Chapter 5
Saint
The first kick takes the lock.
The second takes the door off its hinges.
I step into the red emergency light of the warehouse floor, and the world narrows through the black glass eyes of the plague doctor mask.
Inside it, my breath comes back hot and damp. Leather. Old disinfectant. The copper taste of blood from where I bit the inside of my cheek in the van and didn’t notice until now. The beak of the mask distorts sound, turning every shout into something distant and animal.
Good.
Distance helps.
Distance keeps the rage organized.
A flashlight cuts across me.
“Who the hell—”
He comes from behind a stack of crates, gun up, eyes wide with the confusion of seeing a nightmare walk upright. That half second is all I need.
I’m across the floor before he pulls the trigger. Left hand takes the barrel and wrenches it skyward. Right hand—the one wearing brass—comes across in a hook that catches his jaw with a sound I feel through my knuckles.
He drops.
One.
Counting keeps the rage from scattering.
One body. One breath. One problem at a time.
Two more rush from the machine shop.
I roll under the first sight line and come up fast, taking the nearest guard by the ankles and putting him down hard. The second fires. The shot grazes my forearm in a hot stripe that makes the room sharpen instead of blur.
Pain is useful. It tells me where I am.
I catch him by the throat and pin him to the boiler.
“Second floor,” he gasps.
I release him.
Two.
Three.
The stairs are narrow and slick. I take them three at a time.
At the landing, two guards outside a lit door open fire. The first bullet punches into the wall beside my head. Plaster dust ghosts across the black glass eyes of my mask. I shoulder-charge a locker and use it as a moving shield, metal screaming against the floor as I drive forward.
Solar plexus.
Headbutt.
The first guard folds.
The second tries to swing his rifle around, but fear makes men clumsy. I grab his tactical vest and introduce his skull to the wall.
Four.
Five.
The door is reinforced oak. I put my boot through the center of it.
Sokolov is backed against the window, silver pistol in one hand, phone in the other. Not calling for help. Recording. Men like him always want proof they survived something.
On the desk behind him are a thick leather ledger and a stack of photographs.
Young women.
Not women.
Girls.
Scholarship files. Dorm assignments. Printed schedules. Faces clipped to lives the Order had already decided were disposable.
Then I see one photograph near the edge of the desk, half buried beneath the others.
Dark hair.
Small shoulders.
A face close enough to hers that my mind does something violent with it.
For one second, it is Amy. Not almost. Not similar.
Her.
The red light in the room deepens until everything looks soaked in it.
“You,” I say, and the word comes out low through the mask. Wrong. Inhuman. “You prey on girls.”
Sokolov’s eyes flick to the photographs, then back to me. For half a second, he looks offended. Not ashamed. Offended.
“They’re not girls,” he spits. “They’re leverage. The Order taught us that.”
The room goes quiet inside my head.
Beautifully quiet.
“No,” I say. “The Order gave you a system. You chose what to do with it.”
He fires.
The bullet grazes my shoulder and spins me half a step.
I don’t fall.
I look at the wound, then back at him.
“My turn.”
He tries to fire again, but I’m already there. I take the gun and crush his wrist around it until his mouth opens on a sound that fogs the eyes of my mask.
“You think money makes you a god?” My voice shakes with the effort of restraint.
“You’re meat, Sokolov. Meat with an expiration date.”
“Don’t kill him,” Valen says from the doorway. “Not yet. The ledger.”
I hold Sokolov’s gaze one final second.
I want him to feel it.
The thing behind my eyes.
The thing they locked in a room for years and still thought they could aim.
Then I drive my fist into his chest and throw him backward across the desk. The window shatters behind him. Glass rains down in bright, vicious pieces, and he lands hard among the broken tumbler, the scattered files, and all those stolen faces.
He screams.
I let him.
Valen crosses the room and collects the ledger.
I take the photographs. All of them. Including the one that belongs to Amy in my head. I tuck them inside my hoodie, away from the wound in my shoulder, where the blood can’t ruin the edges.
“Where are you going?” Valen asks.
“To wait.” I turn toward the broken window, toward the cold air cutting into the room. “We have a meeting to catch.”
I walk out, down the stairs, and step onto the gravel.
The moon is waiting above the warehouse, pale and indifferent. My mother used to stand under moonlight, as if it could cleanse what daylight exposed.
I know better now.
The Order is behind this.
There’s always a meeting after we finish.
Of course, I’m never invited.
Tonight, I will be.