And it was.

One second, I was listening to the roar of the warehouse shake, quake, fracture, and blow apart, with chunks of concrete, rebar, and more bang-bang-banging against my barrel like it was the centerpiece of a drum set. The next second, everything was quiet—eerily so—the barrel was still, and the only noise was the too-loud thump-thump-thump of my racing heart.

It was so dark that I couldn’t even see the clouds of concrete dust that choked me as I sucked down breath after breath. Slowly, my heart fell back down into a slower, more natural rhythm, and my desperate pants for air eased as the dust dissipated. I huddled inside the barrel, straining with my ears, hoping to hear something, anything that would tell me that I was still alive and not just dreaming that I’d survived.

Silence—complete silence.

That hot, sweaty panic rose up in me again, but I ruthlessly squashed it. Breath by breath, the roar of the explosions leaked out of my ears, and small noises bubbled up to fill in the silence. The steady hiss-hiss-hiss of water from busted pipes. The crackle-crackle of a fire burning nearby. Other moans and shrieks and creak-creak-creaks, as if the warehouse were a wounded animal in the last dregs of its death throes.

When I felt steady enough, I stretched my hands out into the waiting blackness. Rocks, pipes, and slabs of concrete covered the opening of the barrel, but they were a loose, jumbled heap, and it was easy enough for me to claw my way through them, grab hold of the edge of the container, and pull myself out of it. I slid forward, surfing down another pile of rubble, and lay there panting amid the crushed remains of the cinder-block walls, extremely grateful to have survived something I shouldn’t have.

All of the lights were gone, destroyed by the explosions, but small fires burned here and there in the debris, along with the occasional blue-white spark of a live electrical wire, ripped free from its source. The full moon and sprinkling of stars in the sky added a pale silver glow to the ruins, softening the harsh edges and making it seem as though I were lying in the middle of an exotic lunar landscape and not the utter demolition of a building. Still, as I looked around, there was one thing I didn’t see—the barrel the old man had taken refuge in.

“Fletcher!” I hissed. “Fletcher!”

He didn’t respond. He might be experiencing the same ringing ears that I had and couldn’t hear me. That was what I told myself. Not that he was dead. Not that his barrel had caved in and that he’d been crushed to death by the falling debris. I couldn’t let myself think that way. I wouldn’t.

So I wrapped my hands around a length of rebar and pulled myself up into a seated position so I could take stock of my injuries. I was in pretty decent shape, all things considered, mostly just bruised, battered, and achingly sore from all the rolling around in the barrel—

A faint whisper of noise about fifteen feet to my left had me reaching for one of the knives still tucked up my sleeves.

“Gin!” The whisper took on a more distinctive, welcome sound. “Gin, where are you?”

I sighed with relief. Fletcher. I rose up into a crouch, ignored my screaming muscles, wobbly legs, and pounding head, and hurried in his direction.

Fletcher had also managed to dig himself out of the debris that had blocked his barrel opening, and he was leaning against the side of the dented container, his face, hair, and clothes streaked with dust, soot, and other grime.

I crouched down beside him, my eyes sweeping over his lean, wiry body. He seemed to be okay, although the way he clutched his arm over his chest told me that he probably had some bruised ribs. Nothing that Jo-Jo couldn’t fix, though.

“I’m here,” I said, smoothing back his hair, which was almost white from all the concrete dust in it. “I’m all right. You?”

Fletcher smiled, his green eyes bright. “Still holding on—”

“Over here!” a voice called out. “I thought I saw something move!”

Fletcher and I both snapped our heads in that direction. A pair of headlights popped on and crept toward us along the gravel road that ringed the warehouse. Looked like our attackers wanted to make sure we were dead, instead of just assuming that we’d been killed.

“What do you think?” I asked. “Hide or fight?”

Fletcher held up his revolver. “Fight. I don’t take too kindly to someone trying to bury me alive, do you?”

My grin was even wider and colder than his was.

I helped him to his feet. Then, keeping low, we made our way through the piles of debris until we found a wall that hadn’t completely crumbled. We slid behind the cinder blocks, peered around the edges, and watched the headlights slowly approach.

The yellow beams glowed like two round, giant bug eyes as they pierced the darkness. Fletcher and I ducked down as the lights swept over our hiding spot.

A black SUV coasted to a stop about fifty feet away. The doors opened, and the two men and two women who’d shot up the poker game and blown up the warehouse got out. One of the men had a crossbow perched on his shoulder, while the other guy reached for his Fire magic, the flames of his power flickering in his palm. The two women both clutched guns. All four of them approached the warehouse debris, stopping at the edge of the destruction, not too far away from the barrels that Fletcher and I had crawled out of.

“I heard voices, and I swear that I saw somebody move over here,” a man’s voice rumbled out into the night. “This is where they were when we blew up the warehouse.”

“You’re being paranoid, Will,” one of the women answered him. “There’s no way anyone could have survived that explosion. Is there, Tomas?”

“No way, Valerie,” Tomas, the second man, said.

“Yeah,” a fourth voice, the other woman, chimed in. “We made sure that all the cops were dead, and we buried the other two alive, whoever they were. So quit worrying, Will. I want to do something fun now. Like count our take.”

“Sonya’s right,” Valerie chimed back in. “Let’s look at our loot!”

The two women whooped with joy, skipping back over to their vehicle, and Will and Tomas joined in with their merriment. Tomas opened the back door of the SUV, grabbed a black duffel bag, and hauled it over to the hood to use the glow from the headlights to count their ill-gotten gains.

What they didn’t realize was that the headlights made it that much easier for Fletcher and me to see them as well. I looked at the old man. He gestured with his hand, indicating that I should go left while he went right. I nodded back.