Chapter 8
CHAPTER 8
EXTRACTION
At first, Sal was full of the get-the-fuck-in-there-and-bang-heads-together- until-you-get-them-back sort of suggestions.
“Sal, Sal.” Leif closed his eyes. Bjorn’s hand on his arm stirred the hairs there, but without most of the usual electric punch. “Take a breath. You’re panicking, and if you stop to think, you know that’s not the play here.”
“You have to get them back.”
“We will.”
“Roger is not okay in there.”
“Give him some credit. He’s got more training than Bjorn and me. He’s got his dog in here somewhere. He’s going to be fine.”
“But his guard might?—”
“He won’t hurt him.”
“You don’t know that. I don’t even know that.”
“I do.” Though why Sal thought they would know better than anyone else what one random guard might do twigged his radar, now wasn’t the time to ask. “Listen. You have to be our eyes as much as you can from there, but you have to let us do our job.” Their frantic, less than useful suggestions didn’t bode well for them keeping their head if things really went pear-shaped. “Rog?”
Roger cleared his throat.
“Do that again if you’re listening.”
He did it again.
“And one more time if you heard what that guy said to Kassian about your guard.”
He did.
“So you see?” Leif said. “Roger knows the score. All he has to do is not let the guard get bored.”
“How?”
“Tic-tac-toe. Play catch. It doesn’t matter how. He’s got this covered, don’t you, Rog?”
Roger cleared his throat.
“You see?”
“You need water or somethin’?” Antony asked, his voice low and not unpleasant through Roger’s headpiece.
“Yeah, please. That’d be awesome.”
“Sure, sure, little dude.”
“Okay,” Leif said, moving on from Roger, who seemed to be handling things fine for now. “So, next. We have to get in there, Sal. That’s going to be the sticky bit.”
“Gimme my sweats,” Bjorn said.
“What?”
“I can’t go in there half-mast. I need out of these jeans. They’re cramping my style.”
“Half-mast?” Leif muttered. “Really?”
Bjorn grinned.
“Hopeless,” Leif said, but shucked his pack so Bjorn could change.
“I can track Kassian,” Sal said. “He’s gone down a south stairwell to the main floor, and now it looks like he’s headed for the elevators. I’ll let you know where he ends up.” They sounded calmer, now.
“How? His earpiece?”
Sal grunted. “As for you two, that’ll be trickier. You’ll have to just be careful and don’t get caught. Use Bjorn’s electric thingy to circumvent the security, but remember, the more you disable, the less I’ll be able to help.”
“I’m beginning to think Kassian is not the computer genius among us after all.”
“He’s an excellent coder. He speaks fluent computer in many different languages. I speak… spy.”
“How’s that, then?”
“I think if you try that storage room, you’ll find it has a trap door leading to a tunnel that will get you inside.”
“Won’t a secret tunnel be more likely to be guarded than the main entrance? Due to it being a secret and all that?”
“How secret would it be if they posted guards?”
“Point.”
“They’ll be at the other end, so be careful. Bjorn can handle the electronic issues. Leif, you can handle the human?—”
“Yeah,” Leif cut them off. “I got this.”
Bjorn shot him a startled look.
He shook his head. “Come on.”
Sal was right on the money about the storeroom. Bjorn made short work of the lock, snapping the padlock off in his hand, which had Leif doing a double take.
“Kassian is not the only strong guy here,” he said, voice flat.
“Yeah, but that’s tempered steel.”
“So’m I.”
Roger groaned softly and Sal snorted.
“Remind me to stay on your good side,” Leif said.
“Baby, you are my good side.” Bjorn grinned at him, and his knees gave a little wobble because fuck. That grin.
“Are you in?” Sal’s question brought his mind out of the gutter.
“Yeah. We’re in.”
“There.” Bjorn pointed to a partial square of metal peeking from under a metal box.
“Let me.” Leif eased Bjorn away from the box.
It was heavy. Almost too heavy for him to move, but he’d be damned if he’d let Bjorn do it and risk a massive discharge that might black out half the base. Besides which, it would probably give him second-degree burns on his palms.
He got it shoved against a wall finally, to reveal the trap door Sal had predicted. A metal grate covered a set of stairs leading down.
“You’re scary, Sal. How the hell did you know this was here?”
“Does it look well used?”
“No. It’s rusty as hell, and dark down there. Are you sure about this?”
“Positive.”
“Okay.” He glanced up at Bjorn, who was staring at the grate covering the opening with a frown. “Sal? Can you give us a sec?”
“One minute.”
“Two.”
“I’m timing you.”
“Fair enough.”
There was a click and Leif knew, beyond doubt, that for the next two minutes, he and Bjorn were alone.
“Babe.”
Bjorn glanced up at him.
“You good?”
Bjorn nodded, but his cheeks were pale, his lips white where he had them pursed tight together, his eyes a little bit hollow.
“You don’t have to go down there.”
“Like hell.” His voice was as gruff and gravelly with nerves as Leif had ever heard it. “Not letting you go alone.”
“We don’t have to do this. We could just?—”
Bjorn’s head snapped up. “Leave them?”
“No judgement,” Leif said. “You and me. It’s always been you and me, right?”
“You want to bail?”
“I want to keep you is all. Where you go, I go.”
“We aren’t guys who ditch our friends.”
Leif tried to smile, but it was crooked, he knew. Unstable. “We”—he waved a hand between their chests—“are the only friends we have.”
“Had, right?” Bjorn’s eyebrows drew down. “Kassian…” He pulled in a breath and searched Leif’s face.
Leif’s smile firmed up all on its own, and he stepped into Bjorn’s personal space. “Babe.” He took Bjorn’s face between his palms, knowing this was not something they ever did outside of their apartment, or Bjorn’s need to discharge his overflow of power.
“Been using that word a lot lately.”
“We both have.”
“Yeah.”
Leif pulled Bjorn’s face down so he could touch their foreheads together. He needed to say a thing and maybe he had to not see Bjorn’s reaction to it until it was fully out there. “You’re my best friend.”
“Yeah. ’Course.”
“But we’re more than just best friends, right?”
“’Course,” Bjorn said again, then paused. “Like… brothers?”
“Fuck no!” Leif chuckled and put all the things into it he couldn’t seem to find the words for.
Bjorn’s finger under his chin surprised him, because there was no spark. Just skin and tenderness, and next to no pressure, but he lifted his gaze to Bjorn’s anyway.
“Thank fuck,” Bjorn whispered, “because that would be weird.” And he kissed Leif, making him very glad they were so close, because his knees wobbled and his spine melted, and for a minute, there was nothing in the world, not even air.
Only Bjorn.
They broke apart, eventually, and Bjorn studied him some more. “But we are going to have to talk about Kassian.”
“Um,” Sal said.
Leif huffed. “We’ll talk about Kassian.”
“Can we get him back first?” Sal asked softly. “Maybe before you guys divvy him up like a side of beef?”
“Don’t worry, Sal,” Leif said as he stepped away from Bjorn enough to crouch and prise up the grate with a heavy squeal of metal. “Bjorn and I are very sharsies.”
“We need to stop talking about this,” they muttered. “I’m seriously not paid enough.”
Leif snickered as the world slotted into a more comfortable shape around him.
Bjorn maybe wasn’t so proud of the fact he’d very much needed the affirmation that he wasn’t the only one of the two of them who’d been reevaluating things.
He also wasn’t super keen to admit he let Leif go down the stairs first because it was dark down there.
“Sal?” he asked.
“Yes, sweetie?”
It warmed him a bit to hear the endearment. He’d only ever heard them use it towards Roger. “So, how long and dark is this tunnel?”
“It’s a bit of a network.”
“Shit.” He shivered, wishing he’d brought some long sleeves not lined with power-dampening bullshit. He hated spiders and spiderwebs.
“Deep breaths,” they said in his ear. “I won’t keep you down there long. You’re going to take your first left, and at the end of that corridor, there will be a door to a stairwell. You’ll go all the way up.”
“Then what?” Leif asked.
“You’re at the back of the building. You’ll have to get to the front.”
“Maybe we should do that down here?” Leif asked. “Less chance getting caught?”
“No. This branch of things doesn’t get a lot of use, but other parts do, and you won’t have as many options for ducking out of sight down there. The top floor is all cubicles and office space, but not a lot of people in the back part of the building, where you’ll be.”
“How would you know that?” Leif asked.
“I have sources.”
“Rufus?” Bjorn guessed.
“I would never want to have to tell Kassian his brother was involved.”
Which wasn’t the same as saying Rufus wasn’t involved. Only that Sal wouldn’t want to tell Kassian he was.
Leif made no response to that sleight-of-hand wording, so Bjorn didn’t either.
“Wait,” Bjorn said after a minute. “Did you turn Kassian’s ear off?”
“Can’t risk it interfering with whatever technology dear old General George has him working with.”
“So you cut him off?”
Sal said nothing for a long time. Did Kassian even know he’d been cut off? Did he think they’d all abandoned him?
“Guys?”
“Sal,” Leif said, and there was a bit of chill in Leif’s voice.
“You trust me, right?”
“Do we have a choice?”
“You could have bailed back there. I assume that’s what you wanted privacy to talk about.”
Neither of them responded.
“But you’re still here, and I have to believe it’s not just because you want to fuck your office mate. I know you barely know us, but I swear to you, we’re the good guys.”
“I know,” Leif said at last, as they found the left branch and took it.
And that was good enough for Bjorn. If Leif said he knew, he knew. And Bjorn had faith in his friend. His lover. He puffed up his chest and suddenly the tight walls and dark smells didn’t matter so much. He reached forwards and caught Leif’s hand in his.
A tiny spark zinged between them, briefly lighting the passageway in a ghostly blue haze before dropping it back into mostly dark.
Leif gasped lightly and calm settled in Bjorn’s gut. As long as they were together, this was fine.
The left branch was only a few dozen yards longer than the entrance tunnel, and ended, as Sal had told them it would, in a door at the bottom of a dimly lit stairwell.
“So I should warn you,” Sal said as Leif eased the door open, “people say this stairwell is haunted. That’s why no one uses it.”
“Haunted?” Bjorn asked. “Isn’t that a little?—”
Leif gasped and jolted back into him, face pale and entire body shaking.
“Babe?”
“The more empathic a person is,” Sal whispered, “the more this stairwell tends to affect them.”
Leif pressed his back tight against Bjorn’s chest, and shook.
Bjorn wrapped an arm over his shoulder and held him there. “Sal. What the fuck?”
“They’ve found people dead at the bottom of the stairs,” Sal went on, as though reading from a tour guide script.
“People? As in more than one?”
Sal made a distressed sound.
“Dead how?”
“Broken. Like they fell down the stairs. Violently.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Bjorn growled at them. “How many ghosts are we talking about here?”
“Not sure. A few.”
“And you couldn’t have told us this before now?” Bjorn didn’t necessarily believe in ghosts as in the lost spirits of dead people, but he did know, empirically, that places full of death had an adverse affect on Leif. It had been hell finding an affordable apartment that didn’t give his lover the heebie-jeebies.
“Sorry. I forgot.”
“You forgot.”
“Well. Not that it’s haunted. Just that it affects some people more than others.”
“Because of how it affected you,” Bjorn guessed, putting some of the puzzle pieces together.
“I’ve never?—”
“The only way you could know this place so well is if you’ve been here,” Bjorn said, not giving them the chance to deny it.
Sal was quiet.
Roger cleared his throat and Bjorn remembered he was there. Clearing his throat was his affirmative response.
“Rog,” Sal snapped.
“You’re one of them?” Bjorn asked, beginning to drag Leif back through the door.
“No!” Sal said.
“No,” Leif croaked, and Bjorn stopped. “They were being held here.”
The sound Roger made reminded Bjorn more of a hurt dog than a human.
“Kassian and Rufus and Randalph got me and Roger out,” Sal said. “Kassian from the outside, Rufus and Randalph from the inside. But it cost them. Letting us escape is what got them sent on the mission that—” They pulled in a harsh breath. “We are not leaving Kassian or Roger to these monsters,” Sal said, voice like steel.
“No. Of course not,” Leif agreed. He straightened, pushing away from Bjorn, but taking his hand. “Let’s get this over with.”
It was no surprise to Bjorn how whatever was trapped in that stairwell affected them both. While it sent shivers up and down his spine and felt like the air was slippery on his skin, the worst he could say was that it was unsettling.
Leif shook visibly. His hand in Bjorn’s was white-knuckled and his grip painful. His eyes got big and stayed that way, so Bjorn could see the whites, and he made soft, unhappy whimpering sounds in the back of his throat.
“I am so sorry,” Sal whispered more than once. “Leif, I am so sorry.”
Leif made no response. Bjorn didn’t think him capable of speech. By the time they’d climbed two floors, his shirt was soaked in sweat and his bangs plastered to his forehead.
“He’s not going to make it all the way up,” Bjorn said, eyeing the next landing and the door that would lead them to safety.
“I’m fine,” Leif insisted through clenched teeth.
“You know what this is,” Bjorn said, pulling Leif against his side and reaching for the door handle.
“A trap,” Leif agreed with his thoughts. Sweat trickled down the side of his face and Bjorn kissed it away.
The salty wetness sizzled between his lips and Leif’s skin and he regretted, for a moment, removal of the clothes that let them touch without that eternal barrier.
“A trap,” Leif went on, “for anyone who thinks they might sneak in and mess around in the heads of anyone in this building.”
“Can you do that?” Bjorn asked, startled by the idea, but not as much as maybe he should have been.
“Not hardly.”
“But it does tell us a bit about his power,” Sal said.
“Don’t.” Leif gulped in a breath and pushed away from Bjorn to propel himself up the next flight, away from the door. “Have.” He groaned. “Power.”
Bjorn groaned too, because seeing the pain in Leif’s features was brutal. But Leif probably had the right idea. If they bailed anywhere before the top floor, there was likely security in place to incapacitate someone like Leif, whatever he could or could not do.
When Bjorn joined him on the landing between doors, he glared up at him, blue eyes feverish and wide. “You have to get me up there.”
“This is killing you.”
Leif shook his head. “No. It just hurts like fuck. But you’re good. Just get me up there, and I’ll be fine on the other side.”
He leaned so heavily on Bjorn by the last flight Bjorn was more or less carrying him. He’d already turned the handle at the top when Leif grunted at him to wait.
“Why the fuck?”
But Leif pushed himself free of Bjorn’s hold and turned to stand at the top of the stairs.
“Babe!” Bjorn clamped a hand on his shoulder, terrified he intended to toss himself down.
“Hang on,” Leif said.
“I got you.” Bjorn wrapped both arms around him from behind and buried his face in the crook of Leif’s sweaty neck. “I’ve got you. Always.”
Leif sighed and his body calmed, stopped shaking, and some of the chill began to warm against the exposed skin of Bjorn’s arms.
After a second, Bjorn realized Leif was whispering something. “What? I can’t hear you.”
“He’s not talking to us,” Sal whispered.
“Who?”
“You don’t have to do this,” Leif said a little louder. “You don’t have to stay here.”
“Who?” Bjorn asked again.
The stairwell got deathly cold. Frost formed on the metal railings, a coating of malice and anger that even Bjorn could feel crawling over his skin.
“You tried, babe,” he said, and dragged Leif back from the edge of the step and through the door he opened behind them without even looking. Any humans on the other side he could deal with. Whatever that was in the stairwell was beyond them.
The glass in the door’s window frosted over as the hinges sprang it closed with an echoing, metallic crash.
“Directly to the left of the stairs,” Sal snapped. “There’s an office. Get in.”
Bjorn spun, dragging Leif’s limp form with him, and all but crashed through the indicated door into a small room that might have been an office at some point, but was, at the moment, apparently where old office furniture went to die.
He cracked a shin on the edge of an overturned filing cabinet—the wooden kind that he’d been dreaming about lately—tripped over the wheels of an office chair, and landed heavily on the edge of a desk, barely managing to keep Leif’s dead weight from hitting the floor.
Outside, he heard voices and footsteps approaching, doors opening along the hallway, the sounds getting closer.
“There’s no one here” came a female-sounding voice.
“Protocol,” someone else said. “We check every room.”
The treads and other sounds slowed noticeably as they approached the end of the hallway.
“Come on.” Bjorn hefted Leif into his arms and carefully, now, picked his way through the furniture graveyard. Near the back of the room, a tall pressboard cabinet stood, one door hanging off a hinge, the other having been pulled from the flimsy wood.
Bjorn squeezed them both inside and held his breath.
The door to the room opened.
Light spilled from the hallway across the room, slashing past the crooked slit of the cabinet door. Bjorn closed his eyes.
“I told you,” the softer voice griped. “Can we get the fuck out of here?”
“Why’s the window frosted if there’s no one here?”
“Who the fuck knows? I’m not going to find out.”
There was a pause.
“Look, if someone did try to come up here, we’ll probably find another body at the bottom of the stairs tomorrow.”
“We’re on leave tomorrow.”
“Exactly. Come on.”
Slitting one eye open, Bjorn watched the door to the office swing shut, taking the light with it. Still, Bjorn crouched, eyes once more closed—with relief this time—and let out his held breath.
“You know,” Leif whispered, hoarse and too frail-sounding. “They can still see you even if you can’t see them.”
“Apparently not,” Bjorn muttered, pushing the door open.
The remaining hinge gave, and it clunked to the floor. He caught it before it could topple onto the metal desks stacked one on top of the other against the wall. He remained frozen, one arm cradling Leif in his lap, the other outstretched, hand clamped around the door.
There were no sounds from outside, so finally, finally, he relaxed, eased the door down, and his legs out from under himself to sit on the floor of the cabinet, legs outstretched onto the floor beyond the now-missing door, and Leif cuddled against his chest.
“I really, really thought I was applying to be a janitor,” he whined.
Leif chuckled.
Sal sighed. “Okay. Now for the hard part.”
Bjorn sank back against the back of the cabinet, which gave under his weight, popping off to thunk against the wall. The cabinet itself listed to one side, stopped only by Bjorn’s shoulder because he was still sitting inside it.