She blinked, coming back to the moment. “Huh? What? Oh, good … good. And the choppers?”

“Inbound, ma’am. ETA four minutes.”

Eve measured out a tiny slice of a smile. “Good,” she said again.

CHAPTER 104

DAS VERARBEITUNGSZENTRUM

The blast was big.

A one-two punch that sent a tsunami of superheated gas racing after us.

Ghost was faster and made it to the T junction at the end of the hall a half step before I did. The heat caught me, though. It picked me up and hurled me through the air. But I twisted and curled and hit the floor rolling. The main fireball passed over me; it spread out along the ceiling on both sides of the T, dispersing and fading and then burning out completely, leaving all the walls scorched black. Ceiling tiles melted and rained down, and I had to roll around on the floor to put out fires on my goddamn fire-resistant body armor.

I’d never seen a blast like that before. If we hadn’t run as fast and as far as we did, we’d have been reduced to ash.

Ghost whimpered, terrified. He began to get up, but I snapped at him to stay down.

Despite the pain in every molecule of my body, I got up into a low crouch and scuttled like a half-cooked crab to peer around the corner. The hall in front of cell 13 was gone—burned and shattered, with sections of the roof leaning drunkenly down. The paint on the walls closer to the blast was burning sluggishly, though most of the flames had been extinguished by the blast.

There was no sign of the two men. They had literally been blown to bits, and those bits still burned.

I straightened and stood for a moment, trying to understand everything that had happened in the last two minutes. Forcing myself to make credible statements of practical analysis. Despite the wreckage inside my head, old and new, I needed to be in the moment. To understand this.

A team of some kind had attacked the processing plant. Who they were or what their agenda might be was unclear. Certainly not regular military. No, these cats had to be PMCs on the payroll of someone who wanted to free one or more prisoners. They’d mentioned the Spaniard. Did that mean these guys were Fixers? If so, it meant that they were enhanced Fixers wearing ultrasophisticated body armor that exploded when the men wearing them died.

Yeah, find a comfortable chair for that to sit in.

I glanced at Ghost, who was spattered with blood and soot.

“Well,” I said, “it’s finally happened. The world’s now officially crazier than I am.”

For no damned reason at all, he wagged his tail. He’s a weird damned dog.