The follow-up sweep was routine, by the standards of the past two weeks.
That was the danger. I understood it intellectually — the specific risk of routinized movement in a space where routine created predictability and predictability created windows — and I moved through the eastern industrial building with the awareness of the danger in the same way I moved through everything: noted, factored in, adjusted for.
I was in the east corridor when the east corridor stopped being fine.
The rigged section activated without the standard tells — no pressure-creak, no smell of accelerant, just the specific sound of structural elements that had been compromised deciding to be compromised now. The sound was brief and entirely certain.
I had approximately sixty seconds.
***
The east corridor ran
