It was awkward and difficult to treat. The gauze wasn’t applying enough pressure alone.
Think, Tycho.
I pulled away and reached into the kit again, this time for the scissors. I cut into Samara’s shirt down the length of her sleeve to make a pair of long cloth strips. I looped the cloth around her neck and under her arm and then tied the ends together across her chest. It seemed to hold, so I loaded the dermal injector with the clotting agent. I pressed the injector to her shoulder and pushed the button with my thumb, and the nanites were delivered with an audible hiss.
I took up the scissors again, this time cutting Samara’s shirt down her chest. I pulled the flaps of cloth away and searched for the exit wound. There was so much blood I couldn’t actually see it. I ran my fingers across her side and eventually found it. Her body tensed when I touched it, and she made a sound and spat bloody drool.
“You’re okay, Samara,” I lied. “You’ll be okay.”
The exit wound was small, barely the size of a fingernail. That meant the round had fractured inside of her and only a single piece had left her body. There was likely serious internal damage I couldn’t do anything about. She needed immediate help, or she was going to die.
I messaged Andrea.
19
Katerina escaped from holding, currently armed, whereabouts unknown. She shot Dr. Markov. I’ve done what I can, but she has internal bleeding and bullet fragmentation. I need medical assistance here ASAP.
I paused for a few seconds, then sent another message.
I’m sorry, Andrea.
How had Katerina escaped the interrogation room? Could she have hacked it somehow without Thomas knowing? Or was Thomas too busy trying to stay alive to have even noticed? How was that even possible when she had no dataspike and there was no access terminal?
There was every possibility she had already succeeded in getting out of the building. If that was the case, the special forces soldiers attacking our building had already achieved one of their probable objectives.
I wanted to do something. I sat cradling Samara’s head, clearing her mouth when the blood choked her. She’d fallen unconscious, her breathing no longer panicked and ragged, but slow and, worryingly, shallow. I’d heard nothing from Raven or Vincenzo, and I thought of them lying on their backs in a growing pool of blood, staring up with vacant eyes at the ghostly off-worlders that killed them.
At last, a message came in. Understood, Tycho. Pursue Katerina. Capture or kill.
So there it was, I had my orders. Despite how little sense it made, my task was now to hunt down Katerina. I gently lowered Samara’s head, propping up the first aid kit as a kind of pillow for her. I stood and walked through the door into the corridor, entrusting Dr. Markov to whatever help Andrea might be able to arrange for her.
The Jovian soldiers had entered the complex from two directions, the east and west elevators. If Katerina wanted to rendezvous with them, she’d pick one of those two entrances. Then again, doing so would mean she’d run into Section 9 or our android proxies long before her own allies. If she wanted to avoid that, was there any other way to get out of the building? The south elevator and stairwell didn’t have ground level access, but the north elevator—
“Of course.”
The Swan Rooms, our suite within the hotel itself. She could use the north stairwell to enter the Hotel du Lac through the Swan Rooms and then make her way down to the street from there.
I took off running, ignoring any concerns about hostile proxies or Jovian soldiers. If she was moving cautiously to avoid recapture, I could only catch up by being reckless. If I was lucky, there was even a chance that something could have delayed her along the way, and that she might not have made it into the hotel yet.
As I approached the north elevator, I saw the car was already in operation. I repeatedly punched the call button anyway, knowing it would make no difference. I ran further down the corridor to the stairwell, preparing for the long climb, when an uneasy thought stopped me at the door.
What if Katerina expected me to come this way?
It was a paranoid thought, barely rational, but I was never one to ignore my instincts. Katerina could have set an ambush at any number of points, but she could have easily sent the elevator up knowing I would follow via the stairs. She’d then have a single point of entry to monitor, a guaranteed fatal funnel, and the high ground.
I stepped back from the door and looked around for anything useful. I was entering a narrow space, possibly into a trap, and I was unarmed. I had my augments, sure, but I wasn’t confident I could control my prosthetics with enough precision to avoid lethal force in combat. My orders were capture or kill; the priority was to bring Katerina back alive.
The standing water at my feet gave me the idea to look up. The fire suppression piping ran exposed along the ceiling. Now that the system had discharged, there wouldn’t be any internal pressure. I bent deep and jumped, then I grabbed hold of the piping fifteen feet overhead. It didn’t immediately come free under my weight, so I placed a hand against the ceiling, took a breath, and pushed. The pipe groaned, strained, and finally broke. I landed on my feet in a splash of water, holding a three-foot-long section of metal in my hand.
It would have to be enough.
I wrapped my fingers around the handle of the door and crouched low. If Katerina was waiting on the other side, she could only react to it opening. Moving fast enough, I could get through before she fired, then it would just be a matter of getting close. Speed at the start was critical. I shifted my weight between my feet and planted myself, visualizing the path I’d take just beyond the door. I played through the next five seconds again and again in my mind. When I was sure, I turned the handle.
I tore the door open and sprinted past the threshold. I was as alert as I’d ever been in my life then. My vision was a sequence of hyper-detailed still images flashing, one after another at the center of a dark tunnel. My first step beyond the door was on the second stair directly ahead. I bounded up, three steps at a time, scanning for movement.
I came around the first landing and paused for a split second. It could have cost me my life, but so could blindly running through a tripwire or IR field. The stairwell ahead, as far as I could see, looked clear.
I kept still and listened. The door below swung shut, and the sound echoed up the stairwell. There was the steady drip of water as it lightly cascaded down the steps, and the sound of my own breathing. I was alone. There was no trap, no Jovian fire team waiting in ambush, no proximity mine or rogue agent.
I climbed the next flight of steps. Then the one after, and the one after that. My pace picked up as I rose higher and higher, my caution giving way once again to the pressure I’d felt before. Katerina had a six-minute lead on me, and it was growing by the second. My hesitance entering the stairwell couldn’t be helped—it would have been the perfect killbox had anyone been so inclined—but the time I took to reach the Swan Rooms was entirely within my control.
I raced up those winding steps with all the speed an augmented human possibly could, which is to say it was less than a fifth of the time it should have taken. I never grew winded. The pump where my heart used to be kept an even, quiet flow. My legs pushed off the 800th step as easily as the 8th.
The door to the Swan Rooms was locked with a pattern code. The elevator would have let Katerina out into a living room, but the stairwell entrance was behind a faux closet in an adjacent room. Unless she had taken the time to search for it, it was unlikely Katerina had even noticed. It was an aesthetic choice that was now serving a practical use.