Gasoline poured over the reception counter, running down the front edge and pooling on the floor tile, catching the amber emergency light in a thin sheet. He didn’t hurry. He moved farther in, past the bench where fighters usually wrapped their hands, and started splashing it toward the ring.
The shutter hung twisted off one track, metal bent inward. Beyond it, a heavy black SUV sat angled into the breach, its steel push bar buried among broken block and twisted metal. The engine was still running, its low rumble filling the gym.
Two men in suits appeared through the gap. Both had guns held low against their legs. One brushed concrete dust from his jacket while the other adjusted his tie, the kind of small, unhurried movements that said they weren’t expecting resistance.
The gunman nearest the ring worked it slow, methodical. He crouched to look under the ring apron. He walked the length of the heavy bags, glancing behind each one.
The second gunman was already moving toward them.
Mia and Renato backed through the doorway into the rear hallway, keeping out of his line of sight. Mia moved to the left side of the frame. Renato took the right, pistol raised but held close to his chest.
They waited.
Footsteps came toward them. Even, unhurried, a man who thought he had all the time in the world.
Mia watched the opening.
The gunman stepped through and Mia was on him.
She locked an arm around his throat and dragged him back against her. He bucked hard, boots scraping on the concrete, but the idling engine outside swallowed the noise.
Renato stepped in and drove the butt of his pistol into the side of the man’s head.
The gunman went limp.
Mia lowered him to the floor and they quickly made their way to join the others in the storage room.
“Tomas,” Renato said. “Open that door over there.”
Tomas moved over and grabbed the rear door handle and pulled. The door opened an inch, then stopped dead.
He frowned and tried again, harder this time. Same inch. Same stop.
“It’s stuck, Renato.”
Tomas stepped back to give Renato space.
Renato looked.
A heavy chain ran through both outside handles, secured by a padlock the size of a fist, barely visible through the wire mesh in the streetlight.
“They’ve blocked the exit,” Renato said.
One of the boys, the smaller one, made a sound that wasn’t quite a word, high and thin, and grabbed a fistful of Nico’s shirt at the shoulder.
“Hey.” Nico put his hand on the back of the boy’s neck. “Breathe.”
“What do we do?” Tomas said.
Renato looked back the way they’d come, toward the gym, toward the smell of gasoline that had already started crawling down the hallway after them.
“Roof.”
They all knew the roof-access door was in the main gym.
The smaller boy planted his feet. “I’m not going back in there.”
Tomas looked to Lucía. “Help me with him.”
She took hold of the boy’s arm. “You can be scared later. Move.”
Mia and Renato led them back toward the gym. Tomas kept the boys close, with Nico and Lucía on either side.
The unconscious gunman lay just inside the doorway where Mia had left him, one arm folded awkwardly beneath his chest.
The smaller boy stopped short.
“Is he dead?”
“Just sleeping,” Renato said.
Lucía tightened her grip on the boy’s arm.
Mia edged forward to the doorway and looked into the gym.
The remaining gunman was near the far wall, checking behind the free weight racks with the flat, bored attention of somebody nearly done with the search. He straightened, looked once toward the ring, and started for the stairs.
Mia stayed still.
He climbed steadily, one hand on the rail, until only his legs were visible.
Then they disappeared.
The man with the container was still at it, splashing fuel across a stretch of wall near the old equipment, moving with the same unhurried care he’d started with, as if he had all night to finish the job.
The roof-access door sat near the base of the stairs, a plain gray door Mia had never paid attention to. Getting to it meant crossing open floor.
Her eyes went to the wooden practice sword above the lockers. The same one that had hung there since she first trained here, scuffed pale along both edges from years of drilling.
She moved.
Keeping low, Mia crossed toward the lockers and pulled the sword from its hooks.
The gasoline man still had his back to her.
She closed the distance quietly and swung the wooden blade low and hard into the backs of his knees.
His legs folded beneath him. He hit the concrete with a grunt, the container skidding from his hand.
Mia was on him before he could get up.
He twisted beneath her, catching her once with an elbow that sent pain through her ribs, but she got behind him and locked an arm around his throat.
He thrashed for a few seconds, heels scraping against the concrete.
Then he went slack.
Mia looked back toward the doorway.
“Now.”
Renato moved first, leading them toward the roof-access door, eyes fixed on the stairwell as he crossed.
They were all through the door by the time Mia reached it. Tomas had the two young boys ahead of him on the narrow stairs already climbing, Nico and Lucía right behind.
Renato held the door open as Mia approached.
“Go,” he told her, and she went past him into the stairwell.
She stopped on the first step and looked back through the open door.
The man she’d just choked wasn’t lying where she’d left him anymore. He’d somehow made it back to his feet, one hand braced against the wall, shuffling toward the breached front entrance with the slow, drunk gait of somebody whose legs hadn’t caught up with him yet.
There was a lighter in his other hand. A small orange flame cupped against a draft that came through the hole in the wall.
There wasn’t time to reach him.
The arsonist looked toward the stairs.
“Ramírez! I’m lighting it! They’ve gone to the roof! Leave them. We’re done.”
“No. I’m finishing the job.”
The arsonist stared toward the stairs for half a second, then crouched and touched the flame to the floor before making his way back out of the building.
The gasoline lit in a line that raced the length of the gym, hit the soaked counter and wall gear, and turned all of it orange at once. Heat rolled across the gym in a wave Mia felt even from the stairwell doorway. The light changed everything it touched, the ring, the mats, the hanging bags, all of it suddenly gold and shifting with shadow.
Smoke started climbing within seconds, thick and black, gathering along the ceiling.
Renato pulled the door shut and started up after the others.
Boots pounded down the office stairs behind them.
A second later, metal rattled below as he hit the roof-access door.
No one stopped to find out who it was.
Mia stepped onto the roof and dragged in a breath of cold, smoky air.
She heard footsteps pounding up the stairs behind her.
Fast. Close.
The gunman came through the roof doorway with his weapon already up, breathing hard, eyes finding Mia across maybe fifteen feet of gravel.
Renato moved first.
He didn’t go for the gun. He went for the man, shoulder down, driving in low faster than his knees should have allowed, and the impact took both of them backward through the open doorway and down out of sight.
A gunshot cracked out from below.
Mia was already moving toward the door.
She looked down into the stairwell and found Renato partway down, braced against the wall, one hand pressed hard against his stomach. Blood had already soaked through his shirt and was spreading past his fingers, dark in the amber light still flickering up from below.
He was conscious. His eyes found her.
“Go,” he said. Nothing else. His voice came out rough, almost annoyed, like she’d made a mistake in training he didn’t have patience left to correct twice.
She started down toward him anyway. Two steps, maybe three, her hand already reaching for the rail.
Another shot came up from below and struck the wall beside her. Grit stung her cheek. Mia recoiled and scrambled back up the steps, pressing herself against the outside wall at the top of the stairwell.
“Get the fuck out,” Renato shouted.
She stayed at the doorway. She wanted to go down those stairs but understood exactly what would happen if she did.
Another gunshot, from below, muffled this time by distance or smoke or both.
Then nothing.
She looked down the stairs again.
The smoke kept coming until she could no longer make Renato out. Gray on gray, then gone.
Mia turned from the stairs. Five people on a burning building’s roof were looking at her like she might know what came next.
The roof had bought them a little time, but the men below would find another way up.