We descend. The air is hotter down here, the engine thrum bigger, closer, alive in the bones. A bulkhead door is ajar, the key still in the lock.
It’s the kind of room I feel in my stomach before I see it: rows of bunks, a bucket, ten faces in the thin yellow light. All women. I scan the faces swiftly, searching. Phoenix isn’t here. My heart makes a noise I don’t let anyone hear.
“There are other rooms,” the merc says. “We’ll get these out in a minute. Let’s keep moving.”
We clear two more—empty. Then a hallway with a guard at the end, back turned, talking into a radio. He turns too slowly. Atticus shoots once and the man folds. Atticus doesn’t blink. He hates guns, but he never misses.
We reach a door with a dent near the hinge. The merc gestures. “You ready?” he asks me, like he’s offering me an indulgence before he finishes his job.
I push past him and hit the handle.
And there she is.
On the floor, her back to the wall, her eyes open and not seeing us for half a second and then seeingme.
For a moment it reminds me of the way she sat, back against the wall, in our penthouse the first night she belonged to us.
A bloody scrape streaks her cheekbone, and a bruise sweeps beneath her ribs like someone signed their name there, and I will learn who that bastard is, and when I do my capacity for forgiveness will be gone. Expired. There will only be reparation.
The world goes quiet.
“Phoenix,” I say. It comes out wrong—ragged and not the way I rehearsed and entirely honest.
Her mouth trembles and makes itself straight again, and she half lifts her arms. “Conrad.”
I go to my knees so I don’t loom over her. I put the rifle down, palms up, the oldest trick in every book that asks someone to trust. “We’re here. We’re going to get you out of here now. We’ve got you.”
Her eyes flick past me to the mercs, to Storm’s knives, to Maverick’s wrench, to Atticus with a pistol. She counts us, her lips moving silently.
One-two-three-four.Hers. Ours. Each other’s.
“Others,” she says, her voice sanded down to a thread. “I think there are ten in a different room, maybe more in another. But they moved me a few hours ago. Danner is dead.”
A line of heat goes through the room. Storm’s jaw tightens. Maverick breathes like a man who just put down a load he carried alone for too long. Atticus gives the smallest nod, a tally in a ledger that saysthat’s one thing done right.
“We’ll get them,” I say. “You’re first.”
She shakes her head. “No.”
Maverick crouches on her other side, puts a hand near her shoulder but not on it. “Firebird,” he says, voice soft, “we’re gonna get them all out. But you’re fucking going first.”
Her mouth softens and trembles. “Okay,” she says, which is to sayhurry.
Her arms lift again, and I lift her carefully, holding her to me. I can feel her heart thumping against my chest and have to fight the urge to squeeze. For a second I just stand there, one hand tight and tangled in the hair at the nape of her neck, the other arm braced beneath her thighs, and breathe her in.
I start to walk, and she pushes against my chest. “I’ll walk.”
Again, I have to fight my natural instinct. I don’t want to set her down. I don’t want to let her go. But I do.
Once she’s on her feet her spine straightens, and she visibly steels herself. She motions, and sighing, we begin to move the others.
The operators become a conveyor of bodies and fear and then something like relief. The boy’s name is Luis, and he comes beside me and grips my sleeve as if he can hold me accountable that way. The split-lip woman walks under her own power and checks every door we pass like she’s making sure no one is left behind. The humming girl hums quietly. The woman who holds her holds her still.
We leave the way we came—methodical and infuriatingly slowly. Twice more, guns bark at us. Twice more, someone whose name I don’t know drops and stays.
On the open deck, the wind is a cold, clean blade. Phoenix sways, her eyes enormous as she stares down at the water. The boats, large enough to transport everyone, look tiny beneath us nonetheless, the ocean enormous and indifferent.
“We’re going down that thing?” She points to the ladder.
