Blackjack’s Ascent (K19 Genesis Consortium #1)

Chapter 1

BLACKJACK

Deafening sound hit first as an explosion tore through the building. I was out of the chair and under the table before the first slab of stone reached the floor. The hand-carved oak held when another piece slammed into it. A third struck hard enough to crack the wood, but the table didn’t give.

A smaller chunk clipped my shoulder as I crawled clear of the edge, and dust rolled in so thick the hall disappeared. I dragged my shirt over my nose and got to my feet.

The ringing in my ears faded, and I could hear again—a structural groan from overhead, debris falling somewhere to my left, and horrible, gut-wrenching screaming that I had no idea where it could be coming from.

The floor shook with another blast deeper in the building, and a third hit a second later. Spaced charges. Somebody had mapped this building and placed them to bring it down on everyone inside. I needed to get the fuck out of here, but I couldn’t. Not without first finding every survivor I could.

The dust was too thick to see more than at arm’s length. I found the first body by almost stepping on a man’s hand, and when I crouched to check his pulse, I found nothing. The second was three feet farther on, half-buried under a collapsed section of masonry, and gone the same way.

A woman was sitting upright near the far wall, awake and bleeding from her ear. I crouched in front of her.

“Can you hear me?”

She nodded.

“Can you walk?”

“I think so.”

Her name was Rovena Basha, aka Magnolia. I’d seen her in the hall before the blast.

“The entrance is that way. Get outside and find a medic.”

She got to her feet and moved toward the exit without looking back.

I went in the opposite direction and almost stepped over Katarina Stepanova, code name Beacon.

She was flat on the ground under a crossbeam that had dropped from the ceiling supports.

She was speaking, but I couldn’t hear most of it, and when I caught a word here and there, it was in French.

The beam had jammed into rubble at both ends, and the angle was wrong for a clean lift. I got my feet under me, gripped the underside where it met a chunk of stone, and drove upward with everything my legs had. It rose three inches, then four.

“Try to move if you can,” I said through gritted teeth.

Beacon dragged herself clear, and I let the beam drop, causing the nearest support column to crack from the impact. She rolled over and got up on her feet before I could give her my hand.

“There are others in there,” she said, pointing deeper into the hall.

Stone blocks and the ceiling were shifting under the redistributed weight. Load-bearing walls were compensating, and that wasn’t what they were designed for. The third blast had done something to the foundation, because everything on the far side was settling.

“I’ll go. You get outside.”

“No.” She was ten feet ahead of me before I could argue. Her left arm hung wrong. She wasn’t using it, hadn’t reached for it or braced it, and she favored her right side without seeming to realize it.

The dust had thinned enough to see maybe a dozen feet. She crossed to the nearest shape on the floor, checked it, and moved on. I worked the opposite side of the hall, and the building groaned above us the whole time.

The first two I reached were dead, and a man pinned under a slab of masonry had no pulse by the time I got to him.

A few feet away, Beacon crouched near another body.

I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman.

She pressed two fingers to the person’s neck, then dropped her arm and head at the same time.

Her cry of anguish had me torn between going to her or continuing my search for survivors.

“We have to get out of here,” I said when a loud crack above us shook the walls.

“There could be more,” she argued.

“We stay, we die in here.”

When she opened her mouth to answer, voices sounded from outside the rubble. Running footfalls got increasingly closer. My brother, Kingston, came through first, his flashlight scanning the debris. Charity, his wife, code name Amaryllis, was right behind him, followed by Killian Curran, aka Dagger.

“Bishop, thank God.” Kingston ran over to me, and I stood. There was no time for an embrace, but we managed one that lasted a couple of seconds anyway. “How many were in here?”

“Twelve council, plus support staff. Five council confirmed dead so far. One survivor already made it out. The rest are unaccounted for.”

“What hit?”

“Three charges, spaced to collapse the structure. Somebody mapped this building. There could be more that haven’t detonated.”

“Emergency personnel and a K-9 explosive-detection unit are on their way,” said Kingston.

“You need a medic to check your arm and wound,” I told Beacon.

“Not until we find the rest of the survivors.”

“Your left arm is broken, and you’ve been bleeding for ten minutes. You stay in here and the ceiling comes down, we’ll be pulling out your corpse.”

Rather than respond, she turned toward a pile of debris near the east end, where a hand was visible under the debris. She made it four steps before her right knee buckled, and she dropped onto a chunk of fallen stone.

I closed the distance and got my shoulder under hers. She stiffened but didn’t pull away—the leg wasn’t holding, and we both knew it.

“Kingston’s got this. Dagger’s got this. Crews are on the way,” I pressed.

“Those are my people in there.”

“You can’t help them if you can’t stand up.”

Amaryllis called for assistance with a beam on the far side of the hall.

Kingston and Dagger converged on her position.

The building groaned again, deeper this time, and a section of plaster the size of a door dropped from the ceiling, twenty feet from where we stood.

There was no time left for arguing; I needed to get her out so I could help with the search.

The passage was partially blocked with debris, but there was enough space so I could squeeze us both through. Once outside, I eased her down onto the grass.

Blood had soaked the left side of her shirt from the collar to the shoulder, and her left arm lay in her lap—she hadn’t tried to lift it since I’d pulled the beam off her. Under the dust and blood, her face was gray, and her gaze hadn’t veered from the building.

When her eyes closed and didn’t reopen, I put my hand on the side of her neck. Her pulse was fast but steady.

“Medic! Over here!” I shouted as teams exited the vehicles.

Before I finished my sentence, she came to and sat up. “I’m okay. They need to help the others.”

A vehicle came fast up the valley road, tires grinding gravel, and braked twenty yards from where I was kneeling.

Four doors opened at once. Mercury got out first. Lyra Hyde-Carrington was one of the founders of Minerva Protocol.

Her husband, Henry, was half a step behind her, along with two other operatives.

Mercury stopped when she saw what was left of the building.

The east side had pancaked, and the west was sagging.

Dust and smoke rose from gaps in the stone where four-hundred-year-old walls had split apart.

This had been her organization’s headquarters.

Her family’s legacy. The center of everything Minerva Protocol had built over decades, and it looked like a demolition site.

Henry put his hand on her back. He didn’t speak.

She covered her mouth with her hand as she crossed to the grass where Beacon lay. She dropped beside her and pulled her into her arms. Beacon grabbed her back with her one good hand and held on.

“Katarina.”

“Lyra. Oh God.”

While her voice cracked, there were no tears from her even as Mercury wiped hers away with her sleeve.

“Forge is dead.” Beacon’s voice cracked a second time. “So are Verdant and Cipher.”

Mercury closed her eyes. She held Beacon tighter for a second and then eased her back down to the grass and brushed the hair from her forehead to see the gash.

She turned to me. “What’s happening inside?”

“Kingston, Dagger, and Amaryllis are searching for survivors. There are two more deceased that we know of. They haven’t been identified yet.”

When Mercury stood, I knew what she intended to do, and I couldn’t let her.

“Stay with Beacon,” I said as a medic approached.

“I should be in there.”

I shook my head. “You shouldn’t.”

Her eyes met mine, and in them, I could see she received the message I wasn’t saying. In this case, seeing what lay inside would haunt her for the rest of her life. It was bad enough that she could picture it.

“Okay,” she whispered through more tears. Henry was already beside her. He took her arm and guided her back to where Beacon lay on the grass. No words, no hesitation. He’d done this before—walked into the worst of it so the people he loved wouldn’t have to carry it alone.

When two more of our teammates headed inside, I joined them and reiterated what I’d told my brother about the number of blasts and that there could be more.

Like me, they both knew we had no choice but to go in and save everyone we could, regardless of the risk. It was our duty.

The corridor was worse on the second pass. Cracks had widened in the stone since I’d carried Beacon out, and plaster dust sifted from the ceiling in a fine, constant rain. The air was thicker, hotter, and the structural groaning had deepened to a pitch I could feel in my sternum.

Beams of light cut white lines across rubble that had been shapes in the haze twenty minutes ago and were now visible for what they were—broken stone, splintered timber, and the remains of the hand-carved table that had saved my life. Now, it was split in half under a section of vaulted ceiling.

Kingston was marking the positions of the dead for the recovery crews. Amaryllis was on her knees at a body, with two fingers on the neck. She shook her head at me and moved on.

I worked the east side of the hall, closest to the gallery collapse.

The footing was bad here. Rubble was stacked three and four feet deep, with treacherous gaps.

I climbed over a fallen support beam and found two more bodies in the space it had created when it dropped.

A man and a woman who must’ve been seated close together when the ceiling came down. Neither was alive.

I marked their position for the recovery crews and kept working the debris field. Chair legs jutted from a pile of plaster. One shoe. A briefing folder with its pages soaked dark.

A groan, faint, from under the rubble to my right, stopped me. Next, I heard steady, deliberate knocking. Someone was alive under there.

I changed direction and came face-to-face with Dagger, who’d heard it too.

“It’s Givre,” he said, pointing to a forearm extending from under a slab of masonry, its pale skin coated gray with dust, and there was a silver ring on the index finger. Her hands were curled against the rubble, and they twitched as we got close.

Dagger dropped to his knees and started clearing the debris from around her arm.

He worked fast but placed each piece of stone where it wouldn’t shift the weight on top of her.

I came at it from the opposite side. The concrete had cracked across the middle, and one half rested on split wood, creating maybe eight inches of clearance.

The gap she was in was the only reason she was alive.

We couldn’t lift the slab without risking the timber, and if it shifted, the clearance disappeared.

I worked the smaller pieces loose from the edges while Dagger cleared a path along the length of her body.

Each piece we removed changed the load on what remained.

Overhead, noises from the structure shifting got louder.

Just as a crack that sounded like a rifle shot rang out, we worked her shoulder and upper body clear. Givre—Maelle Valais—was prone, conscious, but her breathing was shallow and she couldn’t speak.

Dagger got the last of the debris off her legs, and I eased the broken timber out from under the slab one inch at a time while he cradled the masonry to keep it from dropping. The slab settled onto the rubble, and she was free.

Two medics rushed over with a stretcher and dropped it next to us. Dagger was off his knees and out of their way before they asked. I did the same. They stabilized her neck and got her on in under a minute.

Dagger followed the stretcher. I stayed.