Three hundred feet up the exhaust shaft, arms burning, lungs full of hot metal smell, I think about how most people in my situation would have a better plan.
Then I think about the Ledger ticking in my arm and stop thinking about other plans.
The grate at the top takes three hits to break.
I pull it aside, haul myself through, and the temperature change hits me like a wall. From scorching to freezing in one breath.
The cryo-silo is enormous and blue. Frost on every surface. Pipes running everywhere, channeling chemical coolant.
And in the center, lit from within, a pressurized glass cylinder the height of a two-story building. Pure Euphorionite. The last ingredient.
Two guards below. Armored in interlocking steel plates. Quiet. Professional.
I study them for fifteen seconds from the catwalk.
Then I drop.
Fifteen feet. I hit the floor in a roll and come up shooting.
The first bismuth round hits the left guard center chest. The barium tip catches and flares red for exactly one second and then the man folds. Clean, fast, cauterized.
The second guard is fast. He fires before I fully turn.
The bullet tears through my left shoulder and spins me, and I catch myself against the frozen pipes and shoot back twice.
He goes down.
The alarm starts.
Low wail climbing to a shriek.
I run to the cylinder, pull the thermal flask, jam it under the nozzle, find the pressure wheel, and crank it open.
Blue liquid begins to flow.
I count in my head. Four minutes.
My shoulder is bleeding and I'm counting and watching the flask level and watching the clock on the wall and keeping both numbers running at the same time.
Two minutes forty. Full. I seal it, drop it into the bag against my ribs.
I run.
* * *
The hallway outside is all expensive carpet and expensive paintings and three augmented mercenaries coming around the corner fast.
I flip a mahogany side table and get behind it and the rifle fire cuts through it in about four seconds.
I count three reloads, come around the table's edge, and put bismuth rounds into the two closest.
The third one closes with an electrified baton before I can get the angle.
He swings it at my head.
I take it on my forearm instead of my skull.
The shock hits my calcified veins and transmits badly and it hurts, God it hurts, but my reinforced bones don't snap.
I grab his baton arm, use his forward momentum to spin him into the wall face-first, and keep moving.
The balcony doors at the end of the hall.
I hit them at full run and they burst open and cold clean air, actual clean air, hits my face. Above the smog. Brass Canopy air.
I almost stop just to breathe it.
Instead I climb the railing and look down at the sloped copper roof below.
Behind me, boots on carpet. A lot of them.
I jump.