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Great. That was exactly the type of thing I wanted to hear when our lives were at stake and time was of the essence.

“First, let’s see if that key you found actually works,” Chan said, gesturing to Mila with raised eyebrows. She paused, and Chan tilted his head. “You want us to trust you? Give us the key first. Prove you’re working with us and not Holt. I’m not saying another word until we’re out of this cell.”

With a nod, Mila moved forward and inserted the key into the lock. It turned with a satisfying click, and the door swung open.

“How long do you think we have before Holt or someone else wakes up?” Chan asked, stepping out of the cell and looking around the lab. For what, I didn’t know.

Mila shrugged. “An hour? Maybe more, but I wouldn’t count on it. Once Holt comes to a decision about what he wants to do with you, it won’t take him long to dole out his punishment.”

That’s what I was afraid of. He couldn’t keep us prisoners forever. And we’d already proven that we wouldn’t abide by his wishes or conform with whatever his standards were for an ideal daughter and her boyfriend. Sure, he might keep me alive—whether it was some sick game he liked to play or because he’d sunk so much money into finding me that he couldn’t justify killing me yet. I’d played along with his idea of becoming his heir, but he had to know now it was all a facade.

And now that he knew Chan worked for the CIA, Chan’s life certainly had an expiration date. The only reason he hadn’t killed him yet was that he needed to extract information out of Chan first, and that sort of thing took time.

Aka torture.

I shuddered. That obviously wasn’t the future I wanted for Chan. So no matter what plan Chan had in store, I was willing to give it my everything. He was the strategist. He’d hopefully looked at all the angles of this problem and come up with something better than running away really fast while dodging bullets, which was the only thing I could come up with.

“Mila,” Chan said, “I need you to get as many weapons for you and me as you can find without rousing anyone. Grab them from storage or anywhere that there aren’t people. If you think there’s a risk, don’t take it.” He turned to face her, as serious as I’d ever seen him.

“In addition to the weapons, I need you to find three gas masks,” he said. “Those aren’t a request, those are a necessity. With how paranoid Holt is, and with this being an underground bunker, I’m sure Holt has them though, am I right?” Chan gestured to the air canisters in the corner of the lab to prove his point, which, I had to admit, was a good one. A man who had air canisters had to have gas masks somewhere as well.

Mila didn’t even hesitate. “I know where they are,” she said.

I stood by the cell and hooked my thumbs in my belt loops. For being such a supposedly integral part of the plan, I sure was feeling like an afterthought to this conversation.

Chan returned his attention to the table. “Come back as soon as you can.”

Mila nodded and moved toward the door. “What are you going to do?” she asked, her hand on the knob.

Chan was already flipping through the papers on the desk. “Holt’s removed all the pills and most of the vials. I’m going to figure out which one of these is the most recent formulation so we can take it with us. The CIA is going to want to analyze it.” Chan sent her a smirk. “Looks like you’ll get your wish of leaving with collateral after all.” He shrugged. “Well, if we make it out of here, that is.”

She nodded toward me. “What about Andee?”

Chan shook his head. “You don’t get to know what she’s doing.”

He didn’t even bat an eye. Neither did Mila. She just paused for a second, shrugged, and said, “Guess I deserved that,” before ducking out of the lab.

When she’d left, Chan turned to me. “Can you make a sleeping gas out of the materials in this lab?”

I blinked for several seconds before responding. Then I looked around. “Chloroform isn’t something I make regularly, but it’s not that hard to do.” Mostly I’d been so terrified of accidentally killing someone in chemistry class I’d memorized how to make it so I wouldn’t have anyone’s death on my hands.

“The real question,” I said, “is how much you need. And whether they have any bleach.”

Chan stopped what he was doing and moved to the opposite side of the room. “I think I saw some cleaning supplies over here,” he said. “Most labs wouldn’t want foreign cultures growing—ah, here it is.” He held up a gallon of bleach and carried it back to me. “And the answer to your other question is, as much as you can make.”

In the movies, chloroform was something people poured on a rag and held in front of someone’s face to make them pass out. But the reality was a lot more dangerous than that. In its concentrated form, trichloromethane was a colorless, dense liquid that could knock out grown men and even cause death in high doses once inhaled as a gas.

But I didn’t ask questions. I just got to work, snapping on some latex gloves I found on one of the tables and cooling the bleach to below zero degrees Celsius using the equipment in the lab. It’d been so long since I’d done this kind of work, with liquids rather than powders, I found myself struggling to measure everything properly. Then again, maybe it was the stress of the situation, knowing everything was riding on me getting this right. No pressure or anything.

“Are you going to use it on Holt?” I asked.

Chan pocketed one of the vials, then moved to another table, rooting through the supplies there.

“We’re in a system of underground tunnels,” he said. “They ventilate in air from the outside so we don’t suffocate.” He flipped some papers over and read the pages for a minute before continuing. “We’re going to pump the chloroform through the vents to put everyone else to sleep. That’s why we need the gas masks for you, me, and Mila.”

I paused as I let that sink in. “Well, this isn’t going to be enough.” I put down the methyl ketone I’d been about to add to the bleach.

Chan looked up with an alarmed expression.

I struggled to put my thoughts into words. “These tunnels are small, don’t get me wrong. But filling the entire space to knock out everyone?” I pursed my lips. “It would take way too much chloroform. Can we direct the airflow to rooms we deem a higher priority?”

I was thinking of Holt or Xander. The people most likely to raise an alarm. But Chan was already shaking his head. “We might be able to section off half the tunnels so we hit the places where Holt has people sleeping. But then we’d leave all the exit tunnels open, and those are the places Holt leaves guards on duty twenty-four seven so no one can uncover his operation or leave here unnoticed.” He seemed to think about what he was proposing and winced. “But if we choose to knock out the people actively on duty, we leave people like Holt unaccounted for.”

I knew what he wasn’t saying out loud. We’d have to trust that Mila was telling the truth. That Holt had taken a sleeping pill and he’d be out for a bit. Even if she was telling the truth, there’d be a chance he’d wake up sooner than anticipated and we’d be right back where we started.

In a cell, without any hope of escape.

Chan paced the lab, rubbing a hand across his face. “We’ve already pushed our luck with Holt. But I’d rather make sure we put the guards to sleep if given the opportunity,” he said finally. “We’re just going to have to hope for the best.”

Chan sighed. “If Mila can find any weapons—”

It was at that moment the door to the lab opened, and I honestly thought I was going to have a heart attack. I didn’t know whether it was possible for someone my age, but from the way my heart jumped into my throat, I thought for sure I was about to keel over and die.

“I got these from the storage room just down the hall,” Mila said, popping her head in. She carried guns. Lots of guns. I could tell Chan was impressed despite himself. Well, as soon as he relaxed his fighting stance.

She came the rest of the way into the room and let the door close quietly behind her. Chan helped her unload her haul in the center of the lab, and they began sorting through everything while I returned to my work.

“Did you find what you need?” Mila asked Chan.

“Yes.” He nodded to the tables. “Unfortunately, Holt’s now so paranoid he’s only keeping one vial of each formula in the lab. So I figured out which one was the latest, but the CIA will have to make do with only one sample of the liquid drug itself and the antidote. I wish we had it in softgel form, since that seems to be what Holt used for his final pills, but we’ll take what we can get.”

“At least it’s something,” Mila responded, and I hated that I was in agreement. After everything she’d put us through, I didn’t want to agree with her. About anything. But all things considered, I saw why she’d done it.

Rather than give any attention to the kaleidoscope of emotions swirling in my chest, I redoubled my efforts and focused on the reaction in front of me.

Chan finished sorting the weapons on the floor and came to stand behind my shoulder on my left. “Here,” he said, attempting to take the beaker from me when he saw how much I was shaking. “Let me help.”

“No.” I pushed his hand away. “It’s way too easy to kill someone. And as much as I dislike everyone in the tunnels, I’m not going to have blood on my hands.” The beaker shook so much I had to set it down. “I want them all to rot in prison first.”

Sure, it’d be easy to take care of the problem once and for all. But everyone down here had to answer for their crimes. Besides, if we were targeting the guards rather than my father, I didn’t need him placing the blame on my shoulders when he finally hunted me down. And as much as I wanted to believe otherwise, I worried it was only a matter of time.

Unless he was in prison. I knew he’d escaped before. But I had to have faith that the CIA would plug that security breach and put him in a higher security facility this time around. I wasn’t going to be the one with his blood on my hands. This plan had to work. We had to get out of here. I wouldn’t allow myself to think of the alternatives.

I poured in the last of the methyl ketone and began the mixing process. From this point on, it’d be a waiting game for the haloform reaction to occur. I’d decant the remaining water from the mixture once it had settled, but until then, I had time on my hands.

I settled in on the floor next to Mila. “I hope you don’t mind if I check the ammunition,” I said, opening one of the boxes. Sure, I knew nothing about guns. Gunpowder, on the other hand…Well, that was a whole different story.

I didn’t actually think she’d walk in here with blanks. By this point, she didn’t have a reason for helping us if she wasn’t actually on our side. If she got caught, Holt would have her neck just as much as he’d have ours.

But I wanted a backup plan in case things went south. Plus, I was just mad enough still that I liked keeping her on her toes.

I set aside the gas masks Mila had brought and picked up the boxes. She didn’t say anything, though her expression spoke volumes as I took a single bullet randomly out of each container and brought them back to the table I was using as my workstation.

Blanks and bullets both would have gunpowder, but I’d been around enough dummy ammunition in my job to recognize the fake stuff on sight. I didn’t even have to take these out of the box to recognize they were the real deal, which was why Mila’s eyebrows were furrowed in confusion as I started taking apart the cartridges. Without a hammer, I had to rely on the rusty clamps that’d been holding some of the plastic sheets of the lab in place, fashioning them into makeshift pliers to break open the bullets and empty out the gunpowder. At first Chan watched me with a puzzled expression. I worked quickly, hoping he wouldn’t insist I stop.

But he didn’t even ask me what I was doing, he just asked how he could help.

“Cut the plastic into foot-long strips,” I instructed. “I’ll need at least four. Then see if you can find matches in any of the drawers. I don’t want to make my own if they have some here already.”

Mila must have assumed I was doing something that was part of Chan’s original plan, because she went back to strapping guns to her back and waist. Maybe that was why Chan didn’t ask questions in front of her. Because he wanted to give the impression of a united front. Either that, or he knew I wouldn’t waste bullets needlessly.

It felt good to be doing something, for once. Working with the familiar materials, creating the tools of my trade—it was almost like I’d gone back in time to a place where none of this had ever happened. When I’d never met my father and I still believed I was the child of the famous actor Keith Huxley-Beck. My fingers knew what to do, rolling the gunpowder into the plastic from the lab and mixing it with the proper chemicals and powders. Of course, I had to make adjustments—this lab wasn’t equipped with my standard materials, and I knew I wouldn’t get the same results I was used to.

But it would be enough. It’d have to be.

By the time I was done, the chloroform was ready to be distilled. Now Chan and Mila were waiting on me, their parts of the mission prep finished. Luckily, Chan had found matches, which would save me time. Mila kept checking her watch, which didn’t help my anxiety, and Chan had opened the door and was standing next to it, watching the hall like he was worried someone would jump out and yell, Boo! , at any moment.

I couldn’t do anything besides finish what I’d started. By the time everything was done, I didn’t have a moment to process what we were about to do. Chan was already picking up the bottles of chloroform and shepherding us out the door.

They had their guns, but at least I had a few tricks up my sleeves.