The assassin jammed the blade into the crack and pried the doors open. A cable ran up the dark elevator shaft. He wedged the machete kitty-corner in the doors and stepped into the shaft. Without speaking to her, he hauled himself up the cable, right past the doors where Sherry peered in with wide eyes.

“Where are you going?” she asked. Sherry looked up and saw the bottom of the car twenty feet higher. Casius was now parallel to a large opening on the opposite side of the shaft, ten feet up. He swung into the causeway without answering her, but she had her answer already. He dropped to his belly and reached down the shaft for her.

She edged forward and, clasping the pried elevator door with her left hand, she stretched her right hand up for his arm, wondering if she had the strength to hang on.

But he seized her wrist like an iron claw and the question fell away. She gripped nothing but thin air. He literally snatched her from her feet and hauled her up to the opening. She threw her leg over the lip and rolled into him.

He repeated the process, taking them another floor higher, just below the elevator itself. And then they were standing and scanning the tunnel they had entered.

A long line of lights hung from an earthen ceiling stretching both ways several hundred feet, maybe longer. To their right the tunnel ended in a glowing light; to their left the tunnel dimmed to darkness. An idle conveyor belt ran waist high the length of the passage.

A shout suddenly echoed down the tunnel and the sound of boots thudding onto packed earth reverberated past them. Casius grabbed her wrist and pulled her into a stumbling run toward the dark end of the tunnel. She pulled her hand free and tore after him, pumping her fists in panic.

“The priest!” she panted.

“Just run!” he said.

Cries of alarm suddenly filled the air. A shot crashed around her ears. Casius slid to a stop and Sherry almost ran through him. She threw her arms up and felt her palms collide with his wet back. Her hands slipped to either side and she smacked into his wet flesh. But neither seemed to notice.

They had reached a steel platform, she saw, and Casius had managed to unlatch its gate. He leapt over the threshold and yanked her through. When he punched something on the wall, the whole contraption trembled to life and began to rise. They were on a freight elevator of some kind. Flashes of fire erupted down the tunnel, chased by shouts of anger. Sherry instinctively crouched.

Then they were past the earth ceiling and rising through a vertical shaft lit by a string of bulbs along one wall.