Bonds of Brass (The Bloodright Trilogy #1) - Emily Skrutskie Page 0,128

a lever-type handle. I glance up at the ceiling. My lips twist at the sight of familiar tiles. If there’s someone on the other side of the mirror, they’d better move fast, because I’ve already thought this through once before. I hook my aching toes around the leg of the closest chair and sling it around, jamming it under the door’s handle with a satisfying crash. An extra kick wedges it in there good and tight.

I round the table, grab the other chair, and hoist it up. Under the clatter it makes as I set it down on the table, I hear muffled voices on the other side of the door. The handle rattles. My blockade won’t hold for long. I hop on the table, then clamber onto the chair, throwing out my arms as it wobbles beneath me.

No time for second thoughts. No time for hesitation. It only takes a quick strike with the heel of my palm to pop the ceiling tile up, releasing a puff of stale dust that claws into my eyes before I can close them. I cough, swaying. The rattling behind me grows more insistent.

I feel for the metal struts that form the ceiling’s support. The ridges dig into my palms as I test my weight against them. The whole structure creaks, and I wince, reaching deeper into the crawl space. My fingers brush against a support beam. Relief washes through me.

I loop one arm around it and jump, my chest colliding awkwardly with the ceiling’s lip. I try to remember which way I was facing before the dust got in my eyes. Pause. Focus. Home in on the noise.

The rattling behind me has been replaced by rhythmic thuds. Someone’s trying to kick their way through the door.

I haul myself up by the support, wrestling my legs into the crawl space and looping them around the beam. Dust clots my nose, my lungs—my whole world is fouled by the neglect inside the ceiling. I hazard a peek through my burning eyes, but it doesn’t do much for me. I catch the glow of the fluorescents in the interrogation room streaming through the punched-out panel, and the rest is darkness.

So I do it blind. Hand over hand, I yank myself forward along the support, wincing away from the blazing heat of the lighting units as I squirm past them. They’re my markers—two lights over and I know for sure I’m in the next room. A turn at a juncture along the beam to throw off anyone on my tail. Another two lights. I nearly burn my shoulder on one of them.

I pause, finally wiping the dust out of my eyes. Coughing before was an inconvenience. Now it could get me killed. I pull the collar of my shirt over my nose and mire myself in the scent of my own sweat instead.

Inventory. I’ve lost my armor, and they took both my comm unit and the pistol I was carrying when they loaded me up in the truck back on the prairie. I’m left with shirt, jacket, pants, boots, and a little velvet bag pressed against my chest that won’t do me any good if I can’t get off the academy base.

That starts with getting out of this ceiling. I try to visualize the layout of the detention center—how many rooms there were and where the interrogation room was relative to the rest of the block. If I come down in another room with a locked door, I’m humped, especially if there’s no way for me to get back up. Time is working against me, but chaos is working for me. I have to keep moving.

I have to think like Wen.

It’s terrifyingly easy to slip into her mind-set. To imagine where her head was when we blew the skipship and jacked the wiretram and scrambled across the rooftops of Isla. It’s the animal instinct of flying a Viper and jumping from the Ruttin’ Hell and clawing through postwar Trost. It’s everywhere I’ve been before.

There’s a trade-off between silence and speed. I choose the latter. The crawl space fills with muffled thuds as I scramble along the support as fast as I can, my boots slipping in the dust. Go