“I’m sorry I was such an asshole to you.”

Somers shushed him as he pulled the next camera down. They moved through the darkness from one flashing red beacon to the next, and Somers felt like he was drifting in outer space. The next camera. The next. The next. Until nothing red flashed ahead of them. They shuffled forward, with Somers running one hand through the air, and then his knuckles cracked against limestone and he swore.

“Are you ok?”

“Yeah, fine. I think we’re at the end of the line, though. Let’s see if they had fire exits back in the 1800s or whenever they built this.”

Their two-man parade followed a spiral now, with Somers bumping up against the next wall when they found it, tracing it to its corner, and following the next wall. Moments later, he found the boards bolted into the limestone, their lengths securing a door and preventing it from opening.

Nico’s breathing roughened. “We can’t get out, can we?”

Somers ran his finger around the door. At the top, his fingers brushed another bouquet of grenades, plastic and cheap like the first ones. Then he moved the door itself, running his hands across the wood. Like the door at the other end of the sub-basement, it was splintered and warped, and he could feel its age in the rough surface. He yanked on the boards blocking the door and noticed the contrast: smooth, pressure-treated lumber. Another recent addition. His hands found the bolts, which were sunk into the wood. They were a big gauge, bigger than his thumb.

“We can . . . we can break it down, right?” Nico said, his fingers digging into Somers’s shoulder now.

“Maybe,” Somers said. “It’s hard to tell in the dark, but it feels pretty substantial.”

“We can take the screws out then. Or the nails. Or whatever. We can just take them out.”

“I can’t even get my fingers around the bolt; we’d need tools.”

“Well, you’re supposed to be some kind of fucking super cop, so just fix it!”

Somers squeezed Nico’s hand once. “Come on. There’s a little light by the other door; we’ll stay over there.”

They reversed course, and now, with that patch of watery light ahead of them, their path through the sub-basement was short and easy. Once Somers’s oxford caught a discarded camera, and the plastic casing chittered across limestone. Otherwise, the only sound was Nico’s rough breathing; his fingers bit through the t-shirt, and Somers guessed Nico was holding on, desperately holding on, in more ways than one.

When they got to the steep stairs that connected the sub-basement to the basement proper, Somers sat on a step, his back to the wall, the Glock on the next step up where he could reach it. Nico paced for a few minutes and then he dropped onto the next step down, his head rocking back against the wall.

“It’s a little warmer over here,” Somers said. “Good thing they didn’t weather strip that door.”