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“I do, as well,” Rose Walker chimed in.

Wynter didn’t speak, but Nick realized he could feel her agreement.

“If we’re going to turn back, we have forty-five seconds,” Kit said nervously.

Nick glanced at his own clock, and realized she was right.

But something about that light seemed have changed the calculation for more than just Nick. He didn’t want to be the one to say it, though. In the end, he was a coward, and didn’t want to be the one to suggest everyone he loved risk dying down here.

In the end, it was Wynter who broke that silence.

“I think we should go ahead,” she murmured.

There was a silence after she spoke.

The clock continued to count down through it, and Nick was still walking, and everyone behind him was still walking, too.

Then the clock went past the first timer, and the numbers turned orange.

Nick kept walking.

Everyone behind him kept walking with him.

* * *

He was startingto panic for real now.

Five minutes, six seconds,pulsed in the corner of his mask.

Fuck.

The light was growing brighter, but there was still no sign of the tunnel’s end. Every step they took brought them lower and deeper into the mountain, and made the light just that much brighter, but they were running out of time.

Four minutes, forty-two seconds,the light pulsed.

Nick walked right into it.

He smacked his face hard enough to completely shock himself.

He could blame the strange lighting, or the thickness of the air, or the distortion through the green-lit mask. Even so, it was jarring, if not completely off-balancing, to walk face-first into something he hadn’t seen at all, especially as a vampire.

Vampire vision, not to mention their other senses, including an ability to sense air pressure and feel objects through a process not dissimilar to echolocation, meant that running into objects just wasn’t something that happened to a vampire.

Well, not under ordinary circumstances.

This was hardly an ordinary circumstance.

The shielding from the suit sent out vibrational waves from each of their bodies, bouncing the hard metals of the radiation away to keep it from penetrating their skin, flesh and bones, and eventually killing them.

The mask was thick and organic.

This air was unlike anything Nick had ever moved through.

Whatever precise mix of those elements made Nick unable to see the glass-like wall in front of him, Nick didn’t see it. He smacked into it, and jumped back, nearly knocking over Wynter and Kit in the process.

He caught hold of his wife’s arm in one gloved hand, and Kit’s in the other.

The instant he was sure neither would fall, he let go, unsure how much radiation would be on his hands just from being in here, and unsure if he would mess up their shielding just by touching them.