Once Broken Draft 1 CH 43
#42 of Once Broken
draft 1 of Book 6 in the Tristan Series, where Alex takes Tristan back Home, to Samalia, in the hopes that fulfilling a quest out of Samalian legends will bring Tristan's sanity back and make him a cold, calculated, killer once more.
Alex and Tristan race to the computer.
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The doors opened and Tristan was out, shooting everyone. "Where to?"
"Third left, then second right. Fourth door on the right." Alex fired indiscriminately, following Tristan.
"Next time we do this," Tristan said, "Remind me to bring explosives. Destroying the lifts would buy us extra time."
"Jacoby probably had some on him." Someone opened a door to see what to commotion was about and Alex cut her throat.
"Really?"
"Yeah, he seems to like gadgets."
"If he shows back up, I'll have to go through his stuff." Tristan stopped firing. An alarm began sounding, and the technicians had taken refuge in their rooms.
"Clock's officially ticking." Alex ran down the hall, telling the door to open when he reached it. He handed the data chip with the authorization code to Tristan and headed for the array's terminal.
"I'm in position," Tristan said as Alex began typing.
"It shouldn't take me too long." He moved through the code. "Okay, talk to me," he told the system, and it obliged. Unfortunately, that didn't mean it was anymore cooperative than anyone else in this building had been.
"Alex, how much longer?"
"A little more. This thing got a strong immune system. A lot stronger than I expected." He abandoned the repair he was doing to the code he'd inserted. He needed a new tactic. The system laughed at him.
"Oh, you just wait," he mumbled, "we'll see who'll be laughing in a few minutes."
"I don't know if you have minutes, Alex." Tristan sounded calm, as he always did, but the warning was worrisome.
Alex focused on hijacking the system's immune system. If he could get that to do the work for him this would go faster, but this was a popular technique, so there were multiple safeguards against it.
The terminal trembled under his fingers. "What was that?" Alex asked by reflex, and the break in what he was telling the system set his work back.
"An explosion. Is there anything the security forces would have to blast through to reach us?"
Alex shook his head, not willing to break the flow again. This would be too fucking tight as it was.