The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

still in his right hand, and dived.
    He passed through the open circle into bright light. He felt the iris’s edges draw sharply inward and slam against one of his shins, and then he was through, both feet clearing the margin. He saw the ground coming up beneath him—not the runway blacktop that’d been there in the present, but a gridwork of paver stones. He kept hold of the gun with one hand, and threw the other downward to break his fall. He hit hard, took half the impact with his hand, then tucked and rolled to let his shoulder take the rest. The move wasn’t graceful, but it worked. He ended up on his back, the MP7 slamming hard onto the pavers but not discharging. Still gripping it, he pitched himself sideways and got up into a crouch, eyes everywhere for any sign of Finn.
    But he couldn’t see anything. The air was thick with black smoke from the just-closed iris. He could make out low, boxy shapes here and there, ten to twenty feet away in several directions. Waist high, they caught the wind and made it swirl, trapping and churning the smoke.
    Travis took a step and heard his foot kick something tiny and metallic. It skipped away over the pavers before he could get a look at it, but he knew by the sound what it was: a bullet cartridge. He glanced down and saw two more beneath him. He stooped and picked one up. Thirty-eight caliber. He pictured Finn, sometime in the last ninety seconds, fumbling rounds into a revolver on this very spot.
    He scanned his surroundings again. Still no sign of Finn, but the smoke was already thinner. The box shapes were resolving. He could see now that they were made of concrete, and were open on top. They were half filled with dirt—planter boxes of some kind, but there was nothing growing in them.
    He couldn’t stay here in the open any longer. He chose a planter at random and sprinted for it, MP7 leveled in case Finn was already hiding there. He passed the first corner: nothing but open space beyond it. He ducked low and made his way down the box’s length, and took the next corner without pause. That side was empty too.
    He advanced on the last obscured face. The smoke was thinning by the second. This kind of cat-and-mouse stuff was all luck when it was one-on-one. A team of four people or more could use tactics, cover each other’s backs, but between single opponents it was almost purely random. Finn would be around this next corner or he wouldn’t. If there, he’d be facing away or he wouldn’t.
    Travis took the corner.
    Finn was there, crouched five feet away, his pistol aimed straight back at Travis.
    For three seconds neither made a move.
    The cylinder lay at Finn’s feet, safely out of the crossfire; Travis saw it without breaking eye contact.
    Travis considered the situation. He could pull the trigger on the guy right now and probably resolve the whole thing. The risk was that, even with half the guy’s head missing, motor reflex could still fire the .38—and probably hit the target, at this range. Travis thought he’d probably take the risk, if it were just his own life on the line. But it wasn’t.
    “The two women who were with me in New York,” Travis said. “They’re still there. They’re stuck in the ruins.” He indicated the cylinder with his eyes. “I need that to get them back. I’m not leaving here without it.”
    Finn’s gun hand remained steady. “That’s not going to happen. If you take this, Garner can still stop me.”
    “Garner’s stopping you as we speak. He knows about Longbow. He knows you’re activating the satellites. He’s on the phone right now setting up raids at all their corporate properties. I imagine one of them will net Audra.”
    Each piece of information seemed to rattle the man more deeply, though Travis thought his reaction was missing something. It looked like unwilling acceptance where surprise might have been.
    “You had to know it was over,” Travis said. “From the moment Paige slapped Garner last night, you were never going to pull it off.”
    Finn shook his head. He took the cylinder in his free hand and moved back two feet, rising to full height as he did. The .38 stayed level.
    Travis stood upright, too. He felt sunlight begin burning his neck through the dissipating smoke. Visibility was better: it was like standing in a thin fog, though the light glared through it everywhere. Travis still couldn’t see beyond the nearest forty feet of paver stones and planter boxes. This place seemed to be a