Page 71 of Wraith: Lethal Impact

Hammer takes the doorway behind me and holds it. If the structure comes down, somebody has to be standing where the way out used to be.

I move through the wreckage in a tactical sweep, clearing each section. The secure room—the door hangs open. Inside, the impression of two bodies still pressed into the thin mattress. The chair where my plate carrier hung. The concrete floor where I counted magazines in the dark while she slept.

Empty.

Fear is a living creature in my chest, clawing at the inside of my ribs with hooked fingers.

I push deeper. Past the collapsed band saw. Past the overturned fuel drums. And find …

Ivy.

She's slumped against an armory crate, her back pressed against the reinforced steel, her legs extended on the concrete. Her left hand clamps a blood-soaked bandage against her right thigh. Her right hand still holds her sidearm, the barrel pointed at the gap between the crates.

When she sees me, the pistol drops. The control she's been holding collapses.

"Lily." Her voice is barely audible above the fire. "She's alive. They took her."

I drop to a knee beside Ivy. My hands move, checking the tourniquet on her thigh, assessing the wound. I pull a pressure dressing from my IFAK and seat it over the entry wound. The bleeding is controlled, but she's pale, sweating, fading.

Overhead, a groan builds into a crack, and forty feet of burning timber comes down across the aisle I cleared ninety seconds ago. Sparks wash over the crates. The heat climbs another ten degrees.

"Tell me outside."

"There's more, you need to⁠—"

"Outside."

I sling the M4 across my back. One arm slides beneath her knees. The other goes behind her shoulders, and I lift her off the concrete the way I'd lift something fragile.

A sound escapes through her teeth. Her hand stays clamped on the bandage.

"I know." I turn my shoulder into the smoke. "Keep the pressure. I've got you."

Fifty feet to the north doorway. I cover them in a straight line, angling my body so her wounded leg rides clear of the crates and the fallen framing, taking the shocks through my knees so the ground never reaches her.

Heat presses the left side of my face. Her head drops against my chest plate. Her breathing runs fast and shallow. I count her exhales the way I count rounds.

Twelve. Fourteen. Sixteen.

Then mud under my boots. Rain on my face. Air that doesn't burn.

Cipher is already running toward me.

He crosses the open ground before I clear the doorway, the tablet abandoned somewhere behind him, his sidearm forgotten in his hand.

"Ivy." Her name comes out of him raw. He reaches us and his hands are on her face, in her hair, hovering above the bandage without landing. "Ivy⁠—"

"I'm here." Her fingers close around his wrist. "Julian. I'm okay."

Rook spreads a poncho across the wet ground. I lower her onto it and ease her shoulders against the Land Cruiser's wheel well, out of the rain. Cipher drops to his knees in the mud beside her.

The blood has dried in a crust above his left eyebrow. His assault vest hangs crooked on his frame. The tablet lies face down in a puddle fifteen feet away, carrying the only intel that decides whether we breach at all. The analyst who catalogs everything has forgotten all of it as he tends to his woman.

He works the tourniquet with shaking hands. Checks the seal on the bandage. Checks it again.

"The femoral's intact." His voice breaks. "It missed. It missed the artery."

"I know." Ivy's palm finds his jaw. "Breathe. I'm going to be okay."