Chapter 13
The corridor pitched beneath my feet. I caught the wall with one hand, and my other struck a faded evacuation map beneath a cloudy plastic cover.
A sheet of paper had been tucked behind it. Claire’s narrow handwriting ran over a rough sketch of the service halls: past the pump room, left at the red pipe, down the short stair, out through a personnel door facing the harbor.
The route was marked SAFE EXIT. Beneath it, in smaller letters: KEEP CLEAR FOR NIGHT CREW.
“Ethan!” I shouted. “There’s a service exit past the pump room. Get them moving that way.”
He looked from the map to the workers scrambling toward the main gate.
“Go!” he yelled. “Follow the red pipe! Don’t stop in the corridor!”
The alarms blared overhead. A worker stumbled as another crack shivered through the ceiling. Ethan caught his shoulder and shoved him toward the passage.
I ran to the office.
Mara struck the door once more. Her palm was red, her face gray with dust, but she was on her feet.
“Stand back!” I shouted.
She moved away from the door. I grabbed the red fire extinguisher from its wall bracket and rammed its heavy base into the warped frame. The first blow jolted pain up my arms. The second bent the metal around the latch. On the third, the door burst inward.
Mara caught herself against the desk.
For a heartbeat, we only stared at each other through the dust.
Then she grabbed my sleeve.
“Workers first,” she said.
“I know.”
There was no accusation in her voice now. No demand that I prove what I wanted from Willa, or a question about whether I could be trusted. Just a decision made between us, and the danger still moving around it.
We joined the line of workers funneling toward the service corridor. Mara took one side, calling out to anyone who lagged; I stayed behind the last two, watching the ceiling. Ethan had reached the emergency panel and lifted its handset.
“Evacuation through the harbor-side service exit,” he said into the site system. “Leave everything. Keep moving.”
The announcement crackled over the alarm. Ahead, the red pipe vanished around a corner. Claire’s pencil line on the map had been thin and uncertain, but the route itself was real. The pump room smelled of wet rust and old oil. A short stair led down to a steel door.
Mara pushed it open. Cold harbor air swept in, carrying the distant wail of sirens.
A worker stumbled through, then turned to help the person behind him. One by one, they crossed the threshold into the open yard. Ethan stood outside, waving them toward the far side of the perimeter, away from the service lane.
“Is everyone out?” Mara asked.
He counted the workers as they emerged. His jaw tightened, then eased.
“Everyone I saw inside.”
She closed her eyes for the briefest moment. I didn’t touch her. She opened them and looked toward the unfinished building.
“Victor,” she said.
I turned.
He was already moving across the yard with the ledger clutched to his chest. Dust whitened his coat. He had chosen the vehicle lane, the one running away from the workers’ exit, and he was headed for a dark SUV parked beside the chain-link gate.
“Don’t go near the building,” Mara called after me.
“I won’t.”
I ran across the open ground, keeping wide of the service exit. Victor reached the SUV and yanked open the driver’s door. I angled for the lane ahead of him, where the pavement narrowed between concrete barriers and a stack of site materials. The workers were behind me, safe on the far side of the yard. No one was crossing here.
Victor slid into the driver’s seat and started the engine.
I stepped into the lane.
The SUV surged forward. Victor hit the brakes hard enough that the tires shrieked against the pavement. The vehicle stopped several feet from me.
He stared through the windshield, the ledger still in his fist.
“You don’t know what’s in that book,” he shouted.
“Enough.”
“You think paper changes anything? You think one recording makes you clean?”
“No,” I said. “It makes you answer.”
His mouth tightened. For a moment, I saw the man I had trusted to manage my company—the polished voice at a board table, the steady hand on a contract. Then he looked at the people gathered beyond the fence, the workers he’d nearly left inside, and the ledger in his grasp.
He was choosing again.
Mara’s phone, cracked and streaked with dust, began to vibrate in her hand. The signal bars flickered, disappeared, returned. She glanced down at the screen.
“It reconnected,” she said.
The phone chimed. Then again.
She read the message, and her expression changed—not relief exactly, but something solid enough to stand on.
“The reporter has the complete recording,” she said. “He says it’s safe.”
Victor heard her. His eyes cut from the phone to the ledger, then to the gap between me and the nearest open gate.
May you like
Behind us, sirens climbed louder. No one had taken the book from his hand. No one had yet closed the distance.
Victor gripped the ledger against his chest, flung the SUV door open, and lunged for the exit.
