She raced into the hall, making for the stairwell. Just as she reached it, the elevator doors slid open. Bolting inside, she heard the shouts behind her as she ran up to Level 32. Footsteps pounded from above and below, a staccato beat punctuated by the panicked thrum of her heart. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Of course nothing here burns. She dove through the door for SL-32, no longer trying to hide, just to make it to the generator. Taking precious seconds, she heated the knob to molten, praying that the lock would fuse. Then she ran.
There were soldiers on this level. She could hear them down the hallway, doing a sweep of the rooms. Closing in.
She wasn’t going to make it out. Not from this far down, this deep in the belly of the beast. The realization of it bled through her. But she had no time to mourn. She had to take out that generator. She had to give her father and Gage a chance.
The door was locked. Every damn thing in this base was locked. Riding on temper and desperation, she blew the lock apart, the door flying back on its hinges, warped and blackened. If they didn’t know exactly where she was before, they did now.
Embry raced through, following the conduit pipes down another hall and to the right. And there they were. Not one generator, but a series of five. The drone of them echoed off the concrete walls of the big room. She wouldn’t be able to hear anybody coming. But there was only one way in, one way out.
Positioning herself halfway between the generators and the hallway, Embry dropped her shields and released the fire. Flames spun out from her hands in each direction, flowing like water exactly where she directed it. With one stream she blocked the entrance. Hopefully it would be too hot for the soldiers to approach, and hot enough to melt any bullets before they got to her. The other stream she let build and swell, stretching to encompass all five generators.
The steel began to creak and groan as it expanded. Faintly, beneath the roar of flame, Embry could hear shouting. They’d found her.
Her limbs began to shake as she cranked up the heat. Pain pulsed through her brain from the effort of controlling both streams at differing levels of intensity. Sweat trickled down her brow, evaporating before it reached her chin.
Something popped. At first, Embry thought her fire wall wasn’t keeping the bullets at bay. Then she realized with a series of successive snaps that the rivets on the generators were flying loose and bouncing off the concrete walls. Steam began to billow. Almost there…
With a scream of metal, the first generator blew. She dove to the floor as shrapnel flew through the air. A second and third explosion rocked the base as the next ones exploded. Debris rained down, burning her clothes, slicing her flesh. The wall of flames blocking the hallway was extinguished, but she managed to maintain the line to the generators. There were people in the hall, hesitating to cross the superheated threshold. Unable to re-establish the fire wall, she shot a succession of fire balls to hold them at bay until she could demolish the last two sources of power.
Thinking of Gage and drawing deep on her fire, she threw one last burst toward the remaining generators. With an explosion that left her deaf and half blind, she succeeded. Then everything went
dark.
Chapter 10
“Where are you taking me?” Gage demanded.
The question, like all the others he’d tossed out, went unanswered. Christ, he needed intel. Embry was somewhere in this bunker with hundreds of highly armed soldiers seeking her out. She needed backup. She needed an entire goddamned team of functional Shadow Walkers, not a has been and a Walker that had been beaten, tortured and who knew what else. But they were all she had.
She and Adan were all he had.
A radio squawked. “Breach on Level 32! Breach! Get a goddamned fire crew down here!” A volley of gunfire punctuated the transmission.
Fear fisted around his heart.
“Bravo team, we need backup!” Static was interrupted by more gunfire and screaming. “The generator—”
When the elevator lurched to a halt, Gage was ready. Taking advantage of their imbalance, he drove an elbow into one of his captors’ ribs and broke the knee of the other. Amid chaos and shouting, the lights went out. Instinct had him intercepting the nearest man and slamming his head into the wall. Behind him, he heard the sound of fists on flesh, the crunch of bone, and the telltale thud of bodies. Someone slammed the butt of a gun into his shoulder. He spun, driving a knife hand into the pressure point under his opponent’s arm, following with open-handed strikes to his ears. His body had barely hit the floor before Gage was feeling around the roof of the car. “Where the hell is the trap door?” Urgency was a frantic drumbeat in his blood. Embry. Have to get to Embry.
Gage could sense Adan a few feet away, but couldn’t see him in the thick black that should’ve been clear as day. So much for Shadow Walker skills coming back under duress.
“I’d ask how you came back from the dead, but I figure that’s a story that’ll have to wait until we get out of here. Why can’t you see?”
“Lost my mojo. Flying blind here.”
There was a click and a creak as Adan found and opened the top hatch. “You don’t have your Walker skills. How the hell did you think you were going to get out of here?”
“This was supposed to be a recon mission. Embry didn’t think that far ahead.”
Adan’s hand clamped around his arm. “Embry’s here?”
“Who do you think blew up the generator? We’ve got to get to Level 32.”
“Where are the backup teams?” he demanded.
“There are no backup teams. The Council refused to mount a rescue mission. Embry would be here on her own if Matthias hadn’t told her where to find me.” Putting an end to the discussion, Gage boosted himself through the hatch and clambered onto the roof of the elevator car.
Adan followed. “How could he let her do this?”