The silence after didn't last as long as it should have.
"Getting you out of this building." Lucius kept his voice level, already moving past her toward the guard still pressed flat against the wall. "That's the only priority that matters right now." He looked at the guard directly. "You know this facility better than the rest of us. Is there another way out from here that isn't the way we came?"
The guard swallowed hard, nodded, seemed to need a second to find his voice again after what he'd just watched. "There's a service route. Logistics chute, down to sub-level three, feeds into the harbor pipe network. It's how they move heavy equipment without routing it through the public corridors."
"Good." Charlotte was already turning that way. "Then let's move before—"
"No." Lucius didn't raise his voice, but it stopped her anyway. "They'll have mapped this building before they ever set foot in it. Every exit on record, they've already thought about. Walking us straight there blind, no eyes on it, no plan, gets people killed faster than staying put would."
Charlotte's jaw tightened, but she didn't argue the logic, only the timeline. "Then what?"
"We stop being blind about it first." He glanced back down the corridor toward the four men on the floor. "Hopefully nobody heard that gunfire over whatever's happening in the rest of the building. That buys us a little time before somebody comes looking for these four specifically."
His eyes went up, tracking along the ceiling until they found what he was looking for: a small black dome recessed into the corner where the corridor met the support column. 'No way to know from here if it's still live,' he thought. But if the people outside this building had the access Lucius suspected they did, that camera was worth more to him right now than the gun he wasn't carrying.
"Strip them," he said, turning back to the group. "Everything with a signal. Radios, earpieces, anything on their belts that isn't a weapon. Then we move the bodies. Find an empty closet or a server room nearby. Leaving them out here ruins whatever time we just bought."
Charlotte and the guard moved without needing to be told twice, the aide hovering uselessly a step back, still not entirely present behind his own eyes. Lucius checked the four of them himself while the others worked—wrists, pulses, breathing—and used two of their own restraints where it mattered. Not out of mercy. Out of not wanting to find out the hard way that one of them had been playing possum.
He laid the gathered comms out on the floor in front of him, then reached into his jacket and came out with his phone instead.
"What are you doing?" Hannah, quiet, watching him with the particular focus of someone who'd learned to ask that question and actually listen to the answer.
"Making a call."
"To whom?"
"I have a plan."
He was already dialing before she could push further, the general emergency line, the number every phone in New Kong carried whether it ever got used or not. It rang twice before a voice came on, flat and procedural, and Lucius cut across the standard script before it could finish the first sentence.
"I'm inside the Sentinel Forge research building. I need to be connected to whoever's running point on the response outside, not dispatch. Tell them King, private security detail, currently with hostages including Hannah Gipson."
A pause. The kind that meant someone on the other end was deciding whether he was worth the risk of believing.
"Hold."
The hold lasted long enough that Lucius had time to watch Hannah's expression shift from confusion into something closer to calculation, the same look she wore in meetings when a number didn't add up the way someone wanted her to believe it did. Then the line clicked over, a different voice this time, older, tired in the specific way of a man who'd been standing in one spot making decisions for hours.
"This is Commander Teo. Who am I talking to?"
"King. Bodyguard detail for Hannah Gipson." He kept his voice flat, efficient, the register of a man giving a briefing rather than asking for help. "There's a camera at the junction where the east service corridor meets the support column outside the primary conference wing, second floor, three doors past where a wall got breached about ten minutes ago. If you've got any feed into that section, look at it now. You'll see four hostiles down on the floor directly in front of it."
Silence on the line, brief, the sound of someone else being flagged down off-screen.
"...We've got it." Something in the commander's voice had changed by the time he came back, the wariness of a man talking to a stranger replaced with something closer to attention. "Confirmed. Four down, matches your description." A pause. "That tells me you're where you say you are. It doesn't tell me you're one of the good guys."
"No," Lucius said. "It doesn't. You don't have time to solve that problem properly right now, and neither do I. You can spend the next ten minutes trying to verify a man you can't see, or you can spend them helping the people I'm about to get moving. Your call."
Silence, longer this time, the sound of a man doing math he didn't like the shape of.
"...Talk to me." Not warmth. Not trust either. A decision made under pressure, the kind Lucius recognized because he made the same kind himself, constantly. "What do you need?"
"There's a service route down to sub-level three, harbor pipe network, that isn't on whatever path the hostiles are actively watching. I can get civilians to that exit point if you can have people positioned to receive them."
"How many civilians?"
"Two in the immediate group. Possibly more, depending."
"I can't promise you that route's clean." The commander's honesty landed harder than reassurance would have. "I don't have eyes that deep into the building. What I can do is have a team standing by at the harbor end and watch whatever feed I can find along the way."
"That's enough."
"One more thing," Lucius said, keeping his voice level. "I have a man on the outside. Toby. My team is going to route him to your command tent. I need you to establish a secure comms channel through his encrypted line so I don't have to keep this cell phone open. Watch for him."
"Understood," Teo replied. "I'll have my people intercept him."
"Good. Lastly, I'm about to put on one of their masks and their gear to move through this building without getting shot by their own people. If you've got anyone with a rifle watching windows or doorways out there, make sure whoever's on that line knows a man wearing Vanguard colors radioing back odd information might be one of the good guys today."
A pause, dry enough to carry through the line on its own. "You're asking me to tell trained marksmen not to shoot a man dressed exactly like the people they're there to shoot."
"That's the ask, yes."
"...Noted. I'll pass it along, King. Try not to make anyone regret it."
The line went dead before he could answer that, which was probably for the best.
Lucius put the phone away and looked at Charlotte. "Get Toby on your earpiece. Tell him to find Commander Teo at the perimeter command tent and patch us through the secure channel. We can't rely on cell service moving forward."
Charlotte gave a sharp nod, already lifting a hand to her ear to make the connection.
Hannah hadn't moved through any of it, arms crossed, jaw set in the exact way Lucius recognized from the negotiation table two hours ago. "I'm not going."
"You are."
"Enoch's still in this building. So is half my office staff. I'm not walking out of here and leaving them for whoever's turn is next."
He'd known this was coming from the moment he'd started talking to the commander about an exit point instead of a full extraction.
"If you're going to insist on that," he said, "give me something useful instead of an argument."
She didn't hesitate. "Enoch runs event logistics for anything with press attached. He'd have set up wherever they staged the press wall for today, which is close to the conference wing, not the plaza. If he's not there, check anywhere they were routing catering or equipment, because that's the kind of thing he'd stay near even after everything went wrong. He doesn't leave a job half coordinated. It's the most predictable thing about him."
"That's useful."
"I know." Something that wasn't quite a smile. "I didn't get this job by being decorative."
It still cost him a second longer than he wanted, weighing what she'd given him against a schedule they didn't have room to argue on.
"Charlotte gets you to that exit point," he said finally. "That's not negotiable." He pointed a finger between the three of them. "But if that sub-level route isn't clean, or if it's compromised, do not push through and do not improvise. You fall back to the locked maintenance room we passed on the third floor, barricade yourselves in, and wait for my all-clear on the comms."
Charlotte nodded. "Understood."
"I'll find Enoch," Lucius finished.
"Alone."
"Not alone." He reached down, grabbed one of the heavy tactical masks from the floor, and tossed it.
The guard flinched, fumbling the dark, plated helmet against his chest, catching it a fraction of a second before it hit the floor. He scrambled to get a grip on it, his eyes darting up to meet Lucius's. The look on his face was one of wide, incredulous terror—the exact expression of a man realizing he was being drafted into a suicide mission by a lunatic.
"He's coming with me," Lucius said seamlessly. A nod toward the terrified guard. "You know this building. I don't. That makes you more useful to me right now than a weapon would be."
The guard's face did something complicated, caught somewhere between the panic of dropping the mask and the specific kind of resolve that comes from having already survived the worst part of a day once. "Okay," he managed.
Charlotte caught Lucius's arm before he could start outfitting himself, her voice dropped low enough it didn't carry past the two of them. "That route might not be clean either. You said it yourself, they'll have thought of it."
"They might have." He didn't try to make it sound better than it was. "It's still the only route we've got that isn't the one we already know is watched. I'd rather bet on 'might' than 'definitely.'" He held her eyes. "If this goes wrong, nobody's coming for you the way we're going for that exit point. You understand that."
"I do."
"Say something that sounds like you actually understand it."
"I understand it, Charlotte."
She held his eyes a second longer, the same weighing look she always gave him when the math wasn't finishing the way she wanted, then let go of his arm. "Get her to that exit," he said, to the guard's counterpart in the group, meaning it for all of them, "or I will have questions for both of us later."
Hannah stepped in close before Charlotte could start moving her. "Don't do anything stupid."
Something that might have been an actual smile crossed his face, brief and real. "I already am."
She didn't have an answer for that. She looked at him a moment longer than the situation strictly allowed, and then let Charlotte start her down the corridor without further argument, which was, from her, its own kind of trust.
Lucius pulled the mask down over his face last.
---
It sat wrong at first, the world narrowing down to whatever the internal display decided was worth showing him, a faint overlay of nothing useful along the bottom edge of his vision. He adjusted inside two steps. The gear did the rest, black plating settling over shoulders built for someone with a slightly different frame, close enough not to draw a second look from anyone who wasn't already looking for a reason.
The guard fell in half a step behind him, the way subordinate personnel walked, which Lucius suspected he'd worked out entirely on instinct rather than any training either of them had time to plan.
They passed two goons midway down a stairwell, coming up as Lucius and the guard were going down. Lucius didn't slow, didn't speed up, just gave the small, economical nod that seemed to pass for acknowledgment among these people and kept moving. One of the two said something to the other, low, and laughed at whatever it was. Neither of them looked twice.
The guard's breathing didn't return to anything normal until they'd cleared two more floors.
A door near the base of the next stairwell had been wedged shut from the inside, a chair jammed under the handle, an obstacle nobody had thought to mention because nobody had known it was there. The guard tried it once, quiet, felt it hold, and led them around through a longer service loop without needing to be asked twice. Two extra minutes lost. Two minutes Lucius didn't like giving up, with no better option than to give them up anyway.
"Where would they be keeping people," Lucius said, low, once the stairwell opened back into a service corridor, "if it's not the atrium?"
"There's a smaller conference space two floors down that'd back onto exactly what she's talking about. Press staging, overflow room for the Expo. Windowless, server racks along one wall. If they're using more than one collection point, that's the next likely one."
Windowless was worth something. Whoever had picked that room had picked it on purpose, out of any line a rifle could work with from outside.
They found it inside ten minutes.
---
Lucius cataloged the room from the doorway gap before doing anything else. Four hostiles that he could see, spread wide enough to cover every angle of the space, one at the far door, two loose along the hostage row, one drifting near a second exit half-hidden behind a bank of dead server racks.
He went down the hostage row next, face by face. Nine of them, maybe ten, wrists bound, backs against the wall. He knew what Enoch looked like from photographs in Hannah's office and from the man's own careful, easy manner in every meeting Lucius had ever stood through. He wasn't here. Neither was anyone matching the rest of the staff list the guard had run through on the way down.
Which meant this wasn't the room they'd come looking for. It meant something worse than that too, something that took a second longer to land properly: this building didn't have one collection point, or even the two they'd already accounted for between the group they'd been marched toward originally and this room. It had at least three. There was no telling from here how many more, or which one Enoch was actually sitting in.
Four wasn't an impossible number on its own. Four in a room this size, with hostages seated between him and half of them, with an exit he hadn't confirmed and a guard beside him who'd never done anything like this before today, was a different problem entirely from four in an empty corridor.
One of the goons crossed to a chair angled away from the room, facing a blank section of wall, and crouched to say something too low to carry. For a moment nothing happened at all.
Then the chair spun.
"Well." The word came out delighted, drawn long, and a figure rose out of the chair like he'd been folded up inside it on purpose, waiting for exactly the right moment to unfold. "Guess it's show time, then."
Violet and dull yellow, ruffled at the collar in a way that would have read as a costume party mistake anywhere else. White paint smeared and split by a grin too wide to be natural, yellow teeth behind it, distorted bone visible in the structure of his cheeks where the paint didn't quite manage to hide what was underneath.
He came up off the chair already talking, already moving, weaving through the seated hostages with the loose, delighted energy of a man arriving at his own birthday party. "Don't everybody thank me at once. I know, I know, sitting still this long is hard when there's this much tension in a room. I could feel it building all the way over there. Like a held breath." He crouched in front of an older man, tilted his head. "You're holding your breath right now, aren't you? Go ahead. Breathe. I want you at your best for this."
He drifted on before the man could decide whether that was a question, Hopping over a row of legs with manic agility, sliding past a terrified woman clutching her badge. "Sarah! Oh, target employee of the month over here! Look at that shiny lanyard. Mind if I keep it? No? Fantastic!" He snatched it off her neck with a cackle, patted her head twice like a dog, and spun on his heel.
He drifted the perimeter next, trailing a gloved hand along the wall, along a goon's shoulder, along the back of another hostage's neck just to watch him flinch away from it, narrating the whole circuit to nobody in particular. "You know what I love about a room like this? Everybody's already decided how it ends. You've all got the same little movie playing behind your eyes. I just get to pick which parts we actually film."
And then he stopped right in front of Lucius.
He tilted his head, eyes wide, white-painted brow furrowed in mock confusion. "Whoa. Look at you. Brand new gear, zero sweat. Did you just spawn out of a wall or what?" He reached up and aggressively yanked Lucius's collar straight, a bizarre, violent twitch of a gesture. "There! Now you look official! Try not to ruin it, we have guest stars coming!"
"Anyway." He clapped once, delighted with himself, already back at the center of the room. "Outside's getting bold. Boats, birds, the whole parade, and not one of them backing off like people who understand what's at stake here. I think we should help them understand better."
His hand closed around the wrist of a younger woman near the end of the row, hauling her up mid-sentence like the motion cost him nothing at all. She made a sound that wasn't quite a scream yet, more the sound of someone who hadn't decided if screaming would help.
"Cameras." He said it to the room in general, turning her to face wherever he wanted the shot framed. "Somebody get the cameras up. It's time we gave the nice people watching from outside something worth actually watching."
Two of the goons broke off toward a bag near the far wall, unzipping it, pulling out a compact rig that had clearly been packed for exactly this. The room's temperature seemed to drop another degree as the pieces came together, tripod, light, a single black lens that would carry whatever happened next to every screen in New Kong within minutes of going live.
Lucius pulled back from the doorway an inch, running the numbers one more time because the first pass hadn't gotten any better the second time through.
Four hostiles in the room. Nine hostages who couldn't run. A guard beside him who'd already proven he could hold his nerve exactly once, and Lucius had no way of knowing yet whether that was a limit or a floor. A disguise that had survived one man getting close enough to smell him and had no guarantee of surviving whatever came next.
And somewhere in this building, at least one more room like this one, holding people neither of them had found yet.
He had never liked bad math. This was the worst math he'd done all day.
---
To Be Continued