“Where’s the service entrance? The fire stairs?”
Zach sighed. She was one stubborn piece of work. And, really, what did he give a damn what she did? She wanted to walk down fifty flights of steps? The steps would be lit; there’d be battery-powered emergency lights leading the way, the same as the emergency lights on an airplane. After that she’d be on her own, on the dark streets where she might learn that people weren’t always at their best in situations like this, but again, that was up to her.
He was nobody’s knight gallant. He never had been.
“Do a ninety-degree turn,” he said wearily. “Hang a right, go down the hall, hang another right, go through the dining room, through the breakfast room, into the kitchen. The service door will be dead ahead.”
She swept past him. Went maybe two steps. And stopped.
He smirked.
“A little dark for finding your way through the forest, Gretel?”
Oh God! Very dark. So dark she could only make out occasional lumps and bumps of what had to be furniture.
“Not at all,” she said, and stepped forward, straight into a chair.
“I have medical supplies upstairs, right alongside the candles and flashlights, when you finish destroying yourself.”
His tone was pleasant. Cheerful
Jaimie gritted her teeth, unzipped her shoulder bag, dug through makeup, pens, pencils, a small notebook, Power Bars, breath mints, a tiny tin of aspirin, balled-up tissues, her Kindle, her phone, her iPad, her wallet…
There!
She closed her fist around her keys.
Caleb had given her a tiny LED flashlight the year she’d moved to D.C.
“This way, Diogenes won’t be the only one who searched for an honest man,” he’d said, and she’d laughed, hugged him, clipped the thing onto her key ring and promptly forgotten all about it.
Until now.
Don’t fail me, she thought, and clicked the on-off button.
A narrow, bright, almost adequate beam of light pierced the darkness.
Next time she saw her big brother, she’d have to give him a supersized kiss.
She followed the light down an endless hall, down another hall, through a couple of rooms and into an industrial-size kitchen. The light bounced off acres of shiny stainless steel, vast expanses of ceramic tile, over a door, over a second door.
She tried the first one. It opened onto a pantry.
The second opened onto a hall.
A dark hall and a dimly lit EXIT sign.
She stepped out the door carefully, searched around with the flashlight until it picked up a stairway.
A long, steep, narrow stairway that ended in a right-angle turn.
And a blackness broken by wavering flashes of light.
“Shit,” Zacharias Castelianos said, from just behind her.
“Meaning,” Jaimie said, trying to sound triumphant instead of terrified, “you thought the stairs would be completely dark.”
“Meaning,” he said, “building code requires a battery-powered emergency system, but this one doesn’t seem to be working very well.”