[ DAMIAN ]
The zip tie broke on the fourth attempt.
Not cleanly. The plastic didn't snap so much as give, the structural integrity failing at the stress point I had been working for the last twenty minutes, the wrist twist and pull combination that military survival training had filed somewhere in my body's memory alongside everything else that had survived the fog intact.
My wrists came apart. I sat there for a second letting the circulation come back, the specific pins and needles of blood returning to places it had been denied, and then I moved to Reuben.
His were rope. Easier in some ways, harder in others. The knot was good but the rope itself was old, the fibres slightly degraded from months of Singapore humidity. I worked the knot from the back, finding the point where the tension could be redirected rather than fought directly, and it came apart in two minutes.
Reuben rolled his wrists and winced and sat up properly for the first time since I had woken up in this room.
I went to the window.
The blind was thin enough to see through if I pressed close. Outside was the building exterior, the narrow gap between the nursing home and the CPIB structure beside it, the ground below. I calculated the drop.
"You're not thinking about jumping," Reuben said from behind me.
"No." I stepped back from the window. "Too high. Second floor maybe. Not this."
"Good because I have a bad knee."
"I know. The man on the radio mentioned it."
Reuben made a sound that might have been a laugh under different circumstances. I turned away from the window and looked at the room properly. What we had. What we could use.
The wardrobe, empty but solid, the doors heavy enough to matter if swung correctly. The mirror on the wall, screwed in, glass that would shatter into edges. The bed frame, old institutional steel, the bolts in the wall loose from decades of soft plaster. The IV stand in the corner I hadn't clocked before, the kind that had been left here from the room's last occupant.
"What do you have," I said.
Reuben checked his pockets. "A lighter. A folded piece of paper. Three paracetamol in a blister pack."
"The lighter's useful."
"For what."
"I don't know yet. But fire is always an option."
Reuben looked at me with the expression of someone recalibrating their assessment of what kind of person they were dealing with. Before he could say anything else I heard it.
From the corridor outside. Voices. But different from the previous times, not the casual conversation of people moving between tasks, but the specific directed quality of people addressing something unexpected.
I moved to the door and put my ear against it.
"Raise your hands. Both of them. Now."
A pause.
"I said hands up."
I knew that voice. Not the person speaking but the situation the voice was describing. I had heard Theo-3 be addressed before. The particular way people talked to something they weren't sure how to categorise.
They had found him.
I stepped back from the door. Ran the calculation fast, the way the military had taught me to run it, variables and outcomes, available resources against required force, probability of success at each decision point.
The gun they had was the service pistol. My service pistol. Which I had told them was empty and which was in fact empty and which they had presumably verified by now or were about to. A gun with no ammunition was a club. A heavy one but a club.
I looked at Reuben.
"When the door opens," I said quietly, "you go for whoever is closest to you. You don't have to win. You just have to occupy them."
"I'm not a fighter."
"I know. Do it anyway."
I took the IV stand from the corner and held it at my side.
Then I opened the door.
[ NARRATOR ]
The corridor of level three resolved in half a second.
Four men. Two near Theo-3 in the centre of the corridor, one with the pistol raised, one flanking. Theo-3 on his knees, hands raised, amber eyes steady and giving nothing away. Two more men further down the corridor, one leaning against the wall, one starting to turn toward the room door as it opened.
Damian took all of this in and acted before the last piece had finished registering.
"Gun's empty," he said.
The man holding it turned.
Damian was already moving.
[ DAMIAN ]
I crossed the corridor in three steps and hit the Chinese man with the pistol before he had finished turning, driving my shoulder into his chest, taking us both hard into the opposite wall. The pistol clattered away across the floor.
Behind me I heard Theo-3 stand.
The man recovered faster than I expected, getting his arms around my torso from the side and twisting, trying to use my momentum against me, and I let him have the twist because fighting momentum is wasteful, went with it, turned into it and brought my elbow back hard into his jaw on the rotation.
CRACK.
His head snapped sideways. His grip loosened. I didn't wait for it to loosen more.
The second Chinese man was already on me.
He came from the right, low, going for my legs, the smart move against someone whose legs he knew were compromised. I dropped my weight fast, sprawled, denied him the takedown, and got my forearm across the back of his neck as he came through and drove his face into the wall beside us.
THUD. Hard plaster. He bounced off it.
From further down the corridor, Reuben against the Indian man, not winning but not losing immediately either, occupying him the way I had asked, using his weight and the wall and pure desperate survival instinct.
From behind me, a wet sound and a thud. Theo-3's propofol. The Malay man hitting the floor in the specific way of someone whose legs had simply stopped receiving instructions.
But the Malay man hit the floor shouting.
One word. Loud enough to carry through the ceiling above us.
"LEVEL THREE."
Footsteps on the stairs above. Two sets. Moving fast, coming down, the particular rhythm of people who had been waiting for exactly this sound.
I looked at the two men I had already hit. First Chinese man against the wall, concussed but upright, hands braced on the plaster, trying to remember what his legs were for. Second Chinese man on one knee, blood on his face from the wall, already pushing back up.
Two more coming down the stairs.
I did the math.
The staircase door burst open.
Two more men. One had a length of pipe. The other had nothing in his hands which somehow seemed worse.
The second Chinese man got back to his feet behind me.
Four standing. One with a pipe. Reuben down, I caught it in my peripheral vision, the Indian man having finally gotten clear of him, Reuben against the wall.
Four to one.
I picked up the IV stand from where I had dropped it.
The pipe man came first.
I didn't let him swing it. Stepped inside his range before he had wound up, jammed the IV stand across his forearm horizontally, felt the impact travel up through the metal into my hands.
CLANG.
His swing died. I drove the stand forward into his chest and he went back into the staircase door behind him.
BANG.
The empty hands man lunged from my left. I sidestepped, let him come through, caught his wrist on the way past and used his momentum to redirect him into the wall.
CRACK. Face first. He slid.
The first Chinese man, recovered enough to be dangerous again, grabbed me from behind, arms around my chest. I snapped my head back. Connected with his nose.
CRUNCH.
His grip broke. I spun and hit him twice before he finished registering the headbutt. He sat down against the wall and stayed there.
The Indian man had gotten free of Reuben. He came in from the left, composed, the most controlled of all of them, and as he closed the distance I saw it.
A knife on his belt.
I got there first.
I pulled it out clean. One motion. Flicked it open and spun it once in my palm, finding the balance point, the weight distribution, the specific relationship between my hand and the handle that muscle memory had kept while everything else got fogged.
The Indian man's eyes dropped to the knife.
I drove it through his hand.
The blade went through the palm and into the wall beside him, pinning his hand flat against the plaster.
THUNK.
He screamed. Short and sharp, the involuntary sound of someone whose body had received information their mind hadn't caught up to yet. Then the second sound, lower and sustained, as the reality of it settled.
I was already turning away.
The pipe man had recovered. The empty hands man was up again. The second Chinese man was on his feet.
Three of them.
The pipe man swung. I stepped inside it for the second time, the same move, and this time I hit him across the throat with the edge of my forearm and he went down making sounds.
GHCK.
DOWN.
The empty hands man and the second Chinese man came together. Side by side. The corridor was narrow enough that they couldn't quite flank me and they both knew it but they came anyway because they had run out of other options.
I stepped right, drew the right man's strike, let it graze my shoulder, got inside his guard and hit him four times in the body. Fast. No gap between them. The sound of it filling the corridor.
THUD THUD THUD THUD.
He folded.
The last man, the second Chinese man, hesitated for exactly half a second.
I used the half second.
One step, closing distance, one strike to the jaw with everything my right arm had left.
CRACK.
He hit the floor and didn't try to get up.
Behind me, from the wall, the Indian man had pulled the knife free.
I heard it before I turned. The specific wet tearing sound of a blade coming out of something it had gone through, and underneath it a shout of pain that he turned into forward momentum, coming off the wall, the knife in his bloody hand, the particular fury of someone who has been hurt badly enough to stop caring about what comes next.
He came fast. Faster than the wound should have allowed. The knife hand raised, coming down toward my shoulder.
I stepped aside.
Not away. Aside, rotating, one hand catching his wrist on the way through, redirecting the downward arc sideways and forward, changing the trajectory by forty degrees.
The knife found the second Chinese man who had been getting back up behind me.
Not deep. The flat of the blade catching his shoulder, stunning rather than cutting, but enough. He went back down.
The Indian man's momentum carried him into the wall.
He hit it with his shoulder and turned and looked at me and looked at his hand and sat down on the floor with his back against the plaster and didn't get up again.
The corridor was quiet.
I stood in the middle of it and looked at what was there.
Six men down. Various conditions. All breathing. None of them moving.
I put my hand against the wall and let it take some of my weight and breathed.
[ THEO-3 ]
I stepped over the unconscious Malay man and stood in the corridor and looked at what Damian had done.
I looked at it for quite some time.
Then I went back to level two and retrieved the medical supplies I had taken from the nursing station and returned and began working.
The Malay man first. Recovery position, airway clear, pulse strong. The propofol would hold for another twenty minutes approximately. I bandaged his wrists after, zip ties from the supply on my storage unit, applied firmly but not restrictively.
The pipe man next. The throat strike had not caused structural damage. Bruising, inflammation, his voice was going to be unpleasant for several days. I noted this and bandaged his wrists and moved on.
The Indian man. His hand required the most attention. The knife had gone cleanly through the palm between the third and fourth metacarpals, missing the major tendons by a margin I found either fortunate or precise depending on how I assessed the person who had thrown it. I cleaned the wound, packed it, wrapped it thoroughly. He was conscious enough to watch me work. He didn't say anything. I didn't say anything either.
I zip-tied his wrists in front of him rather than behind, given the injury.
The remaining three. Varying degrees of concussion, bruising, one fractured wrist which I splinted as well as the available materials allowed. All conscious by the time I reached them. All quiet in the specific way of people who have had a significant revision to their understanding of a situation.
When I was done I stood up and looked at the corridor.
Six men, bandaged, zip-tied, seated against the walls. Medical needs addressed. Immediate danger neutralised without permanent harm.
I looked at Damian.
He was sitting against the opposite wall with his eyes closed and his breathing doing the careful controlled thing it did when he was managing something he wasn't going to mention. His hand was pressed to his left side. There was blood at the corner of his mouth that he had wiped away but not entirely.
I sat down beside him.
I did not say anything about the sutures or the blood or the side or any of the things my medical assessment was producing at considerable volume in my processing.
I sat beside him and was present and let him have the quiet.
Reuben Lee was against the wall at the end of the corridor, one hand on his ribs, looking at all of us with an expression I did not yet have enough data on Reuben Lee to categorise.
After a long moment he said: "Is he always like this."
I considered the question carefully.
"I am still compiling data," I said. "But preliminary assessment suggests yes."
Reuben looked at Damian. Looked at the six men along the walls. Looked back at me.
"Right," he said.
The corridor settled into quiet.
Outside the nursing home the city continued its silence. Inside it, for the first time since we had entered, the balance of the situation had shifted completely.
I noted the time.
I noted everything else.
I did not note how I felt about it because I was still deciding what the correct word for that was.
End of Chapter 17