Read Chapter 11: Blackout Snipers

The archive annex smelled of old paper and dust, but underneath that, Étienne caught something else—machine oil and cold sweat. He froze mid-step, the rolled 1974 plan clutched against his chest like a shield.

Marie had stopped too, her head cocked. The reading room stretched before them, long tables scattered with yellowed documents. Emergency lights cast weak pools across the floor. Nothing moved.

But the front door was still locked. Marie had insisted on that.

"Back door," Étienne whispered.

Marie shook her head. "It's a fire exit. Trip alarm. We'd—"

The lights died.

All of them at once. The emergency batteries too. The basement plunged into absolute dark, the kind that pressed against your eyes.

A floorboard creaked. Somewhere to their left. Then the unmistakable sound of a suppressor cough—hollow, muted, wrong—and a light fixture above them shattered.

"Down!" Étienne grabbed Claire's arm and dragged her under the nearest table. Marie dropped to her knees beside them, already scrambling.

"Who the hell knows we're here?" Claire hissed.

Étienne didn't answer. Because the answer was obvious: whoever killed Sarrazin. Whoever ransacked the lab. Whoever had been waiting for them to find exactly what they'd come for.

Another suppressed round, this one ripping through a filing cabinet behind them. The documents inside exploded in a white flutter of confetti.

"They're shooting blind," he whispered. "They don't have night vision—"

Something green bloomed in the dark, a faint phosphorescent smear across the far wall. Then another. Night-vision goggles. Two of them.

The mercenaries were sweeping the room in coordinated arcs, and Étienne had three seconds before their scan reached the table.

He grabbed Marie's hand. "The stairwell behind the circulation desk. The one with the 'No Admittance' sign."

Marie's eyes went wide. "That goes to the sub-basement. It's sealed off—"

"Wrong-way staircase. Two flights down, it connects to the utility tunnels. I mapped this building when I was a kid." He didn't have time to explain that his father used to bring him to municipal engineering talks at the university, that he'd played hide-and-seek through these basement corridors for years. "Trust me."

Claire was already moving, staying low, hugging the shadow of the reference stacks. Étienne pulled Marie after her.

They reached the staircase door just as the green sweep passed over the table they'd left behind. A double-tap of rounds tore through the space where Marie had been kneeling.

Étienne shoved the door open. The stairwell beyond was a stairwell in name only—a grim concrete shaft, pipes running overhead, no railing, and steps that had been installed backwards, forcing anyone descending to take each one as a blind stumble.

He started down, pulling Marie. Claire followed close enough that he could hear her breathing.

Two flights down, they hit a chain-link gate. Padlocked.

The green glow appeared at the top of the stairs above them.

Étienne didn't think. He handed the plan tube to Claire, grabbed the padlock in both hands, and twisted hard against its rust-seized body. The metal bit into his palms. The lock didn't give.

"Étienne—" Claire's voice was tight.

The suppressor coughed again, and a round ricocheted off the concrete wall inches from his head. The sound rang like a struck bell, leaving his ears screaming.

He twisted again, put his whole body into it. Something snapped—not the lock, but the hasp where decades of corrosion had weakened it. The gate swung open.

"Go, go, go!" He shoved them through and into a low tunnel that sloped downward at a steep angle, water dripping from an unseen source above them.

The utility tunnel was a relic of the 1970s, which meant it was exactly the kind of place his father's generation had constructed to be forgotten. It made sense, glancing up at the walls, to notice the bundle of cables running along the ceiling—steel-armored, oiled, heavy gauge. Not normal power for the university annex. Those were control lines.

Right here, following his father's old blueprints.

Behind them, boots hit the concrete stairwell. The mercenaries had entered the chase.

Claire surged ahead into the dark, one hand trailing the wall to guide herself. The tunnel curved right, then left, then split into a Y. Étienne grabbed Claire's shoulder. "Left. It comes up near the old maintenance sheds."

They went left, their footsteps slapping against flooded sections of floor. The tunnel narrowed until they had to go single-file, shoulders brushing the damp walls.

Then Marie stumbled. Her foot caught on a cable and she went down hard, cracking her knee against a pipe flange. She cried out—sharp, involuntary—and the sound echoed like a gunshot.

Something grabbed the back of Étienne's collar. A gloved hand. Wrenching him backward off his feet, hurling him against the tunnel wall. His head cracked against the concrete and ribbons of light flashed across his vision.

A shape loomed over him.