Chapter 143
“I’m going to destroy it,” Charlotte said.
The words came out level and without drama, the way she said most things that mattered. She was looking at the reinforced door at the end of the corridor instead of at Sophia because looking at Sophia would make this harder than it already was.
“The depot. All of it. If we can trigger an explosion, it will take out the building and everything they’ve stored here. It cripples their supply chain for months.”
“Okay. I understand.”
Charlotte turned to her daughter, who stood beside her in a blue dress stained with Voronov’s dried blood. The calm expression on her young face was unnervingly composed, as if she carried the weight of the world, revealing a maturity far beyond her years.
“Not okay,” Charlotte said. “You’re going through the ventilation duct. Now. I’ll meet you at the campsite with the horses. If I’m not there by dawn, you ride for Golden and find the settlement.”
“I’m not leaving without you.”
“Sophia…”
“No. You didn’t leave me, and I’m not leaving you. If you’re blowing this place up, I’m helping you blow it up, and then we’re both walking out together.”
The alarms wailed around them. Somewhere above, glass broke.
A voice shouted in Russian, and boots moved through corridors with the organized urgency of men responding to multiple crises at once.
Sophia met her gaze without flinching, and that look told Charlotte everything she needed to know about how the previous days had changed her.
Maybe it was the previous two months or the collapse itself that had turned all of them into people their former selves wouldn’t recognize.
“Fine,” Charlotte said. “Stay behind me. Do exactly what I say.”
They moved to the door of the depot. Charlotte swiped the keycard.
The lock disengaged, and the heavy door swung inward on well-oiled hinges into the room she had left hours earlier.
Nothing had changed. In the harsh light of the single bulb, the inventory of an occupation’s ambition filled a concrete room beneath a converted school.
The scale of it was even more apparent as Charlotte looked at it with intent rather than in reconnaissance.
She moved to the nearest crate. The stenciled Cyrillic identified it as demolition charges, the kind used for structural work or, in a war, to bring buildings down. She pried the lid open with the knife. Inside, packed in foam and paper, were blocks of something that looked like clay but wasn’t.
“These are shaped charges,” she said. “If we can rig a chain reaction, set the fuel off first, then the explosives…”
She was thinking aloud, mapping the sequence and calculating distances and timing with the focused efficiency of someone who had spent months surviving by understanding exactly how things worked and how they could be made to fail.
Then she heard a sound from the doorway.
She turned with the knife ready. Mason stood in the doorway.
Jack was beside him with his ears forward.
The boy was dressed in the clothes he had worn at the campsite, and his face carried held stillness.
Charlotte had come to recognize it as his version of courage.
It wasn’t the absence of fear. It was the decision to act despite it.
For three seconds, nobody moved. The alarms screamed.
The single bulb buzzed overhead. The crates of explosives waited in their rows, and in the doorway stood an eight-year-old boy with a dog at his feet.
“What are you doing here? I told you to stay at the campsite. If I wasn’t back by noon…”
“I followed the people coming out of the duct,” Mason said. “They said you were inside. I came through with the last group. Jack found the way down.”
He had ignored her instructions, followed the escaped prisoners through the ventilation system, navigated a facility full of armed soldiers, and found his way to the basement, where his adoptive mother was standing in a room full of explosives, preparing to destroy herself along with the building.
Charlotte crossed the room and dropped to one knee in front of him.
Her hands found his shoulders, and she held him with a grip that was probably too tight and that she couldn’t make gentler because the alternative was shaking.
“You can’t be here,” she said. “Do you understand what’s happening?
This building is full of soldiers. There are alarms. People are looking for us.
This room could kill everyone in it if something goes wrong. ”
“I know. I understand.”
“Then go back through the duct. Take Sophia with you. I’ll meet you at the horses.”
“No. We’re not leaving.”
Charlotte gazed back and forth between her children.
Her sixteen-year-old daughter, clad in a bloodstained dress, wore a hardened expression that spoke volumes.
It was clear she had faced unimaginable horrors that night, and there was a fierce determination in her eyes that suggested she was ready for whatever lay ahead.
Mason, only eight but carrying the weight of the world on his small shoulders, rested his hand gently on a dog’s head, his gaze steady in a way that no child should ever have to bear.
She felt a deep sense of dread knowing that neither of them would leave her side.
It was painfully obvious. If she chose to stay and destroy the depot, they would stand by her, no matter the cost. If that building were to come down, they would be caught in the chaos with her.
The choice she had been grappling with had become a heartbreaking dilemma, as their lives had intertwined with hers in that moment.
There was no way she could sacrifice them, not for any structure and not for any war.
With love, Charlotte stood tall, overwhelmed by the wailing alarms surrounding her.
The single light bulb buzzed above them, casting a stark light on the neatly arranged crates of explosives.
In that concrete room beneath an occupied airport, Charlotte found herself wedged between her children, facing a choice that had become a profound, unspeakable responsibility.