Chapter 2 - The Vertical Escape
Clara didn't hesitate. She helped Eli to his feet, but the boy’s legs buckled. He was too weak to stand, his face turning a terrifying shade of ash. Tristan grunted, scooping the six-year-old into his left arm. The boy felt weightless, like a bundle of dry sticks.
"Stay close to my hip," Tristan told Clara. "If I tell you to drop, you lay flat on the floor and cover your ears. Understand?"
She nodded, grabbing the hem of his cashmere coat once more.
Instead of taking the main stairwell where Callahan’s men were stationed, Clara pointed to an old laundry elevator shaft—a manual dumbwaiter used for linen when the building was a hotel in the 1950s. The metal cables were rusted, but the wooden carriage was suspended at the basement level.
"It goes to the maintenance room behind the lobby," Clara murmured. "The cameras don't see inside it."
Tristan looked at the narrow wooden box. It was built for laundry, not a grown man and two children. "You two get in. I'll haul the cable from the inside."
He squeezed into the cramped space, pulling the children against his chest. The smell of rotting wood and old grease was suffocating. Gripping the cold, oily steel cable through the opening in the carriage roof, Tristan pulled. His biceps strained, the muscles in his back bunching as he dragged their collective weight upward, inch by inch, in absolute darkness.
Above them, on the third floor, a sudden crash echoed through the shaft.
"Check the basement!" a voice shouted from the stairwell. "Callahan said he heard something near the old boilers!"
Tristan froze, holding the cable with raw physical strength, his palms burning against the steel. He looked down through the cracks in the wooden floorboards. A flashlight beam sliced through the basement doorway they had just abandoned.
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"They're down there," a man muttered below.
Tristan didn't wait. He gave one massive, violent heave, ripping the carriage up the final three feet until it clicked into the latch of the lobby maintenance closet. He kicked the wooden door open, tumbling out onto the concrete floor just as footsteps began pounding down the basement stairs below.
