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Entering the house, Mia was more focused on retaining and using information than she had been when she had been trying to keep the entire Cavalcanti operation in her head.  With her sleeve over her left hand, she wiped dirt and forest grit off the soles of her shoes, before setting them on hardwood.

The disaster sirens screamed.  If a baby’s scream was honed by years of evolution to tug at the heartstrings and make the parent act, the siren was engineered to make her go, to make her feel small.  To make it clear there was something bigger than her at play.

Which fit.  The closer she got to Ripley, the more she itched to act.  She needed to save her.  She was so close.  Ripley, right this moment, could be under her feet, part of the house.

Ripley was a natural speed reader.  It had come from an early love of reading that Mia had nurtured and Rip wanted to read so much that she’d worked out ways to get through a book faster.  By the end of an early-grade book, she’d have grasped it in totality.  She’d been a proud bookworm.  She’d torn through readings so fast her second grade teacher had taken issue with it.

It was also a method with its drawbacks.  The same teacher had assigned a reading with a list of questions to answer after, as an evaluation in class, and Ripley had struggled with it.  A good teacher figured out a student’s challenges, but this bitch had instead taunted Ripley for not being a reader after all, and called her a liar in front of the class.  After a few hours settling a distraught Ripley, after school had ended for the day, Mia had worked through things with her daughter to figure out the glitch in how Ripley read.  Rip focused on the tops of words instead of digesting the letters individually or subvocalizing, picked up the more relevant information at the start and end of sentences and paragraphs, anticipated and caught verbs and names on the way, and then inferred to fill gaps.  Her glance was like a skipping stone on the surface of the water, catching relevant information on the way.  In the process, Ripley’s eyes would naturally and repeatedly skip over a weirdly constructed bit of dialogue containing the name she was supposed to identify for two of the questions in the evaluation.

Mia had worked with Ripley to figure out ways to slow down and take in more detailed information when required, when there wasn’t a whole rest of a novel to read and resolve any blanks or gaps with.

Mia had contemplated doing something to get the teacher out of Ripley’s life, but had decided against it, with her personal rules, and the fact she’d had her hands full with Tyr.  Mostly, she’d celebrated, that Ripley had unique ability.  That there was kinship there.  Because Mia had done something similar.

Mia had learned about memory palaces as an older teen and thought that’s what I’ve been doing all along.  Maybe it was innate.  Maybe it was a reaction to the Fall, when her memory had been all she’d had, and she’d wanted to hold onto it, instead of letting memories distort slightly with every recollection.  It was key to her work, remembering the details, remembering names, who was where, what identities could be dredged up, repackaged, and sent to someone, and who and what was in play.

In that way, she could keep the entirety of the Cavalcanti family, such as it appeared online, straight in her head.  People, the city, it wasn’t that complex.  Too many people were idiots, taking the shortest routes to their destinations, moved only by big life events and crisis.  Illness, accidents.

Now, without giving that up, she had to set it aside.  A house of cards framed in the back of her mind, or a webwork of pictures and interconnected threads, drawn up on her computer instead of a corkboard.  She couldn’t let a thread drop, or let two similar pictures get swapped.  With that ginger care, she moved to a shelf in case she needed it, while she built and expanded on another.

Thinking about Ripley was a kind of agony.  Her heart had been ripped out of her chest.  It made everything worse.  Headache, tension, pain.  She was so close.

So she tried to maintain focus, as a way of putting all of that out of mind.  Anything had to be more constructive than dwelling or worrying.  She built using the house Valentina had drawn and the house from the outside as reference.  She added the glimpses she’d seen of it in the background of two thousand pictures that had been posted on social media.  Davie didn’t take many, nor did Valentina or her brother, but Davie’s wife and his youngest posted with some frequency.  Other images were from events, when Davie hosted some family around holidays, or when distant relatives were in town.

A wall here, a bookshelf there.  Table over there.  In her mental picture of things, it was a three dimensional blueprint, with flashes of detailed reality cutting through it, as seen in pictures, or glimpsed through windows.  She filled it in, and expanded the blueprint here and there.

Davie had gone outside, and others had gone with him, but the house wasn’t empty.  Carson was more focused on the people and being quiet, and apparently heard something, because he pulled on Mia’s good arm.

She shook her head.  “Dead end.”

He took her into another room, where the light coming in from the front window was giving things the faintest orange light.

It was hard to hear everything with the tornado sirens ongoing, but the volume of conversation and footsteps swelled as people moved down the hall.

“You get water.  As large a container as you can fill and carry.  You, see why the group in the garage is taking so long.  And you-”

“I don’t take orders.”

“He said everyone should listen, and do whatever-”

“No.  Not me.  Not the two men they call the cousins.  If there’s any issue, I’ll tell the boss I wasn’t taking orders, okay?”

He sounded so matter of fact about it.  Like a parent who knew something to be absolute fact, to an anxious child.

He went on, “There won’t be an issue.  You.  Get me a glass.  I don’t know where things are.”

“I don’t know if we can just take a glass from the kitchen.”

“I can.  A glass of water.  Then take two with you, go do a patrol of the exterior vents.  If anyone’s gone or if there are issues, we want to know sooner.  If anyone else gives you an order, you tell them this came from me.  Even if it’s the boss…”

He moved out of earshot.  Mia remained still and quiet, in case Carson could hear it better.  She wondered if the gunshot in the enclosed space back when they’d dealt with Nathaniel in the bathroom had hurt her hearing.  Before Davie Cavalcanti had even been in the picture.  There was still a faint, perpetual whine to accompany with the unending headache and tension that she had from the Fall.

“Okay,” Carson whispered.

“What was that last part?  I didn’t hear.”

“He’s checking on other people Davie hired.  I think he’s worked with them before, he’s bringing them water.”

Water sounded nice.  It was warm, from the summer heat, and the warmth had a stickiness that the faint trace of smoke in the air only seemed to amplify.  As if it stuck to the inside of the nostrils and made her feel congested.  Stuck to the skin, and made it worse at dealing with the sweat.

“Do you hear him?”

Carson shook his head.  “Hard to tell.”

Mia closed her eyes.  The house, the layout.  There was a room above the garage with large windows on two sides.  A media room, that worked like a second living room, but Valentina and her brother hadn’t used it, because it was more Davie’s, close to Davie’s room.  When they had watched things in the living room, or while the youngest daughter did, their stepmother would talk over the next day’s meal plan with staff, then retire to that room.  Most of the time.  When she’d seen it from the outside, there had been activity there.  Lights on, people, but the windows were tinted in a way that obscured what was within.  Especially there, where the glare would impact TV watching.

Presumably, if they’d kept working with Davie, they’d have moved on to working from there, instead of the open warehouse space they’d been situated in, brightly lit, concrete floors, corrugated metal walls, wires and guards everywhere.

“Computer staff,” Mia whispered.  “Drones, and-“

Carson put a finger to his lips.

People came back through the hallway.  Mia itched to get going before Davie came back into the house, or before things got busier.  Because they had to get out, too.  With Ripley.

The people disappeared down the end of the hall.

“Okay,” Carson whispered.  He reached for the door.

“The man who was just talking, the two cousins in the woods, possible one or two others, new drone pilots, tech staff,” Mia whispered.

“Minimum five mercenaries?”

“Total unknowns,” she whispered back.  Unknowns she hadn’t researched.  Unknowns with capabilities.  Unknowns who could have skills in the same way Highland and Bolden had skills.

Carson nodded his acknowledgement of that, a tight motion, then eased the door open.  He paused, not even poking his head through, and Mia held her breath.

Then he led the way.

Down the hall.

The door to the basement.  It had a number code.

If she could tear it out of the wall, she could break in, but then the next person to pass by might know something was up.  She could tear it out and push it back in, but depending on the way it was built, that wouldn’t necessarily be possible.  It could even be that tearing it out in the first place would be too hard, too noisy.

She used the backs of her fingers to double tap his arm, then pointed.

This would be a risk, a massive gamble.

She opened a bedroom door.

It was occupied.

Carson eased the door shut.

“Danny,” Carson whispered.  They’d gotten his name from Valentina.

Danny was beaten so bad only one eye would open, hair matted to the side of his head with blood, neck swollen and bruised, eased his way to a sitting position with care, clearly hurting in ways that weren’t just face and neck.

“Did he hire you?” he asked, voice quiet.  He wheezed as he breathed.  His eye moved, while the rest of him was still.  Taking in details like where Carson had been bleeding.

“We’re with Gio,” Carson whispered.  “She has a different name now.”

“Does my father know you’re here?”

Mia shook her head.

“Is she okay?  Gio?”

Mia answered, “She has a new family now.  She’s loved.  She’ll be loved more, when there is less chaos and crisis getting in the way.  She has a little brother and sister, now.  She’s on her way to being okay.”

“Did she ask you to come for me?”

“No,” Mia replied.

“Good.  Good, told her not to.”

“We’re here for Ripley.  We need the code to the basement.  Do you know it?”

“Ripley, right.  Saw her earlier.”

“Is she okay?”

“Nobody here is.”  He paused, his expression changing, then he said something that was clearly not what he’d been planning to say, “My dad’s men thought they might have escaped.  Then my dad said no.  That she’s still here.”

Mia nodded.

“He said to keep them pinned.  Watch any exit points.  Patrol regularly.  Once the power comes back on, they’ll know where they are.”

“Tracker?  Heat sensor?  Something in the vents?  Or-?”

Carson touched Mia’s arm.

She fell silent.

“Hide,” Carson whispered.

There was a large closet.  She walked inside, stepped on luggage, and hid behind clothes.  She hated that she was framed like she was, in this moment.

Carson left the closet door ajar, dropping clothing so it blocked it from fully opening, making it look like the closet door couldn’t have recently been opened, before withdrawing his hand back through the gap.  As he closed the gap more, the clothing settled.

He wasn’t even fully into his hiding place when the door to the bedroom opened.

Whoever had opened the door didn’t say anything.

“Stay.  It’s not worth running,” Danny mumbled.

Mia had a view of only a slice of the room, past coat hangers and through the gap in the door.

It was a man.  He wore a t-shirt and a gun holster that crossed his chest and another gun strapped to his thigh.  His hair was shaggy, his chin unshaven, and he had a cigarette in his mouth, unlit.

He raised his eyes for a second, looking out the window.  The window gave a view of the city, on fire.  The room was filled with the sound of Danny’s soft wheezing and the whine of the sirens.

She wondered what he thought about, as he looked.  For her, seeing the glimpse of things through the gap in the closet door and out the window, she imagined Tyr out there.  Countless youth like the little girl at the edge of the Civil Warrior attack.  How small that girl had felt in her arms.

Which made her think about Ripley.  Every second she had to wait made her resent this man, hate him.

Ripley was hurt and trapped and he was delaying her.

If something about him didn’t scare Mia, she would have stepped out of the closet to try to quietly handle him.

The man reached out, jostling Danny, and Danny jolted ‘awake’.  The jolt meant he moved in ways he shouldn’t, and he groaned, curling up, one hand at his side.  He hissed through his teeth, grunting intermittently.

“I heard voices,” the man said.

“Where?  Who?” Danny asked.

The man didn’t immediately respond.

Mia closed her eyes as his eyes roved in the direction of the closet door, scanning the room.  She didn’t want the whites of her eyes to stand out.  Besides that, she had to remain very, very still.

“Yours?” the man asked.

“Oh.  Scared me.  I thought we were being attacked.”

“Who would attack us?”

“The mayor?  I don’t know.”

“That would be stupid,” the man said, quiet, calm, a bit condescending.

“Give me a hand?  I have to piss,” Danny asked.

“No,” the man replied.

Danny, easing himself back up to a sitting position, gradually moved his legs around to the floor.  He sat there, audibly wheezing, hunched over, the man a few feet in front of him.

“What happened between you and your father is between you two.  Not my business.  I won’t help you or get in your way.  I heard talking, which is my business.”

“Okay.  Then can you get out of my way so I can piss?” Danny asked.  He put a hand on the nightstand, and struggled his way to his feet.  His shirt rode up, and even in the relative gloom, Mia could see the bruises at his side.

Danny stepped out of the room.  The man paused for a long second, then drew in a deep breath through his nose.  Then he took in another, mouth open, tongue slightly out.

Then he bent down, getting a tissue from a box by the bed, and blew his nose.  He stuffed the used tissue into a pocket, then left the room.

Danny was next door, in the bathroom on the other side of the closet, and his urination was audible, as were his grunts of pain.  He finished, the sound trickling off, then rinsed his hands.

After he finished, there were voices in the hall. Danny and someone else.  Not the same man as before.

“Shit, man.  You going to clean that?”

“…Yeah.”

“I think you should sit to take a whiz.”

“I’m not sure I could stand again,” Danny replied.  “How are they looking?”

“Not sure I should say.”

“Get to a hospital sometime?”

Whatever Danny said or whatever noise he made, Mia couldn’t make it out.  Maybe there was a gesture.

“Yeah.  Yeah.”

There was a pause, then two soft knocks on the door.

Mia and Carson emerged from the closet, easing their way out.  Danny stood in the hallway, his back to them, leaning hard against a door frame.  His gaze went through another open door, opposite his own.

By the looks of it, it was Valentina’s old room, from a past life.

Two bedrooms and the bathroom at the end of the hall, and the stairwell partway down its length.

Mia checked the coast was clear, then approached.  Carson went straight to the door.

“Two, eight, one, nine, nine, nine,” Danny murmured.  I don’t know about the door below.”

A glance into the bathroom filled in her mental image of the house.  It looked like Danny’s urine had sputtered more than it had streamed.  Most of the splash was crimson or pink tinted.  It was striking against the white of the porcelain and tile.

“The mayor’s son is with her, then there’s the kid, and her mom,” Danny whispered.

“Not her mom,” Mia whispered back.

Danny twisted around, very slowly, rolling his body against the door frame more than he turned.  He gave her a long look.

“You kidnapped the kid.  Right.”

“Rescued,” Mia whispered.  She met his gaze with her own, unwavering.

“Like we rescued Gio,” Carson said.

The boy stared at them with one good eye, his breaths wheezing.

“Before the lights come on,” was all Danny said, eyes dropping to the floor.  “You asked earlier.  I don’t know how he’ll find them.  But it’s all prepared.  The vents are an emergency exit, if we’re raided.  Not a great one, but…”

Which would mean there was a way to get the exterior vent covers open, and get from the vents to the outside.

“Is there a way to access the vents from this floor?”

“I don’t know.  I really don’t know.”

“Do you want us to take you with us?” Mia asked.  “You’d need to get your shoes on.  Be ready.  If you have strong painkillers to push through the pain, or anything…”

He was already shaking his head.  “I’m not sure I can run.”

Mia glanced at Carson.  “Carry him?”

Carson lifted up the side of his shirt.  The bandage was soaked through, and blood soaked his leg down past hip to the side of his knee.  He shook his head.

She rubbed at her shoulder, judging.  “I’m sorry.  It’s been a long night.  I normally would.  Do you want to try?  Running?”

He visibly wavered.

It was a hard decision to make.  If he said yes, there was a chance, but if he couldn’t keep up and he ended up caught, he would almost certainly get killed.  Or worse.  If he said no…

This was his life.  Until the next chance to get away.

“Decide before we come back this way,” Mia whispered.  She reached out, and brushed hair away from his face.  She cupped the side of his head with her hand.  “You’re a good brother.”

He flinched from the touch, and not because his face hurt.  Then he looked at her with a momentary disgust.  But that passed.  His expression crumpled, as much as that was possible with the swelling.

“I was shit.  I didn’t do anything.  Didn’t help.  I was always focused on other things.  My dad.  Earning my place.  As if she’d always be there, I could fix things later.  Until she decided to run.”

All his thoughts turned inward.

Mia’s thumb ran along bruised, possibly broken cheekbone.  “For what it’s worth, I think you’ve more than made up for it.  You’ve done good by her.”

“Yep,” Carson said.  “No doubt.”

A tear ran down Danny’s cheek.  He twisted his head to one side, expression changing at the clear pain that movement caused him, so the tear wasn’t visible.

“Gotta go,” Mia whispered, to Carson.  She stepped into the bathroom, and grabbed the soap dispenser with the pump nozzle, and put it in a back pocket.  Carson stepped into the stairwell, and gave the thumbs up.  It looked like the door had been propped open, while people were coming and going, bringing supplies through.

“The man you were talking to,” Carson whispered, glancing up at Danny, who stood in the open doorway above.

“He went down there.”

Mia paused to listen.  “Do you know who he is?”

“He was an analyst for the state department.  The guys were talking about it.  I don’t know if you know what that means, but-”

“We know,” Mia whispered.  It didn’t mean he was an analyst.  “And the two men in the woods?  The cousins?”

“They ran backgrounds and did sweeps for the safety of incoming diplomats.  People were speculating that’s also cover.  For what they actually did.”

“And the people in the computer room?” Mia guessed.

“I don’t know.  I overhear from cousins and people I know.  With those others, it’s not a huge secret. Almost a point of pride.  But people in the computer room?  I didn’t hear anything about that.”

“Good man,” Carson said, touching the boy’s shoulder.

The door opened.  He held it for Mia, then eased it closed.

The basement wasn’t as dark as it could have been.  It was huge, in a way the house didn’t feel huge because the walls and furniture made things feel smaller and more constrained.  Down here, same footprint, mostly, none of that, it was more like an open warehouse with a ceiling Mia could reach by putting her hand up and jumping.  Shelves lined some of the walls, but the way so many shelves were out there but failed to cover much of the floor made it all feel bigger.

There were people inside.  A group had flashlights, but they were on the far side of many layers of plastic sheeting.  It wasn’t thin sheeting, but closer to something industrial, that wouldn’t blow around with wind at a construction site.  The more distant point where the trophies were was probably where the light was brightest.  It was hard to look at, even with the plastic sheeting making it diffuse.

And over this way… chains and chairs.

A plastic cooler, sitting on a chair, with the lid removed.

Mia approached, heart pounding.  The sound of the tornado sirens had taken on a different texture, filtered in through ducts.  Like it was the world that was groaning, muted, reverberating through everything solid.

The water was barely cold.  The arm had visible lividity, and had gone past pruning to faint bloating.  Well past the point of being able to be reattached.  Mia’s fingers interlocked with the fingers of the very small hand.

Horror welled inside her.  Tension crept up her neck and shoulders.  It felt like the sirens were coming from the core of her, a tearing, yearning sound, bigger than her body could hold.

Was there any possible way to kill enough of them to make up for this?  Every single person that had looked past this?  Every soldier that decided their fear of Davie Cavalcanti was worth letting this happen?

Tears fell freely down her cheeks.

“Okay,” Carson murmured.

She looked over at him.

The fleeting expression on his face was one she’d only seen a few times.  When he himself was hurt.  When she’d first met him, getting Tyr.

Anger and anxiety are fuel.  Use them.

Use what you have.

The basement had no walls that she could see, like Valentina had described it.  Ducts ran through the ceiling.  Mia stared up at it.

She had to find a way.  To find Ripley, who was trying not to be found.  To deal with the threats.

Analyst for the state department.  This was a whole realm of the underworld that they hadn’t delved into, had only heard about and occasionally touched on.  One man they’d tried to disappear had been chased down by someone with a similar title.  Federal, not state.  The analyst had found him before Mia and Carson had gotten him out.

She and Carson had unraveled it later.  Analyst for the state department, or some federal department, or, to a lesser degree, diplomatic security… they were job titles people could hold that could be a face in the crowd, uninteresting enough nobody would really ask many questions about their work, but they wouldn’t be surprising if they popped up here or there.

The government had a way of spinning up special agencies as emergency counter-terrorism, officially unofficial departments that kept corrupt government departments in line, off-the-books elite agents and teams that were enough steps removed that even the next closest off the books team could keep its hands clean.  They popped up, teams were set up to monitor the other rogue and off-the-books teams, some changed sides, and some were left in place by an outgoing government or subfaction that hoped to get back into power again soon.

Sometimes, with stuff like the bioweapon in New York, it was these guys.  Keeping an eye on the right channels and acting.  Sometimes it was them perpetrating the deeds.  A rogue agency of overly capable people left without oversight, with contacts to call in, sometimes with resources or privileges, gone too rogue.

Mia doubted that even an incoming president would know the entirety of how things were organized, after the way things had gone in the last sixty years.  The only way they could know most of it would be to resurrect a group or set up a new one of their own to investigate, manage, or hunt down the dead branches.  Compounding the problem.

All creating a webwork of people who each, if someone like Mia were to follow the threads available, had digital trails leading to something that signaled, heavily, that this was classified or deliberately obfuscated.  That they shouldn’t get involved.

So she hadn’t gotten involved.  And they, she hoped, had no reason to know or follow up on the fact she existed.

One was now here in the dark.  Two more were in the woods.

There were other people down in the basement, pacing around.  Lights were shone into the areas where a duct had slats for air to flow down and through.

Ripley should be up in one of those ducts.

She wished she could look up and see Ripley peering down.  Just to know.

“How’s it going?”

“All the alerts are going off for fire and shit.  And they’ve got us combing the woods.  After all those TV reports about how fast the fire can move with wind like this?”

It was Danny, up near the top of the stairs.  Talking to someone else.  Giving them a heads up.

Mia kept her focus on the house.  There was minimal light out this far, but she could see the shapes of the ducts, and she could see the PVC pipe where all the cables ran through.

She moved, silent and steady, tracing the line of that pipe.  Away from the stairs.  Away from the light.  Away from the men that had passed Danny by.

Those men went straight for the light.  To the trophies that needed life support.

Mia startled.  There was a man, standing by the wall, headphones on.  A normal Cavalcanti soldier.  He was visible only when she approached, and the contrast of the light coming from the side against the profile of his body, and the darkness on the other side of him became clear.

He’d straightened, slightly.

He saw her too.  Just barely.

The difference was, for him, there was a huge chance that anyone he ran into in the darkness was a friend.  A small chance it was Ripley or Natalie, or the Mayor’s son, who were presumably supposed to be kept alive.  A minuscule chance it was a threat.

She stepped forward, then, as he started to speak, lunged, jabbing for his throat.  Left hand, because it was stronger than her right, with her shoulder torn.  The man knew how to fight.  He knocked the punch aside.

He started to yell, but Mia was anticipating it.  She pressed in, throwing her weight forward, crushing his arm against his upper chest and face.  The yell had come out like a yelp, cut short by the pressure.

With his free arm, he punched her, twice.  Once in the ear, which stunned her a bit.  She pulled her head back-

Ripley needs me.

-and another punch caught her in the side of the face.  She drove her forehead into his face, and he turned his head aside, avoiding the worst of it.  Mia realized she’d momentarily lost all sense of balance and was tilting sharply left, and grabbed onto him, fingers on jacket and shirt, hauling on him to either pull him over with her or pull herself back upright before she could fall.

Then he fell.

With two hands, he tried to staunch the flow of blood from the knife in his neck.  Some of the spray had caught Mia in the face.

Carson pulled the knife out.

The man, gurgling, tried to scream, and Mia covered his mouth with one hand, which only half-worked.

“Sorry,” she whispered, checking over her shoulder.  That hadn’t been efficient or elegant.

Carson held a finger to his lips.

The people Danny had just been talking to were coming down the stairs.  Mia pressed her body against the side of a shelf that was against the wall, her shoulder throbbing from the exertion just now.

Two people had flashlights and lit the way.  Two more were bringing boxes- it looked like the sort of metal box of first aid supplies that would be in a vehicle, with a hard plastic tote of water sitting on top.  They were focused on the job, and on not spilling the water.

Mia suspected the layers of security gave them the illusion that they were safe.  That the greatest danger was Davie.

With Carson’s help, she dragged the body, shirt and jacket hiked up around head and neck wound to catch as much of the blood as possible.  Her eyes were on the ceiling, and on the way ahead, in case someone else was standing guard in the dark.

Carson collapsed.  Mia jerked, as the body she was pulling suddenly had a lot more drag, and the jerk made her shoulder explode in pain.  In her momentary bewilderment and pain, she immediately focused on Carson, tufts of his hair between her fingers as she pushed hair back to get a clearer look at his face.  He was on hands and knees on the ground, pain clear on his face.

“Your side?” she asked.

“That bullet took a chunk out of me.”

“Can you keep going?”

“One second.”

She nodded.

“What are you thinking?” Carson asked, whispering, one of his hands lying over hers, at the side of his head.  “What’s our plan?”

“That this might be leading somewhere.  Cable, internet, other lines,” she replied, indicating the PVC pipe with wires running through it.  “Living room is there, kitchen’s there, the second entertainment room would be way over that direction.”

“Secret room, way to get out?”

“More like fuse box,” she replied.  “By process of elimination…”

She pointed.

“Okay.  Let’s go.  Let’s find a spot to put him.  Can’t do this much longer.”

They reached a cluster of shelves that Mia felt okay leaving the body in, placing two boxes to obscure the view.  There was some blood on the ground, but that was unavoidable.  Blood was tricky like that.

“I was thinking,” she whispered, eyes back on the ceiling.  “If there are sensors or traps, they’d need power.  But there’s no gaps or anything in the PVC, feeding out.  No wires I can see.”

“No,” Carson agreed.

It was a grim thought.

A trap or sensor was easier to work around, if they could spot it.

“I can’t help but think… what if they got her?” Carson asked.

“Who?”

“Ben and Rider.”

Mia gave him a long look.

“If she got out, somehow, and they found her, then they led us to believe we had to get in here ourselves… knowing we might not make it out?  Or we’d lose time?”

Mia shook her head.  “Even if there was a fifty percent chance that was true… we’d be here, checking.  Because we can’t afford to leave her here.”

“Not wrong.”

“And it’s not a fifty percent chance.  I don’t think they could’ve gotten out like this.”

“Okay.”

She’d told Ben what would happen if he played games.

They followed the connection to what she’d hoped would be a fuse box.  It wasn’t.

Just a hole in the wall.  Leading to the outside.  It was an imperfect hole, which seemed weird, considering the quality of the construction, otherwise, just barely wide enough for the PVC pipe and a bit of light to shine through.

There wasn’t anything outside that should lead to that.  Her first thought was that it could maybe be the connection to the vent cover.  If Danny was right, and the vents were built to also be an escape route in case of a raid or attack on Davie’s house, there’d have to be a way to unbar the way.  But there wouldn’t be one near here.  No vent covers.

No… extending her mental map out further…

That would be the station.

“This feeds into the early warning station Tony Arcuri told us about,” she murmured.

“Can we use it?”

She shook her head.

So much wasted time.

Her anxiety ramped up.  Images of Ripley’s fate darted through her mind.  Of Tyr, being upset his parent were gone.  Valentina not having anyone.

No.  There had to be ways.

“We have to find her,” Carson said, barely whispering anymore, in how stern he sounded.  “In the ducts?  But Davie’s men are doing the same thing.  Can we signal her?”

“This way.”

“Do you have an idea?”

She didn’t.

She still had the same idea from before.  But now it became that much riskier.

Because the other lines she wanted to trace went toward the light.  Where people were.

She wiped at her face, aware that could make the difference.

They hugged the wall, moving past the chairs and cooler again, then toward the plastic sheeting.  There were more shelves near the wall, which the sheeting lay across.  Getting between those shelves and the sheeting meant that if the light happened to shine on them, they’d be visible, as blotches of color and movement, only a bit blurry on the one side of the sheeting.

Mia’s eyes scanned the contents of the shelves.  Several had locked panes of plexiglass, keeping the contents within safe.

Some folded piles of clothing.

Tapes.

She could guess that it had something to do with the taking of the trophies.

“Stop pulling away!” a man shouted.  “Hold his head.  Are there any neck braces, to restrict movement of the head?”

Flashlights moved.  People moved.  The play of light and shadow against the curtains shifted.

Mia drew back as much as she could.  She let Carson watch for trouble, her eyes on the ceiling.

“Intubated.  Squeeze.  Don’t stop.  Trade off if you have to.”

“This is fucked.”

“You will be fucked if you don’t listen.”

“The hill’s on fire.  The sirens are going, they were talking about this place going up in flames.”

“It’s a ploy.  There’s someone further up the hill, they don’t see the fire, the wind favors us.”

“This is fucked.”

“If you can’t do the job,” a man said, and it was the same man who’d talked to Danny.  The analyst.  “Get out of the way, let someone else handle it.  I’ll let the boss know you couldn’t.”

“Do you want to?  Standing the fuck around, not doing anything.”

The anxiety in voices made Mia’s own anxiety stir.  Ripley needed help as much or more than these people did.  There was a boy who needed help.

Her eyes spotted the shapes of ducts… she didn’t believe Ripley would be up there, this close to where there’d be so much attention.  The smallest sound would draw everyone’s eyes and ears to her.

And the wires, the PVC pipe…

Mia edged closer to the open doorway, around a rolling set of drawers with a ‘sharps’ disposal container on top.  The open door itself was actually a shutter, and led to a tiled space which was presumably the operating theater and where all the medical supplies were.  There were people doing more serious work within.

She flinched as someone emerged about three feet in front of her.  Two people pushed a rolling cart between a corridor defined by multiple sheets of the plastic on either side.  Past two more curtains of sheeting that were separated by a few feet each, and into that central area where all the lights, the soldiers, the analyst, and at least one of the doctors were.

She made her best judgment and ducked across that ‘corridor’ to the far side.  Toward the far corner of the house.

There were some shelves and two more rolling cabinets.  Mostly medical stuff.  Some reference books.  Some tech.

There was a cot, presumably so a doctor on shift could catch a nap.

And then there was the fuse box.  There it was.

The other corner had the ventilation system and the sabotaged generator, which had two people working on rebuilding it.

Mia’s eyes went back to the shelf with the texts.

Under the bookshelf.

Had she been thinking about books?

There weren’t many options for ventilation access near here..

Mia checked Carson was still with her, and then traced a careful route around the perimeter, where the shadows were deepest.  Past the sheeting, someone lifted up an armless, legless torso and carried it through the corridor into the tiled room.

A space this big needed a big machine to bring the air through.  A duct ran up from the machine and into that network of ducts that fed into the rest of the house.  Presumably, the vents that fed to the outside helped bring in more.

Mia took cover behind the machine.  It was quiet, but the sirens outside did transmit some sound into the ducts, and she could hear some of that.

She ran her hand along the point where the duct met the machine.  Screws rattled.

With fingernails, she picked up a screw head.  No screw.  It had been snipped off, and naturally rested in the recess.  One had fallen to the ground, she noticed, now.

She met Carson’s eyes, then lifted the end of the duct away from the machine, so it pointed down into empty space.

And the toe of one of Ripley’s old-fashioned shoes poked down, and was guided to a toehold by Carson’s hand.

There was one faint metal bang, as a toe kicked the side of the unit too hard.

Everyone else was too preoccupied.

Ripley climbed out, shivering, almost flinching away, and then recognized Carson, first.  Then Mia.

Mia touched fingers to Ripley’s lips, making sure she knew to be quiet, then accepted the fierce, one-armed hug from her daughter.  She answered with a hug of her own, two-armed, tight, even though it made the damage at her shoulder scream.

Ripley pulled away, and hugged her dad, just as hard, but a little more abbreviated, before sitting back.  There was a wide-eyed wildness to her, a fear, that Mia hadn’t ever seen, that broke Mia’s heart.

Ripley reached up into the duct.

The boy climbed out too.  Mia used her hand to block his toes from banging the metal, and helped him find footholds.  Ripley clung to one side of her, tight, scared.

Until the boy was with them.

“Let’s go.” Mia whispered.  Even though she wasn’t sure what route would even work.  They’d have to cut across the plastic sheeting again, which was a risk, or move close to the-

“No.”

Mia looked at her daughter.

“Not without Natalie.”

Concern crossed Mia’s expression.  It only deepened when she followed Ripley’s gaze.

The shelves with the books and medical stuff.

A vent above those.  Mia had wondered if Ripley might be there.

“I’m not sure she can get out without help.  It was hard enough getting in,” Ripley whispered.

The metal would pop and bang as weight shifted.

Climbing down would be slow.

To save Natalie Teale?

More people had come into the ‘tent’ of plastic sheeting.

She wondered if they’d found the blood.

“Mia,” Carson whispered.

She tensed, worrying he’d heard something she hadn’t.

But his eyes were on the ceiling.

The PVC pipe.  There still weren’t any detours.  No power feeding into sensors, that she could see.  Some feeding to the outdoor cages, but she doubted her ability to pop those open and she knew they were guarded, anyway.  It would alert the Cavalcanti family.

No.  If there was no sensor or anything like that, but Davie was confident he could find Natalie, Ripley, and the boy… it was a tracker.

Her plan had been to sabotage the fuse box, and gain some control over when the power came back on.  There were other traps she could think of.  She had the soap, as dumb as it was.  But now she knew, they wanted the power on.

“We have to handle it,” he whispered.

The analyst stepped out of the curtain, with a few soldiers, and was briefly illuminated, before the curtains fell back into place, stiff and slow, and obscured some of that light.

He was having them stand guard by the door or the stairs.  It was really the only way out.  Someone had seen the blood.

So they needed the fuse box or generator working, and they needed the tracker.  Maybe those things together could buy them a window, draw attention.  That was the one option that came to mind.

Except there was only one real place the tracker could be.  The absolute bastard.

“We have to save her,” Ripley whispered.  As if that was the one and only consideration in play.

Piling the impossible onto the improbable.

Ripley’s expression, barely visible, as the four of them hunkered behind the ventilation unit, was changing by slow fractions.  It was an expression that had been in Mia’s nightmares, tied to that green Ion with a missing ‘n’.

Mia hugged her daughter, so she didn’t have to see the expression, or know that, on some level, Ripley didn’t see her as her mom anymore.  Not in full.

“Okay,” she whispered back, meeting Carson’s eyes, unsure if she was lying to her daughter.

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