filled the silence.
My hand moved to where my pistol should have been. It found nothing. I’d lost it somewhere, probably in the drainage ditch or the riverbank or one of a hundred moments when survival mattered more than equipment.
The driver’s door opened.
A figure stepped out, silhouetted against the headlights.
It was tall and broad-shouldered.
It moved toward me with purpose.
I couldn’t see his face.
All I could do was stand there, shaking with cold and exhaustion, and wait for my fate to unfold.
The figure kept coming.