She was clawing at the gurney restraints, icy blue eyes wide with manic, trapped-animal terror. She saw Tedmond and saw the silhouette of a man who looked hauntingly like the woman she’d been imprisoned beside, and her mouth opened in a silent scream."Hugo—the code!" Tedmond roared, the sweet gas beginning to blur the edges of his vision."I’m trying! The terminal’s slaved to the Spire!" Hugo’s fingers flew across the keypad, bruises dark under the flashing emergency strobes. "They’ve locked the local override!""Thomas! Albert!" Lottie shouted into her comms, her knees dipping as the gas thickened. "We’re at the door! Sorsha has the lockout!""Working on it," Albert’s growl came back, faint but steady. "Clara has a biometric bypass. If you can get her to touch the glass from the inside, the pressure sensor might trip the emergency release."Tedmond’s gaze snapped back to Clara.She was panicking.And they had less than three minutes.Clara’s fingers were bloody from clawing at the

“Clara!” Tedmond roared, reaching the base of the shaft.The elevator car hadn’t merely settled.A secondary ceiling collapse had dumped a fresh mound of concrete slabs and rebar directly onto the crumpled floor.Clara wasn’t in the hallway.She was still in the rubble, buried beneath the new fall.Tedmond threw himself at the debris.He didn’t use the crowbar. He used his bare hands.‘I didn’t bring her out of that chamber just to let the building finish the job,’ he thought, fingernails tearing as he heaved a fifty-pound slab of masonry aside. ‘Not another body. Not today.’“Lottie, stay with Molly and Hugo! Keep the light on the corridor!” he barked over his shoulder.“Tedmond, the timer!” Lottie shouted back.Her heart lodged in her throat as she hugged Molly close. The girl was hyperventilating, small hands clutching Lottie’s tactical vest.‘Please let him find her,’ Lottie prayed silently. ‘If we lose Clara now, after everything—’“I’ve got a hand!” Tedmond growled.Through the

Thousands of miles away, in a room lit only by the cold glow of monitors, Thomas was losing his mind.His fingers flew across the keyboard, but the screens were a chaotic mess of flatlines and flashing SIGNAL LOST warnings.“I can’t find them! Albert, I can’t find them!” Thomas’s voice cracked with raw panic. “The transponders snapped off when the tail blew. One second, they were at thirty thousand feet, and the next—nothing! They’re just gone!”Albert didn’t respond. He sat perfectly still, face drained of color, staring at the last known GPS coordinate. He looked like a man watching the world end in real-time.“Albert! Say something!” Thomas slammed his fist onto the desk. “What was the last thing Marek said? Did he have a chute? Is Tedmond awake?”Slowly, Albert turned his head. The calculated mask he usually wore was shattered. His eyes were bloodshot, his jaw clenched so tightly the bone looked ready to snap. He didn’t look like a professional anymore; he looked like a man pushed

A violent cough split the forest.“Kh—kgh!”A voice followed, raw and shredded. “Damn it…”The moonlight shifted, cutting through the dense canopy to reveal a pale, trembling midriff.Lottie lay sprawled in a bed of crushed ferns and jagged stones. Her shirt had been shredded and shoved up during the fall, exposing her belly, and the gruesome sight of a thick, jagged twig protruding from the soft flesh just above her hip.She reached down, her fingers slick with cold rain and warm blood. Her hands shook violently as she gripped the wood.“Son of a… mother… god!” she hissed through gritted teeth.She drew a ragged breath, her vision swimming with black spots.With a guttural grunt of pure agony, she yanked.“AAAGH! F—fuck!”The twig came free with a sickening, wet squelch.Lottie’s head slammed back into the mud, her body arching in a spasm of raw pain. She tossed the blood-stained wood into the darkness, her chest heaving as she fought to keep from blacking out.As the moonlight fin

Molly looked down at her shoulder as if seeing it for the first time. She gave a small, weary shrug, her eyes softening as they met his."I'm used to it, Hugo," she said quietly, her voice small in the vast, dark woods. "It… it does hurt. But not as much as seeing you wake up. That hurt a lot more, thinking you were gone."A lump formed in Hugo’s throat. He reached out, gently taking her hand and squeezing it, despite the raw ache in his own fingers."You're too tough for your own good, you know that?" he murmured."One of us has to be," she whispered, leaning her head against his shoulder for a fleeting moment.The fragile calm shattered with a low, distant sound.THOOM.Both of them looked up. Through the thick branches to the west, a brilliant streak of bleeding red tore through the sky, exploding into a crimson star that stained the fog pink."A flare," Hugo whispered, jaw tightening. "That's Lottie's signature. She's alive.""But if we can see it," Molly said, voice trembling as