He didn't wait for courage to make the decision. Courage was too slow and too unreliable. He moved because there was no other option left that didn't taste like failure.
Ethan swung back onto the ladder, metal biting into his palms as he slid down faster than was entirely sensible. The cold knifed into his clothes the closer he got to the ground. By the time his boots hit dirt, he was already shaking, not from temperature alone but from the knowledge of what was happening to the structure above his head.
He kept low, slipping between shadows and blind angles, his brain working the way it always did: structure first, risk next, then everything else. The men planting charges weren't paying attention to anything except their grid and their timeline. That helped. The fact that they were that calm made everything worse.
