Page 68 of Wraith: Lethal Impact

The sound is sudden and final. The steady hum that has been the facility's heartbeat simply stops. The laptops flicker to battery backup, their screens dimming. The overhead work lights go dark. The warehouse plunges into gray half-light, lit only by the thin wash of pre-dawn glow bleeding through the corrugated metal walls.

Ivy and I freeze.

The silence is enormous.

The kind of silence that carries weight and texture—the silence of a theater in the half-second between the conductor's baton rising and the orchestra's first note.

Except this silence doesn't precede music.

This silence precedes violence.

"They cut the generator." Ivy's hand closes around her sidearm. "They're here."

I move. My dancer's discipline overrides my terror. My gun is back in the secure room with my stripped-off gear—too far. But the armory crate Dax left behind is only six strides away. I cross the facility, bare feet silent on the cold concrete, and wrench the heavy lid open. Inside, nested in foam cutouts, a collection of scavenged weapons—two pistols, spare magazines, a tactical flashlight, a set of zip cuffs.

I grab the Beretta 92. The grip is familiar—the same model my father taught me to shoot on the range behind our house outside Chicago. Magazine loaded. I rack the slide. The metallic snap echoes through the dark warehouse.

Fifteen rounds. Two spare magazines. Thirty more in the armory crate.

Counting steadies me. It always has.

I cross back to Ivy's position. She's moved behind the armory crates, her back against the reinforced steel, her sidearm up and tracking the main entry points.

"How many?" I drop beside her, pressing my shoulder against the cold metal.

"I don't know." Ivy's voice is controlled, but there’s a tremor underneath—the vibration of a string pulled too tight. "If they had our comms, they know our force disposition. They know the team left. They know it's just us."

Two women.

One analyst with a 9mm. One ballerina with a Beretta and bare feet.

Against however many operators the Consortium deemed necessary to take a logging facility defended by two females.

A blast punches a ragged hole through the corrugated metal, spraying fragments of aluminum and rust across the warehouse floor. The concussive wave hits my chest and steals a heartbeat. Dust and debris billow through the gap, and behind the dust, the first shadow enters.

I fire.

The Beretta barks twice—the report deafening in the enclosed space. The shadow drops. The recoil kicks up my wrists, but my stance is solid, my grip the one my father drilled into me ten thousand times, is unwavering.

I hit center mass. Both rounds.

A second breaching charge takes out the north door. A third shatters the window frame above the tactical workbench. The facility is being opened from three directions at once.

I know that sound. I watched Hammer carry the same thing into this building in a canvas satchel.

"North door." Ivy pivots and fires three controlled shots into the doorway. A body crashes backward through the frame. "They're flooding us."

Shadows pour through the breaches. Dark tactical gear. Balaclavas. Suppressed submachine guns sweeping the dim warehouse in disciplined arcs. I count them as they enter—a dancer counts everything, every beat, every body, every position on the stage.

Four through the east wall. Three through the north door. Two through the window.

Nine. Against two.

I don't stay behind the crates.

The ballerina doesn't hold a position—she moves. The warehouse is a stage. The armory crates are set pieces, and the spaces between them are wings and corridors. I know how to move through a stage without making a sound.

I break left, sprinting barefoot across the cold concrete, sliding behind a rusted band saw. The nearest hostile sweeps his weapon toward the armory crates where Ivy is positioned. He doesn't see me. I'm four meters to his left, crouched in the shadow of industrial machinery.