Chapter Twenty-Eight #2
“When you were clear of the door!” Evelyn snaps, her composure fracturing.
“I needed you here. Both of you. The end of the tunnel requires two biometrics to open from the inside. Wade’s design, in case he needed to escape with a hostage.
I have his DNA on file, encoded into my prints.
But I need a second living subject from the program to trigger the release.
A ward resident. That’s one of you two.”
The vault door behind us shudders. A muffled, thump-thump-thump against the steel.
“They’re cutting through,” I say. The math was simple.
Two miles of tunnel. Seventeen kids. One wounded doctor.
Two armed women who wanted to kill each other.
And forty-five seconds until the mountain turned to fire.
Kiera and I rip the tactical vests off the older children and strap the smallest ones to our chests with straps and belts, tight against our body armor.
The infants are light but fragile, their bodies limp and warm against us.
The older kids shuffle forward on their own, silent and obedient, eyes wide but unfocused.
“Move,” I commanded, shoving Reyes toward the tunnel entrance.
“Now. Kiera, take point. Mrs. Hawthorne…”
“Don’t call me that,” Evelyn hisses, already herding the first set of children down the dark maw of the passage.
“...you’re in the middle with the kids. I’ll guard the rear.”
Kiera doesn’t argue. She grabs the scarred girl’s hand, then reaches for another child—a boy, maybe ten, who stared at me with eyes too blue, too familiar —and pushes past her mom.
The tunnel is narrow and claustrophobic, with a low ceiling forcing me to hunch. The children moved in a silent, stumbling river ahead of me, guided by Evelyn’s harsh whispers and Kiera’s gentler urgings. Dr. Reyes stumbles, and I jerk her upright, my grip bruising.
“You should have let me negotiate,” she gasps, her breath sour with panic. “The mercenaries work for the board. They would have taken the children alive. For inventory.”
“They work for whoever pays,” I growl, my grip on her arm tightening. “And I don’t negotiate with fucking anyone.”
The blast hits behind us. Even two hundred yards deep in the stone, the concussion feels like a physical blow.
A wave of superheated air roars down the tunnel, scorching the back of my neck and tossing the smaller children like leaves.
I threw myself over Dr. Reyes—careful not to smash the babies strapped to my chest—not to save her, but to use her body as a shield for the children in front of us against the debris raining from the ceiling.
Concrete dust chokes the air, turning the world white and suffocating.
The roar dies into a hellish wind. The light from the facility behind us is severed. Plunging us into darkness. “Kiera!” I shout, coughing as my ears ring.
“Here!” Kiera’s voice cuts through the dark, raw and fierce. A beam of light clicks on her phone. She’s on her knees, shielding four of the children with her body. Blood runs from a cut on her forehead, black in the LED glow. “All accounted for.”
Evelyn’s voice drifts from further ahead, steady and unbothered by the near-death. “The collapse sealed the entrance behind us. We have to go forward. No turning back.” I drag Reyes to her feet. She’s limping now, genuinely hurt. Good.
“Sterling,” Kiera calls out.
I find her hand in the dark and squeeze once. “I’m here, Thorn.”
Cam’s voice crackles through my earpiece, breaking through the jamming now that we’re clear of the facility’s shielding. “Sterling! Fuck, I thought you were dead. The thermal signature just went nuclear up there. What’s your status?”
“Moving,” I whisper, low enough that Reyes can’t overhear. “Seventeen kids. One hostile. A guide. Exiting via the river, two miles north.”
“Negative,” Cam shoots down the idea. “The river exit is compromised. Satellite feed shows heat signatures there, too.”
I stop. The children bump into me, a chain reaction of small, frightened bodies. Kiera turns, her eyes meeting mine in the dim light. She heard. “Then we go up,” she says. “Somewhere else. Anywhere else.”
“There is nowhere else,” Reyes wheezes, leaning against the wall.
She’s smiling now, blood on her teeth. “The tunnel floods in twenty minutes. The mercenaries own the river. And the ventilation shaft ahead leads directly back into the fire. You’re in a coffin, and you brought the children into it with you. ”
Evelyn steps forward, her flashlight beam cutting up the wall.
It catches a rusted, oval-shaped hatch sealed with a wheel-lock like a submarine door.
Above it, stenciled letters, faded but legible: DISPOSAL UNIT 7.
“There’s one other way,” Evelyn says, her voice grim.
She points the light higher, tracking a vertical shaft that disappears into perfect blackness.
Iron rungs, rust-eaten but present, lined the concrete tube.
Three hundred feet straight up. The chute.
Dr. Reyes laughs—wet and ugly, blood flying out. “You’ll never get them up there. Not seventeen children. Not with the rungs rusted through in half the places. Not before the smoke fills this tunnel and cooks us all alive.”
I step to the hatch, grip the wheel, and turn.
My shoulders scream, the muscles tearing and knitting from old wounds, but the mechanism groans, gives, and releases.
The hatch opens on a throat of pure darkness.
I look up. Three hundred feet. I’ve free-climbed buildings in Montreal for extraction jobs.
I’ve scaled silos in Kansas with bullet holes in my thigh.
The physical capability wasn’t the question.
“Most of the kids can’t climb,” I say, assessing the width of the shaft.
Too narrow to carry them on my back. I’ll be an anchor.
Kiera, you’re behind me. We rope them to us.
Two lines. I pull, you push from below. We move as a chain.
” Kiera is already tearing fabric strips from her shirt and the kids' gowns, her movements quick and ruthless.
“You can’t carry seventeen bodies three hundred feet,” Reyes says, disbelief edging her voice. “Not even you, Ghost.”
I grab the first rung. Metal flakes under my palm, but it holds.
I test my weight. Solid. I look back at Kiera, at the seventeen faces pale in the flashlight glow—Subject 014, the girl with the scarred wrist, the boy with the burn on his cheek, the twins, holding hands.
“I’m not carrying them,” I say, already starting up the shaft.
“I’m leading them. They climb. They’ve survived this place. They can climb.”
“Sterling,” Kiera warns, her voice tight with urgency. “The smoke…”
“I know.” I climb five feet, find a stable rung, and brace my back against the opposite wall of the narrow shaft, creating a human wedge.
“Pass me the first one. Now.” I could smell smoke now—acrid, burning plastic—sinking down the tunnel like a predator.
Fire is consuming the oxygen below, snaking its way up.