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“Are the workers secure on line C?”
A muffled, answering chattering from a radio.
“Good. We’re on our way. Neumann will be just behind us.”
The guards’ footsteps faded away quickly.
Sebastian ducked back out and hurried down the hallways faster now but as silent as he knew how to be.
The alarm whined over his footsteps, which was the only good thing about it. It was awful, tightening something inside him slowly and insistently. He gritted his teeth.
“It’s like it’s specially designed to make you want to crawl into the floor,” Noah growled, twisting in his mind as if he could escape the sound.
“It is.” According to Sebastian’s conversations with Oliver.
The alarm changed pitch again.
Then more guards, and these ones Sebastian didn’t hear until they were almost on him, their footsteps covered by the alarm’s new tone. He threw himself into a room without checking it and pressed into the corner.
There were more than two this time, moving quickly, and Sebastian caught a snatch of their conversation as they passed.
“They found a body outside the walls.”
“Another one?”
“Not a worker this time.”
Then Sebastian snapped ramrod straight at a loud voice from inside the room with him. “Noah Hughs? What the hell are you doing in here?”
Sebastian turned slowly, a self-satisfied smile curling across his lips. The room he had hidden in was a small locker room with two rows of dingy metal lockers. Between them, bare-chested with a shirt in his hands, stood a handsome man with a nasty expression and a familiar voice, though the one time Sebastian had heard it, it’d been muffled by a helmet.
Sebastian closed the door behind him. “Neumann, right?”
Neumann’s eyes narrowed dangerously, though they flicked to Sebastian’s hand as he engaged the lock. “That’s sir to you.”
“What are you doing?” Noah was all but cowering in the back of his mind, and Sebastian ignored him.
“Were you going to leave him out there?” Sebastian put his hands on his hips, cocking one out, and tilting his head as he sized up the man in front of him. Much taller than Noah—grew up eating proper meals—and above average height in general. Muscular, trim. Clean-shaven face. Attractively straight nose and bow lips. A good catch.
That nose crinkled, and those lips twisted in confusion. “What?”
“Noah. Noah Hughs.” Sebastian took a step closer, though not within arm’s reach yet. “Were you going to leave him out on the oxygen-less surface of this godforsaken planet?”
“Why the fuck are you talking like that, Hughs, you imbecile?” Neumann stepped up chest-to-chest with Sebastian and shoved him. Good strength. Sebastian stumbled back against the wall.
“He was!” Noah confirmed. He had stopped cowering, perhaps in the face of Sebastian’s obvious lack of fear. “He’s done it before. To friends of mine. Acquaintances. No one cares when a few workers spend too long on the ice and don’t make it back.”
Sebastian shook his head and tutted. “And after you stole his daughters’ medicine, you were going to leave them fatherless and his sweet wife a widow?”
Neumann scoffed. “I don’t give a damn about your malformed brats or your malformed wife.”
“That sounds a lot like a yes?” Sebastian raised his eyebrow as he stood straight, looking up at Neumann so steeply it made his weak neck hurt.
“No one would have missed you then.” Neumann’s bared his teeth like an animal and advanced slowly. “And no one’s going to miss you now.”
“You know, I really do think a lot of people would miss him.” Sebastian met him until they were a hairsbreadth away, and a flicker of doubt passed through Neumann’s eyes at the unfamiliar behavior. “But I feel very confident that no one will miss you.”
Sebastian snapped his arm up to grab the back of Neumann’s neck and raced down Noah’s mercifully short limb. For a moment, he worried he had still misjudged and that Neumann would shake off the weak arm before Sebastian got down it and Sebastian would be left wriggling on the floor.
