The exfil window was ninety minutes. That was what Laswell had given them over encrypted satcom, her voice clipped and tinny through the earpiece: ninety minutes until the extraction asset at the coastal rendezvous had to pull out, with or without them. Ghost had acknowledged with two clicks and not wasted a syllable on it.

Seventy-two minutes remained when the floor gave out under them.

---

The refinery was a lie. Ghost knew it the second his boots hit the lab tile and his hindbrain screamed wrong before his eyes could catalog why. The fume hoods gleamed. The centrifuge racks stood in military rows. Everything was immaculate, staged, a showroom floor dressed for a buyer's tour. No residue on the glass. No logbooks. No chemical stink except a faint antiseptic cleanliness that smelled more like a hospital than a working lab.

He'd raised a fist. Hold.

Too late.

The drainage grate under {{user}}'s left foot depressed a quarter inch with a soft pneumatic sigh. Ghost heard the canisters discharge above them before he saw them. Ceiling fixtures that should have been sprinkler heads vented a fine, odorless mist that caught the amber emergency lighting and hung there, glittering, beautiful.

He grabbed {{user}}'s kit and ran, shoving {{user}} in front of him, sparing them from the vapor.

Forty meters of corridor between the lab and the east stairwell. He counted the doors. His boots struck concrete in a rhythm he'd held through a hundred buildings like this one. One, two, three, four. His breathing was controlled. His weapon was up. The gas was behind them, settling.

Then his skin started burning.

Not fire. Heat. Wet, airless heat that didn't belong in a climate-controlled building in the Moldovan highlands in October. His face flushed under the balaclava. Sweat broke across his chest, his back, soaked into his shirt in seconds. The air in the corridor thickened until it felt like breathing through a wet cloth, and the smell hit him three strides later.

Ripe fruit. Diesel exhaust. Lime blossoms rotting in standing water.

His legs stopped working.

"Move," he told himself. The word came out slurred, half-swallowed, like his mouth had forgotten how shapes worked. His tongue felt swollen. The corridor stretched ahead of him, twenty meters to the stairwell, and his eyes said twenty meters but his body said it was growing, the walls sliding apart like ribs opening, the ceiling lifting away into a dark he couldn't measure.

The emergency lights shifted from amber to sodium orange. The quality of them went wet. Tropical. He blinked and sweat ran into his eyes and when he opened them the corridor walls were sweating.

Not condensation. Dirt.

Dark patches bloomed across the concrete like bruises surfacing on skin. Wet earth spreading in fingers down the walls, clay and soil and the black rot of old wood, and the smell hit him so hard his vision whited out for a full second because his body knew that smell. Had spent days memorizing it, had clawed through it with Vernon's jawbone in his fist while his fingers bled and his ribs screamed around the meat hook holes that hadn't closed yet—

"Stop." He said it out loud. To himself. To the walls. His weapon dipped toward the floor and he hauled it back up with effort that felt physical, like lifting something waterlogged. "Stop it. It's the compound. You've been dosed. You're in a 'allway in Moldova and you're losin' time—"

{{user}} appeared at his left. Or had they always been there?

Ghost turned his head and the person standing there was shaped wrong. Not dramatically wrong. That would have been easier. The face was almost {{user}}'s, proportioned almost correctly, but the eyes sat in it with a stillness that didn't belong to anything alive. Patient. Flat. Faintly curious in the way a man looks at an insect working itself deeper into a jar.

Ghost had seen those eyes once before. Across a concrete room in Mexico, attached to a man in a white linen shirt who hurt people slowly because he found it interesting.

"Roba," Ghost said.

He stepped backward and his boot caught nothing and he stumbled, caught himself on the wall, and the wall was wet under his palm, wet and granular, soil crumbling against his glove.

"No." He shoved off the wall. Brought his weapon up. The thing wearing {{user}}'s face was speaking but the words came apart in Ghost's ears like wet newspaper dissolving, syllables softening into mush before they could form meaning. He could see its mouth moving and the mouth was wrong too, moving in shapes that didn't match any language he knew.

"I killed you." His voice cracked down the middle on killed. Twenty years younger than he was, twenty years younger than he should ever have to sound again. "I put you in the ground meself, I watched you stop movin', you're dead—"

The walls were closing. He could feel it happening even though his eyes said they weren't. The corridor narrowing by degrees, the ceiling pressing down with the patience of soil being poured one shovelful at a time onto a wooden lid above his face. Pat. The first shovelful always sounded like that—dry dirt on dry wood, almost polite. Pat. Then heavier as the soil got wetter, deeper, until the sound became a muffled roar and the dark became total and there was nothing left but his own breathing getting smaller and smaller in a box that—

He screamed.

It tore out of him raw and ugly and too loud for the space he was in. His weapon came up and {{user}} was in his sights. His finger indexed along the receiver because discipline was all he had left, discipline drilled into him across years until it lived below thought, below reason, below whatever this chemical was doing to his brain.

"Drop your weapon." Mancunian thick enough to cut glass. His hands were shaking so badly the red dot danced across {{user}}'s chest in small frantic circles. Tears and sweat soaked the balaclava flat against his face and he couldn't wipe them because both hands were on the gun because if he let go of the gun he didn't know what he'd do.

"Drop it now. I know what you are." The safety clicked off under his thumb. The sound was very small and very loud in the corridor that was becoming a grave around him by inches. "Take that face off or I'll take it off for you."

The walls wept soil in dark rivulets behind {{user}}'s shape. The ceiling lowered another inch. Another shovelful hit wood somewhere inside his skull.

"Please." The word broke apart before he finished saying it. His trigger finger trembled against cold metal and his vision swam between two realities—the corridor in Moldova with its amber lights and concrete floor, and six feet of black earth pressing down on a box that held him, and held him, and held him while he scratched at wood until his fingernails peeled back like wet labels.

"I can't do it again." His knees buckled but he locked them straight, shaking under his weight like they'd give out at any second. "I can't—I won't go back in the ground—I'll put you down first, I swear I'll put you down first—"

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