The fourth floor had three more guards and an actual squad-sized response forming up at the elevator bank. I pulled Zero behind a half-wall at the stairwell mouth and held up two fingers, then made a gesture I hoped meant flank, and her eyes did the smiling thing again.

"You’ve got a plan."

I corrected her, "I’ve got the start of a plan."

"Tell me."

Nodding, I explained everything. "I throw a grenade I do not have, you handle the squad while they’re distracted, I take out the two at the elevator, we move."

"Lukas. You don’t have a grenade."

"They don’t know that."

I stood up, half-stepped into view of the squad, yelled "GRENADE" at the top of my lungs, and ducked back down. Six grown men in armor immediately threw themselves flat onto a marble floor, which is something I can confirm makes a tremendous amount of noise even before Zero went over the half-wall and into them like a thrown axe.

She handled it. I hadn’t been kidding about taking out the two at the elevator; they’d both turned to gawk at the grenade shout, and I came around the corner with the gun and got both of them in the legs, low aim, before they could turn back.

They went down screaming, and I felt extremely little about it because they had kidnapping detail written all over them.

"Two," I whispered, low, to Zero, as I rejoined her on the far side of the squad.

"Of what?" She looked a bit confused.

"Number of times your face has done a thing to my heart this hour. I’m counting."

"This is not the time, Lukas."

"It’s always the time. The bedroom, the courtyard, the apocalyptic infiltration of a hostile gang’s headquarters. Always the time." I winked at her.

"You are infuriating." She chuckled, definitely enjoying this too.

"That’s three."

She made a sound that was either a laugh or a swear word in a language I didn’t speak, and we kept moving.

...

We found her on the seventh floor.

The room had been an executive office once. Glass desk smashed in the corner, a dead plant in a dead pot, a view of the courtyard through a window that had been hammered with rebar. And in the center of the room, sitting on the floor with her back against the wall and her knees drawn up to her chest, was a young woman.

She was thin in the way that wasn’t natural thin. Cheekbones that should have had more flesh on them. Wrists I could have circled with my thumb and forefinger. Hair that had been some color before grime took over.

She was wearing what had been a white shirt and was now closer to gray, and there was a metal collar on her neck... not a choker, a collar, with a small dark indicator light on the front.

Her eyes were down. She didn’t look up when the door opened. The face that turned slightly toward us was so empty of expectation that it took me a full second to realize she had given up expecting anyone to come.

I’d written this scene before. In one of my novels. I’d written it with a different room and different characters, and I had thought, when I wrote it, that I had imagined it carefully.

I had imagined nothing. The actual thing in front of me was worse than every word I had ever put on a page.

I crossed to her in three steps and crouched. Zero stayed at the door, watching the hall.

"Hey." I made my voice as gentle as I had ever made it. "Hi. I’m Lukas. We’re getting you out. Can you walk?"

Her eyes finally lifted, took me in, but did not change. "...Are you a buyer?"

I felt my chest tighten hearing her, but still tried to be calm on the outside. "No. I’m a rescue. We’re going. Can you walk?"

"...Yes."

"Good. The collar... does it do something? Explode, track, hurt you—"

"Tracks. Maybe shocks. I don’t know."

"Zero."

She came over, looked at it for half a second, did something to the side of it with two fingers and a wrenching twist that I didn’t follow, and the collar came open and fell to the floor.

The small indicator light went out. The young woman flinched at the sound it made, and then stared at the collar on the floor like it might reattach itself.

"Up." I held out a hand. "We have to move. Now."

She took my hand. Hers was so light it felt like picking up a bird.

...

The drones came before we made it back to the stairwell.

Two of them, slim quad-rotor things, buzzing down the corridor with optics tracking us. Zero’s hand was at my back, pushing both me and the woman ahead of her. The drones started chirping an alarm.

"They have eyes on us," Zero called. "Time’s up. Run."

We ran down seven flights of stairs, the woman keeping pace better than I had feared, mostly by virtue of weighing about as much as my left arm.

The squad on the fourth floor was trying to reorganize, and Zero went through them again on the way down without breaking stride. The squad on the third didn’t form up in time.

The cargo door was still open when we hit the bottom, and we burst out into the alley, and the courtyard alarm was going by then, a single rising thumping that I could feel in my chest cavity.

"Hood up," Zero snapped at the woman, pulling her own up.

We crossed the inner courtyard at a sprint, blended through the market, scattered the foot traffic, and came out the south gate faster than seemed possible.

I half-expected the gate guards to challenge us, but the alarm was rising behind us and they were turning toward the courtyard, not the gate, doing their job exactly wrong.

We went a quarter mile out before Zero let us slow.

"Bank," she said, still calm as ever. "State Bank. We can hide there for a few hours. They won’t expect us to double back into a zombie nest."

"Genius and terrible. I love it."

The young woman, between us, had not said another word since yes. She was still walking, though. One foot in front of the other, hood up over hair the color of nothing, her hand in mine where she had held it since I’d given it to her in the office.

I squeezed it once, gently, just to remind her there was a person at the other end.

She did not squeeze back.

But she did not let go.