Chapter 5 Jinx
Chapter Five: Jinx
The facility looks like every other building designed to hide monsters.
Clean lines. White walls. A sign out front that says "Alpine Fertility Institute" in tasteful gold lettering. The kind of place wealthy couples visit when they want a baby and nature won't cooperate. The kind of place that promises miracles behind closed doors.
The miracles here involve turning children into weapons.
We're parked half a click out, hidden in a copse of trees that shields the van from the road. Midnight turned to one about twenty minutes ago. The shift change should be happening now, guards swapping posts, attention divided, minds wandering toward the end of their watch.
The perfect time to breach.
Asher is a solid presence beside me, checking his rifle one final time. His face is calm, focused, all traces of the man who held my hand erased by mission protocol.
"East team, status." Jagger's voice crackles through my earpiece.
"In position." Asher's voice is steady.
"West team?"
"Ready." Marlee's tone is clipped. She and Thiago are on the other side of the building, waiting for our signal.
"Kira, Dom?"
"Rally point secure. Vehicles prepped." Kira's nervous energy bleeds through even over comms.
"Then we go. East team breaches first. West follows thirty seconds later. Converge on the children's wing. Ten minutes, people. Clock starts now."
Asher moves first.
He flows through the darkness like he was born in it. His shaved head catches the faint moonlight, and the rifle in his hands looks like an extension of his body. Behind him, I match his pace, my weapon ready, every sense tuned to the night around us.
The grass is wet with dew, soaking through my boots. The air smells like pine and frost and underneath that, antiseptic. The smell of the facility, bleeding out into the night.
The east entrance is a service door, tucked away from the main building behind a row of dumpsters. According to Jagger's intel, it leads to a maintenance corridor that connects to the children's wing. Minimal security. Easy access.
Intel is wrong more often than it's right, but still, I have hope this one is on the money.
Asher reaches the door first. He pulls a kit from his vest and goes to work on the lock. I stand watch, rifle up, scanning the shadows for movement. The night is still around us. Too still. The kind of stillness that comes before violence.
The mechanism clicks. The door swings open.
No alarms. No guards.
Too easy.
We slip inside. The corridor is dim, emergency lighting casting everything in shades of red, turning us into demons moving through hell.
The air smells like antiseptic and decay.
There’s a hint of fear, the kind that comes from torture or impending death.
It’s old and stale, soaked into the walls, into the floors, into the very bones of this building.
I know that smell. The Foundry had it too. The smell of children learning that the world is pain.
"Corridor clear," Asher murmurs into his comm. "Moving to checkpoint one."
We advance in tandem, covering angles, watching shadows. The building is quiet around us. Too quiet. At this hour, there should be night staff, guards on patrol, something. Instead, there's nothing but the hum of fluorescent lights and the distant whir of ventilation.
"I don't like this," I breathe.
"Neither do I." Asher pauses at a junction, checking both directions. "Left leads to the children's wing. Right goes deeper into the facility."
"Left."
We turn left. The corridor opens into a wider hallway, doors lining both sides. Each door has a small window, reinforced glass, and through them I can see beds. Small beds, sized for children.
Empty beds.
"Jagger." My voice comes out rough. "The rooms are empty. No kids."
Static. Then: "Repeat that."
"The children's wing is empty. No occupants."
A pause. Long enough to make my skin crawl.
"West team, report."
"Same here." Marlee's voice is tight. "We've cleared six rooms. All empty. Beds made, no personal effects. Like they were never here."
"They knew we were coming." Asher's jaw is tight, his eyes scanning the corridor. "This is a trap."
The lights go out.
Not gradually, not with warning. One second the hallway is bathed in red emergency lighting, the next we're plunged into absolute darkness. Total. Complete. The kind of dark that swallows you whole.
“Put on the night vision goggles. Now.”
My night vision kicks in, pupils dilating, but before my eyes can adjust, footsteps echo through the darkness.
Footsteps. Lots of them. Coming from both ends of the corridor. The rhythmic thud of boots on tile, the click of safeties being disengaged, the whispered commands of men who know exactly what they're doing.
"Contact!" I bark into the comm. "Multiple hostiles, east wing."
Gunfire answers me.
Muzzle flashes strobe the darkness, turning the world into a series of frozen images.
Guards in tactical gear, at least eight of them, pouring in from both directions.
Not private contractors. These are trained operatives, moving in formation, laying down suppressive fire that tears chunks out of the walls, the ceiling, the floor.
Asher grabs my vest and yanks me into a doorway as bullets chew up the space where I was standing. Plaster dust fills the air. The smell burns my nostrils. We return fire, the kick of my rifle jarring against my shoulder, and two guards drop before the others find cover.
"West team, status!" Jagger's voice is sharp in my ear.
"Pinned down!" Marlee shouts over the sound of gunfire. "At least six hostiles. Thiago's hit!"
"How bad?"
"Shoulder. Through and through. He's mobile but bleeding."
"Rally at extraction point Charlie. Abort mission. I repeat, abort."
Abort. The word tastes like failure. Like ashes on my tongue. All those kids, gone. Moved before we could reach them, shipped off to some other facility, some other hell. And now we're fighting for our lives in a building that is designed to be our tomb.
"Moving." Asher pops out of cover, drops another guard with a double-tap to center mass, ducks back as return fire peppers the doorframe. "Jinx, cover me."
I lean around the doorframe and open up on the guards at the far end of the corridor. The rifle bucks in my hands, brass casings pinging off the floor, and two more go down in sprays of red. The others scatter, diving behind blockades and into rooms, giving Asher the opening he needs to advance.
We move down the hallway, trading cover fire, working together like we've done this a hundred times. In a way, we have. The pits taught us both how to fight, how to move, how to survive when the odds are stacked against us.
The difference is, back then we were fighting each other. Now we're fighting together.
"Stairwell ahead," Asher calls. "Leads to ground floor."
"Go."
He hits the door at a run. I'm right behind him, spinning to cover our six as we enter the stairwell. The door swings shut, cutting off the sounds of gunfire for a precious few seconds.
"West team, we're in the east stairwell. Moving to ground floor."
"Copy. We're cut off from Charlie. Redirecting to secondary rally point."
"Negative." Jagger's voice cuts through. "Secondary is compromised. They've got vehicles blocking the road. You need to find another way out."
"Working on it." Marlee grunts, more gunfire crackling through her comm. "Thiago, on your left!"
The stairwell erupts.
The door below us slams open and guards pour through, rifles up, flashlights cutting through the darkness. Asher and I are caught mid-descent, exposed on the stairs, no cover in sight. Just two men against six, with nowhere to hide and nowhere to run.
Time slows.
My training takes over, the Foundry programming that I hate but can't deny.
Everything becomes crystal clear, hyperreal.
The lead guard's rifle swinging toward Asher.
His finger tightening on the trigger. The angle of trajectory that will put a bullet through Asher's chest, through his heart, through everything that matters.
I move.
My body slams into Asher, driving him sideways, and the bullet that was meant for his chest catches me in the side instead, missing the vest plates and driving into my skin.
The impact is like being hit with a sledgehammer, a white-hot explosion of pain that drives the air from my lungs.
We tumble down the stairs together, arms and legs tangled, the world spinning end over end.
We hit the landing hard. My head cracks against the concrete. Stars explode across my vision. But Asher is already rolling, coming up on one knee, rifle in hand. He fires, and the guards at the bottom of the stairs drop in a spray of blood. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.
Then silence.
Just the ringing in my ears and the wet rasp of my breathing and the warmth spreading across my ribs, soaking into my shirt, pooling on the concrete beneath me.
"Jinx!" Asher is beside me, hands pressing against my side, his face pale in the dim light, eyes wide with terror. "Stay with me. Stay with me, you stubborn bastard."
"I'm fine." The words come out wet.
That's probably bad.
"You're shot."
"Noticed that." I try to laugh and end up coughing instead. Blood flecks my lips.
Definitely bad.
"This isn't funny."
"I'm hilarious." I grab his vest, use it to pull myself up. The pain is almost enough to keep me down. But I shove it down the same way I've shoved down everything else. Pain is familiar. Pain I can handle. "We need to move. More coming."
He hesitates. The urge to stay wars across his face, the need to patch me up, to do anything other than drag a bleeding man through a building full of people trying to kill us. His hands shake where they press against my wound. Asher Madden, who has never been scared of anything, is terrified.
Of losing me.
"Move," I repeat, softer this time. "That's an order."
"You don't give me orders."