Chapter 24 · Two Keys, One Cage

"The other half," Knox said, "opens the loft. Not the latch."

I didn't move. The tray was still cold against my palms, the match stem sitting in its plastic well like it hadn't just saved my entire case. "Say that again."

"You heard me." He didn't blink. "My half opens the loft door. Yours kills the sprinkler. Neither one touches the latch alone."

"Then what does?"

"Both. Same second. Two panels." He tipped his chin past the wet steel shelving to a second keypad I hadn't clocked, because I'd been too busy not drowning in foam. "You want out of this room, Rhea, you need my hands too. And I need yours."

The air in here had already gone thin, that stale, chewed-over taste of a sealed space breathing itself twice. Forty-eight hours of it, if nobody blinked first. My shirt was still damp at the collar from the near-miss spray, sticking cold to my collarbone, and every time I inhaled I got him — cedar, gun oil, something underneath that was just heat and skin, too close in a room this size not to taste it.

"You knew," I said. "You knew when you handed me that code.