The four minute patrol window had given them the checkpoint.
What it had not given them was what was waiting on the other side of the checkpoint, because what was waiting on the other side of the checkpoint had not been there during the morning reconnaissance and had not been on any of KaSandra's maps and was not accounted for in any version of the plan that Thomas had laid out in the warehouse.
Two people.
Standing in the main eastern corridor thirty feet past the checkpoint with the particular quality of people who had been waiting, not patrolling, not moving through the facility on any operational task, simply waiting, as if they had known that something was going to come through the checkpoint at some point and had decided to be there when it did.
Thomas saw them first.
He saw them and stopped and Katherine read the stop and stopped behind him and Dean read both of them and stopped behind her and the three of them held their position at the edge of the checkpoint space and looked at the two figures in the corridor and the two figures looked back at them.
One was tall with dark hair and broad shoulders and the easy physical confidence of someone who had been in a great many situations like this one and had come out of all of them in good enough condition to be standing in this corridor right now. He was wearing a suit but not the tannish brown of Victor's standard suits. His was darker, closer to charcoal, with a cut and a fit that was different in the specific way that a uniform differs from a costume, a difference that said this was not something put on to blend in but something worn because it was what you were.
The other was shorter and leaner with the same dark hair and the same easy confidence and something in the line of his jaw and the set of his eyes that was so close to the first man that Katherine's brain registered it as a copy before she registered the word for what a copy meant.
Brothers.
Except not.
Not brothers.
She felt it before she understood it, the specific quality of the space between them and the taller one that was wrong in a way that had nothing to do with appearance, a flatness, an absence of the particular warmth that living things gave off that Katherine had been learning to read since Engel started teaching them to read the field.
The shorter one had it.
The taller one did not.
Thomas had gone very still beside her with the specific stillness that meant he was processing something and had not finished processing it and was not going to move until he had.
Dean had his hand on his weapon.
The shorter man smiled.
It was a good smile, practiced and easy, the smile of someone who had used it for a long time and knew what it did to rooms.
"Thomas Riverside," he said. His voice was the voice of someone who enjoyed the specific pleasure of saying a name to someone who had not expected to be known. "You came in through the checkpoint. That was impressive. The patrol window is only four minutes."
"Ryan," Thomas said. His voice was flat and careful.
"In the flesh," Ryan Bay said. He looked at Katherine and Dean. "And you brought friends. The Duke girl and Dean Duke." His smile shifted slightly. "Victor will be very pleased."
"I doubt that," Dean said. "Since we're leaving."
"I don't think you are," Ryan said. He looked at the figure beside him. "Do you think they're leaving?"
The other figure said nothing.
It looked at Ryan with hazel eyes that were precise and flat and held the specific quality of something waiting to be told what to do.
Katherine looked at it.
She looked at the space it occupied in the corridor and the way the air around it moved and the specific flatness of its warmth signature and understood with a clarity that settled into her chest like cold water what she was looking at.
Not Ryan's brother.
A copy of Ryan.
A construct made from Ryan's space magic, shaped like Ryan, wearing Ryan's face, built for a specific purpose and currently fulfilling it by standing in this corridor blocking the path to the lower level access and looking at them with hazel eyes that were precise and flat and waiting.
Ryan was watching her realize it.
"Smart girl," he said. "Yes. My brother Bill is otherwise occupied this evening and I needed someone to hold the corridor with me." He gestured at the construct beside him with the casual affection of someone indicating a useful tool. "Space magic is extraordinarily versatile."
"We know what you are, Ryan," Thomas said. "We know what the Bay siblings do for Victor."
"Do you," Ryan said.
"We know you're hired for this," Thomas said. "You're not true believers. You do what you do for the contract and when the contract ends you move on." He held Ryan's gaze steadily. "So let's talk about the contract."
Ryan looked at him with something that might have been genuine amusement.
"I like you, Thomas Riverside," he said. "You're practical. Your father was practical too." He tilted his head slightly. "But the contract for this particular evening is not something that can be renegotiated at the point of delivery. You know that."
"Then we do this the other way," Thomas said.
"I suppose we do," Ryan agreed.
He moved.
He was fast in a way that was specific to space magic, the particular speed of a person who could manipulate the geometry of the space between themselves and their target, and the distance between him and Thomas collapsed in a way that was not physically possible for a person moving under normal conditions and Thomas caught it and redirected it with the trained reflex of someone who had fought space magic users before and knew that the normal rules of distance and approach did not apply.
The construct came for Dean.
It was not Ryan and it did not move like Ryan, it moved like a thing that had been given Ryan's shape and Ryan's physical capability and none of Ryan's individual judgment, and Dean read that immediately, read the mechanical quality of it, the way it committed to a line of attack without the micro adjustments that a real fighter made in real time, and he used that reading to step out of the line and let the construct's momentum carry it past him.
Katherine moved on the construct.
She felt for her fire element and let it build fast, not the controlled channeling of training but the full deliberate call of something that knew what it needed to do, and when she hit the construct with it the space magic that held it together responded in a way that was immediately informative and not entirely encouraging.
It absorbed the heat.
Not deflected. Absorbed. The construct's form shimmered and distorted and then restabilized, the space magic that composed it redistributing around the energy she had put into it the way water redistributes around a stone dropped into it.
She pulled back and switched elements.
Wind.
She sent a focused blade of compressed air at the construct's midsection with Samantha's techniques running through the back of her mind and the construct distorted again, more severely this time, the form losing cohesion at the center before the space magic pulled it back together, slower this time.
It could be hit.
It just couldn't be hit the same way twice.
She filed that and moved.
Across the corridor Thomas and Ryan had engaged in the specific way of two people who were genuinely matched, neither of them finding a clean advantage, Thomas's combat training and field experience meeting Ryan's space magic and the particular unpredictability of a fighter who could shorten and lengthen the space around themselves at will. Thomas's flaming blade was in his hand and it was lit and when it connected with Ryan it connected clean and real and Ryan's charcoal suit smoked at the shoulder where it caught him.
Ryan hissed.
"That's new," he said, his voice tighter now, the practiced ease of it compressed by the pain of the contact.
"Three months of training," Thomas said. "We've all gotten better."
He came at Ryan again and Ryan shifted the space between them and the blade went through where Ryan had been and Ryan came back from a different angle with a weapon of his own, a curved blade that caught the corridor light as it moved, and Thomas took it on his forearm with a deflection that opened a line in his sleeve and a line in the skin beneath it that immediately began to run red.
Thomas did not stop.
He turned the deflection into a redirect and the redirect into a counterattack that caught Ryan in the ribs and Ryan took it with the controlled grunt of a professional absorbing a hit and kept moving.
Dean was dealing with the construct.
He had figured out the same thing Katherine had figured out faster than she had and he was working with it, varying his attacks, switching tools and angles and types of force with the fast adaptable intelligence of a man who had been in enough fights to understand that winning was usually a matter of learning faster than the other person, and the construct was not a person and did not learn, and that was its fundamental weakness.
Dean found a combination.
Physical impact followed immediately by a channeled weapon strike before the space magic could redistribute, the two-part attack creating a split second where the construct's form had to respond to two different types of damage simultaneously and could not fully absorb both.
The construct distorted.
Severely.
It held for one second and then two and then it came apart, the space magic losing cohesion in a cascade that started at the center and moved outward, the form dissolving from the inside with a sound like the air pressure equalizing in a closed room, a soft implosion that left nothing where it had been.
Dean stood in the corridor breathing hard.
He looked at Katherine.
Katherine looked at Thomas and Ryan.
Thomas was bleeding from his forearm and from a second cut she hadn't seen him take along the side of his jaw, and his flaming blade was in his right hand and Ryan was three feet away from him and Ryan was bleeding from the shoulder and the ribs and his practiced smile was gone, replaced by the expression of a professional who had revised his assessment of the situation and was not pleased with the revision.
Ryan looked at the empty space where the construct had been.
He looked at Dean.
He looked at Katherine.
He looked at Thomas.
He made a calculation.
Katherine saw him make it and saw the result of it in the shift of his posture, the slight backward lean of a man who had decided that the contract for this particular evening had reached its practical limit and that continuing it was no longer in his operational interest.
"Another time," Ryan said.
He stepped backward.
He stepped backward into the space behind him and the space behind him opened and took him and he was gone, the corridor empty where he had been, and the only evidence of his presence was the blood on the floor at Thomas's feet and the smoke still rising from the corridor wall where Thomas's blade had missed him on the first exchange and caught the wall instead.
Thomas stood in the corridor and breathed.
Katherine looked at his arm.
"How bad," she said.
"Manageable," he said. He looked at it himself. "Manageable," he said again, with the specific tone of a man confirming something to himself as much as to her.
Dean was already moving to Thomas, pulling something from his kit, and Katherine held the corridor while Dean worked on Thomas's arm with the fast practiced competence of someone who had dealt with field injuries before.
Thomas let him work.
He looked at the lower level access door at the far end of the eastern corridor.
He looked at the blood on the floor.
He looked at Katherine.
"Group two is in the operational center," he said. "Something changed up there. We need to get to Fenix and get everyone moving to extraction."
"Fenix is with group three," Katherine said. "Engel and Samantha. They have him."
Thomas processed this.
"Then we need to find out what changed in the operational center and we need to get everyone to an extraction point before the patrol completes its next loop and finds the checkpoint." He looked at his watch. "Eleven minutes."
Dean finished with Thomas's arm and straightened up.
"Eleven minutes," Dean said.
Katherine looked at the corridor ahead of them.
She looked at the blood on the floor from the fight that had just happened and the empty space where the construct had been and the smoke mark on the wall and all the other evidence of what the corridor now contained that it hadn't contained when they came through the checkpoint and she thought about what Ryan had said.
Another time.
Not defeated.
Not done.
Just done for this evening.
She filed that too.
"Move," she said.
They moved.