Page 109 of Hard Luck (Blackstone House)

“How do you feel about grilled rat?” I asked. “We could make a campfire.”

“You want me tocatch a rat?”

I’d actually planned to do that myself. It wouldn’t have been the first time, but I quickly realised that rat catching was unlikely to be on Obituary-Writer-Bella’s list of skills.

“Uh, yeah? I can collect the firewood.”

Cole just sucked in a breath and kept walking. Through a set of double doors, a mess room full of dining tables led to a kitchen. We checked every cupboard, but there was no food left. Not even cans. Not that we had a can opener.

On the second floor, bedrooms had been abandoned with drapes at the windows and linen on the beds. At least we had somewhere to sleep tonight. Somewhereverydusty. And damp. The walls were covered in water stains, the result of zero maintenance over the past several decades.

“What are you doing?” Cole asked as I opened the door to each room in turn and checked the ceilings.

“Looking to see if there’s a way up to the roof.”

“Why the hell do you want to go up to the roof?”

“Haven’t you ever watched a survival movie? We need to signal to passing planes. Write a message to anyone looking for us, and the roof is the best place to do that.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to see if there’s a beach? We could use a stick to write in the sand.”

“You said before that there wasn’t a beach.”

“Not a sunset-and-cocktails Instagram beach, but there might be a small bay somewhere.”

“So I can break my other leg climbing down to it? No, thanks. Maybe we’ll be able to scrape a message into the dirt on the roof? Or we could use bed linen and weight it down somehow?”

“I guess.”

There was no way onto the roof from the inside, no hatch or stairs, but we did find a metal fire escape that led from the second floor to the ground. The fire escape had a wide metal landing, and when we piled three nightstands on top of each other, then two, then one, the wobbly pyramid formed giant steps high enough that I’d be able to scramble onto the flat roof.

Predictably, Cole didn’t like the idea.

“This doesn’t look safe.”

“Well, do you have a better plan?” I asked.

“No,” he admitted. “Sweetheart, you’re still wearing a cast.”

Of course I was. I only had one dive boot, and the cast gave my left foot better protection than if I tried walking barefoot. As it was, I’d had to pick three thorns out of my toes.

“You’re very observant. Hold the pile steady, okay?”

He didn’t have a choice. I hopped up onto the roof before he could stop me, and there was a good reason for that. I was going to write an SOS message, all right, but it wasn’t going to say “HELP.” No, I needed to spell out “BEAR.” I’d considered “SHARK,” and if it had been a simple shipwreck, that would have been perfectly adequate because Cole and I weren’t in immediate danger. But I was worried about Dr. Blaylock. Whatever the boyswere doing, I couldn’t see him being complicit. So, “BEAR” it was.

I studied the old-school built-up roofing, layers of felt coated in bitumen to make it waterproof. How did I know that? Because in Priest’s school of special ops, we’d learned all about construction. If we knew how a building was made, we could work out how to destroy it.

The good news? On a built-up roof, the top layer was usually covered in a layer of gravel to protect it from debris and sunlight. On the barracks building, the stones were dirty on top, but when I stirred them up, lighter undersides were revealed. All I had to do was scuff a message for Echo.

The bad news? The stones got through the holes in my cast and hurt like fuck when I stepped on them.

I gritted my teeth, spat several curses, and began scuffing. The sooner I got this done, the faster?—

“Everything okay?” Cole’s head popped up at the edge of the roof.

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

“You were turning the air blue up there.” He took in what I was trying to do. “Hey, walking on those stones has gotta hurt.”

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