The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

in the world before the iris slipped shut.
    She could see two sets of feet and shins coming already. Rounding the chairs. Pivoting. Crossing the open space. The men wouldn’t even need to look through the iris for their targets. They could simply shove their pistols through and start shooting. They couldn’t miss.
    The SIG.
    Where the hell was the backpack? When Paige had tossed it through, she’d been thinking only of getting out of the room fast. She spun, trying to guess where—and how far away—it could have ended up on this side.
    But she saw the SIG the moment she turned. A small hand was gripping it. And centering it on the iris.
    Bethany fired.
    Paige looked in time to see a kneecap, five feet beyond the opening, burst inside its pant leg. A man screamed and fell bodily into view. Not Finn. The guy still had his Beretta, but he wasn’t aiming yet. Bethany’s next shot went right through the bridge of his nose. He flopped forward onto the carpet. The second pair of legs dug in to a hard stop. The man vaulted sideways, just missing Bethany’s next round. It cratered one of the suite’s bulletproof windows instead.
    By then Paige could see Travis getting to his feet. Reaching to help her up. Bethany was rising too, but staying bent at the waist, keeping the SIG positioned to fire again.
    Ten seconds later they settled into a safer position, several yards from the iris at a random angle. The opening looked strange hovering there in the darkness, lighting up the intermittent rain a few feet around it.
    Bethany kept the SIG leveled. Nobody appeared at the opening.
    The next minute went by like ten, and then the iris slipped shut, and there was nothing but the rain and the chill and the darkness of the ruined city.

Chapter Thirty-Nine
    Almost at once the rain provided a form of guidance. They could hear it hissing where it passed through the rusted bars of the steel grid, but somewhere close by it was making another sound. A hard pinging against something solid, resonant.
    The stairs.
    Just as in the office building in D.C., the heavy treads of the stairs in this structure had survived the decades of neglect. The three of them had climbed the full thirty flights earlier in the day.
    Travis stood. “Let’s go.”
    They made their way across the gridwork, stopping a few times to reassess the direction of the pinging. They took careful steps, placing each one tentatively before shifting any weight forward. There were other things than the stairwell that they might encounter. The elevator shaft, for one.
    Travis swept an arm low in front of him. After a moment it hit something rigid. A structural upright. He felt down its length and found the top of the still-sturdy handrail.
    Thirty seconds later they were two floors down. Travis stepped off of the landing and navigated by memory to where he’d left the twelve-gauge, a few yards away. It was still dry, leaning under the intact metal panel. He carried it back to the stairs.
    “Hand me the backpack,” he said.
    He heard it shift in the darkness and then Bethany pushed it into his hands. It contained nothing but shotgun shells now. Bethany was still holding the SIG, and Paige had the cylinder.
    “What are you doing?” Paige said.
    “I’m going back up,” Travis said. “You’re going to keep heading down.”
    “The hell we are. You’re coming with us, or we’re coming with you.”
    “Finn and his people have the other cylinder,” Travis said, “and it’s their only way out of the building. The ground floor probably slammed shut like a bear trap half a second after you smacked Garner. Even the upper stairwells could have building security in them by now. Finn has to assume they do, either way. So his only exit is through the iris, on the top floor. Think of that, along with the fact that he still wants to capture or kill us. What’s his best strategy?”
    Paige was quiet a few seconds. Then she said, “He’ll give us a few minutes to flee, and then come through the iris. That way we’re not right there, shooting at his guys on their way through the bottleneck.”
    “Exactly,” Travis said. “Once they’re past that point, the advantage is all theirs. You saw the goggles around their necks. They can see in the dark and we can’t. If they come through the iris in the next couple minutes, while we’re groping our way down the stairs, they’ll overtake us long before we reach the ground. And they know we can’t use our own cylinder to go