Chapter 4: Escape and Counterstrike
The dark in the closet was absolute. It was a thick, suffocating thing that pressed against Jess’s eyes and filled her lungs with the smell of mildew and metal. For a long moment, there was only the sound of Alex’s ragged, furious breathing and the distant, industrial hum of Sabine’s workshop.
“I can’t believe her,” Alex seethed, her voice a harsh scrape in the black. A thump followed—her fist hitting the wall. “Miley! Of all people! Sarah’s gonna be destroyed. That… that traitor.”
Jess didn’t answer immediately. She was running the scene back, frame by frame. The way Miley had stepped into the light. Not looking at them. Looking at Sabine. The tremor in her voice when she spoke about Sarah, about the fear. It had been real. But there was something else. A performance.
“I don’t know if she did,” Jess whispered finally.
“Are you kidding me? Jess, she shook the terrorist’s hand! She’s helping her build a genocide machine right now!”
“I know what I saw.” Jess shifted, her hands exploring the wall behind her. Rough, flaking paint over concrete. “But I also know Miley. I’ve walked in on… their thing. By accident. More than once.”
“Ugh, I don’t need the details,” Alex muttered, but she went quiet, listening.
“It’s not just sex. It’s a whole… dynamic. Sarah dominates. Miley adores it. She worships the ground Sarah walks on, literally. She gets off on the scale of it, the danger, the sheer power disparity.” Jess’s fingers found a seam in the wall, a vertical line of slightly cooler air. “That fear she was talking about? For her, it’s part of the attraction. It’s the spark. So to suddenly decide that same spark is a reason to exterminate all giantesses? That’s a one-eighty her psyche wouldn’t make. Not that fast.”
“So what, she’s undercover?” Alex’s voice was skeptical but laced with a thread of hope.
“I think she’s buying us time. Sabine was monologuing. We were captured. The plan was dead. Miley gave her a new toy—a smart, sympathetic engineer. It distracted her. It stopped her from just shooting us in the head and dumping us in the river.”
A cold clarity settled over Jess. It was a theory woven from desperation, but it felt right in her gut. Miley was impulsive, emotional, but she wasn’t suicidal, and she wasn’t a killer. Her version of rebellion was wearing a daring outfit, not triggering a race war.
“Okay,” Alex said, the fight bleeding out of her voice, replaced by a practical urgency. “So if she bought us time, we shouldn’t waste it. Can you see anything?”
“No. But feel this.” Jess guided Alex’s hand to the seam she’d found. It was about four inches wide, running from floor to a point above their heads. “Airflow. Weak, but it’s here.”
Together, they scraped at the edges. The material wasn’t concrete. It was some kind of old, brittle paneling. Alex dug her nails in, braced a foot against the wall, and pulled. With a groan of corroded screws and a shower of dust, a whole section of paneling popped inward an inch.
Not a wall. A vent cover.
Beyond it was a deeper, cooler darkness, echoing with the drip of water and the faint, metallic sigh of the building settling.
“Jackpot,” Alex breathed.
They worked the cover loose. It was heavy, but manageable. The opening behind it was square, just large enough to crawl through on hands and knees. A stale, river-adjacent draft washed over them.
“Where does it go?” Alex whispered.
“Away from here,” Jess said, and that was enough.
They crawled. The duct was a tight metal intestine, lined with decades of grit that coated their hands and knees. They followed the faint draft, took turns at junctions guided by nothing but instinct and the worsening fear of a dead end. The sounds of the workshop faded, replaced by the echoing drip-drip-drip of condensation and the scuttle of something small in the shadows.
Finally, a faint, grimy light filtered up from a grate below them. Jess peered down. They were over a narrow service corridor, lit by a single, flickering bulb. It was empty.
She shoved at the grate. It gave way with a screech that sounded cataclysmic in the silence. They dropped down, landing in a crouch on the dusty floor. They were in a different part of the sub-basement, far from the workshop. The hum was a distant phantom here.
“We need to stop that broadcast,” Alex said, brushing dust from her jeans. “Noon tomorrow is too soon. We need to trash the place. Now.”
“We are not soldiers,” Jess repeated Ellie’s warning, her own voice sounding hollow. “Two of us against eight armed fanatics.”
Alex’s eyes scanned the corridor. They landed on a stack of old, fibrous packing material leaning against the wall. Nearby, a junction box with frayed wiring sparked weakly behind a cracked glass cover. A slow, dangerous grin spread across Alex’s face. It was the look that always preceded Jess’s life becoming significantly more complicated.
“We’re not soldiers,” Alex agreed. “We’re art and pre-med. I’m good with composition. You’re good with biology. And fire is a chemical reaction, right?”
“Alex, no.”
“Do you have a better idea? The tracker’s gone. Comms are dead. Sabine’s moving up her schedule. We can’t call for help. We can only raise the biggest alarm we possibly can.”
Jess looked at the frayed wires, at the dry, aged packing straw. She thought of the park, of Jules’s blank eyes. She thought of noon tomorrow, a city of giants losing their minds at once. The calculus was terrible, but it was clear.
“Distraction only,” Jess hissed. “We are not engaging. We start a fire in this isolated section. The smoke or the heat triggers whatever passes for alarms in this dump. It creates chaos. Then we run like hell back the way we came.”
“Deal.”
It was disturbingly easy. Alex arranged the dry material into a loose pile near the junction box. Jess, using a piece of broken pipe, carefully smashed the glass cover away and exposed the sparking wires. She wasn’t an electrician, but the principle was simple: energy plus fuel.
She nudged a wisp of the fibrous material closer to the intermittent arc of electricity.
It caught on the third spark.
A tiny, bright ember glowed, then bloomed. It tasted the dry straw and grew, hungry and eager. The flames were yellow and quick, snapping up the pile with a soft, rushing sound. Heat washed over their faces.
“Go!” Jess grabbed Alex’s arm.
They ran back down the service corridor, toward the memory of the vent. Behind them, the fire crackled, already seeking the old wood of the wall framing. Smoke began to coil, thick and grey, filling the corridor ceiling.
An alarm began to blare—a harsh, metallic clanging that shattered the basement’s deep silence.
Shouts echoed, magnified and distorted by the industrial space. Running footsteps, these ones heavy and urgent, pounded somewhere above them.
They reached the vent. Alex boosted Jess up first, then scrambled after her. They hauled the grate back into place just as two of Sabine’s guards rounded the corner into the smoky corridor.
“Fire in sector seven! It’s spreading to the old wood!” one yelled into a radio.
“Sabine wants the core components evacuated! Now! Abandon the workshop!”
Chaos. It was working.
They crawled back through the duct, faster now, the acrid smell of smoke following them. They dropped back into the closet, now empty and unlocked. Cracking the door, they peered into the main workshop space.
It was a scene of frantic activity. The halo of work lights swung wildly as people rushed to disconnect servers and carry delicate-looking component boxes toward a far exit. The giant emitter itself, gleaming and malevolent, was being carefully lowered onto a motorized pallet.
Sabine stood in the middle of it all, a statue of furious control. “Prioritize the emitter and the frequency drive! Leave the rest! Go, go!”
And beside her, helping to direct the flow, was Miley. She had a tablet in hand, pointing at the exit, her face a mask of cool efficiency.
As Jess watched, Miley turned her head. Her eyes scanned the chaotic room and found Jess’s gaze through the cracked closet door. For less than a second, their eyes locked.
Miley’s mask didn’t slip. But her right eye, the one farthest from Sabine, closed in a slow, deliberate wink.
Then she turned back, shouting at a slow-moving technician. “That box is redundant! Leave it! The ignition sequence is all we need!”
The confirmation was a bolt of pure energy straight to Jess’s heart. She pulled Alex back into the shadows. “She’s with us. She winked.”
“Told you,” Alex said, but there was no triumph, only a sharp relief.
“They’re evacuating. Taking the emitter. We need to see where they’re going.”
They slipped out of the closet, using the rolling banks of smoke near the ceiling and the giant, rusted machinery as cover. They trailed the evacuation to a large freight elevator at the far end of the cannery. The doors were just closing on Sabine, Miley, the palleted emitter, and a handful of guards. The indicator light began to climb toward ‘G’.
“They’re going to ground level,” Alex whispered. “They’ll have trucks.”
A different sound cut through the fading alarm and the crackle of the spreading fire. It was a deep, resonant vibration that thrummed through the very foundations of the building. A vibration they both knew in their bones.
Something enormous was moving outside. Something that made the centuries-old brick dust shiver from the mortar.
A voice, vast and furious and vibrating with a power that shattered remaining windows, rolled over the riverfront, penetrating the cannery walls.
“MILEY SMITH! YOU HAVE FIVE SECONDS TO SHOW ME YOU’RE ALIVE BEFORE I TEAR THIS CITY BLOCK APART BRICK BY BRICK!”
Sarah had arrived.
The elevator was gone. The fire was spreading. And outside, a 250-foot-tall giantess, driven by a protective rage far more terrifying than any playful tease, was about to reduce the world to rubble to find her girlfriend.
Jess and Alex stood in the smoky, crumbling basement, the decision already made for them. They ran for the stairs.