Leslie softened her eyes and offered a sad smile. “No, darling Corday. There is no more time to hide away. I will not hand our city over to the inept hands of Brigadier Dane’s failing leadership. There is another place we can go, a place my uncle refused to consider. Inside there might be food, supplies, guns, ammunition... everything we need to take a stand and end this.”

Eyes bone dry in their sockets, feeling as if all life had been sucked from him, Corday made himself engage. He knew the very place she suggested and understood why it was off-limits. “During the breach, while my fellow Enforcers were trapped in the Judicial Sector, dying from plague, Callas’ home went into lockdown. For all we know, the contagion was let loose behind that steel barricade. To force the gate could expose the population and kill us all.”

She turned her back on the blood in the room, moving to the dwelling’s small window and its slice of sunlight marking the ground. “There is another way inside, Corday, a small, secret entrance. Like my uncle, I know where it is.”

The information did not surprise him. In fact, he, others in the resistance, had suspected there must be secondary access—an escape hatch in case of emergency. It had been Senator Kantor who fervently refused to risk the lives of millions to find out what might lie within the Premier’s home.

Leslie answered his silence, turning her head to see him motionless, the corpse of her uncle wrapped in plastic and cradled in his arms. “If nothing is done, we are going to die. The proof is in this room. Salvation might wait beyond Callas’ door, and Shepherd would never suspect the resistance would gather there. Let him think he’s won, that we’ve disbanded while we rally behind walls he cannot penetrate. This is our only chance, Corday.”

There was another roadblock, the woman the resistance would look to for leadership. “Brigadier Dane will stand against you on this.”

“That’s why we are going to open it, you and I, before we go to her. When we come to the resistance, we come bearing hope, or we die as we should for our ineptness.” She sounded so much like her uncle in that moment: imperious, confident. “Now, put him down. Leave my uncle here. He would not want us to waste time or endanger ourselves simply to cart his body to be gawked at by the people he loved.”

He put the remains down on the room’s only table, took a step back. Spinning the golden ring on his finger, twisting it around and around, Corday turned his furious attention to Leslie Kantor. “If you are wrong, we will unleash the virus.”