Esme already felt as if she had run a marathon. Two floors down and a hundred and fifty yards ahead of her, the corridor she had been running down split into two. In terms of the geography of the building, the left corridor was closest to the exterior wall. What were the chances of an emergency exit out of the museum? Did museums even have emergency escapes? All those guests upstairs dead. She’d sat by some Californian tech guy. She knew she had met him but she couldn’t remember his name. Shock, she supposed. The guy’s white shirt soaked in blood; she’d tried to stop the bleeding but there was nothing she could do. As his breathing grew more laboured, she’d stroked his cheek, although she didn’t think he knew she was there. She shivered at the memory. And how many more were dead? How many of the young and gifted who worked with her at Derkind? Any and all of those deaths were on her. They’d come to the museum for her and for Tobias and for Syd – to celebrate with them, to learn from them – and they’d been slaughtered where they stood.
She could hear someone behind her. Urgent running footsteps. It was the first sign of life she’d heard since she’d caught sight of the stairs and taken refuge. How long had she been down here? It was minutes, she thought, it just felt like hours. Was it a guest from the launch? Should she stop? She glanced back over her shoulder but couldn’t see anything.
A strange scraping sound travelled to her along the echoing corridor.
What was that noise?
Her heart leapt as some survival instinct filled in the blanks. It was a blade being dragged along the wall. She imagined it cutting a channel into the paint. She was being hunted, and by someone who enjoyed the hunt. They would move faster if they lifted the blade away from the wall, but they didn’t want to. They didn’t feel they had to, because they knew they had her trapped down here.
If she kept running, whoever it was would catch her and kill her.
She imagined grey paint peeling and curling from the wall.
She thought about the man she had killed in her apartment because she’d decided to live rather than die. But she had no weapon this time. Other than her wits.
And if he was playing a game, then she could play a game too.
She drew her hand down the front of her bloodstained dress – don’t think about it, she ordered herself. Don’t think about the dying and the dead. She had seconds and it might not even work. She lurched to the right-hand side of the corridor and trailed her right hand down the wall, then cut straight across and veered left. It wasn’t much, but it was all she had.
Tobias. She thought about Tobias and how much she loved him. About Atticus. Imagined squeezing his warm hand in hers. What had she told him? Be brave. So easy to say and so hard to do. She thought about North – the man her uncle had sent to keep her safe – and she thought about Syd. About how little time humanity had left. She stopped running and threw herself in the lee of a doorway. If she opened it, he would hear her. If he looked too closely, he would see her.
Along the main corridor, her pursuer’s footsteps came hard and fast. They kept trying to kill her – the break-in, the Lamborghini, right here and now, and the worst thing was they only had to get it right once for everything to be over. Fifty-fifty, she thought. She had a fifty per cent chance of dying in the next few seconds. But she was a killer herself – didn’t she deserve to die? This then was how it felt to be on the threshold between life and death. This agonizing hope that you might get to live, and the soul-devouring fear that you might have to die – never more alive than in the moment you were so very close to death.
Should she step forward and face the ultimate bogeyman? The temptation was there – Freud’s death drive. No more grief. No more longing and struggle. Washing away her past sins and present guilt. This was the moment, if ever there was one. She lifted her foot from the floor.
But it would make everything she had done worthless. She put her foot back down. However much pain she was in, she stuck by the decisions she had made and she still had a job to do. She pressed closer into the wood of the door.
Her breath sounded like the loudest thing on the planet, so she stopped breathing. She squeezed her eyes closed as if darkness might protect her as much as silence. Ridiculous, she thought – like a child hiding. Coming ready or not. She needed a gun. She needed North, but he wasn’t here. What had North said? That he’d killed seven guilty men, and she’d been so appalled by that aggression. But he’d been honest and done what he felt he had to do and she understood that now. She hoped he was alive, that he hadn’t been brave and foolish. She hoped he wasn’t among the dead upstairs.
The pace of her pursuer seemed to hesitate for the briefest moment.
Left.
Or right.
Fifty-fifty.
She could smell her pursuer’s musky sweat. She pressed her lips together to stop herself from letting out a whimper of animal terror.
Right. The footsteps picked up again, the sound of the dragging blade, and she moved off, fast and silent. How long did she have till he realized he had made a mistake and turned around? Minutes? Seconds?
There was no doubt in her mind that the man chasing her was doing so with one intention – murder. These people were here for Syd, and they wanted her dead. And they wanted Tobias dead too. The thought of Tobias bleeding and dead made her want to weep. They had come to murder Tobias, to murder her, and to steal the intelligence they had created together. And for the first time that night, she wondered what Syd thought about it all.