Page 149 of Jax
The door on the right opened into another hallway—bare concrete, strip lighting that flickered like the building was giving out beneath its own weight. I felt the thrum underfoot. Not instability, just age. This place had layers. And none of them clean.
Sully’s voice cracked low in my ear. “Pisser ahead. One target. Mine.”
We rounded the next corner just in time to see a man—half-drunk, halfway through relieving himself into a bucket—turn and blink. He didn’t speak. Just stared, slack-jawed, before Sully put a silenced round through his temple. He crumpled, dead before he hit the floor.
It felt mechanical now. Like flipping switches. Opening doors. Killing pests. My heart didn’t spike. My hands didn’t shake. Not until I thought of Stella. And Violet. The reason we were still walking through this hell instead of torching it from above. Every corridor brought us closer. Every shot meant one less man between her and the light.
We regrouped at the third junction. Carrick tapped his comm once, two rooms left, on either side of the hall ahead. He and Niko took the left-hand door. Sully and I went right, while Deacon provided over-watch from behind.
The room was small. Two cots, barely touched. MRE wrappers in the corner. Cigarette burns on the wall. A photo hung crooked above one bed, three men in camo, grinning like war was a vacation. I took it down and folded it. I didn’t know why. Maybe because one of those faces was now missing a jaw. Maybe because war like this wasn’t supposed to leave souvenirs.
We moved on. No words. Just the quiet language of practiced bodies—shoulder brushes, mirrored steps, the faint clicks of gloves on steel. The corridor ahead pulsed low. Dim light. Sharp angles. Shadows that seemed to think about shifting.
This wasn’t fury. Fury burns too fast. This was surgical. Cold. The kind of discipline honed by trauma and repetition. We’d already mourned what we might lose.
At the next junction, I gave Sully a tilt of my chin. He moved—steady, unhurried, like a man who’d never met a fear he couldn’t outweigh. He swept the blind corner while I covered high, every motion reminding me that subtle didn’t mean soft. I didn’t breathe until he did. Then we moved again.
Forward. Silent. I didn’t have to look to know where they were. I could feel the rhythm in my blood—the staggered fall of boots, the press of gear against vests, the brush of breaththrough filters no one used. There were no words. Just proximity. Purpose.
The air changed as we turned the corner. Colder. Not from the storm, but sudden, noticeable change. The humidity that had clung to us for hours dropped like we’d passed through some invisible barrier. My skin prickled. It wasn’t environmental. It was engineered. Controlled. Someone had sealed a space nearby, and pumped it with its own air. That meant power. That meant purpose.
I paused. Pressed my palm against the wall beneath a corroded conduit box. Concrete met my glove—cracked and chipped—but beneath that, something deeper. A tremor. Not a failing transformer hum. Rhythmic. Clean. Machinery, built to last. Something was back there. Temperature-sensitive. Possibly alive.
My stomach twisted, not with panic, but with certainty. I kept my voice low, barely trusting the air to carry it. “It’s here.”
Carrick was beside me in seconds, eyes sweeping the seams of the structure like he could will them open by force alone. “What are you feeling?”
“Power flow. Cold air. Could be refrigeration. Maybe backup battery housing,” I murmured, fingers still pressed to the wall. “But something’s off with the reverb. It’s not an open space. It’s controlled. This has to be the area where Stella was held, based on her descriptions. Violet is probably being held in the same place, somewhere on the other side of this door.”
Niko dropped to a knee, already unrolling his pack. “Double-bolted. Electronic lock. Local access.” His tone stayed even, but I caught the set of his jaw. “No alarms. Fresh wiring. They didn’t think anyone would find it.”
He slid his bypass tool into the seam, movements clean, practiced. For two minutes, the only sound was the quiet click of metal against metal and the faint scrape of tension rods shifting.His shoulders stayed squared, steady as stone. But then I saw it—the faint crease of his brow. The lock wasn’t giving.
“Come on,” he muttered under his breath, twisting the pick a fraction tighter. A soft hiss of static bled from the panel, mocking him. He pulled back, recalibrated, tried again. A click came, but not the right kind.
Sully flicked his gaze to me. I didn’t move. Not yet. Niko tried twice more, precise as ever, before he finally exhaled through his nose and cut me a look. Not defeat. Just calculation.
“Jax,” he said quietly. “Your eyes.”
I crouched beside him, peering into the guts of the panel. Fresh solder glared up at me, wires rerouted into false loops, a misdirection circuit built to waste time. It was clever—meant to trip up even trained hands. But it wasn’t flawless.
“They overcompensated,” I murmured, already reaching into his kit. My fingers sorted through the tools by instinct, pulling a micro-pick and grounding clamp. “Cross-wired the leads to stall anyone working straight. You can’t brute force it.”
Niko didn’t argue, didn’t bristle. Just leaned back enough for me to work. “Show me.”
My pulse synced to the circuitry, mapping every false junction. I eased the clamp against the frame, bridging the current, coaxing the sequence instead of fighting it. One by one, the false wires gave. The tension shifted beneath my hand, a rhythm falling into place.
Three seconds. Two. One.
The pad’s light flipped from red to green with a soft, mechanical hiss.
I sat back, letting the tools fall quiet. “Door’s open.”
Niko gave one short nod acknowledgment. “Good work.”
The cold rushed out as the seal broke, sterile and processed. Antiseptic. Bleach. Metal. And beneath it, something older—damp, rotting at the edges.
I didn’t breathe. Couldn’t. The air screamed wrong.
