He was running before the shot sound faded.
Not the shot itself — he had not heard the shot from his position in the car because the warehouse's concrete walls absorbed the discharge. What he heard was the radio change: the specific thirty-second silence that followed an unexpected sound in the middle of a tactical operation, before anyone had processed what to report.
He was through the north entrance before the first voice came back on.
The north entry was a loading dock door, heavy steel, propped two inches by a brick. He registered it as propped-open in the same moment the Board registered the man in the interior shadow eight feet to the right of the door.
Second shooter. Positioned to cover the entry. Oriented toward the dock floor interior, expecting a response to come in high and slow.
Ethan came in low and fast.
The Board processed the man's posture in the quarter-second it took to clear the door — the body angle, the weapon hold, the specific way the feet were distributed for a standing firing position that was not optimized for close-range. Four feet of space between the wall and a support pillar. The man was already beginning to turn when Ethan covered the eight feet.
He did not stop.
The contact was four seconds. The man's weapon went to the concrete floor. The man's head went to the pillar in a controlled way that produced the specific sound of someone who would need medical attention and would be there to receive it when medical arrived. Ethan was already moving.
The dock floor was the size of a tennis court, empty except for industrial shelving units along the north and east walls. The Board had the structural layout from the permit: two stairwells, east and west. The west stairwell was where Calloway had directed Jackson. The west catwalk was the one with no camera coverage and no ground-floor sightline.
He heard Tim's voice on the radio: "7-Adam-12, shots heard, north entry, I'm going around to the east."
Tim was outside. Still outside.
He took the west stairs at speed. The stairs were steel, the open-grid kind that vibrated with weight. The Board was running the catwalk layout above him — the east end where Calloway had placed himself, the west stairs where Ethan was, forty feet of elevated walkway between them.
Forty feet. At a sprint, four seconds.
He cleared the top of the stairs.
Jackson was at the east end of the catwalk. Sitting. One arm braced against the catwalk railing, the other hand at his right side. He was not unconscious. He was not standing.
Calloway was no longer visible. The Board logged the open door at the catwalk's far end — the fire exit, which the Board had mapped as connecting to an exterior stairway down to the street. The door was drifting open in the specific way of something that had been opened and not pulled fully closed.
Jackson's radio was on the floor beside him, still transmitting the empty channel.
Ethan crossed the forty feet.
He was on the catwalk floor next to Jackson in the specific configuration of a trauma-adjacent response — weapon out and covering the fire exit, the open door, the angles that could still produce a threat. The Board processed the scene in the same second: no further immediate threat in the catwalk space. Jackson's arm at his side was the right arm; the blood was present and visible but not arterial, the pressure of the injury not the catastrophic pressure of a center-mass hit.
"Mercer," Jackson said. His voice had the specific quality of a person who was managing pain with the part of his brain that still had operational access.
"I'm here," Ethan said.
"He—" Jackson stopped. Jaw tight. "West stairs. I heard—"
"He's gone." The fire exit. Calloway had the exterior stairs. Ethan made the calculation in the same moment he made it: leaving Jackson to pursue Calloway through an unknown exterior route while Jackson was injured on a catwalk with no backup in immediate position was not a calculation that came out differently no matter how many times the Board ran it.
He put his free hand against Jackson's side and pressed.
"Talk," he said. "What's the injury."
Jackson's face: the specific expression of someone running a self-assessment and not wanting to report what it finds. "Right side. Entry's clean, I think."
The Board noted: Calloway's access to the fire exit stairs meant the street below, a vehicle, the absence of a secondary confrontation. Tim was working around to the east. The two units on south and east had no sight to the west exterior. Calloway would be in a vehicle in sixty seconds.
He was going to get away.
The Board filed this alongside the thirty-six wrong data points and the four correct ones and the moment Tim had said good instinct, wrong thread and the moment the group chat pun had been the last light thing before the window.
He pressed his hand against Jackson's side and kept the weapon at the fire exit and called Tim on the radio.
"7-Adam-12, west catwalk, officer down. Not critical. Suspect exiting west exterior stairs. Get to the west face."
Tim's voice: "Moving."
The Net was running at maximum on the fire exit door and at a different frequency on Jackson — the protective-extension frequency, the one that had been fogged and late and wrong for forty-eight hours, now running clean and loud and without the fog of the emotional-compromise error because there was no ambiguity left to mistake.
Jackson was breathing. Regular.
The fire exit door drifted another inch in the building's draft.
The Board was still filing.