Page 69 of Wraith: Lethal Impact

I fire twice. He folds.

I'm already moving. The discipline is automatic. Reposition after every shot. Never fire from the same location twice. The same principle that governs a dancer's spacing in a corps de ballet: occupy the space, command attention, then vanish before the audience's eye can track.

Ivy fires from behind the crates. Controlled pairs. Disciplined. She drops another hostile in the north doorway, the body collapsing across the threshold.

"Lily, they're flanking right." Ivy's voice carries across the gunfire.

I pivot and catch the flanking hostile mid-stride. The Beretta cracks. He stumbles but doesn't drop. His body armor absorbs the round. I fire again, higher. The second round catches him above the plate carrier, and he goes down hard.

Magazine one is empty. I eject, slam the spare, rack the slide. Two seconds of choreography executed between heartbeats.

Thirty rounds left. Seven hostiles remaining. Ivy is pinned. The east wall breach is still open.

An incendiary device crashes through the shattered window and detonates against the timber support beam. The flash is blinding. White phosphorus heat erupts in a bloom that ignites the dry timber framing and the stacked lumber along the far wall. The fire catches, climbing the structure with a hungry roar that drowns the gunfire.

The warehouse fills with thick, acrid, choking smoke that burns my eyes and claws at my lungs. The tactical advantage of darkness inverts. The fire casts shifting light that creates false movement everywhere. Heat rolls across the concrete floor in a physical wave. Every gunshot inside the metal walls echoes with concussive force.

A burst of automatic fire stitches across the armory crates. Ivy cries out—a short, bitten-off sound that communicates everything.

Pain. Surprise.

A body absorbing impact.

"Ivy." I'm moving before her name leaves my mouth. I cross the open floor in a sprinter's burst, sliding behind the crates on my knees. She's slumped against the steel, her left hand clamped over her right thigh. Blood wells between her fingers, dark and steady.

"Through and through." She grits the words between clenched teeth. "I can still shoot." She lifts her sidearm with her right hand. It's shaking. "But I can't move."

The fire climbs the walls. The timber frame groans. Smoke rolls across the ceiling in an undulating mass. The remaining hostiles are repositioning, using the smoke and firelight as cover to close the distance.

"They want me." The words come out calm and steady as I improvise a tourniquet from my belt and tie it around her upper thigh. "They're here for me. For the compass. If I draw them away from you..."

"Don't you dare." Ivy's grip tightens on her pistol. "Wraith will⁠—"

"Dax isn't here." My voice stays level. "And if they find us both, they'll take us both. Or they'll kill you to simplify the job."

Ivy's expression fractures. The analyst who monitors comms, runs spectral analyses, and keeps her emotions in airtight containers stares at me with terror—not for herself, but for what I'm about to do.

“Can you crawl out of here?” I press my hand over Ivy's, the one clamped against her bleeding thigh. The contact is brief, loaded with everything I can't say.

“I can try.”

I stand.

Smoke swirls around me, the firelight casting my shadow long and jagged across the warehouse floor. Seven hostiles move through the burning facility, their weapon-mounted lights cutting bright arcs through the haze. They're sweeping toward the armory crates.

Toward Ivy.

I step into the open.

"Here." My voice cuts through the smoke and the fire and the chaos. Not a scream. Not a shout. The projecting voice of a ballerina calling a cue from center stage—pitched to carry, impossible to ignore. "I'm what you came for."

The weapon-mounted lights swing toward me. Seven white beams converging on a barefoot woman in an oversized olive drab T-shirt, a Beretta in her right hand, a silver compass glinting at her chest. I should be terrified, but they need me alive.

I run.

Not away from the facility—through it. The fire has turned the warehouse into a labyrinth of burning walls and collapsing beams. The smoke is suffocating, the heat a physical force pressing against my skin. I leap a fallen support beam, the movement pure instinct—a grand jeté executed in a burning building, my body horizontal in the air for a fraction of a second, bare feet clearing the flames.

Behind me, boots thunder on concrete. The hostiles pursue. Their weapon lights strobe through the smoke, chasing me. Every step they take toward me is a step away from Ivy bleeding behind the armory crates.