Don’t try this at home, boys and girls, I thought, and filled the autoloader with another three shells, which was as many as it would take. And wasn’t that going to be fun?
“Shit, shit, shit.” That was Ray again, only he was looking at the gun this time. Like he thought this was crazy, too.
“Can you hack it?” I asked him, as the pounding increased to a crescendo.
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” He shook his head. “Somebody else’s, sure, given enough time, but—”
“You’re not going to have a lot of time,” I warned him.
“How much are we talking about?”
I checked my ammo. “Two, maybe three minutes.”
“What?”
I grabbed his shoulders. “You’re the best. You said so. You’ve hacked portals all over this city—”
“But not the Senate’s!”
“You’ve hacked some of the Senate’s.”
“But not the gateways!”
“Ray.” I looked at him seriously. “We are not getting back upstairs, okay? I’m just laying it out there. We go through the portal, or we don’t go at all.”
“But you—you’re good—”
“I’m not that good.”
“But best-case scenario—”
“We die on a higher floor, that’s all. There’s just too many of them.”
He stared at me.
“You can do this.”
“I—you don’t understand,” he whispered. “I’m a screwup. I’ve always been a…I can’t—”
“Yes, you can. You can and Radu’s going to help you.” I looked at him. “Aren’t you?”
And it was a testament to how fucked we were that even Radu was looking serious. He nodded soberly. “I know the old passwords, and the kind of things they use. I can…guess…at this one.”
“He can guess,” Ray said faintly, as I pulled them over to the door.
And looked at Radu. “When you get through, tell them that I think we’re dealing with Jonathan. Tell Louis-Cesare.” Because he and the necromancer had a past, and he needed to know.
“You can tell them,” Radu said quietly.
“Yeah, well. Don’t wait for me. If you get the portal open and I’m not close enough—”
Ray said something really foul.
“I don’t have time to argue,” I told them, my head pounding so hard the room was pulsing in and out. “Just remember, all right?”
Radu nodded, Ray glared and I licked my lips.
And then I threw open the door.