She was hyperventilating.
Fuck. “Let me do it. You stay here.”
She bristled. “Like fuck.”
Oops, I’d prodded her pride. “Helgi, it’s okay. Trust me, if we come across a giant snake, it’s all yours.”
She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. “No, I have to do this. Like fuck am I going to cower. Never cower, remember?”
I locked gazes with her. “Yeah, I remember.”
I pulled Jezebel from her holster. “You ready to conquer your fear?”
“I’m ready.”
Her face was too pale, but I knew Helgi, and she was going to do this with or without me just to prove she could.
I pulled open the door and we stepped into the corridor.
No sign of the rat.
Helgi sagged. “Motherfucker.”
I strode ahead. “Let’s get to the control room before it comes back.”
* * *
I didn’t bother with the main lights. The huge room was filled with lit monitors and blinking lights. Everything was on and working, as if the humans who’d run this place had popped out for lunch and would be back at any moment.
It was creepy as fuck.
“Shitting hell.” Helgi studied all the tech. “Anya, chick, can you do this?”
I honestly didn’t know. “Look for a manual, anything that might have instructions.”
Helgi began to search while I studied the monitors. Images of the complex greeted me on the many screens—surveillance. Empty. Dark. Empty. Movement. Okay, level four was off bounds.
“Here.” Helgi slammed a huge manual on the desk beside me.
“Fuck, okay.” I paged through it, checking the index and finding the section on generator monitoring. “Keep watch. I got this.”
Ten minutes later, I’d accessed the feed to the generator room and pulled up the controls to adjust the many generators. All I needed to do was remotely shut them down.
I hit the relevant keys. Nothing happened.
“Dammit.”
“What is it?” Helgi asked from the door.
“It won’t remotely shut down.”
“What do we do now?”
I thumbed through pages until I came to the one with the schematics of the generator room, sublevel 0. I tore out the page and shoved it into my pocket.
“We head to the generator room and manually shut it down.”
“What level?” Helgi asked.
“Sublevel 0.”
She locked gazes with me, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out what she was thinking.
Rats loved the underground.
Chapter Five
We took the stairwell to the ground floor and then continued down. The final stairwell was pitch-black, and the smell I’d picked up on earlier was now a stench.
“We get in and we get out,” Helgi said for the third time.
Rats, why the fuck did it have to be rats? Huge cockroaches we could have handled, but rats? Fate was playing with us.
“Listen, I can tell you how to shut down the generator if you want, and I can watch your back.”
“No.” She stuck out her chin mulishly. “I got this.”
I stopped her outside the sublevel door and pulled Jezebel from her holster. “In that case, you’ll need a decent weapon.”
She grinned. “You’re letting me wield your baby?”
“Just this once, bitch, so don’t get any ideas.”
“Ha.” She took Jezebel and handed me the short sword. “Those rats better watch out.”
“We might not come across any.”
“Yeah.”
But neither of us were convinced.
I took a deep breath and pushed open the door. A small entranceway greeted us, and a set of fire doors sealed off the generator room. I peered through the red lines that made cubes in the door’s glass. The room was dark, with only one or two emergency lights, but the huge steam turbine was clearly visible in the center. A metal grill balcony ran around the periphery, but it was shrouded in darkness.
And the space behind the turbine wasn’t visible from our vantage point. We’d have to be quick and we’d have to work fast. There was a bank of monitors to the left of the turbine where the shutdown keycode could be entered. I just needed to log in using the password on the page I’d torn from the book and enter the alphanumeric override code.
Simple.
“We head to the monitors to the right of the turbine, you see it?”
She nodded. “I got your back.”
I pushed down the release bar on the door and stepped into the room with Helgi at my back. We kept low as we ran toward the control panel. The monitors here were dark and a key slot was visible.
I stared at it.
“What is it?”
“I need a key to turn it on.”
“Fuck.”
Think, Anya, think. Wait, the turbine had valves and a lever…a lever that shut the valves. If we couldn’t do an override from the control panel then we’d have to manually shut down the turbine.
I pulled the page from my pocket and smoothed it out. The plans stared back at me. The lever, where was…Shit.
“What is it?” Helgi whispered, sensing my disquiet even as her eyes roamed the room looking for threats. “Can we shut it down?”
“Yes.” I kept my voice low. “But we need to head to the back of the turbine to do it.”
“I was afraid you’d say that.”
“You? Afraid?”
She snorted. “Rats, chick. Fucking rats.”
We shared a grin that said when we got out of here we’ll laugh about this over an ale, but right now it was time to shut down this machine.
I led the way, short sword ready to swipe, but Helgi took over, Jezebel ready to swing as we pressed into the darkness. The turbine rose up beside us, orange and ominous. My heart thundered as the darkness grew thicker, and then Helgi froze.
I stopped behind her, peering over her shoulder, and bit back a curse. A heaving mass greeted us, a pile of hairy bodies that breathed as one, making the darkness pulse with life.
Helgi’s breath came faster and I pressed a hand to her shoulder.
She nodded.
We skirted the mass, backs to the turbine, hearts in our mouths, as we rounded it and stopped behind it. More rats, piled up and sleeping, and there was the lever I’d been searching for.
There was no need to speak. We both knew
