My body wouldn't listen to me.
That was the most frightening part, not the gunshots, not the dark, not even the fact that I was currently descending a staircase I hadn't known existed twenty minutes ago. It was the trembling. Fine, constant, running through my hands and my knees and the muscles of my jaw in a way that had nothing to do with cold and everything to do with the fact that my body had decided to process the fear my mind was refusing to acknowledge. I pressed one hand flat against the wall as I went down, partly for balance and partly just to feel something solid and real and stationary in a night that had stopped being either of those things the moment the first gunshot cracked through the silence.
“Breathe. Slowly. In through the nose. Count it.”
I forced it. Deliberately,
