Chapter 31 · Whoever's Holding the Clock

"Someone's already—" Voss doesn't get to finish it. Milo's forearm slams down across his windpipe, bone-on-bone against the grate, and the rest of the sentence turns into a wet cough and a spray of blood across the mesh.

"Already what?" Milo's voice comes out flat, no heat in it, which is worse than if he was yelling. "Finish."

Voss just laughs. It rattles in his chest like something's cracked in there. "You think I'm scared of the knee?"

"I think you're scared of the guy on the other end of that clock," I say. I don't look up from the panel. Can't. The amber numbers are still climbing down, and my hands are shaking bad enough that the screwdriver keeps skating off the housing screw.

"Cade." Milo's voice again, closer this time. "Talk to me. What's it say."

"Nine minutes, forty. It's not a countdown to open. It's a countdown to seal — a second seal, on top of this one. Whoever's running it wants us in here past whatever they're planning."

"So we break it."

"You don't break a bio-lock timer, you reroute it, and I can't reroute what I don't have access to anymore.