The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

his slow turn. And then he stopped. He was looking down the entry hall toward the outer corridor—and the unseen stairwell beyond.
    He thought about it. It made sense. It was all that made sense, really.
    He turned again and studied the suite, no longer envisioning its alternate form. He looked across the living room, through the doorways on the far wall, toward the distant end of the residence.
    The point furthest from the stairwell.
    He headed for it, waving his men to him as he went. They fell in behind him, weapons ready. Fifteen seconds later they reached the place—a sitting room with wicker furniture and bright yellow paint. It had thick canvas drapes—pulled back at the moment.
    Finn pulled his FLIR headset up and secured it over his eyes. His men did the same. He raised the cylinder. He put his finger to the on button.
    And then he withdrew it. Something obvious had occurred to him.
    “Shut the drapes,” he said. “And kill the lights.”
    Travis waited. The rain had soaked through his shirt. The night was probably sixty degrees, but the dampness made it feel a lot colder.
    He continued to sweep his eyes across the darkness. It was hard to say how long he’d been kneeling here. Three or four minutes, at least. Paige and Bethany should be most of the way down the building by now.
    Travis cocked his head. He’d heard something. The sound was distant, keening, rising and falling. Just discernible in the rain. It reminded him of the wolves in the ruins of D.C., but the pitch was higher. Coyotes, maybe. Or simply the wind playing through the girders.
    Paige kept count of the floors as she and Bethany descended. Garner’s suite had been on the thirtieth. They’d come down twenty-three flights from there.
    The going was harder than she’d imagined. The metal treads were slick in the rain, and on some flights the handrail was missing. She tried to remember what the stairwell had looked like in daylight on their way up. Tried to recall any places where the landing was buckled or compromised in any way. She didn’t think she’d seen anything like that—it should have stuck with her if she had—but she couldn’t shake the sense that there was something. Something she’d noticed on the ascent. Something that hadn’t mattered then, but might matter now, in the dark.
    Travis had discounted the keening sound—what little of it he could hear—even though something about it troubled him.
    Now he heard something else. Very faint, at first. A kind of drumming. It might have been only the rain intensifying—but he felt no change in it on his skin.
    Then the sound swelled by a tiny degree, and he recognized it.
    And he understood that he was in trouble.
    Paige was stepping onto the fifth floor when it happened. The moment her foot came down, she remembered exactly what she’d been trying to think of, and why it did matter—not because of the darkness, but because of the rain.
    It was a clump of maple leaves, still attached by their stems to a narrow twig. Lying there curled and damp in the afternoon light, they’d been harmless. Something to step over and forget within a few seconds.
    Plastered flat now against the smooth bars of the gridwork, the clump might as well have been an oil slick.
    Paige’s leading foot hit it, coming down hard off the bottom step, all of her weight on it in the instant before it went out from under her.
    Her arms shot down to break her fall against the steel treads—it was that or break her skull—and she was on her ass before she realized what she’d done.
    “Paige?” Bethany said.
    “Fuck!” she hissed—she just managed to keep it from being a scream.
    She threw herself forward, away from the stairs and out across the blind void of the fifth floor, following the sound of rolling metal on metal.
    The cylinder.
    Rolling away from her, fast as hell.
    Toward the edge.
    The drumming was the sound of helicopter rotors. And the high, rising-falling tones were police sirens.
    Still down on one knee, Travis spun hard toward the sound-source, swinging the Remington around with him. Too late. A hand gripped the weapon’s barrel in the darkness and shoved it upward, and then something else—probably a silencer—slammed into his temple. He dropped. Landed facedown on the grid flooring. Just holding on to consciousness.
    Paige scrambled forward on all fours—there wasn’t time to get up on her feet. All visual reference was gone. There was only the steel grid beneath her, and