2026-10-19 20:44:42
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CHAPTER 26: The Panic Tunnel
I took the stairs two at a time, and Jax swore and came up behind me."Vance, wait. Vance!"I didn't wait. The shot was still ringing in my ears, flat and final, and with every step I told myself it hadn't been her. It could have been a guard. It could have been Marcus firing at the broken dome to scare us. It could have been anybody. I knew exactly how that sounded, and I kept climbing anyway.At the top I put my shoulder to the service door and went through into the lobby.It looked like a place where something had died. Foam had dried in gray crusts across the marble, and glass from the dome lay everywhere in bright fans. Two of the elite guards were down near the counter and one sat against a pillar holding his jaw. Captain Reyes lay flat on his back beside the stairs, out cold, his rifle kicked halfway across the floor. Whatever had happened up here in the last two minutes, the Shield Bearers had been busy.A guard I hadn't seen swung up from behind the teller counter with his ri
CHAPTER 25: Back Through the Door
I got as far as the third landing."Keep moving," Valerie said, behind me. "They'll be down the stairs in forty seconds."I stopped. My legs had simply stopped. I stood on the cold concrete with the drives clinking in my pockets, one hand braced against the wall, and I could not make them go any farther."Leo." Jax's voice. "Come on.""She's up there.""I know.""He's got a gun to her head.""I know that too." He turned me around by the shoulders, not roughly. I could just see his face in the dim emergency light, his helmet tucked under one arm. There was blood in his short dark hair. "Listen to me. I've done this longer than you. You can't beat twelve elite guards and Marcus Vance with four of us and nothing but flashbangs. If we go back through that door, we all die, and he keeps the money, and she dies anyway. That's the math.""I don't care about the math.""You will." He said it without unkindness. "In about ten minutes, when you're safe, you'll care a great deal."Nobody spoke f
CHAPTER 24: Glass
Smoke swallowed everything.I hit the floor before I knew I'd moved. Rifles opened up around me, a crackling roar, rounds spanging off the marble and pinging off the vault door, and the dome above us showered down in jagged panes that rang as they hit. I covered my head with both arms and felt shards bounce off my back."Leo!" Sienna's voice, somewhere to my left. "Leo, stay down!"Three dark shapes dropped through the broken dome on lines that sang in the dark. They hit the lobby floor in the middle of the smoke, and the nearest guard went flying backward before he'd finished turning around. Blue light flared in the haze, a long bright crest across a chest plate."Shield Bearers," somebody screamed. "They're in the lobby!""Jax!" I yelled."Stay low, kid!" Jax's metallic voice rolled across the room. "We've got this!"I'd never seen them fight up close in the open. On the boat I'd been half dead on my back. Now I watched Mason plow into the line of guards with both riot shields locke
CHAPTER 23: Mr Vance Receives Visitors
For a moment nobody breathed. The foam hissed softly off the marble as it dried, and a single pane of glass, late to the party, let go of the dome and shattered somewhere far across the floor.He looked exactly as I remembered.That was the strange part. Six months of imagining him as something larger, a monster, a storm, and here he was, just a tall man with perfectly cut gray hair and cold gray eyes and a scarf tucked neatly into his coat. There was a fleck of foam on his lapel. He flicked it off with one gloved finger, as if it were an insult."Marcus," I said."Leo." He smiled his old smile, the small cruel one he used on waiters. "You've lost weight. They aren't feeding you on that boat?"The foam had thinned to a low drifting haze. Around us the elite guards had fanned into a loose half circle, rifles raised, but none of them fired. Marcus walked into the middle of the lobby and stopped, ten feet away, with the pistol steady."I was upstairs when the alarm sounded," he said, con
CHAPTER 22: Foam
"Hands where I can see them."The voice came from the man at the front of the fan, a lean, hard faced guard with a gray crew cut and a captain's insignia on his collar. He wasn't shouting. He didn't need to.I stood in the vault doorway with the keycard still in my hand. Behind me, in the little steel room, the terminal beeped steadily as it worked through the third freeze. I tried not to look back at it."We're not armed," I said."I'll be the judge of that." He took a step forward. "Step away from the vault, Mr. Vance. Slowly."I didn't move. Beside me Sienna slid her hand into her coat, and I saw the captain's rifle swing to cover her.Reyes didn't look like a man who got surprised easily. His uniform was spotless, his boots polished, and he held his rifle like a tool he respected. I'd seen men like him standing behind my uncle at the funeral, and it was only now, with twelve of them in a half circle around me, that I understood why Marcus had always kept them close. They didn't ha
CHAPTER 21: Clearance
The alarm was a wall of noise.White strobes went off in the dome, the mezzanine, the corridors, and the floor lit up under my socks with a pattern of red grids. I spun around. The guard on the stool had dropped his phone and was fumbling for his radio, his mouth already open."It's the handle," Sienna shouted over the sirens. "It's wired! I didn't know!""Can you stop it?""I can try." She was already moving. She sprinted for the teller counter and vaulted it in one motion, boots thudding, and slid across to a computer terminal near the end.The guard was shouting into his radio now. "Intruders in the lobby, repeat, intruders in the main lobby! I need backup now!"I ran at him. I'm not proud of it. I hit him with my shoulder and the two of us went down hard, the radio skidding across the marble. He was bigger than me, and he swung a fist that glanced off my cheekbone and rang in my skull. I got a knee into his stomach and rolled off, wheezing, my ribs screaming under their bandage."
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