The crowbar bit into the folded steel of the driver’s door with a shriek that rattled Nairi’s teeth.
"You always had her terrible timing," Tigran murmured, leaning down so his tailored overcoat brushed the muddy asphalt. The scent of expensive bergamot and sodden wool overpowered the metallic stench of leaking coolant. "She thought she could shame me with carbon reports. Imagine that. Blood thinking it could dictate margins."
Nairi strained against the nylon restraint cutting across her collarbone. Rain pelted upside down against her chin, mixing with warm iron dripping from her hairline. Ten months ago, in the drafty mezzanine of the studio, Lusine had slapped those exact carbon copies onto the drafting table, the paper fluttering against Nairi’s forearm.
*"He is selling rotten aggregate to the harbor piers, Nairi! He’s your patron, not your saint!"*
*And Nairi had shouted back, defensive, furious, poisoned by gratitude: "He funded our clinic project in the south when every municipal board laughed us out of the room! He’s your brother, Lusine. Trust someone for once in your miserable, suspicious life!"*
*Lusine’s mouth had tightened into a white seam. "My brother would pave over my bones if the square footage turned a profit."*
*Nairi had walked out. She had slammed the heavy cedar door and left Lusine alone under the fluorescent strips.*
The memory bit harder than the raw skin on Nairi’s ribs. She had delivered her best friend to the slaughterhouse with an argument about loyalty.
Tigran jammed the hooked end of the bar into the cracked frame, bracing his polished oxfords against the bent rocker panel. "Don’t worry. The coastal storm will wash the road clear before dawn. Just another tragic skid on greasy tarmac."
A sharp heel struck the safety glass.
The remains of the windshield exploded outward in a hail of green safety pebbles. Maro vaulted her hips off the crumpled center console. Her left arm hung at an unnatural angle, dislocated at the socket, but her right foot was bare, the patent-leather designer shoe gripped in her right fist like a trench club.
With a ragged, feral scream that stripped every ounce of corporate poise from her throat, Maro drove the three-inch steel spike of the heel directly into the meaty curve of Tigran’s inner thigh.
Tigran howled. The sound was high, grotesque, completely stripped of his practiced baritone. He stumbled back into the blinding spray of the highway drainage ditch, the shoe still embedded to the hilt in his charcoal trousers. Dark, thick arterial fluid geysered through the torn wool, black beneath the orange streetlamps.
"Out!" Maro wheezed, spitting blood and glass onto the upside-down roof. She dragged a jagged shard across Nairi’s locked seatbelt until the webbing gave way with a dry pop. "Move, you sentimental idiot, before his convoy rounds the interchange!"
Nairi crashed down onto her palms, shards digging deep into her skin. She grabbed Maro by the belt of her soaked trench coat, hauling the other woman through the empty windshield aperture. Tigran was on his knees twenty paces away, clawing at his leg, cursing in breathless, rhythmic obscenities while fumbling inside his jacket for a pistol.
"I can't run," Maro gasped, her knees folding as soon as her soles hit the wet slope. Her left shoulder was visibly dropped, the joint bunched under purple skin. "The shoulder is out. I'm slowing you down."
"I'm not leaving you," Nairi spat, hauling Maro upright against her own bruised ribs.
"Shut up and look at the ridge!" Maro snarled, shoving Nairi away with her good hand. Headlights were cresting the overpass—two black utility vans, engines whining in low gear as they cut across the grassy median. "They saw the upload ping. They know our IP address was routed through your restoration terminal at Saint Vartan’s. Go! If they take both of us, nobody testifies!"
"Maro—"
"I spent six years trying to bury your career, Nairi. I will not have my sacrifice wasted on your pathetic guilt! Run to the nave! Lock the secondary ironwork!"
Tigran fired. The bullet skipped off the asphalt near Nairi's boot, singing into the night air.
Nairi bolted.
She plunged down the embankment, sliding through wet clay and brambles until she hit the service alley behind the old quarter. The neon glow of Tsovasar reflected off every slick cobblestone, painting the world in sickly shades of magenta and acid yellow. Her lungs pulled wet, ragged gasps. Every hard step sent a dull thud through her cracked ribs.
Behind her, pneumatic tires skidded over gravel. Shouted commands echoed between the high limestone walls of the old district. Two men in tactical rain gear cut into the lane fifty yards back, their flashlights carving through the downpour.
She didn't look back.
She knew these alleys better than any surveyor in the province. She rounded the baker’s corner, slipped beneath an arch of half-rotted scaffolding, and vaulted the low perimeter fence surrounding Saint Vartan’s Cathedral. The massive stone basilica rose like a black cliff against the neon smog, its rose window gaping open, wrapped in the skeletal iron framework of her unfinished restoration.
Nairi slipped through the small master-key door set into the grand oak portals, threw the internal deadbolt, and dropped the heavy bronze drop-bar into its cradle.
A heavy thud struck the exterior wood two seconds later. Boots kicked the panels. A muffled voice barked into a radio.
Inside, the nave stood in cold shadow. The air was colder here than on the street, smelling of ancient mortar, damp lime, and linseed oil. High above, rain pattered through the open sections of the clerestory, dripping onto the plastic tarps covering the nave floor.
Her knees buckled. She sank to the stone flags, trembling so violently her teeth clicked together. Blood seeped from the cuts on her palms, slick and warm. She had nothing. No weapons. Maro was captured or dead on the roadside. The upload had gone through, but if Tigran's men cleared her body from the site before the morning papers printed, the police would write it off as an industrial casualty, just like Lusine’s fall off the Khazhar ridge.
A heavy crack split the wood of the southern transept door. They were using a sledgehammer.
Nairi dragged herself to the base of the construction hoist. Steel scaffolding pipes climbed sixty feet into the gloom, reaching toward the rib vaults and the timbered catwalks she had surveyed all autumn. She climbed. Every rung sent spikes of pain through her wrenched ribs. The metal was ice-cold, slick with moisture blown in through the clerestory.
Ten feet. Twenty. Thirty.
Below, the side door splintered open with the sound of snapping oak. Two beams of white halogen light cut across the checkerboard floor. Boots crunched on dropped mortar.
"Search the crypt first," a voice ordered, harsh and flat. "Tigran said she doesn't leave the perimeter alive. Make it clean. A fall from the timberwork works fine."
Nairi flattened her belly against the narrow wooden planks of the high catwalk, forty feet above the floor. She tucked her head between her arms, biting her sleeve to stifle the ragged hiss of her lungs. The halogens swept the nave, blades of light cutting the shadows beneath her, missing her perch by inches.
In her soaked pocket, the burner phone Maro had pressed into her jacket gave a sharp, low vibration against her thigh.
Nairi froze. She slipped her thumb into the seam, easing the cheap plastic device out into the dark. The screen flared with an unlisted number.
A single message lit the glass:
'Look down.'