After three identical moves, I arrived at the first horizontal handhold—a meager lip at the base of the second-floor window bay. It wasn’t much, but I could dig my fingers into a half-inch gap and give my triceps a rest.
“A-team in position at northwest stairwell. Over.”
“C-team in position at northeast stairwell. Over.”
Noyes said, “All teams standing by. Over.”
I continued to climb, hand over hand, up the vertical piece of metal. I knew I was strong, but I hadn’t tested my upgrade to this extent. In my life before, I wouldn’t have made it up a single story of this building, but tonight I climbed the first three with effortless grace.
It was only as I reached the fifth floor that I noticed the first tremor of muscle fatigue in my triceps. I knew they’d be fine. The real strain was developing in my adductor pollicis, first dorsal interosseus, and flexor pollicis brevis—the finger and hand muscles involved in pinching and grasping.
Noyes came through in my earpiece: “Logan, how we doing, buddy? Over.”
I could hear the stress in my voice as I answered, “Five floors up. Need to focus now. Out.”
I glanced down, instantly relegating into the background noise the part of my consciousness that wanted to scream at the vomit-inducing distance between me and the tiny kayak. I reached up once more, pinching a grip on the vertical beam, the balls of my feet scrambling up the glass as I ascended from the seventh to the eighth floor.
Sweat was pouring down my back, my legs, dripping off my heels. I clung once more to the unforgiving, half-inch steel ledge, my gastrocnemius and soleus （calf muscles） quivering. It was my glucose levels, which fueled my muscles, getting dangerously low, veering me into hypoglycemia. While my triceps and pectorals were burning, they weren’t the real problem. It was my fingers. They were nearing the end of their ability to keep me on this wall. The pain wasn’t the problem. I could wall that off. Eventually—pain or not—my finger muscles and tendons would simply fail.
I looked down.
It would be a 37-meter fall into six feet of water. I weighed eighty-four kilograms. I would fall for 2.75 seconds. Speed at impact 26.93 meters per second. 96.95 kilometers per hour. 30,458 joules of energy at impact. Survival unlikely but possible, although six feet of water was nothing. It wouldn’t stop me from slamming at considerable speed into the submerged sidewalk.
Broken legs for sure—I’d probably drown.
I looked up the face of the building, which seemed to meld into the night sky. I’d hoped to reach the tenth floor, but it was now or never.
I reached into my pocket, now clinging to the building with one hand, fighting through another wave of muscle cramps as I dug out the C-4 charge and carefully ripped the adhesive covering away with my teeth.
With one hand, I set a timer on the blasting cap for thirty seconds. I would’ve liked more time to climb away from the charge, but I figured I had less than a minute of clinging to 140 Broadway left in me.
I started the timer and stuck the charge on the lower half of the ninth-floor window. Until this moment, I’d been holding my adrenaline back, knowing I’d need it at the end. Now I let the fear creep in, a sliver of blinding panic, and with it the adrenaline I would need to not fall.
I down-climbed fourteen feet to the next floor, got a two-handed grip on the vertical beam.
The blast nearly shook me off the building, but I fought to hold on, glass raining down on me, my grip slipping.
I reached up for the next handhold, squeezing with everything in my being, squeezing so hard I was afraid I’d break my fingers, and kept climbing, sweat running down my face, burning my eyes, and I could see the gaping hole the charge had blown in the side of the building. It had twisted some of the metal into horizontal shapes that called out to me for handholds. I didn’t trust them.
I stayed on the intact vertical beam until the ninth-floor opening was just within reach. With my left hand pinching as hard as I could, I flung myself at the ninth floor, glass slicing through my right forearm as I clung to the edge, my feet dangling over open space.
I was going to fall.
I shot my left arm into the room, needing something, anything, and I clutched what felt like the leg of a desk.
It was the first real handhold since leaving the kayak, and I leveraged myself up over the edge and rolled into a dark room.
For a moment, I lay gasping on the floor—my legs, arms, and hands trembling with exhaustion and strain. After thirty seconds, I sat up and studied the damage to my arm. Eight glass shards protruded from my right brachioradialis—two of them deep in the forearm muscle. I reached into the pack, emerged with the roll of duct tape. I ripped off a long piece, stuck it to the desk, and began removing the glass. Blood sheeted down my arm. Pain threatened; I walled it away. When I’d dug out the final, deepest jag, I carefully squeezed the gashes together and wrapped my entire forearm in duct tape—hoping it would hold until I could properly stitch myself back together.
I put my socks and shoes back on, wondering if anyone on the floors above me had heard the blast.
I was sitting in what appeared to be a library, surrounded by bookshelves filled with legal volumes. Came to my feet, shouldered my pack, and moved around a dusty conference table into a hallway.
I slipped on my NightShades. Straight ahead stood a reception desk. I walked past the bank of dormant elevators to the north side of the building.
I was on the ninth story. The lab was twenty-five floors above me, and I had four stairwells to choose from.
Turning left, I headed for the northwest stairwell.
Seventeen minutes, twenty-nine seconds had elapsed since I’d started my ascent. I pulled my Five-seveN pistol as I approached the stairwell door.
I opened it slowly.
Complete darkness.
With no ambient light to work with, my NightShades were useless. I went to the nearest office, and as I grabbed a stapler off the desk, my phone buzzed in my pocket. I took it out—Edwin calling.
“Hey,” I said.
“Where are you?” Something was wrong.
“Why?”
“Are you in the building?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s a second team en route.”
“Why?”
“They’re going to land on the roof—”
“No, you can’t let that—”
“I was just told…” He lowered his voice. “…this isn’t my op anymore.”
“How is that possible?”
“Your time in Virginia…” He meant when he’d held me in a glass cage. “There was video footage. People found out. People way above my pay grade. I thought if we moved quickly on this thing, we could stay under the radar. Obviously, I miscalculated. They were watching me. I had no idea.”
It had to be the Department of Defense. Had they been searching for me and Kara all this time? The military applications of an enhanced human were the stuff of DARPA dreams, and in some ways even scarier than Kara’s plan. At least her motivations came from a place of wanting to help our species. She wanted to upgrade everyone. I had a hunch our government wouldn’t take such an egalitarian approach.
“They’re about to come in hard.”
“Who?” He didn’t answer. “Edwin. Tell me what I’m up against.”