Daiyu.
I blinked hard, shaking my head, almost believing it was a hallucination. But she flicked on the lights and her confident stride dispelled any doubt. Tucking her gun away in the holster strapped at her waist, she crouched down. Her touch was light against my shoulder. Gently, she removed the rag from my mouth. I drew a long, shuddering breath.
Her hand hovered above my swollen cheek. “I can’t believe they did this to you,” she said. Her helmet was half-tinted, but I could still catch the hard glint of her eyes.
“Daiyu.” My throat was raw, and the word came as a croak. “What are you doing here?”
She slipped behind me, working on the rope that bound my hands first. “My father returned from abroad today, sooner than expected. I track his whereabouts through his Vox, which he always wears. He arrived at Jin Corp when I was about to leave my internship for the day,” she said in a low voice.
The rope loosened slightly, and sensation flooded back into my arms, tingling my hands—painful but wonderful. I flexed my fingers and for a moment, I felt Daiyu grasping them before the rope slid off. Shaking my arms out, I rubbed my shoulder joint, wincing.
She crouched back down at my feet in front of me, unknotting the rope binding my ankles. “I avoided running into him but was curious when he headed away from the elevators that led to his office. I became even more curious when I saw Da Ge join him.”
I imagined Daiyu sneaking around, tailing her father, but making it look as though she had every right to be where she was—because she was Jin’s daughter.
“I followed them down here and heard enough. I knew my father was capable of questionable choices in his business practices, but”—she gave a rough shake of her head that I could see even with her helmet on—“I had to come back and free you.” She tugged hard at the rope. “There are no blurred lines when it comes to murder. Even my father should know that.” The bitter note of her tone didn’t disguise the hurt and disappointment I heard there.
But he doesn’t care, I thought. Anything to further his own agenda. Did Daiyu just find out tonight that her father was capable of murder?
“He’s ordered people killed before.” It was cruel to say it so bluntly, but she needed to know the truth. Especially now, when Jin Corp was about to blow.
“I had no actual proof before, but now . . . ,” she replied. I barely heard her above the steady drone of the fire alarm. The rope slid off my ankles, and she pulled me gently to my feet.
I swayed, then felt Daiyu beside me, wrapping an arm around my torso, steadying me. Her closeness comforted and disconcerted me all at once.
“Three minutes,” the polite female voice reminded us. “Please exit the building. You have three minutes.”
“Imagine my surprise when my Palm told me my security code had been accessed at the front entrance,” Daiyu said. “I knew it had to be your friends—the ones Da Ge didn’t capture.”
My vision darkened for a moment, barely perceptible in the dim room, and I felt light-headed. She had let me see her code during that personal tour, hadn’t she? Even though Lingyi had already hacked the info. How long had she been tracking our use of it? And why? How much did she know?
I shoved away from her. “You remembered it was me,” I said in a hoarse whisper. Me who had kidnapped her and held her for ransom.
“I knew,” she replied.
Those two words punched like bullets into my chest. And I felt my breath sucked from my lungs, as if I were being bulldozed flat. I would have doubled over if these last months of training, of pretending to be someone I wasn’t—someone smoother, harder, more confident—hadn’t become inextricably tied to me. I had turned into Jason Zhou, was more comfortable as him, than I had ever wanted to be. While I was angsting over lying to Daiyu, she had been playing me all along.
“We have to go.” My tone was firm, not giving away the tumult of emotions that were overwhelming me. “They’re bombing the place.”
“You used the fire alarm to clear the employees out,” she murmured. “Nice.”
“Two minutes,” the polite female voice reminded us.
Once the building was cleared, the bomb would likely go off within a few minutes. I knew that was how Victor had planned it.
“Come on!” I grabbed her hand, because no matter what happened between us, I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself if she didn’t make it out safely.
“I know the nearest exit,” she said and took the lead. “In the upper-level basement.”
We ran together, my heart going double time from desperation, from holding Daiyu’s hand in mine, and the corridor stretched longer in front of my eyes, expanded, as if in some fun-house nightmare.
“Thank you for exiting in a timely manner,” the female voice said above the alarm.
Time was up.
We dashed up one flight of stairs, side by side.
Pummeling against the emergency door on the landing, I pressed the exit bar and slammed against it like a brick wall. Locked. Gods. Flinging her arm out to push me back, Daiyu unholstered her gun. The barrel lit in red and she pulled the trigger. Her arm jerked upward from the explosion of the shot. A neat round hole the size of a fist appeared where the jamb would be. The air was tinged with smoke. I pushed against the bar again just as a deafening boom erupted above us, shaking the building to its core. The exit door wouldn’t give. Another long boom followed immediately after, and Daiyu and I fell into each other. She tucked her head into my shoulder and I wrapped my arms around her, holding her tight against me, the glass of her helmet cold against my cheek.
The ground rumbled beneath our feet as the entire building shifted and groaned, like a monster awakening. My ears rang, even after the building quieted. With one arm still wrapped around Daiyu’s shoulder, I shoved at the door again.
“It’s useless,” Daiyu said. She sounded as if she were speaking to me from the other end of a long tunnel. “Jin Corp’s in lockdown, and these doors are impenetrable. I just got the company-wide message in helmet.”
“We’re trapped, then?”
“No,” she replied. “I know a way out.”
She slipped away from me, and I followed. I watched her straight back as she pushed a door, which opened into the main corridor on the ground floor. The golden ambient lighting I had seen during my tour had dimmed, replaced by red lights that pulsed, casting the wide hallway in a macabre bloody glow, like some horrific scene from The Shining. The fire alarm had ceased, and there was no sound except for our echoing footsteps and the monstrous moaning of the building. A distant ringing still filled my ears.