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"Sweep the racks," she tells a pair of her people. "Walk these three out the back and hold that door from outside. You two, the front."

Whitlock's somewhere up here, and Torres's people can have him. I keep moving toward the stairs.

The heavy door at the far end stands open on stone stairs. The agents start down with their weapon lights on, and I go behind them.

Delilah walked me down this staircase over my map, with my red pencil in her hand. The bad step near the bottom groans under my boot, and I stomp it so she'll hear me coming.

Their lights sweep the hall below, the barred doors and the bare bulbs hanging dead on their wires. They land on Dutch.

He's at the cell nearest the stairs, with his pistol in his right hand and a key already turning in the lock with his left. His flashlight lies on the concrete behind him, still burning.

"FBI!" the lead agent shouts from the stairs. "Drop it!"

Dutch yanks the cell door open. It's her cell. The lead agent's light finds Delilah right behind the bars, square in the line of his rifle.

Dutch drags her out by the torn front of my flannel. Her hands are zip-tied behind her. He clamps his left forearm across her collarbone and jams the pistol muzzle under her jaw.

Blood shines on her left cheekbone in the white of the lights. She doesn't make a sound.

"Back up the stairs," Dutch says, and coughs. "All of you. She and me are going out the tunnel."

The lead agent's rifle doesn't move. He can't take the shot with her face that close to Dutch's.

I'm one step behind the agent, and my pistol stays in its holster. Hector said there were three girls down here, and I don't know which cells they're in now. A miss would ricochet off this stone into one of them or into Delilah.

Dutch's eyes find me past the agent's shoulder. His lips pull back off his teeth.

"Hollister," he says. "You came through my gate."

At my fight barn, I told him that if he came through my gate again, he wouldn't drive back out of it. He used a crying girl to lure Hector out to him instead.

"I came through your boss's gate," I tell him. "Let her go."

He starts backing down the hall toward the tunnel, dragging her with him. Every step puts her closer to that truck.

Delilah looks at me past the muzzle. Her eyes are wide open and clear. She isn't frozen. She's thinking.

When Dutch coughs, his forearm lifts off her collarbone. She tucks her chin and sets her weight. He coughs every time he talks, so I'll make him talk.

"Your boss isn't down here, Dutch," I tell him. "He ran up those stairs and left you holding her. Whitlock walks out the front, and you go down for every girl in these cells."

His jaw works. He opens his mouth to answer me, and the cough tears out of him instead.

She drives her head back into his face.

The gun goes off. The shot smacks limestone over our heads, and chips of rock spray down the hall. Everybody ducks, me included.

Dutch staggers with blood pouring from his nose. His arm falls away from her, and she goes straight down to the concrete, the way I'd tell a fighter to drop out of a headlock.

The lead agent still has no clean shot. His line runs past Dutch into the cells behind him. I'm closer, and I go.

I hit Dutch at the waist with my shoulder and drive him into the bars of the next cell. His pistol flies out of his hand and skids down the hall. An agent kicks it and plants his boot on it.

Dutch is heavier than me, and he's been in fights. He drops his chin and hits me in the ribs, then again, short and hard. He learned to fight in bars and back alleys, where a fight runs until somebody can't get up.

When he throws the third one, his right shoulder dips first, the way my fighters' shoulders dip when they're gassed and can't hold their arms up anymore. I duck my head to the side, and the punch goes past my ear. I put my right hand into his jaw.

His head snaps sideways into the bars. I catch his collar, slam him against them once more, and take him down to the concrete.