“We can see people from here. How many need rescue?”
“Reliable numbers are hard to acquire, but there may be as many as twenty people on the floors above the fire. A rescue helicopter has been called, but it’s not close and concern over the radio is that the fire and smoke will spread to the top floors before anyone can be rescued.”
“No one has come to the roof of the building.”
Curtis spoke up. “Those doors are probably blocked, too.”
Oliver reached up to the quiver, drawing an arrow. “Spartan and Wild Dog, take the roof and get that door open so people can get to that ’copter when it arrives. Mister Terrific is with me, and we tackle the lower obstructions so the firefighters can get in and do their job. White Canary and Black Canary, gather the people on the upper floors and get them to that roof.
“Whoever did this is likely long gone,” he added, “but be ready, just in case.”
“How do we get from here to there?” Spartan asked.
“Leave that to me,” Green Arrow said, firing the first grappling-hook arrow across the gap between buildings.
* * *
Spartan reached down, fingers closing around Wild Dog’s arm, and hauled him up onto the Dearden Tower roof. Straightening and pulling his guns, Wild Dog nodded his thanks.
“I don’t like hanging out in space like that.”
Spartan shrugged, his gun also in hand. “Jump out of a few airplanes, and it’ll feel like a cakewalk.”
“I’ll put that on my to-do list.”
The area they stood on was flat, covered mostly in black tar, but they could see a patio area covered with mezzanine tiles and scattered planters with tropical shrubbery, placed around wrought-iron chairs and tables. To the left, under a pergola covered with some flowering vines, stood both a fully stocked bar and an elaborate gas grill. In the center jutted a shed-style building of cinder blocks with a steel door. Except for the door, it had been painted in bright colors appropriate for a southwestern adobe. The door was an unrelieved square of unadorned steel.
They moved toward it, Wild Dog matching Spartan’s pace even though there was a substantial difference in their stride. Dull thuds reverberated from the steel door as if it were some strange percussion instrument being played from the other side. Spartan turned the volume up on his voice amplifier, and leaned close to the door.
“Hey!” he boomed. “We’re here to help.” The percussion stopped, leaving the noise of the sirens sounding thin and brittle from far below, and the whistling of the wind over the rooftop they stood on.
“The door is stuck.” The voice was male, sounding as if it came from underwater. “I can’t get it open and there’s a lot of smoke and heat.”
“Are you alone?”
A chorus of noises sounded, Spartan’s sharp hearing picking out several distinct voices. They swelled for a second before falling off. Then they were replaced by the male voice from earlier.
“There’s a group of us from Whisken Holdings and a few other offices. Maybe eleven or twelve of us.”
“What’s your name?”
“Darrell Grizzle.”
“We’re going to get you out of there, Darrell,” Spartan shouted. “There’s a chopper on the way.” He turned the voice modulator back down to normal.
“This thing’s been welded shut.” Wild Dog pointed along the edges where the door sat inside a frame of the same color and material. Along the gap lay a thick weld, like a fat caterpillar that didn’t end—one long wavy roll that looked like syrupy steel poured into the space between door and frame.
It was a heavy-duty seam.
Unbreakable.
Spartan looked at Wild Dog. “We have to do something.”
Rene turned, taking in the entirety of the rooftop patio.
“I have an idea.”
* * *
Black Canary propped her feet against the window, and kept her eyes fixed on her reflection. While speeding across the chasm between the buildings, her brain had begun to swirl. Zip-lining was one thing—racing into an inferno was something else entirely. Awareness of what lay ahead sat heavy in the pit of her stomach.
Eyes forward, seeing only herself and her partner while ignoring the clutching panic that climbed the vertebrae of her spine. The wind shear off the building pushed ferociously against her, making it difficult to keep steady. White Canary pressed against her, mouth close to her ear.
“Watch your eyes.”
Before zip-lining to the burning building, they had discussed how they were getting inside, but it still took her a second to react and tuck her face into her shoulder. A big swaying push and a loud THROONNGG sound that vibrated through her soles and across the front of her body.
Give, she thought. Just give.
Three more times it happened.
Sway, THROONNGG, and vibration through her body like a shock. Each time the swaying arced further, the vibration more violent.
A sharply brittle crash followed the third THROONNGG and in one jerk of motion she fell. Her feet hit hard, jolting through her shins and knees, and her hip banged into something with bruising force. She gasped, and heat filled her lungs from the sharp intake of breath. Opening her eyes, she found herself in a room, kneeling on broken glass. Recovering her equilibrium, she quickly detached herself from the cable that still trailed out the window.
White Canary propped beside her with the grace of a ballerina. The blonde hero grinned at her, making the dimple in her chin even more pronounced. She followed Dinah’s example and unhooked herself.
“Mister Terrific was right,” she said. “The heat created enough backdraft to pull us and most of that glass right inside.”
“He’s usually right,” she said wryly, gathering her resolve. “It can be very annoying.”
“I’ve got a teammate like that.” White Canary began moving forward. “Come on, let’s see what you’ve got.”
Dinah followed, White Canary becoming just a pale gleam of blond hair and pearl-gray leather in the sooty haze of the room. She moved faster to catch up, passing through the room full of cubicles just a step behind. The smoke that filled the air smelled like burning cotton candy and left an oily film on her skin.
Chemical fire. Anger settled in her bones, that someone had done this on purpose, this terrorist act. Then they found the first group of people.
* * *
“That was different,” Curtis Holt said.
Green Arrow unclipped from the cable, giving him a hard look. Heat and smoke rushed past them, being sucked out the opening where a window had once been.
“I’ve hang-glided, parachuted, and zip-lined, but I’ve never done it into a burning building.” Mister Terrific dropped the clip from his costume. He saw the look coming from under Green Arrow’s hood, directed at him. “I’m just saying, it was an experience.”
“Think about it on your own time,” Green Arrow growled. “We have work to do.” He turned on his heel, moving into the flames. Mister Terrific followed, closing his mouth to keep the sooty smoke out of his lungs as much as possible.
“Overwatch, why aren’t the sprinklers working?” The voice in Holt’s ear belonged to Green Arrow.
“According to everything I see, they are,” Overwatch replied.
“They aren’t. See what you can do.”
“On it.”
The office they moved through had been demolished. Desks and chairs overturned, flames licking around them. The ceiling tiles that weren’t fallen or reduced to so much confetti had been scorched black and the carpet crunched, brittle and hard underfoot, melted in great swaths through the middle.
Mister Terrific scanned everything as he followed, taking in what he could through the acrid smoke that made his eyes water. As the tears ran over the T-mask that adhered to his face, his engineer mind worked overtime.
The scorch marks and the angles in which the destruction paths lay indicated an explosion. The flames that traced the walls and decorations—still burning on anything they could�
�were a darker orange, amber at their core. The smoke that rolled past felt oily against his skin, like a petrol fire, but didn’t sting. Breathing was hard but not a genuine struggle, so the flame wasn’t eating all the oxygen in the room. Sweat ran freely down his back, and he wanted to shrug off the tight-fitting Kevlar-reinforced leather jacket to cool off. Still, the heat wasn’t so intense he felt any danger to his lungs and their delicate linings. The back of his throat itched in a mentholated sensation, and his mouth filled with the taste of burnt sugar.
His brain listed fourteen chemical combinations that would create an explosion of this level, then result in a fire with smoke of those characteristics. None of them occurred naturally in modern construction, and none of them was powerful enough to do any structural damage to a building like this.
Using his long stride, he closed the gap with Green Arrow.
“This was intentional.”
Green Arrow stopped under a glowing EMERGENCY EXIT sign.
“What do you mean?”
“This fire was made in a lab, by someone. It won’t do any damage to this building.”
“The floor is blocked off.” Green Arrow pointed at the steel door in front of them. “The building isn’t the target.”
“Oh.”
“Overwatch, where are the firefighters blocked?”
Felicity’s voice sounded. “One floor below you.”
“Why can’t they come up?” Mister Terrific asked.
“The isolation doors,” Green Arrow said.
“Got it in one guess,” Overwatch said. “The one between nine and ten isn’t opening.”
“Isolation doors?” Mister Terrific coughed.
Green Arrow turned to him. “Every fifth floor has an isolation door installed,” he said, “designed to be impenetrable and fireproof, to act as barriers in extreme situations. My father was especially proud that he’d included them.”
“Extreme situations like this one?” Terrific asked.
“It was so each set of floors could act as a panic room of sorts. There was a lot of fear of terrorist attacks back then.”
“Sounds completely reasonable, not crazy at all.” Mister Terrific coughed again, the smoke drying his throat.
“In hindsight, it might have been a bad idea for a fire,” Oliver admitted.
“There must have been some safety factor,” Holt said. “Why can’t fire and rescue get through?”
“They’re reporting that their override code doesn’t work,” Overwatch answered, “and they’re still working on getting the heavy cutting gear up the stairs. They have an electronic locksmith on the crew, but the door is too hot to touch and he can’t work in Nomex gloves.”
“It’s hot? Is there fire on our side of it?”
“Not that I can see from here, but on the floors above you, yes. I’m running a diagnostic on the door itself through the buildings systems, but there’s no fire, I repeat, no fire, on your side of the isolation door.”
Green Arrow pushed through into the stairwell.
“Then let’s go knock down a door.”
* * *
“You think this will work?”
Wild Dog let the propane tanks taken from the grill and the tiki bar drop to the tile with a dull thunk thunk sound.
“I don’t know, Hoss,” he said, “but I know that this…” He tapped the wall of the building beside the steel door. “…is cinder block, and it’s easier to get through than that door—but what we brought ain’t enough to do the job. We gonna need something with more kick than our guns.”
Spartan nodded. “I understand that, but will this work?”
“That’s a question for Curtis, but he ain’t here, so let’s see. It might not do anything more than make the wall weaker.” Wild Dog put the tanks together in front of the wall, one on top of the other.
“How are you going to light those things? A bullet will just let the gas escape.”
Wild Dog pulled a black rectangle of plastic from a utility pocket on his pants.
“What is that?” Spartan asked.
Rene wedged the device into the handle of the front tank and pulled a zip tie tight around it. The zip tie compressed a button that caused the device to click and arc a blue spark of electricity between two contact points. The tie held the button down, making the device cycle in a click-click-click-click.
“That’s the ignition switch I yanked out of the grill,” Wild Dog said as he began moving away. Spartan followed, and about forty feet out, near the parapet at the edge, they stopped. Wild Dog pointed at the tanks.
“Now, shoot just under that and the gas should light on that ignition.”
Spartan stared at the tiny spot. The margin of error was slim—nearly nonexistent. An inch or two off and the gas would simply leak out, never reaching the spark from the ignition. It was a precision shot. He’d made similar ones many times as a soldier, even more on the practice range.
He squeezed his hand together, the muscles tight around his knuckles and finger bones.
“This was your idea,” he said. “You take the shot.”
* * *
They found four people on the twelfth floor, and added them to the civilians from the tenth and eleventh. Herding the frightened civilians between them, they led them up, working their way to the roof.
“Be careful,” Black Canary called out. “Fire is unpredictable.”
Without turning around, White Canary raised her hand in a thumbs-up. The man in front of her sobbed into a hoodie he held in a wad over his face. The smoke had thinned with each floor they’d passed, but it still hung in the air with the shimmering heat. This floor, however, appeared flame free.
“I can’t.” The man in front of her stopped walking, shaking his head. “I can’t,” he said again.
Black Canary reached toward him. “Only a little further, sir.”
“No!” the man screamed hoarsely. “I can’t go further!”
“Sir!”
The man’s face twisted ugly. “You masked freaks are leading us to the fire! I won’t go!” He turned, grabbing the door they were passing, turning the knob with a violent jerk. The wisp of smoke curled up over the man’s knuckles as he screamed in pain.
Abruptly the door was sucked in, dragging the man forward. Black Canary snagged his shoulder, yanking back. The man’s hand came off the handle, leaving skin stuck to it like meat cooked in an unoiled pan.
The door yawned open, a black maw of swirling smoke. Black Canary pushed the man away as the opening belched out a fireball large enough to burn them all to ashes.
7
The heat radiating off the door baked through the thin leather gloves he wore.
That wasn’t right.
The door was just as he remembered—a flat unadorned steel slab in a two-inch steel track, no knobs, no handles of any kind. He would draw on it with chalk while his father worked, overseeing the men who performed the physical labor of raising a skyscraper, forcing beams of steel and slabs of concrete to do as they willed and defy gravity.
This door had a flame-retardant core. It wouldn’t burn.
“Overwatch, where are the first responders?”
“On the other side of the isolation door,” she replied.
“Then there’s no fire making this hot,” Mister Terrific said.
“No, there’s not,” Green Arrow grumbled.
“What is it, then?”
“I can answer that now,” Felicity said over their comms. “The good thing about a state-of-the-art building is that they generate lots of real-time information about what’s happening.”
“Enlighten us, please,” Oliver said brusquely.
“The door has a massive electrical charge running through it, and it’s acting like an overloaded capacitor, holding the heat you feel.”
“Then cut the power.”
“That was my first instinct, too.” Felicity’s voice came in and out slightly, and he pictured her doing what she normally did on the comms, rolling ar
ound in her chair and talking with her entire body. “But the security measures in the building would require either a physical interference at the main grid in the basement, or shutting down three city blocks—one of which includes a hospital, and another has a terminal disease hospice.
“So no can do,” she concluded.
“We’ll have to figure something out here.”
“If I come up with a solution I’ll chime in.”
Green Arrow turned to Mister Terrific and growled, “Figure something out.”
“Oh.” The taller man stepped back. “You mean right now?”
“Yes.”
Mister Terrific’s mouth opened, then closed—as if he wanted to say something, then thought better of it.
“You chose the name Mister Terrific for a reason,” Green Arrow said, putting a hard hand on his companion’s shoulder, eyes fierce through the emerald mask. “You haven’t failed to live up to it yet.”
Mister Terrific nodded at the reassurance, yet, despite the heat sweat there, a chill ran up his spine.
* * *
Something tore in her throat. A shear of hot, wet pain told her that something vital to the operation of her voice had violently come loose.
Still Dinah Drake screamed.
Black dots crept at the edges of the fire that was her world, the hungry fire, the beast, the eater of flesh. The inferno had been unleashed when the panicked civilian had flung open the door that had held it back. The fire, starved for oxygen, raged out in a wave seeking to consume them. Black Canary had done the only thing she could.
Open her mouth, and scream with all her might.
The sonic force shunted around a hard knot of agony, pushed out with sheer will, slamming into the consuming fire like a ringing hammer, holding it at bay. Her scream pounded inside her skull, the feedback from it curdling her stomach. Something trickled down the back of her throat, something that tasted like hot, wet pennies.
She spasmed, wanting to cough.
At a small drop in sonic force, the fire surged toward her, eating its way closer. She smelled the singe of her own hair and ignored it even as it tried to crawl in and join the tickle cough that threatened to make her throat clench, cutting off her canary cry.
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