Chapter 264 | The Misdirection Play
Chapter 264: 264 | The Misdirection Play
The Oracle Feed noticed and helpfully provided data about the exposure event that I dismissed so fast the notification probably got whiplash.
Camille fired another volley. Three rivets in a spread pattern designed to cover my retreat angles. I ducked the first, sidestepped the second, and caught the third with a construct six inches from my hip. The amber arm absorbed the impact and the rivet dissolved on contact, its material composure failing outside of Camille’s active control range.
"She’s overextending. She’s six feet past optimal firing position and her regeneration timing has slipped by point three seconds. She’s angry."
Percy’s voice had lost every trace of hesitation. The boy who couldn’t decide whether to say hello or goodbye was calling tactical reads with the confidence of a ten-year veteran running a field operation.
I grinned behind the mask.
"Percy, what’s the hallway look like between me and room 2C?"
"Clear. Fourteen feet from your current position to the door. No constructs. No traps. She left the hostage room undefended because she expected to hold the corridor."
Camille had stopped advancing. She stood in the hallway with rivets glowing at both palms, her brown eyes tracking my movement with the focus of someone who had decided that the next exchange would be the last one. The overhead fluorescent light caught the defined line of her jaw and the sharp angle of her cheekbone, and even in the middle of a combat exercise with adrenaline flooding my system, some part of my brain that I really wished would shut up registered that Camille Ortega was devastatingly beautiful when she was trying to kill someone.
"You’re stalling." She said it flat, without the heat of her earlier exchanges. The anger had cooled into something more dangerous. Analysis. "You don’t need to beat me. You just need to keep me occupied while your partner does something."
Smart.
Really, really smart.
"Maybe I just like talking to you."
"And maybe I put four rivets through your shoulder and we find out if your telekinesis works with a punctured rotator cuff."
Behind her, at the far end of the east hallway, something shifted in the stairwell doorway. A slight movement, barely visible against the fluorescent backlight. Percy, repositioning from the east stairwell to the second floor while Camille’s attention remained locked on me.
I needed her looking this direction for another thirty seconds.
"Your top is ripped," I said.
Camille’s eyes dropped to her chest for exactly one point seven seconds. The lace edge of her bra was visible above the shifted fabric, the deep orange accent line pulled taut across skin that flushed darker as she processed what I’d said and what I was looking at and the fact that I had the audacity to mention it in the middle of a tactical engagement.
The orange glow at her palms doubled in intensity.
"You’re dead."
She fired eight rivets in under three seconds. The fastest sustained volley I’d seen from her, each construct trailing orange luminescence as it crossed the distance between us. I threw myself sideways through the nearest open doorway, which happened to be the bathroom she’d been using as her alcove, and the eight rivets punched through the doorframe behind me in a staccato line that sounded like a sewing machine running through steel plate.
Water sprayed from the holes she’d put in the pipe earlier. The bathroom floor was already slick, and my boots found approximately zero traction on the wet tile as I slid toward the far wall. A construct grabbed the towel rack and arrested my momentum, but the sudden stop wrenched my shoulder and the feedback lanced through my temples.
"She’s not following into the bathroom. She’s adjusted her line to cover both the bathroom door and the hallway approach to 2C. She is good."
Of course she was good. She had a ninety-one Rivet Precision rating and an Aspect Control of eighty-seven, and she had been putting holes in things since she was eight years old when her frustration about dishes turned the family kitchen cabinets into abstract art.
I took three seconds in the bathroom to catch my breath. Water soaked into my boots from the floor. The spraying pipe created a mist that fogged the mirror above the sink, and through the fog I could see my own reflection. Charcoal suit, amber accents, half-mask, amber eyes above the black fabric.
The eyes were bright with something that wasn’t fear.
"Percy. Where are you?"
"Second floor. East corridor. Twenty feet from room 2C. She cannot see me from her current position. But she’ll hear the door."
"Can you get inside without her hearing?"
A pause. Then Percy’s voice came through with the particular quality of someone who had just realized something. "The window. Room 2C has a sealed window overlooking the courtyard. The seal is acoustic dampening adhesive, not structural. At my current strength I cannot break it, but a construct could peel the adhesive from the exterior."
I was already moving. Two constructs extended through the bathroom wall, one phasing through the gap between the drywall and the exterior panel, the other punching through the pipe-damaged section where Camille’s earlier rivets had compromised the structural integrity. Both constructs emerged on the building’s exterior and traveled along the wall toward the window of room 2C.
The adhesive seal was industrial grade but not reinforced. My constructs found the edge and began peeling it back, working from the bottom corner upward with the particular kind of quiet patience that driving your spectral arms through a wall for twelve straight hours of drywall repair had taught me.
"She’s moving." Percy’s voice dropped to a whisper. "Repositioning toward the bathroom. She heard the construct."
Of course she did. Camille’s Precision Read didn’t just show her where walls could break. It showed her where the stress was concentrating. And a spectral construct traveling through a wall generated exactly the kind of structural pressure that her passive ability was designed to detect.
I had maybe ten seconds before she pinned me in this bathroom.
"Percy. Window seal is halfway open. When I tell you, push through and grab the hostage. Get it to the ground floor south exit. That’s the extraction zone."
"The fall from the second floor window to the courtyard is approximately eighteen feet. I cannot survive that drop without injury."
"There’s a ledge at the first floor window. Drop to the ledge, then drop to the ground. Total fall is under ten feet."
"I am not an athlete, Lukas."
"You’re a hero, Percy. Same thing."
Silence on the earpiece for two full seconds. Then his voice came back smaller and steadier than I’d ever heard it.
"Tell me when."
I burst out of the bathroom at full speed, not toward Camille but away from her, sprinting down the west corridor toward the stairwell. The move looked like retreat and I needed it to look like retreat because every second she spent processing my apparent flight was a second she wasn’t covering room 2C.
Camille’s voice followed me down the hallway, loud and sharp. "Running won’t save your partner!"
She was wrong, but she didn’t know that yet.