Chapter 4: The Dead Man's Switch

"We need to know where his control room is," Jarrin said. He leaned against the storage tank and let his jaw hang loose, trying to keep the pain in his ribs from making every word an event. "Everything's wired together. He's got a central hub, and if we find it, we can cut off the trigger point for all these charges."

Jazz squatted near the hole in the floor, studying the cracked concrete. "So we split up. Find the control room, isolate it, and then close the net."

"That's one way to lose half our team before we're done," Clint said from where he'd settled against the wall. The blood on his side had soaked through his jacket and wasn't showing any signs of stopping. "We move together. That's how this works."

"We can't all fit through card portals," Jazz said. "And the lower deck is a minefield. I can carry two through at once, maybe three if they're light. Jarrin's heavy. Clint's injured."

Tony was already moving, limping toward the far corridor with one hand pressed to the back of his helmet. "Server room's two levels up. I was in here during the prep. If Kazir set up a central detonation hub, it's going to be in the control room, and the control room's connected to the server infrastructure. He's not running this remotely. He's wired every trigger point to a master board."

"So he's in the building," Jarrin said.

"He's right here. He's not running." Tony paused at the stairwell. "And he's broadcasting. I'm picking up an encrypted feed on a frequency that shouldn't exist. Someone's on the other end."

The stairwell was a narrow shaft between concrete walls, and Jazz took the lead with two cards pinned to the underside of the railing. She stepped through the first one and appeared on the second-floor landing, pulling Jarrin through on her back before Tony could argue. He came through last, the repulsor gauntlet sparking.

The corridors on the upper level were wider, lined with service conduits and electrical panels that glowed faintly orange in patches. The walls felt warm, like someone had been breathing on them. Jarrin could feel it through his shoes, a faint vibration in the concrete floor, a rhythm that matched the pulsing from every charge Kazir had planted.

"I'll take the catwalks," Jazz said. "Upper level. Jarrin, you take ground floor with your bubble thing. Strip the flammability from everything. Pipes, conduits, gas lines, the works. We meet at the control room."

"Control room's at the center of the complex," Tony said. "I'll get you a map. Server room's this way."

They split. Jazz vanished through a card she'd already placed on the ceiling, appearing on the catwalk above them and moving away in a flash of shimmering light. Jarrin looked at the corridor ahead, at the web of pipes and conduits running along both walls, and felt the weight of what she'd asked him to do.

Strip flammability from every pipe. Every conduit. A room full of charges wired to every surface. Jolly Roger had enough range to cover maybe twenty feet of pipe per bubble, and Jarrin's current bubble capacity was reduced from the last fight. He'd spent too much on the mezzanine. Each bubble took effort, took precision, and the bigger the target, the longer it took for the Stand's fingertip to hold it steady.

He started walking.

The first pipe was overhead, a thick steel conduit running the length of the corridor, and Jolly Roger's bubble reached for it the moment Jarrin pointed. The bubble popped against the metal, and the pipe went from glowing faint orange to dull gray, the heat draining away as the flammable residue left the metal's surface. Jarrin kept moving, popping one bubble after another, working his way down the corridor like a man defusing a bomb with a rubber band.

By the fourth pipe, his arm was burning. Stands drew energy from the user, and Jolly Roger's repeated use was starting to eat through whatever reserve stamina Jarrin had built up since the last fight. Each bubble cost him. Every pop drained a piece of him that wouldn't refill until he rested, which at the moment was a theoretical luxury he could not afford.

The corridor branched at a junction, and Jarrin turned left, stepping into a narrow service corridor that smelled like grease and old wiring. More pipes here, smaller ones, running along the walls instead of overhead. He popped bubbles in quick succession, letting Jolly Roger work on autopilot while Jarrin focused on the geometry of the space.

A door stood at the end of the corridor. The control room. He could see the faint glow of orange light bleeding from underneath it, and when he pressed his ear to the metal, he could hear something. A click. A steady, rhythmic click, like a timer, except it wasn't a timer. Jarrin had heard that sound before, back when Kazir had been standing behind the crate with the ticking bomb. A connection. A live feed. Someone was receiving a signal from inside that room, and Kazir was sending it.

He backed away from the door and turned around. The service corridor stretched behind him, and the orange glow from the pipes was getting brighter, thicker, as if something deeper in the facility was waking up.

The wall to his left exploded inward.

It wasn't a pipe. It wasn't a conduit. It was the wall itself, a section of concrete that turned to a web of cracks and then blew outward like a door was being ripped off a hinge. Kazir came through it, moving fast, Bomb Voyage's orange glow surrounding him like a halo, and Jarrin barely got Jolly Roger's bubble up in time.

The bubble caught the first charge Kazir threw, a fist-sized ball of condensed energy, and the charge went inert the moment the bubble popped. But Kazir had already thrown two more, and Jarrin's bubble popped the second one but not the third. The wall behind Jarrin erupted, the concrete shattering outward and taking a chunk of the corridor floor with it. Jarrin went down hard, hitting the ground with concrete dust filling his mouth.

Kazir was on him in three steps.

The fist caught Jarrin in the chest and lifted him off the ground, throwing him backward into the remaining wall. His ribs screamed. Jarrin's vision grayed at the edges, and Jolly Roger's form flickered behind Kazir, its red eyes wide. One more hit and the Stand would dissolve, and if that happened, Jarrin would be defenseless against the most dangerous man in the facility.

Jazz hit Kazir from the catwalk above. A card had been placed on the ceiling overhead, and she dropped through it like a stone, appearing behind Kazir with a kick that caught him in the back of the knee. Kazir buckled, and Jarrin used the opening to grab a pipe from the wall and swing it at Kazir's head. The pipe connected, and Kazir's head snapped sideways, but he didn't go down. He spun, catching Jarrin's arm in a grip that was too strong to be purely physical, and Jarrin felt the bone in his wrist grinding against itself.

Jazz reappeared between them. A card had gone into Kazir's face, embedded in his jaw, and she pulled Jarrin through the card space and out onto the far side of the corridor, dragging him behind a junction box.

Jazz was breathing hard. Her leg was bleeding, dark red soaking through the fishnet stockings from where something had caught her during the transfer. A charge had gone off near her, probably caught the side of the card portal as she stepped through, and the impact had torn something in her calf.

"Are you all right?" Jarrin asked.

"I'm fine. You?"

"My wrist is broken. I think."

Jazz grabbed his wrist and yanked it sideways with a sharp pop that made Jarrin see stars. "Fixed." She pulled another card from her jacket, pinned it to the wall behind them, and used it to portal them both down the corridor toward the control room.

They arrived twenty feet from the door. Jazz's leg was still bleeding, and her face had gone pale. She leaned against the wall for a moment, breathing through the pain, then straightened up and pushed the card into Jarrin's chest with one finger.

"Wait here. I'm going in."

"You're bleeding."

"I'm always bleeding. It's part of my brand." She pulled a card from her jacket, pinned it to the ceiling above the control room door, and stepped through it.

The door swung open. Jazz appeared inside the control room, and Jarrin followed through, stepping out into a wide chamber lined with server racks, monitoring equipment, and a central console that dominated the far wall like an altar. Kazir stood behind it, both hands on a panel of switches and dials, Bomb Voyage's orange glow pulsing from the equipment around him.

On the main screen, a live feed played from a camera positioned somewhere inside the room itself. A man sat in a chair across from the feed, his back to the camera, watching Kazir through a glass wall that Jarrin couldn't otherwise see.

"Who's that?" Jarrin asked.

"That," Kazir said, "is the only reason you're still breathing."

Jazz stepped forward. Her leg was failing her, but she stood anyway, her card between her fingers. "It's over, Kazir. We found you."

"Found me. Good." Kazir's hand hovered over the console. "But found is not the same as caught. Look at the screen. Tell me what you see."

Jarrin looked. The man in the chair was watching through the glass. He wasn't moving. He wasn't speaking. He was simply there, behind a wall of transparent material that Jarrin's bubble couldn't reach from this distance.

"A dead man's switch," Jarrin said. The pieces were falling into place. "His Stand gets destroyed, you detonate everything. That's why you're standing behind the console. Why you're talking to us instead of running. You want us to make the first move. You want one of us to blow your Stand, and then we blow up the facility."

Kazir smiled. It was the worst smile Jarrin had ever seen, flat and mechanical, like someone had drawn it on with a ruler. "You're smarter than I expected."

"Tony." Jarrin didn't look away from Kazir. "Hack the feed. Cut the connection between him and whatever he's talking to."

Tony appeared from the doorway, moving carefully, avoiding the glowing patches on the floor. "I'm already on it. This encryption is military-grade, but it's not quantum. Give me thirty seconds."

"Thirty seconds is a long time."

"Thirty seconds is an eternity when you're standing next to a bomb."

Jarrin stepped closer to the console. "Kazir, listen to me. If you detonate that facility, you die. There's no version of this where you walk away. You're standing on the same charges as we are. If you blow the whole thing, you blow yourself up."

"I'm aware." Kazir's hands rested on the console. "But the man behind me, the one you can't see, is my handler. My insurance policy. If I die, he detonates the charges remotely. If my Stand is destroyed, same thing. The switch isn't tied to my life. It's tied to Bomb Voyage."

"That's the same thing," Jazz said. "If his Stand is destroyed, he dies."

"Not necessarily. Bomb Voyage is a bound Stand. If I die, the Stand dies with me. If the Stand dies, I can still live, as long as someone else takes control." Kazir tapped a key on the console. "I'm the trigger. Not him."

Tony held up his hand. "Got the feed. It's live, but I've isolated the signal. He's broadcasting, but no one's receiving. His handler is just watching. No connection."

Kazir looked at Tony. Then at Jarrin. The smile faded. "You don't understand what I'm dealing with. There's someone else. Someone bigger than me, bigger than this facility, bigger than every Stand user on this planet. He's been building an army."

"What army?" Jarrin asked.

"Three cities. Three Stand users, placed, armed, waiting. They don't know what they are, and they don't know they're part of something. But they will." Kazir's voice dropped. "The Architect. That's who they call him. I was his first soldier, and you're his first mistake."

Jarrin stared at the screen. The man behind the glass hadn't moved. He was just watching, waiting for whatever was going to happen next.

"Tony," Jazz said. "I need a working communication relay. Something that can broadcast across the city, across the country if we need it. We need to find those three Stand users before the Architect finds them."

Tony pulled out a laptop from a compartment in his suit. "I can rig something from the server room hardware, but I'll need the facility's main power grid running."

"Can you do it?" Jarrin asked.

"I can do it. It'll take time, though. And while I'm doing it, I need you two to keep Kazir busy. The Architect's three users out there, and if Kazir's any kind of scout, there are more where these came from."

Jarrin looked at Jazz. She was still standing, still holding her cards, her leg bleeding and her face set in that expression she wore when she was already five steps ahead of everyone in the room.

"We're not done," she said. "This was the opening shot."