Chapter Text
Riley doesn’t really have anything to hold on to, but she puts her left hand over the top of the smooth hump of a beam between two panels of glass. At least that gives her the illusion of having something to grab when the glass breaks.
In her ear, Mac’s breathless objections combine with the sound of fist hitting flesh into a sort of white noise as she pulls back as far as she can and aims the gun through the panel of glass she’s lying on near the top of the glass dome rising above the center atrium of the building.
The targets are a good eighty feet below her, but she tries to ignore the below part as she lines up a shot. There are three men and a woman, but only one of them, the apparent ringleader of this terrorist meet-up, is holding a gun on Jack.
One of the others, not the ringleader, slams a fist into Jack’s gut. Again. “Tell us who you work for.”
Jack goes down with a pained groan that’s loud and clear over the comms. He pants, rolling onto his side and clutching at his stomach. “NASA,” he gasps. “I’m an astronaut, duh.”
In response, the man kicks him and steps away. “I say we shoot him.”
The ringleader raises his gun.
“No,” Riley whispers, but her objection doesn’t mean anything to the man with the silencer, who steps closer, aiming the long black barrel downward.
Jack rolls onto his back. Even from eighty feet up, Riley can see that his face is covered with blood.
“Last chance,” says the man who’s holding the gun on Jack.
She sees the whites of Jack’s eyes as he looks upward at Riley. “Don’t do it,” he says, and it could almost be to the man in front of him, but Riley knows he’s talking to her.
“You ought to know by now that I do what I want, old man,” Riley says, and pulls the trigger.