Twenty-two steps.
I made it four.
Then the hook behind my sternum set proper and yanked, and my legs went out from under me like somebody had unplugged the cord. I hit the stairs on one knee. The stone was warm. Stone should not be warm.
"Up," Raphael said.
"Working on it."
"Not fast enough." He got a fist in the back of my collar and hauled, and I have absorbed a punch from that man that put a dent in a training wall, so being lifted by him felt roughly like being nominated for something.
"Thirty-nine," Emi said behind me. Her voice had gone thin and flat, the doctor voice, the one she found somewhere between the Necropolis and now. "Thirty-nine primary. It's still climbing while we move."
"Faster is better then."
"Faster is not medicine."
"Nine steps," Isabelle said in my ear. "Three minutes forty. Jacob is holding the loop with tape and prayer."
