The first few steps in the stairwell were intact. Every step after was either waiting to collapse beneath Dani’s weight or missing altogether. She climbed and crawled more than she walked. Halfway up, several steps were gone. She stopped to locate the sniper, hoping she could get a clear shot from her current position and wouldn’t have to continue beyond the gap in the stairs—but a fallen beam from the upper level obstructed her view of the Warden, who, judging from the thunderous blasts that kept sounding, was still mercilessly firing on Miles and the other trapped MPs. Dani couldn’t see Coulson, but the continued noise of plasma pistol shots told her that the MP and the Warden on the ground were still trading shots.
Dani adjusted her feet, crouched, and sprang upward. Her leap was a little short. Her arms reached the next step beyond the gap, but her chest collided with the edge, and now her swinging lower body threatened to drag her off the step entirely. She glanced down at the pile of twisted metal below, waiting to impale her. She struggled to pull herself up but didn’t have the arm strength to do so. She swung one leg up and, body contorted, managed to hook her boot around a piece of the handrail still attached to the wall. Her grunts grew louder as she clawed her way out of her predicament.
Once she was out of danger from falling, Dani clung to the handrail and drew in deep, raspy breaths.
Whose brilliant idea was this?
She wanted to stay curled and clinging to the handrail a bit longer, at least until her pounding heart slowed, but Miles didn’t have time for her to rest. She forced herself to continue up the stairwell. Debris fell as she moved, but the sniper was too deafened by his rifle’s whine and the blasts that followed each pull of his trigger to hear the racket she made.
Three-quarters of the way up the stairs, she found the massive hole in the wall she’d spotted from below. She stopped on the crumbling steps and looked through. She had an unobstructed view of the sniper now—still lying prone on the slab and shooting down at the MPs.
She drew her tranq pistol and aimed it at the Warden. Body armor covered his chest and back, but his arms and legs were vulnerable to a tranquilizer dart. She lined up her weapon’s sights with the back of his left thigh and steadied the weapon with both hands. She took a breath, released it slowly, and started to squeeze the trigger—and her boot broke through the step she was balanced on. Her body dropped; her arms struck the edge of the hole in the wall, sending the tranq pistol bouncing out of her hands. She scrambled to the next step, but it too began to crumble beneath her. She scampered up the remaining steps as the stairwell progressively collapsed behind her.
She reached the next level in the building and dove away from the stairs, hoping the floor was more stable. She flattened her body against an intact portion of the floor where it met a wall far from the collapsed stairs. She hoped the sniper couldn’t see her. He had to have heard the crashing stairs, even with the constant noise of his quake rifle.
All shots from both the rifle and plasma pistols paused. Yep, definitely heard it. Though she desperately wanted to see where the Wardens were now and which MPs were still alive, Dani didn’t dare move. If Coulson had been anywhere near the now-collapsed stairwell when it gave out, she was probably dead.
The pause was brief; the weapon fire quickly resumed, including that of the quake rifle, and as it did, Dani realized how odd it felt to be relieved that the fighting had resumed. Shots weren’t being fired in her direction, so she had remained undetected.
The sound the quake rifle made before it was fired irritated her. Her shot at the sniper with the tranq pistol had obviously missed. She had two knives left for weapons. She could protect herself with a knife to some extent, but she was no expert at fighting with one.
Once again, she had the option of hiding where no one knew where she was and leaving the MPs to whatever fate awaited them, or trying to help Miles and hoping they both survived. With a curse, she moved from her position on the floor to a crouch. She returned to the edge of the floor where the stairs had collapsed. The angled slab of concrete where the sniper was lay almost below her. Any closer, and the falling concrete would have taken him out. No such luck.
She surveyed her surroundings. Twelve-foot ceilings. Seven-foot drop to the slab, almost straight down. If you run, jump, and make it closer to the top of the slab, the seven-foot drop becomes four. You can almost land on the sniper to take him out. Have the knife out when you jump. No. My luck, I’d just stab myself with it. Tackle the sniper, then pull the knife. At least I won’t have a gun in my hand to be killed by friendly fire if I die like Jace says I do, right?
Dani passed both hands through her hair and shook her head. God, this sucks.
She moved away from the edge of the gaping hole in the floor back to the wall and took a deep breath.
Horrible fucking plan.
She pushed off the wall and sprinted over the twenty feet of intact flooring. She leapt across the gap, and her boots landed hard against the angled slab while her palms slammed against its surface. Pain shot through her burned hand, but there was no time to worry about that. She dashed toward the sniper.
He’d heard her landing. He rolled and swung his rifle upward. Dani lunged for him and slammed her shoulder into his chest. The rifle fell from his hands, and they skidded a few feet in a tangle of limbs. Dani escaped his grasp and drew her knife. He reached for his knife, but it wasn’t in its sheath.
He had been injured at some point; there was dried blood on the side of his face. Dani’s mind worked to find a way to defeat him, but her brain’s gears halted when she noticed the name on his uniform.
“Rowan.” Dani shook her head. “You’re a tenacious bastard.”
Rowan grinned. “I could say the same of you. Attacking me with my own knife, now that takes some nerve.” He shifted his feet to move higher up the slab.
Dani moved parallel to him, refusing to let him have the higher area; she didn’t want him to be able to rush down on her quicker than she could sprint up to meet him. Either way, she couldn’t outfight him. She wished one of the MPs would shoot him before she had to do anything, but no one fired up at the slab. Her only option was to surprise him. He was a trained killer; she was a trained scavenger.
Rowan’s boot skidded on loose debris on the slab, and Dani charged without hesitation. He then grinned, and she realized she’d fallen for a feigned slip. She was committed to her attack now, though, so she swung her blade at him. He slammed both of his hands into her wrist, one on each side, and the blade flew out of her grip. Before she could recover, he made a fist and swung it back toward her, striking her in the jaw just below the ear. Dani stumbled from the blow and fell on her back.
She blinked to clear her vision while she clumsily scrambled backward down the slab, keeping her eyes on the blurred shape still moving toward her.
“I really hope you’re an Echo. I will kill you several times for this,” Rowan said. He picked up his knife and lunged at her, poised to thrust his blade into her chest.
Dani rolled, pulling her second knife as she went. As he came down at her, she drove it into the side of his body, below his armor. The knife’s hilt prevented the blade from going deeper than she wanted. His warm blood flowed over her hand. She twisted the knife, and Rowan cried out. She jerked her knife free from his body and scrambled away from his attempt to stab her again.
Blood poured from the Warden’s wound, running in thin streams down the concrete. The hand he held over the wound turned red. He crawled up the slab, still holding his knife. Dani neared the top edge of the slab as he approached. Her vision remained blurred from his earlier punch, and she had nowhere else to go if he reached her.
Rowan slowed as loss of blood weakened his body. Before he could reach Dani, he collapsed.
Dani stared at the fallen Warden, waiting to see if he’d move again. The ringing in her ears lessened, and she heard the continued fighting on the ground.
“Goddammit, Coulson, kill that fucker already!”
Dani wasn’t sure how much time passed before Rowan’s body began its bluish glow. She scooted on her rump closer to him and rolled him to his back. His body writhed as he returned to a younger Rowan—in his early twenties. She pressed the tip of her knife to his throat, realizing as she did that her hand and forearm were red with his blood. Her blade trembled; she shuddered and dropped the knife. “The MPs can kill him if they want him dead.”
She crawled on her hands and knees to the quake rifle. Still dizzied by the blow she’d taken to her jaw, she picked up the rifle and stood. Pain exploded through her body when something struck her chest. The force blasted her off the slab, launching her into a ten-foot freefall to the floor below.