tracked their configuration warily with my eyes as I edged closer.
“I’m going to disarm this,” I said aloud. I didn’t want to admit that I said it more for my own benefit than for Pilar’s.
Considering the stairs hadn’t brought any defenders down on us, I dropped the rifle to dangle from its sling and pulled out an LED flashlight. Better to see what I was doing than try to fight the slim chance anyone watching wouldn’t know we’d survived.
I stepped around Arthur with care, forcing myself to ignore his injuries. I did let my fingers brush his throat—a pulse fluttered against them under the warmth of living skin. My legs almost went liquid with relief, but I forcibly ignored all that too.
I played the flashlight carefully along the wires, following the logic of the device. Trigger, detonation, explosion, lined up in unfailing conditional progression. But …
I ran it backward. Explosion, and before that the detonation, and before that the trigger. I ran it forward again, then back, then forward.
What the hell?
“This is put together wrong,” I said. As I said it, I was positive.
“What do you mean?” Pilar’s voice carried across to me, wired with tension.
“It’s active, but it’s not set,” I said. “There’s no way it can go off. Well, not from moving him away from it, at least.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m sure.”
But I stood for a moment longer, because this didn’t make sense. I was missing something.
And I’d missed something on the stairs too. My mind rewound, backfilled, and I knew what it was.
“Cas?” Pilar ventured.
I shook myself. Get out, then analyze.
Unless all the missing pieces were hiding what would kill us …
But that didn’t make sense either.
“Come here. I’m going to need your help,” I ordered Pilar, and suiting actions to words, I knelt and pulled my knife. I worked as delicately as I could, cutting the ropes minimally to unwind them from Arthur’s hands and feet. Next came the wires and duct tape, peeling them gingerly from bruises and crusted blood.
“How are we going to get him down?” Pilar asked in a hushed voice.
“Gently,” I answered. “He’s probably got—internal injuries, and—” I had to pause to concentrate on what I was doing for a moment. “He’s going to need a hospital. We’ll have to figure out what to tell the police; we can probably give them this place, and say you found him—we’ll make up how—and get Checker cleared—”
“Cas.” Pilar put a hand on my shoulder. “Is anything else here going to go off?”
“No. Not unless there’s something we missed. We can take him out of here. I’m sure.” And then I’d figure out why the hell we could.
“Then why don’t we call the ambulance now?” Pilar asked gently. “If we’re telling the cops we found him here, and he’s this injured—Cas, there are no more stairs.”
I knew that. But we’d be able to rig it so he was tied onto me, or lower him by …
Fuck. Pilar was right. I was good, but EMS would be better.
My hands hesitated, hovering, already sticky with what was probably Arthur’s blood, and I didn’t want to think about that—“They’ll want to call the bomb squad. They’ll see all this and delay.”
“We could just move him closer to the middle. So it’s clear they can take him out.”
“Right. Right.” And come to that, if I wanted to, I could take the rest of the explosives out of here instead of Arthur.
Because of course I had to disappear if police and EMS were coming. They’d have questions, questions I wasn’t good enough at lying to answer, not when I was the center of scrutiny like we would be here.
Pilar read my mind. “Help me move him,” she said. “Then you go; I’ll make the call.”
She didn’t mean to hurt me by it. It was what she knew I’d want, what I did want.
Arthur had kept all the most important parts of his life from me for exactly this reason. I was the type of person who would leave him bleeding and unconscious in enemy territory so I could hide my face from the cops.
I found another loose scaffolding board and pulled it down so we could carefully shift Arthur onto it, then carefully lift him toward the hole in the floor, one of us on each end.
“Don’t wait,” I said, with a harshness that scraped my throat. “Make the call now.” Even if response times were fast, I could be faster. No reason to delay. I handed Pilar