The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

holding it, he turned to the others. He saw more relief than revulsion in their eyes. He tested the knife’s blade on the bind that still hung from his left wrist. It did nothing. It would take heavy-duty cutters to free Paige and the rest. He searched the guards’ bodies for a pair of them, but came up empty. And just as he finished, the first guard’s cell phone rang.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
    And rang. And rang. Travis looked at Paige. She looked back, eyes wide, unsure for a second. Then very sure.
    “There’s no time to free us,” she said. “Take my backpack and get to the surface through the elevator shaft. Use my phone to call for—”
    He shook his head, moving toward her and the others, the guard’s phone still ringing behind him. “There’s gotta be a way to get you guys free—”
    “Listen to me,” she said. “They’ll be here in sixty seconds. Take the pack. Go to the elevator, press the call button three times, then hold it for a five-count. The doors will open on the empty shaft.”
    “Ten of us against them, he said, we can double the guards’ rifles and ammo—”
    “And Pilgrim will turn on the gas again,” she said.
    He had no counter for that.
    She was right.
    Shit.
    He felt every good option break off and fall away, like pieces of blacktop over a washed-out cavity in the soil.
    “They blew the roof off the elevator shaft when they came in,” Paige said. “You can get all the way out. You’ll see the inset ladder when you open the doors. When you reach the surface, call the ninth number on my phone’s list. By then, you’ll understand why.”
    He stared at her. Stared at the others, too. They looked back at him, almost as lost as the dead that lined the wall.
    He had to leave them. It wasn’t even a choice. That didn’t take away the guilt, though.
    The crucial seconds were racing by. He shook the trance and looked down at his still bleeding right hand. The blood trail would give him away. He stooped and grabbed the Medic from where he’d dropped it. Held it in his left hand. Aimed it at his right, the way Paige had aimed it at the wounded man in Zurich.
    He pulled the trigger, and found out he’d been wrong a few minutes earlier when carving his hand with the metal loop. That hadn’t been the limit to how bad pain could be. Not even close.
    His breath rushed out. The edges of his vision darkened. He held on. Stayed on his feet. Looked down at his hand as the pain faded. The thing hadn’t fixed him perfectly—skin and muscle still hung in strips—but the wounds had hardened over, as if cauterized without any sign of being burned.
    He grabbed the backpack, shouldered it and turned to the others.
    “Ninth number on my phone,” Paige said again. “And don’t get killed.”
    Travis managed a smile. No more seconds to burn. He burned one anyway. Knelt and kissed her. Soft, intense, fast. Then he stood, looked at her for another half second, and ran from the room, grabbing one of the guards’ rifles as he went.
    As he reached the elevator doors, he saw the stairwell door next to them shudder. Some other door in the stairwell, high above or below, had just been opened. They were coming.
    Three presses of the button, then hold for a five-count. He reached to do it, then stopped.
    Fifty feet away, Paige’s office door stood open. On her desk, where he’d left it yesterday, was the black case containing the transparency suit.
    Twenty seconds to reach it and come back to this spot. None to spare thinking about it. He sprinted for the office. Through the open door. Grabbed the case, turned, ran hell-bent for the elevators again. Three presses. Hold for five. Those five seconds felt like minutes.
    The elevator doors parted on darkness, with faint light coming down from high above. He saw the elevator cab just a few stories below, its roof a mess of piled cable. Its brakes must have stopped it against the wall. To his left he saw the inset ladder. He wedged the black plastic case into his waistband and stepped to the rungs.
    As he climbed, he saw that Paige had been right. The top of the shaft had been blown away, revealing a patch of deep violet sky with a few stars visible in it. That opening was ten stories above. Even as he considered the impossibility of reaching the top before Pilgrim’s people arrived and saw the elevator doors standing open, he felt the ladder rungs vibrate in his hands. A moment later he heard the deep clatter of their footsteps descending past