Page 101 of Five

I snap out of my daze and reach down for the bindings on my legs.

“Rory!” Five calls from down the tunnel.

“Five!” I yell. But I choke on the smoke.

The heat is intense now too.

“Five!” I try again.

There’s a thundering behind me as I get the last binding loose and fall over to the side of the gurney. My legs give out, weak from the poison I swallowed. And I collapse to the hard ground.

The thundering turns into a barrage of boots running towards me.

“Five,” I call again.

“Rory!” he calls back. “Where are you?”

“I’m here,” I say, but it’s so weak, I know he can’t hear me. He can’t see me either.

I look for the woman, expecting her to be right beside me, but she’s gone.

A set of red taillights appears through the thick, haze of smoke up ahead.

She’s getting away!

I begin to crawl towards her car.

“Rory!” Five bellows.

“She’s getting away!” I scream it as loud as I can. “Don’t let her get away!”

I’m still crawling toward her receding headlights when Five finds me.

He wraps me up in his arms, kisses me over and over and over. On the head, on the cheek.

Someone says, “We need to get out of here. The House is gone. We’re underneath the neighborhood now, and the whole block is about to go up in flames.”

I’m picked up. Carried at a run by Five.

And I have never tasted anything sweeter than his kiss on my lips and the fresh, clear air when we finally make it outside.

Epilogue - Five

Two weeks later

Corruption kills everything.

It’s something my grandfather said often when we were together. And I always wondered what he meant, since he was, after all, one of the most corrupt people I’ve ever known.

Societies rise through trust and they fall by corruption.

Lies.

I’m not trying to say he was a good guy, but he did redeem himself in the end.

At least that’s how I see it.

Wen’s people got us out of Princeton that night two weeks ago. Damian Li had made a deal to end his reign by taking down his own people. He made a database of names. Every corrupt official in the local Hong Kong government. He sent me to Fort Collins that day I met with Jack Joseph to retrieve a code I had written years before to help him infiltrate the Organized Crime and Triad Bureau in Hong Kong. He was going to team up with Wen to bring it all down. And after his death, Wen came to me. To give me a chance to get out and set things right at the same time.