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“Yes.” Breathing. Sedated. Arranged. “His family surfaced dead four months after they went. These are not them.”

“No. Another three.”

“There are more families.”

“Yes.”

“How many.”

“I don’t know. Keep moving.”

43-A: Vendrish female. Tag.

42-C: Xarthian pair. Tag.

Tael’s scent is stronger. This place is pulling it out of him. I stay on his six because I said I would and because his body is writing the same instruction in the air.

JINX: “Third patrol detected. Contractor scent signatures moving toward the lower decks.”

41-B.

Xarthian female. Small. Pulse on the panel: twelve. Dropping.

“Tael.”

“Torres, three-minute window—“

“She’s flatlining.”

Eleven.

I am through the seal with my hands on her chest before the panel updates. Compressions. Rate drilled at nineteen.

Tael at the door: “Nat.”

Not operational and he does not want to leave this doorway.

“Go. Next corridor. Two minutes. Come back.”

“I am not leaving you.”

“She dies if I stop.”

The sentence is correct. It is also a mistake I can already feel. Sending him away in this building is incorrect and I am doing it anyway because my hands are on a chest that is not rising, and I do not have a third option.

He does not move. Claws out. Tail rigid. The look from Parr’s Anchor — whoever comes through this door is already dead.

“Ninety seconds, Natalie.”

“Copy.”

He goes.

I hear the cost in the first two steps. I want him back before the third.

Fourteen. Seventeen. Twenty.

The chest under my hands is too still. The panel ticks. Eleven. Ten.