Page 50 of Make Them Pay

I keep working.

20

Render

Poe weighs less than he should. “Where’s Orchid?”

I get his arm over my shoulder and haul him up from the cot. The first thing that hits me is how light he is. Not just thin. Emptied out. The guy I grew up with, the one who could fireman’s-carry Arrow and Gage at the same time on a stupid bet, is down to bone and willpower held together by pure stubbornness and the kind of anger that keeps people breathing when their body wants to quit.

His face looks worse than the video. Both eyes swollen now. The cut along his hairline has been opened, half-treated, and opened again. Ross was methodical about it. Poe’s wrists are raw where the cuffs chewed into already torn skin.

But he’s on his feet. With my help, yeah, but he’s standing. “Render.” His voice is wrecked—cracked, dry, the sound of someone who’s done a lot of screaming and then gone silent for a long time. “Where is she?”

I stop. “We’ll find her. I don’t know where she is, but we’ll find her.”

Poe blinks at me. “Took you long enough to get here.”

“Traffic was bad.”

He almost smiles. The muscles try, but the swelling won’t let them. I still catch the attempt, and that’s enough.

“The crew?”

“Upstairs. Arrow, Gage, Ozzy, and Lark. Knight’s looking for Orchid. BRAVO’s locking down the outside.”

“Knight came.”

“Knight came. Sawyer too. Dean sent a full BRAVO squad.”

Relief hits him so hard his knees nearly buckle. I tighten my grip and keep him upright.

“Enley,” he says. Just her name, but the way he says it carries two weeks of not knowing if the person he’d been protecting with his silence was even alive.

“She’s safe. She’s running the tech side from outside.”

He starts to ask something, then stops. Even beat to hell and half-starved, his brain is still working. Enley running a digital operation doesn’t line up with anything he knew about his little sister before this.

“We’ll talk later,” I tell him. “Right now we move.”

We move.

The corridor on sub-level two is narrow, lit by those low emergency strips that turn everything amber. Poe limps along with his arm over my shoulder, breathing hard but steady. Behind us the cell door stands open.

“Render.” Her voice comes through the earpiece. Controlled, professional, but I can hear the edge underneath it. The same edge that showed up the second the locks cycled and she realized what her access pattern had cost us.

“Enley.”

“Stairwell’s compromised. Diaz is holding the top, but more guards are coming from the first level. Knight wants an alternate exit through the maintenance shaft.”

“That shaft fits one person. I’ve got Poe. He can barely walk.”

“I know. But the stairwell has active shooters between you and the exit. Diaz can hold maybe three more minutes before the reinforcements from the west side overwhelm her.”

Three minutes. Poe hanging on me. A stairwell full of people trying to kill us, and a shaft that only fits one.

“Enley. Can you kill the lights from your end?”

“I can try. Lighting control runs through the same network I’m in, but it’s a separate system. I’d have to find the access point and write a new command.”