He tried again that evening.
The new guard had a name — Mika had heard it through the door during a handoff, Renzo, which was irrelevant except as data — and Renzo had a habit of standing two feet further from the door than his predecessor, which meant his blind side was slightly different and the timing on the opening would need to account for that.
Mika had built the updated model in his head through the afternoon. He'd also been running a low-grade fever since three in the afternoon that he was managing with controlled breathing and the active suppression of the part of his brain that wanted to flag it as a problem.
It was not a problem. It was a complication. Complications were manageable.
He'd done something he hadn't done before this attempt: he'd staged it. Used the tray from dinner to wedge beneath the bathroom door at an angle that would hold it shut but make a sound when it fell — something for a guard to investigate if the first move went wrong. He'd moved the floor lamp from the corner to a position two feet right of where anyone entering the room would expect to see it, slightly narrowing the natural path inside and adding a variable to anyone trying to follow him quickly. Small things. Details. He'd been an assassin long enough to know that most things failed in the details.
He did not account for the fact that his hands were slightly less steady than usual.
He didn't register it until he was at the door and he raised his hand and saw the fine tremor in his fingers that had not been there yesterday and was there now, light but present, the kind that came from a sustained fever and a sustained suppressant deficit and a sustained absence of actual sleep, and he looked at it for two seconds with something that was not quite alarm — he didn't do alarm — but was adjacent to it, a controlled recognition that this was new and new was data and data had to be integrated.
He integrated it. Adjusted. Proceeded.
He got the door open. He got into the corridor. He got past Renzo — who was startled badly enough to lose two full seconds, which was the gap Mika needed — and he moved fast toward the north stairwell and this time he clocked the floor, this time he was accounting for sensors, this time he moved with the weight distributed correctly and he made it to the stairwell door and hit the release and had one second before the alarm kicked in and he used that second to get through the door and onto the landing and start down.
He made it four floors. The stairwell door on forty-three opened below him and two men came up it with the particular efficiency of people who knew he was coming, and Mika stopped on the landing between forty-four and forty-three and looked down at them and looked up at where he'd come from and did the math with a clarity that his fever was not, quite, degrading.
"You really like staircases," Dante said from below, which meant it was Dante, which meant they'd been watching this in real time and sent Dante specifically, which meant — and this was the part that landed with a cold flat weight — they'd let him get four floors because four floors was enough to be certain it was an attempt and not an accident, and then they'd closed it. It was, professionally, almost admirable. It was also enraging.
Mika sat down on the landing step. Not in defeat — in calculation, because his legs wanted to keep moving and that was the fever and not strategy, and strategy was what he had left. He sat on the step and put his wrists on his knees and breathed evenly and did not let Dante see the tremor in his hands.
"How many sensors?" he said.
"More than you found," Dante said, coming up the stairs. He stopped two steps below Mika and looked at him with that same structural-problem expression and then something shifted in it — not softness, Dante didn't do softness, but a kind of recalibration. "You look like shit," he said.
"People keep saying that to me," Mika said. "It's starting to feel personal."
"You're running a fever."
"I'm managing a fever. There's a difference."
Dante looked at him for another moment and then said, in a tone that was gruff and direct and entirely devoid of whatever warmth he didn't have, "Come on," and went back down two steps and waited. Mika looked at the stairs above him. Looked at the doors. Looked at Dante's back. He stood up, which took a beat longer than it should have, and went down the stairs, and Dante didn't comment on the beat. He also didn't walk ahead. He walked even, which meant he was watching Mika's gait without looking like he was watching it, which was not a thing Mika had expected from him and filed with no small amount of irritation.
They took the elevator back up. Mika stood in the corner of it and kept his breathing even and his face neutral. His wrists were cold. The elevator was slightly too warm. Dante stood across from him and looked at the doors and didn't say anything until they were back on forty-seven and moving down the corridor, and then he said, quietly, without looking at Mika: "You need a real doctor or not."
"Not," Mika said.
"That's not a clear answer for someone running a temperature."
"It's the only answer I've got," Mika said, which was true, because a doctor meant an examination and an examination meant discovery and discovery was the one thing between him and everything falling apart, and Dante could think what he wanted about that but Mika wasn't moving on it. The room door closed behind him. He sat on the floor — he kept ending up on the floor in this room, which was doing something to his sense of dignity — and pressed his back against the bed and breathed.
Thirty-six seconds, he thought. He'd had thirty-six seconds of actual freedom. In two attempts. With a fever and compromised suppressants and a building full of sensors he hadn't fully mapped. Thirty-six seconds was, by some measures, nothing. By others it was a data point. He was building toward something. He just had to stay functional long enough to reach it.
He closed his eyes. Opened them. The room was exactly what it had always been — expensive, locked, Romano's. The air was warm and textured and carried that scent at the edge of it, faint, just enough.
"Son of a bitch," Mika said quietly, to no one, to the room, to the general situation. He put his head back against the bed and stared at the ceiling and focused on his temperature and his breathing and his grip, which was still there, still firm, still holding all of it at exactly the distance required.
He told himself it would hold. He was excellent at telling himself things.