Page 62 of Salt Kiss
I sit back on my haunches and think, and then tap my earpiece. “Goran,” I say, and I hear his loud exhale of relief.
“Fuck, you scared me, kid,” he says. “I could see you on the cameras, but I couldn’t tell if you’d been hit or not. Seems like something you’d do, pretend that you weren’t bleeding out.”
“This is wrong,” I say. “There should be more than two. And if they wanted to steal something down here, I don’t know how they’d do it. They don’t have any drives with them, nothing electronic. Not even phones. Not even earpieces.”
“Maybe...” Goran starts and then stops. The channel’s dead; he’s talking to someone else, I think.
I stand up and holster my gun after checking the magazine. I look at the two men dead on the floor, and then I make myself turn away and walk to the vestibule. I need to go upstairs. I’ll need to wait for the police so I can talk to them. I’ll need to walk them through the night and its events and how it ended with two dead bodies in the server room.
When I reach the elevators and press the button, I notice for the first time that I have blood on my sleeve. With steady fingers, I unbutton the sleeve and roll it up to my elbow. I do the same with the other side.
I just killed for the first time since the war. The knowledge splits and seeps inside me like rotten fruit.
I ignore it.
Turns out you can get really good at ignoring things like that.
I tap the earpiece again. “Goran,” I say. “I’m coming up. I think...something’s not right.”
“I think so too” comes a cool voice, still tight with impatience. Mark. “If there were only two—”
Gunshots, bright, staccato, echo through the earpiece, and then I hear the screams of the remaining guests in the hall.
Goran is shouting now. “Shit, there are six, seven of them? Eight? I’m coming down—”
“Sir?” I ask wildly as the elevator doors open and I rush inside. “Mr. Trevena? Are you hurt?”
Fuck!
I stab at the button to close the doors and hit the button for the second floor, my heart racing, my blood up, but my thoughts coming fast and clear in this slow-syrup world. I see it all now, the clever mechanism of it, a double feint. Tie up the security team with evacuations, lure attention downstairs to the decoys. And then attack.
“I’m coming, sir,” I say, my jaw tight. I’m bouncing on the balls of my feet as the elevator gets moving, gun back out, my skin prickling.
Mark has to be okay. He has to be. If he’s not, if he’s not answering right now because he’s hurt—
I suck in a breath. It’s the first panic I’ve felt tonight, the idea of him being hurt, killed, in danger without me, even though I know he’s capable and dangerous in his own right.
“How many, Goran?” I ask as the elevator slows. I back into the front corner as the doors open and then ease my way out. The corridor is empty.
“Can’t tell,” Goran finally replies. He sounds out of breath, and there’s mayhem in the background, gunshots, screams, grunts. He must have left the office. “I think seven. All armed. Nat’s going to take over for Roz, and Roz and Isaac will join us. I can’t see Trevena.” It’s a sign of his stress that he’s forgotten theMister, slipping into the military habit of calling everyone by their last name.
“I’m almost there,” I say, now running through the empty space to the hall.
When I push through the doors, I find pandemonium.
The fresh swarm of assailants has meant that any guests who haven’t been evacuated are stuck, pinned down, hiding behind overturned tables and the stairs to the stage. Bullets pop and snap, burying themselves in walls and leather booths, and no one’s turned the lights or the music off, so all of this is happening in a steady, engineered scatter of lights. Without the DJ, the music is stuck on the same heady, ethereal loop.
It’s in this nightmare that I finally find Mark in the center of the hall with another man dressed all in black tactical clothes, an abandoned and presumably bullet-less gun kicked off to the side.
Mark is fighting.
Badly.
He’s too slow. He’s clumsy. Out of practice, maybe. His blocks come too late, his parries are too far off-center, leaving him open and unprotected for whole seconds at a time. There’s a glint of metal in his opponent’s hand—a knife—and he should turn or tuck his shoulder oranything, and he’s not—he’s moving like he’s moving through tree sap, and then it hits me.
The gin. The gin he drinks like water, that he was drinking tonight...
He’s out of practice and he’s drunk and he’s going to get stabbed.
