Something is wrong.
I inch closer to the glass, straining to hear what she is saying. A thought is fluttering in the back of my mind, an idea I can’t quite hold on to. There’s something familiar about the lab tech, about the way she keeps using her hands, gesturing emphatically as she points the doctor out into the hall. He shakes his head, removes his gloves, and balls them up into his pocket. He barks a short command before striding out of the procedural room. One of the lab techs scurries after him.
Thomas Fineman is pushing his way to the door that gives entry to the lab. Julian is pale, and even from here I can tell that he is sweating. His voice is higher than normal, strained.
“What’s going on?” His voice floats up to me. “Someone tell me what’s happening.”
The lab tech with the braid has moved across the room and is opening the door for Thomas Fineman. She reaches into her lab coat as he bursts into the room, red-faced.
And just when the idea breaks, washes over me—the braid, the hands, Raven—there is a single explosion, a cracking noise, and Thomas Fineman’s mouth falls open, and he teeters backward and slumps to the ground as red petals of blood bloom outward across his shirt front.
For a moment, everything seems to freeze: Thomas Fineman, splayed on the ground like a rag doll; Julian, white-faced on the table; the journalist with the camera still raised to his eye; the priest in the corner; the regulators next to Julian, weapons still strapped to their belts; Raven holding a gun.
Flash.
The lab tech, the real one, screams.
And everything is chaos.
More gunshots, ricocheting around the room. The regulators are screaming, “Down! Get down!”
Crack. A bullet lodges in the thick glass directly above my head, and from it a web of fissures begins to grow. That’s all I need. I grab a chair from behind me and swing it, hard, in an arc, praying that Julian has his head down.
The sound is tremendous, and for a split second everything is silent again except for the cascade of glass, a sharp-pointed rain. Then I vault over the concrete wall and drop to the floor below me. Glass crunches under my sneakers as I land, off balance, tipping down onto one hand to steady myself, which comes up smeared with blood.
Raven is a blur of motion. She twists her body out of reach of a regulator, doubles back, cracks down hard on his knee with the butt of her gun. As he bends forward, she plants a foot in his back and pushes: a crack as his head collides with the metal sink. And she is already turning toward the room that contains Fineman’s bodyguards, shoving a small metal scalpel into the keyhole of the door, jamming it. She wedges a metal rolling tray in front of the door for good measure. Medical instruments scatter everywhere as they push, shouting, tilting the table several inches. But the door won’t open, at least not just yet.
I’m ten feet from Julian—shouting, gunshots, and now an alarm is wailing, shrieking—then five feet, then next to him, grabbing his arms, his shoulders, wanting simply to feel him, to make sure he’s real.
“Lena!” He has been struggling with the handcuff that keeps one of his wrists clipped to the table, trying to pry it off. Now he looks up, eyes bright, shining, blue as sky. “What are you—”
“No time,” I tell him. “Stay low.”
I sprint toward the regulator still slumped by the sinks. Dimly, I am aware of shouting, and Raven still turning, spinning, ducking—from a distance, she might be dancing—and muffled explosions. The journalist is gone; he must have run.
The regulator is barely conscious. I kneel down and slice off his belt, quick, then grab the keys and sprint back toward the table. My right palm is wet with blood, but I can barely feel the pain. It takes me two tries to fit the key in the lock on the handcuffs; then I do, and Julian pulls his wrist free of the table, and draws me toward him.
“You came,” he says.
“Of course,” I say.
Then Raven is next to us. “Time to move.”
A minute, maybe less, and Thomas Fineman is dead, and the room is chaos, and we are free.
We sprint through the antechamber just as there is a shuddering, tinny crash, a clattering of metal, and a crescendo of shouts—the bodyguards must have gotten out. Then we duck into the hall, where the alarms are blaring and already we can hear pounding feet from the stairwell.