Page 96 of The Girl Who Only Died Once

“I was just going to kill them,” he says, pulling out a Five Hour Energy shot and passing it to her. “You just made them take down the entire alarm because of annoyance.”

Chloe twists open the shot and downs it in one go, then coughs at the taste. “They built it into stone,” she says, pulling out a fruit leather and biting into it. “Stone that’s exposed to the elements. A bird drops a seed on it and chips off a sand is gonna set it off.”

The fruit leather is flavorless in her mouth, which means that she really needs it.

“They must have a dozen false alarms a week,” Chloe continues, after pulling a glug of water from her canteen. “The ward must constantly be going down, then flipping up, then going down.”

He watches her, a funny expression on his face, something halfway between a smile and a blank face.

“It’ll be down until they get over there and put it back,” Chloe says, finishing the fruit leather, then jerks her head towards the door to the tunnel. “Let’s go?”

The expression doesn’t leave him, but his eyes crease into a smile.

23

The moment her footsteps pass over the thread hold of the tunnel, her ears pop and warm air spills over her arms, suffocating after the brisk cold of the forest.

Chloe shivers, once, then sheds her jacket, twisting it into something smaller and storing it into the backpack.

The back of Chloe’s mind tickles at walking into a trap - it always did. Even if she was fully meaning to walk into a trap, her mind tells her otherwise.

When one’s entire self is attuned to traps, attuned to locks and snares, it becomes impossible to ignore them. Impossible to not see them, to not be aware. They nestle under the skin, a pebble in the shoe, a flickering lightbulb in the corner of the eye.

Chloe wishes she could ignore them, just sometimes. Not in life and death situations, not when she has to achieve something, but when she’s walking somewhere and someone put a snare to tell how many people strode over a certain tile…she could use a chance to do so without her nervous system dumping a week's worth of adrenaline into her body.

The tunnel stretches on, black, lit only by spare runes sketched into the wall itself, but Killian steps lightly in front of her, one arm holding her behind him.

He flicks his hand towards a single security camera, and the glass cracks, falling down with a merry sort of tinkle to the tunnel floor.

The tracks gleam in the dim light.

“Is that how you broke through the locking pits?” Killian asks, his voice startlingly loud in the tunnel. “You changed them so they couldn’t work?”

That would’ve taken way more energy than Chloe could’ve ever had, especially without laying a hand against them, so she just shakes her head, squinting at the protections along the wall.

She doesn’t know their protocol for the alarm going down, they might’ve implemented something until it’s reinstated, but now they’re beyond the basic levels of security.

“I broke into the wall and climbed through it,” Chloe murmurs, staring at the perfectly slick stone, at the small crease where the elevator opens up. There’s a lock and key, obviously meant for the guards. “Less protection in the wall.”

Again, the funny sort of smile.

It’s a simple lock, the sort found in elevators around the country meant for firemen in rescue. Chloe’s seen hundreds of them.

There’s a ward to stop alchemy from changing it, from magic from brute forcing it open, so Chloe grabs at her lockpicks, even though her fingertips still tremble.

Killian’s eyes are heavy on that, as she spreads the picks in her hands, like a carpenter evaluating which sort of nail to use.

“I just need you to break the demon barrier, that’s what else I need you for,” he says, almost cajoling. “Get that and I can do everything else.”

She’s not going to let him do all the research gathering, but she gets what he’s saying.

“I’m okay,” she says, then flicks her eyes up to the camera down the tunnel, pointed in the other direction, and before she even completes the thought, he waves his hand, cracking that glass, too.

Convenient.

The lock is so simple she just flicks to the wiggle key, and it pops open in under ten seconds without magic, revealing the control panel.

It’s more of a deterrent to errant teenagers than any actual security.

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