Vane
The steel door sealed and took her with it.
I leaned against the corridor wall. The timer in my hand read twenty-nine minutes and forty-two seconds. I pressed my thumb into the side of the casing hard enough to feel the metal flex.
The noise came in worse than usual. Water shivering in the pipes behind the wall, a shift change three floors down, somebody in the monitoring room working a piece of gum with the steady jaw of a man who thought no one could hear him. Five years I'd spent learning how to push it all flat. Tonight it wouldn't go.
Because the other end of the bond was moving. Harper was reaching, on purpose, toward another man's mind.
I felt the moment she touched his collar.
Not pain. Worse. The thread in my chest got brushed by something that wasn't mine, something co
