VANGUARD OF THE BAY

CHAPTER 9: Trapped in the Shaft

Glass came down like ice across the dashboard as rounds tore through the engine hood.

The driver slumped over the wheel without a sound. Outside, shadowy figures in tactical gear moved through the smoke, closing in on the crashed SUV, their silhouettes cutting sharp lines against the burning wreckage down the street.

"Syndicate raiders." Sienna's cold composure snapped into something sharper, more alert, all business now. "Marcus didn't tell me he ordered an ambush."

"Or he did, and he just didn't tell you because he doesn't trust you either." The words came out harsher than I meant, but I was too rattled to soften them, glass still raining down around us from the shattered windows.

"That's because he didn't order it for you. He ordered it for me." I had to shout over the gunfire. "He wants us both dead so there are no loose ends!"

"Hold this." She shoved an emergency security card into my hands and kicked the door open, glass crunching under her boot.

She fired four rapid stun shots through the gap, dropping two mercenaries before they could raise their weapons, her aim precise even in the chaos. A third round from somewhere down the block took a chunk out of the doorframe an inch from my head, and I felt the sting of concrete splinters across my cheek before I even registered ducking.

"Out, now!" She grabbed my arm and hauled me out into the rain, my ribs screaming at the sudden movement.

We ran through the smoke toward a corporate parking garage. Bullets chipped the concrete pillars around us, spraying dust into our eyes, close enough that I felt one crack past my ear. Somewhere behind us a car alarm had started wailing, uselessly, the sound almost comforting in how ordinary it was against everything else happening on that street.

We ducked inside the service entrance and Sienna slammed the steel fire door shut, sliding a security bar across the handle, her hands moving fast despite the shake I could see in them now. For a second we just stood there, breathing hard, the sound of gunfire muffled but not gone on the other side of the steel.

"That won't hold them long." I clutched my ribs, each breath a fresh stab of pain. "They'll have breaching charges."

"This way." She took the lead down a narrow corridor toward a service elevator, her heels clicking sharp against the concrete despite everything. The corridor smelled of motor oil and old cigarette smoke, rows of employee lockers lining one wall, half of them hanging open and empty like whoever worked this garage had left in a hurry a long time ago. A faded shift schedule was still taped to one locker door, names and hours for a crew that clearly hadn't clocked in for years.

She hit the call button. The display flashed red: SYSTEM ERROR, EMERGENCY BLACKOUT.

"The explosion killed power to this whole block." She kicked the doors in frustration, the metal barely denting.

A boom echoed from the corridor behind us. The fire door buckled inward under a breaching charge. Voices shouted through the smoke, closer now than I liked. I counted at least four of them by the footsteps alone, spreading out to search the corridor room by room, methodical in a way that told me these weren't the same panicked mercenaries from the boat. These were professionals.

"In here." I pulled her toward a manual access hatch beside the elevator shaft, my fingers scrabbling at the rusted latch.

I wrenched the iron lever down. The hatch popped open onto a dark shaft with a ladder running up the concrete wall, cold air rushing out to meet us.

"Go. Up." I shoved her toward it.

She didn't argue, climbing fast. I followed and pulled the hatch shut behind me just as boots rounded the corner into the corridor, close enough that I heard them shout when they found the empty room.

The lock clicked. Darkness swallowed us both.

The only sound was our breathing and, far below, the muffled search continuing through the hallway, boots on concrete, a voice barking orders I couldn't make out. My ribs throbbed in time with my pulse, a steady ugly rhythm that made it hard to think about anything except the next handhold, the next breath, the next few feet of ladder between us and whatever came next.

"Are you hit?" I whispered, one hand on the cold ladder rung below her boots, close enough to feel her breathing steady out by degrees.

"I'm fine." A slight tremor ran under her voice. "Your uncle. He told me he was bringing order back to the city. That's what he always says. Order."

"And you believed him."

"For a while." A pause, long enough that I almost thought she wouldn't finish the thought. "It's a good word, order. It sounds like safety until you realize whose order it actually protects."

"Marcus only cares about himself, Sienna." I leaned my forehead against the steel, exhaustion pulling at me harder than I wanted to admit. "He used my father, he used me, and he's using you."

"You keep saying that like it's supposed to hurt less the more times I hear it." There was no anger in her voice, just a flatness that somehow felt worse than anger would have. "I've known for a while, Leo. Knowing doesn't get you out. It just makes the staying feel worse."

Silence sat in the dark for a long moment, long enough that I started to wonder if she'd heard me at all. Then metal scraped against metal somewhere below us.

A red laser flickered through the cracks of the lower hatch.

"They're cutting through," she whispered. "We keep moving."

My arms had gone past aching into something closer to numb, the kind of tired that made every next handhold a decision instead of a reflex.

We climbed until we reached the fourth-level landing, my arms shaking with the effort by the time we got there, my fingers gone numb from gripping cold steel rungs slick with condensation. Sienna felt around in the dark for the release handle.

"Found it." She pulled the bar down.

The hatch creaked open, spilling amber emergency light into the shaft. As she reached up to pull herself through, something clicked above her head, a small sound that didn't belong.

I looked up.

A mercenary stood on the landing, looking down into the hatch with a grenade in his hand, pin already pulled.

For one endless second I saw the whole thing happen before it happened, the way you sometimes do right before something terrible, every possible outcome running through my head at once and none of them good.