Chapter 12 · Whoever's Hand That Is

"Move." Calder shoved me back from the hatch a half-second before he threw his whole weight into the wheel.

It didn't give. Not an inch. The metal screamed against the housing like it was fighting him back, and his knuckles went white around the spokes.

"That's not the cousins," I said. My voice came out rougher than I wanted, throat still raw from twenty minutes ago, from his mouth and his hand and the way my shirt hung off one shoulder now, collar torn clean through where he'd ripped it open. "They don't have hands steady enough to jam a hatch this clean."

"I know whose hatch this is." He didn't look at me. Sweat cut a line down the side of his neck. "It's mine. Nobody jams my hatch."

"Somebody just did."

He hit the wheel again. Nothing. The panic room swallowed the sound whole — no windows, no draft, just the four steel walls he'd built to keep other people out, and now they were keeping us in with each other and whatever this was.

A red light blinked awake on the panel by the door.