“Yeah,” I say. I taste blood and soap and apple and the faint film of ship in the water. I look at the lock that I turned with my key, and I look at the dent near the hinge, and I look at the girls and the boy and the woman who rocks and hums and the woman who holds her and the woman with the split lip who is tired of being in charge.
“They’ll come,” I say, and this time it isn’t bravado or a prayer. It’s a promise I’m staking my life on. “So we hold. And we make it count when they do.”
12
Conrad
This fuckingship is practically a city of boxes.
We come over the ladder in two single file lines, boots kissing steel, headsets low on our heads. Blackvine’s lead raises two fingers, cuts right, and the whole team flows with him like the deck tilted that way. I hate them for being graceful and organized and professional at this when I don’t have the skill or ability or the technical know-how to pull this rescue off. It’s been rankling ever since Maverick placed the call—the knowledge that we had to call on someone else for help.
All I have right now is sheer, roilingwant. And everyone knows—if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.
“Stay on our hip, gentlemen,” the lead says, unconcerned with my thoughts and irritatingly calm. “We’ll get your girl.”
We snake the lanes between containers—red, blue, gray—soaring tower-high. Every corner is a potential ambush. Every echo is a lie, the sound coming from somewhere else entirely different from where I think it hails. I want to sprint, find herfaster. God only knows what could be happening to herright fucking now, while we take our time walking this maze.
The operators move like they’re shopping—select a route, remove an obstacle, proceed with caution. Two peel left on a hand signal. One forwards posts with a mirror on a stick, three inches of glass that decides which direction we take.
“This is taking too—” I start.
Gunfire snaps from the next corridor, cutting off my protest—two tight pops, then silence. A body hits the deck somewhere we can’t see. My hands go cold and hot at once.
“Contact,” a voice in my ear says. “One down.”
We flow again. The lead lifts a palm and we bleed into cover—Storm behind a ladder cage, Maverick near a stanchion, me pressed to a container that smells like paint and brine. A guard’s shadow spills long past the corner. I count his steps. Four. Five. He clears the angle and points the rifle too high, nervous. The merc in front of me floors him with three shots.
My teeth hurt. “Give me a gun,” I say, reaching.
The merc turns, pats my chest once like I’m a Labrador with a lot of feelings. “Just wait here, pup. We’ll get your girlfriend.”
Storm’s head tilts, dangerous. He doesn’t argue. Instead he pulls a blade from seemingly nowhere and holds it low and close, the steel a soft, unpromising gleam. Maverick, with a tip of his chin, bends, grabs a wrench the size of a femur from a maintenance rack, and tests the weight with a roll of his wrist.
Atticus—Christ, Atticus is white around the mouth and tighter than a snare drum, but when a second shooter comes slashing in from above on a catwalk and sprays bullets, he moves. He yanksme down, shoulder spikes me to the deck, and a beat later we hear the mercs return fire and a boot scraping metal and then a body ringing across the grating.
When the ringing stops, Atticus’s eyes find a dropped pistol. He looks at me, and I nod. He takes it, his hands good on a tool he doesn’t prefer. He pushes his glasses up on his nose and racks the weapon.
I pick up a rifle from the first man down, check the chamber, and feel my pulse settle when the weight is in my hands.
“Stay behind me,” the lead says. “We do this by the book.”
“I don’t have a fucking book,” I mutter. “I have Phoenix, and I need to get her.”
He doesn’t bother to answer.
We move.
The container lanes open into a wider apron, a crane overhead sleeping like a predator. Three guards hold poor cover by a hydraulic spool, the noise of the boat apparently enough to cover the gunfire.
The mercs don’t waste bullets. Two drop at a blade across the throat. The third whirls and bolts—unfortunately for him in the wrong direction. Storm flings his knife silently, like he’s been waiting to do for the past three days. It embeds itself in the man’s trachea, and he goes down with a quiet gurgle. Storm approaches, pulls his knife free, and wipes the blade on the guard’s shirt without looking.
Maverick, grinning like a man who found his favorite toy in a fire, uses the wrench to turn another would-be shooter’s ribs into a question mark when the man tries to flank us. The soundis ugly and righteous. Mav doesn’t smile after. He just steps over the body.
“Forward hold,” a merc calls. “Stairwell. Two down. One fleeing.”
“Phoenix?” I press.
“Lower decks,” he says. “They’ll probably be keeping them in the dorms. This way.”
