Section 2: The Fortress (POV: Declan)
Setting: Warehouse Fortress by Declan.
We switch to the cold, cruelist silence of the warehouse belonging to Declan. The news of the call by Damian, has proven to him what his worst fears are. His paranoid state proves to be well-founded. We witness him through the prism of hyper-vigilance: he goes round and round the security camera screen (one of which reveals the feed with a view of The Lantern Room degenerating to a blank, dead image), and he puts bullets into the gun with a ritualistic accuracy. He breathes a deep steady Puff, a metronome to keep his simmering rage and PTSD at bay. This is what he prepared for.
Blue shows up, gasping and incoherent, and barely escaped his own near death in the market alleyways with the partners of the Wolf. He is all Huffy little jerk, running around the concrete. The brothers dispute--the cold and tactical pessimism of Declan and the manic and desperate plans of Blue. The struggle is evident: Declan believes in his walls. Blue trusts the streets. Neither trusts one another completely.
When the Wolf comes he does not attempt to pick the lock. He begins to dismantle the wall with a construction vehicle, which he hot-wired. The castle of Declan turns into a cage. Declan is shown displaying the brilliance of military tactics and tactics of defense in a series of defensive traps and choke points, his cybernetic arm crushing and blocking. But the Wolf is versatile, and The Burn, in which he breathes his oxygen, and self-destructs, is his means of travelling with hideous speed and power, and of passing traps by an entirely reckless force. Grenade explosions do not stop him, they are simply the more he gets angry, the sharper he is focused.
It is not the design of Declan; it is his isolation that on the contrary is the flaw. The Wolf capitalizes on one of the weaknesses about their argument that Blue has noted, a vent shaft that Declan had considered to be an unfeasible entry point. The Wolf makes it viable. The scene closes with the Wolf in the fortress, the brothers in the main room, where they are at bay with their last stand. The belief that Declan had in his walls is torn apart.