The third floor was a different building.
Not in any way that was visible. The corridor was the same functional architecture as the floors below it — the same walls, the same lighting, the same anonymous institutional quality of a space designed to be unremarkable. But the air was different. The specific quality of the air on the third floor was different from the air everywhere else in the facility the way the air near the sea was different from inland air — not dramatically, but immediately, and in a way that told you something about what was close.
The group moved through it.
Quietly. In the formation they had drilled — Thomas at the front, Katherine and Fenix flanking him, the others in the arranged order that put the right powers in the right positions, the specific geometry of a group that had spent months learning not just to fight but to fight as one thing.
The corridor ran east.
The room at the end of it was the room on the surveillance monitor — the room Jasper had found from the second floor cameras, the room where the lamp burned and Victor wrote and the demon queen existed alongside him in the space the tether held between them.
They had made it halfway down the corridor when the door at the far end opened.
Not Victor.
A man Katherine did not recognize. Then a woman. Then two more — facility security, the people who had been redirected from their patrol toward the third floor when the demon queen's awareness had activated whatever signal she sent when something required her attention.
Four of them.
Standing between the group and the room at the end of the corridor.
Thomas looked at them.
They looked at the group — at twenty-three people in a corridor they had been sent to clear — and the calculation that moved through their faces was the calculation of people who had been briefed on a facility breach and had been expecting to find fewer people than this.
The calculation did not take long.
"Move them," Thomas said.
The group moved them.
It was not a long engagement — four people against twenty-three who had trained for months and who were not interested in prolonging anything, and the specific quality of the group in a corridor with a clear objective at the end of it was the quality of something that had been pointed in a direction and was going there with everything it had.
Forty seconds.
The corridor was clear.
The door at the end of it was still closed.
Thomas looked at it.
He looked at the group.
"William," he said.
William came forward.
"The Tempests," Thomas said.
Mr. and Mrs. Tempest moved to William's side.
Thomas looked at Katherine.
"Together," Thomas said.
"Together," Katherine confirmed.
He opened the door.