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Some other time, maybe, he would have flinched at the forced closeness. This was not the time. Instead he simply focused on getting up without giving Kostya a cigarette burn for his troubles, and tried the hatch. When it gave way he opened it.

"Give me a minute," he told Kostya, which was a bit of a request given that he was standing on his shoulders. He had a flashlight tucked away in the bag on his shoulder but he'd learned that shining a flashlight into darkness was frequently a good way to bring hell down on your head, in Deus work. So instead he angled Fiona upwards, her gentler, paler light flickering over the walls of the elevator shaft.

All he had time to do was bark "it's her; gun; shoot" before, with far less grace than he was usually inclined, bailing and shoving Kostya out of her direct line of sight as he did so with enough force to move him but, it is to be hoped, not enough to actually knock him down. It is to be hoped. No sooner had he done so than he was yanking back to the opposite wall, already prepared to flank.

There was a clatter and then silence before a round of shots were fired into the side of car, at knee height.

The gunshots went clean through his shield, and that was a fact to mull over later, when the time was right. His own legs were hit, too, in the wave of fire, clipping both of his calves. Kostya cussed in Russian, less at the pain and more at the realisation that he'd be limited in movement.

(Syntax said, with the childish smile and an ever-running line of codes, to archive the trauma. Slide the pain away, compress it, gigabytes into mega into kilo, compact. Still there, still intact, because he couldn't take it away but he could make it less, to defrag his sensory overload to the point that it was tolerable, to rearrange his rainbow tables to de-encrypt the pain receptors' work. Kostya is thankful.)

With steady hands, Kostya sought for where he'd packed his runic bandages, legs thrumming with pain intense but not crippling.

Another set of thumps outside and then above. The power flickers on. The elevator descends. If either listened closely, they could hear a murmured conversation, "...told you...Death Hunters always try to run...cowards...be ready..."

He didn't complain but he also didn't mention that he had his own. Kostya probably knew it anyway. He made no move for them, because they might need them. He might need them, Kostya; or--someone who wasn't him, anyway.

He thought, briefly, of America's parting words to him at the portal, of take care of yourself or I'll make you watch me cry every day, and he'd said I promise and he didn't keep his promises but she did and he wished he'd made her say it back. The pain was so screamingly huge that it made focusing on anything but his own blood on the floor enormously difficult.

"No s**t," he managed in a whisper, and, largely through the expedient of using Kostya as a crutch, he managed to haul himself half-upright, remaining crouched lest Bernice think it was wise to open a volley directly at head-level this time. "We are both really ********' stupid," he added. And then, just in case this was a last-stand, Lee-Scoresby-at-the-pass type situation, he added in a whisper without a change in tone or even a glance at him, his gaze fixed grimly on the door, "I know things have been really ******** tense with us lately but you are one of my best friends and I hate you all the ******** time but I love you. Don't tell her I said that, she'll think I reneged on the no homo thing. I didn't. But she'll think that. Don't feel obligated to say that back," he added. "In fact don't. Make fun of me about this later."

The car stopped and doors slid open and a can rolled in, gas hissing in their ears and clouding their vision.