Chapter 18
Eighteen
They moved through the corridors in silence, black gear blending into the seams between emergency lights.
Grace counted steps to keep her hands from shaking. Forty-seven from the blast door where Gunnar had almost died. Another ninety to the next biometric checkpoint, where she knelt on cold flooring and cracked the lock in eleven seconds.
Good thing it was someone else’s architecture. Older. Simpler. She didn’t have to fight her own ghosts to break it.
The team had rearranged itself.
Astryde subtly pulled back. She still covered their six. But she’d put three feet between herself and Grace that hadn’t been there before, and the distance said what her voice didn’t.
Then Bj?rn moved.
He stepped sideways into the gap Astryde had created, slotting in alongside Grace without breaking stride. His weapon stayed loose. His eyes stayed on the corridor.
When he did look down, it was brief. “Thanks, Grace, for back there.”
The lump in her throat sealed off any sound. She nodded.
“Stay close,” he said.
He turned back to the corridor. The formation kept moving.
Ahead, Magnus glanced back. His eyes found Bj?rn’s new position, and his shoulders eased a fraction. He turned forward and kept walking.
They reached the corridor that ended at the vault anteroom door.
Sixty feet of straight, polished stretch under unbroken LED light. No junctions. No doors. No cover. Just the sealed face of the anteroom at the far end. Recessed access panels set into the left-hand wall every ten feet were the only break in the run.
“This is the last stretch,” Grace said. “The anteroom door has its own auth. I have to crack it from the access port beside the handle. Then I go through, plug into the interior terminal, and run the vault layer.”
She looked at Magnus. “Two of us forward. Everyone else holds the corridor entrance and the junction we just cleared. The way we came is the only direction anything can reach us from.”
Gunnar’s jaw worked, then set the formation. Davis at the corridor mouth. Astryde and Tiikaan at fallback positions just inside. Gunnar and Bj?rn covering the upper junction.
“Comms tight,” Magnus said. “Anything moves up the line, you go dark and we hold.”
Grace and Magnus walked the corridor.
She felt the team’s eyes on her back for the first ten steps. By twenty, the team had become silhouettes. By the time she reached the anteroom door, the corridor felt like its own country.
She knelt and plugged her terminal into the access port beside the handle. The hardline jack clicked in. She started working.
The auth rotated through three nested keys on staggered timers. Miss the sequence and the whole system resets. She’d designed it to be uncrackable from outside the facility. She’d never imagined cracking it from inside.
Magnus stood three feet behind her, weapon angled low, watching the corridor.
The first key dropped. Then the second.
Her earpiece chirped once.
Gunnar, voice flattened to almost nothing. “Movement up the line. Going dark.”
Grace’s hands stilled on the keys.
Magnus didn’t speak. He moved.
His hand was at her elbow, lifting. She came up with him, terminal cradled against her chest, the cable still trailing from the access port and stretching to its limit. He drew her ten feet back across the corridor and pressed her into the recessed panel.
The recess was shallow. A foot deep, maybe less. Enough to keep them out of the corridor’s sightline if anyone looked down it from the entrance, not enough for anything else. The cable from her terminal trailed back to the door at full extension. Live. The connection still holding.
Magnus turned his back to the corridor and his body to her, weapon held pointed to the floor, and went still.
So did she.
The team had gone dark. No comm chatter. No status. Whatever had triggered Gunnar’s call, they were handling it from sixty feet away, and Grace and Magnus would find out how it ended when it was over.
She’d never been good at not knowing.
Magnus watched her face.
She kept her eyes on the floor between them, because if she looked up, she was going to have to do something, and there was nothing she could do that wouldn’t break her.
“Grace.”
A breath. Not even a word.
She looked up.
In the blue-white light, his eyes were unguarded in a way she’d never seen them. His gaze was stripped bare of tactics, of suspicion, of every reason he had to keep distance between them.
His free hand came up, slow, and tucked a loose strand of her hair behind her ear.
The gesture was so quiet, so small, that it undid her.
His thumb traced the line of her jaw.
“We’re not done,” he said, voice barely sounding.
Her chest cracked.
His forehead lowered to hers, and for a moment, neither of them moved.
She could have kissed him. He was a half-inch from her mouth and not moving, letting her decide. He wasn’t going to take what she didn’t give him. Even now. Even here. Even when she could feel the want in him as plainly as her own pulse.
She turned her face slightly. Pressed her forehead harder against his, eyes shut, and held on for one ragged breath.
“I know.” Her voice didn’t shake.
She almost wished it had.
His hand tightened at her jaw. He held her like that for one more beat. Then he stepped back.
The earpiece chirped with Gunnar’s whisper. “Patrol passed the upper junction. They’re not coming our way. We’re back.”
Grace’s knees almost gave.
Magnus steadied her without seeming to. She crossed back to the door, knelt, and put her hands on the keys.
The third lock yielded.
She didn’t tell Magnus that somewhere above them, in the grid she could no longer reach, Lars was waiting for a system she’d designed at nineteen to do exactly what it was about to do. She knew it the way you knew someone was standing behind you in a dark room.
Whatever waited on the other side of this door, he had set it.
“Anteroom is open.”
She stood, unplugged the terminal, and couldn’t look at Magnus.
The vault anteroom was on the other side of this door. After the anteroom, the vault. After the vault, the moment she’d been building toward for eight years.
“Let’s go,” she said and walked through.