"Stop".
Holt's hand went up.
They froze under a corrugated canopy and listened.
Then, they heard it… the hollow clank of chain. Not just that, they heard the whisper of something feathered dragging across a roof, and the far-off pop of gunfire that wasn't aimed at them.
"Pike," Holt said with a dark look on his face.
Pike's men were somewhere else, for now.
Ethan let out a breath he hadn't meant to hold and felt Shadowstep hum in response, an instinct ready to unspool across a fence.
With it and his grapple launcher, he could have used it to jump over the rooftop and watched to see them, but he saved it.
They pushed.
The last warehouse in the run had lost an entire side. Through the ragged mouth, Ethan saw the river for the first time in days.
The water ran sullen and dark under a sky that didn't know how to be blue anymore. Across it, west, a smudge of land and the skeleton of a suburb burned into empty outlines.
