Gordon's hand went to his holster by reflex. Found it empty. Remembered, in the same fraction of a second, exactly where his weapon was and whose belt it was currently attached to.
The bio-human's fist came down.
The air displacement ahead of it was enough to feel on the skin. Gordon stood there and felt something older than thought take over his legs — the freeze response, rooted in the part of the brain that predates the prefrontal cortex, that operates on a much simpler calculus than reason.
Then Bullock hit him from the side.
They went down together, the fist passing close enough that the coarse black fur across the bio-human's forearm dragged a line across Gordon's cheekbone. The cut opened immediately — shallow, bleeding freely — and the impact with the mesh knocked the air out of him for a moment.
He lay there, processing that he was alive. Then he got up.
In the dark behind them, Will pressed himself into the shaft wall and did not move.
He'd understood the weakness the moment they'd dropped into the well. Creatures that had spent their entire existence inside laboratory cylinders, then transferred to a lightless sewer system, would have visual processing roughly equivalent to deep-cave fish — not absent, but restructured around light source detection rather than image resolution. A flashlight beam was a dinner bell. Waving it around was like setting out a sign.
He'd wanted to say this. He'd started to say this. But Gordon had been moving and the bio-humans were already turning and the calculus of speak and attract attention to yourself versus stay still and let other people draw the fire had resolved very quickly in the direction his survival instincts preferred.
Will was aware this was not his best moment.
He was also aware that a dead hero was no help to anyone, that Gordon and Bullock were mobile and armed and experienced, and that he had a specific plan that required both a working set of handcuffs and approximately thirty more seconds of being alive.
He was aware of all of this.
He still didn't entirely believe it.
Think. What would he do.
Bullock had found his rhythm.
Twenty-two years on the force, twelve of them in the lower East Side, and his hands remembered how to work in the dark. He moved by sound, tracking the breathing — coarse, irregular, massive — and firing toward the nearest concentration of it. The muzzle flash gave him half a second of strobed visibility each time. He used it.
He wasn't hitting clean. The size of the targets helped. A round caught one of the bio-humans somewhere in the shoulder and it recoiled, retreating toward the far wall with a sound like a dog that's been kicked — confused, angry, not done. It crouched in the dark and breathed at them.
The standoff held the way bad standoffs hold — barely, and only until someone moved wrong.
Three rounds left in the cylinder.
Three bio-humans still operational.
"Gordon."
Will kept his voice below the ambient noise of the falling water — just loud enough to carry.
"Handcuffs."
Nothing.
"The handcuffs."
A pause. Then a chain of silver caught the light for a half-second as it spun through the air toward him.
The sound also carried.
One of the bio-humans — the one nursing its shoulder wound against the far wall — stopped nursing it. Its head turned toward the source of the voice, the collapsed nostrils expanding and contracting as it worked through the sensory information.
Will heard the cuffs hit the mesh. He kept the sound of that in his memory and reached for it, both hands moving slow across the grating.
The bio-human above him stopped moving.
The heat arrived before the smell — body heat radiating from something large, suspended directly overhead. Then the smell arrived and settled over him like a physical object. Not the sewer. Not the standing water. Something worse: a deep animal decay, like something left in standing liquid for a long time, organic and total, the smell of a digestive system that processed whatever it was given without preference or discretion.
Will stopped breathing.
His fingers kept moving. Slow. Millimeter by millimeter across the metal grid.
It can't see me. It can only detect light and motion and sound. I am none of those things.
The bio-human didn't move. It hung above him in the dark, processing.
His fingertip touched the edge of the handcuff chain.
Caught in a mesh gap, the metal flush against the steel. He closed his fingers carefully around it—
The heat on the back of his neck intensified. The bio-human had lowered its head.
Two things happened simultaneously: Will's finger nudged the cuffs, the cuffs shifted against the metal with a small ring of contact, and from overhead came the wet sound of enormous nasal passages doing their work.
A warm, viscous weight landed on the back of his head.
Will registered what it was.
He filed it, immediately and permanently, in the category of things that cannot be responded to right now and continued functioning. His stomach staged a brief revolt that he suppressed through direct willpower. The nasal discharge moved down the back of his neck and along his arm, finding the gap between his fingers and the handcuff chain with the thoroughness of water finding a low point.
The cuffs were moving.
He could feel the lubrication working against his grip — the chain rotating, the metal becoming slick and uncontrollable, every adjustment he made producing a corresponding slip in the other direction. He tried to close his fist around the bracket instead of the chain.
The bio-human's head dropped another inch.
Will's wrist was bleeding — the mesh had opened skin against his knuckles during the search, and the blood mixed with everything else into a sensory situation he was determined not to think about in any detail.
The creature smelled it.
The head came down further.
Come on—
The cuffs slipped.
He felt the weight leave his fingers. He lunged forward flat against the mesh, hand dropping through the gap, catching the falling chain on the last joint of his index finger — one finger, the cuffs swinging below the grating over the open drop to the level below.
The bio-human directly above him exhaled.
The lunge had made noise.
His whole body had made noise.
Something else he'd been controlling gave way.
"—"
It came out louder than he intended, stripped down to the core of what it was: the sound a person makes when everything controlled dissolves at once and what remains is just a human being at the end of their resources in the dark.
The shaft threw it back at him from all directions.
The bio-human above him recoiled — a huge, sharp retreat, several meters, its threat-response overriding its predator instinct for approximately two seconds. The other two pulled back as well, the sound having triggered something cross-wired in their engineered neurology between prey vocalizes and danger registers.
Two seconds.
Then they started coming back.
The cuffs are gone, Will thought, watching them approach. The plan is gone. I've got nothing.
Bullock turned to find the nearest target and the shadow that had been waiting in the dark behind him arrived without warning — the third bio-human, which had been circling the perimeter while the other two held their attention. A forearm the width of a small tree trunk connected with the side of Bullock's head and he went down and didn't get up.
Gordon shouted something.
Will watched the bio-human closest to him and understood, with absolute clarity, that there was no more time for thinking.
Then light punched through the wall.
Two separate overflow ports, maybe fifteen feet up the shaft wall — both of them, simultaneously, filled with hard white beams. Not flashlights. Something brighter, steadier.
Two shots.
The first entered the nearest bio-human's open mouth and exited through the underside of its jaw. It released Will — he hadn't registered being grabbed, but apparently he had been — and lurched backward, making a sound that had no precedent in Will's experience, clutching its jaw with both hands.
The second shot was placed with the precision of someone who had done this before and was doing it properly. Entry through the ear canal, angle calibrated for the brainstem. The bio-human that had hit Bullock went into a violent, directionless rampage — smashing into walls, losing coordination, the motor system sending contradictory signals — and then went down hard, the floor shuddering on impact.
The remaining two bio-humans looked at each other.
Looked at the holes in the wall where the light came from.
Backed up.
A silence assembled itself from the pieces of the last two minutes.
Then, from somewhere above and to the left, carrying down through the shaft with the natural reverb of stone and water:
"Gentlemen." A pause timed for effect. "Is this what happens when you leave the women behind?"
The voice echoed pleasantly off the walls.
Will looked up.
Selina was crouched in one of the overflow ports, Gordon's confiscated weapon in her right hand, a second flashlight in her left, both beams angled down into the shaft with the tactical positioning of someone who had taken thirty seconds to map the geometry before pulling the trigger.
Will looked at her for a moment.
"You found another way out," he said.
"And then I came back." She ejected the cylinder, checked it, snapped it closed. "You're welcome."
Gordon was already moving toward Bullock. Will got there first — hands checking for pulse, checking for breathing, finding both. Unconscious, a cut along the hairline bleeding freely, but alive.
"He needs air," Will said. "And a doctor. In that order."
Gordon crouched beside his partner without speaking. His hand rested on Bullock's shoulder for a moment, then he straightened.
He looked up at Selina.
"The other exit," he said. "Can it take four people?"
"Three," she said. "The fourth one's going to need to be carried."
"Then let's move."