Ahead of him, a tripwire was strung low across the hallway. It was easy to spot—so simple and obvious that Hazard had stopped, looking for the secondary trap, the backup, the real threat. He wasn’t sure how long he’d stood there; time was starting to fragment, and those fragments slipped away no matter how hard he tried to hold on to them. One moment he’d be tracing the outline of the opening, studying the much larger space beyond, looking for pressure plates and tripwires, and then he’d be sucking in a wet breath, trying not to cough, dizzy and unsure of how much time had passed. He knew his brain was trying to protect him. He knew that this was too much—Somers had been right. It was the Haverford all over again, with Somers in danger, with Hazard helplessly snared in a web of traps and dead ends. It was his body flooded with stress hormones but without any way of effectively handling them: neither flight nor fight could help him now, only this slow, grinding crawl through a nightmare warren. And it was too much, too much, too—

He came back again, aware of the stinging in his arm, the hot drip-drip from his fingertips, the wobble in his posture. He was running out of time. Beyond the trip wire, where the opening connected to the warehouse, much of the room was lost in darkness. Hazard knew he could be missing something. He knew he could be making a mistake. But he also knew if he stayed here much longer, slowly dissociating under the weight of panic, he’d end up catatonic. He judged that the fallen CAUTION sign, a bright reflective orange just beyond the tripwire, concealed the true threat. He stepped over trip wire, skirted the CAUTION sign, and got his back to the wall just inside the warehouse proper.

Flood lights burst to life.

“I think you should stay right there for the moment,” an electronically distorted voice stated. “We might as well talk before we finish our game.”

The lights surrounded Hazard on three sides; he shaded his eyes, trying to peer past the glare, but all he could make out was a vague emptiness where the rest of the warehouse stretched off into darkness. He tried to locate the voice, even though part of his brain knew the effort was pointless—the words came through speakers mounted somewhere deeper in the warehouse. The speaker, if he were here at all, could be in a completely different part of the building.

Hazard knew he was here, though. Hazard knew he wouldn’t miss this chance.

“You’re not keeping your part of the deal,” Hazard said. “I made it here. You told me you’d be waiting, unarmed.” Hazard waited, and when nothing came back, he added, “Turn off the lights, walk out here, and I’ll put you under arrest.”

The hum of the lights answered him. The spots put off a staggering amount of heat, and Hazard wiped his forehead before trying again to shade his eyes. Then laughter broke the quiet—shrill, electronic laughter that echoed back from the brick at strange angles and raised the hair on the back of Hazard’s neck.