She doesn’t speak a word.
Her face drops into her bloody hands then, tense, her head lowers more and more, until her fingers are threaded through her hair and stiff against her scalp.
I eye her for a beat, the blood she gets into her hair, the rigidness of her crouched posture, the slight trembling of her spine, as if she’s trying to hide the fact that she’s crying.
The reason for it is a guess in the dark.
It’s not loss.
Erin is over there, on the other side of the spread-out group (no cliques this time among the captives, not since everyone is shaken and battered), and she’s holding a folded scarf to herface. So it’s not like Erin died or anything—and I think her and Connie are somewhat close.
They’re usually together whenever I watch the captives in camp.
I mean, Erin’s face is definitely fucked up.
But that’s not why Connie cries.
Others sit all around, some on the steps, others on the ground, and the newer faces are fringed with doubt before, slowly, they slump down.
The guards are weary around us.
Down two, there are enough gaps around us that some new idiot might make a run for it—and they might just get a head start of about a step or two, since the fatigue is weighing on the guards.
They must have hunted their cold black hearts out chasing the runaways.
But they took losses, too.
I wonder how many the fae lost in that fight.
I don’t know the faces of them all to be able to tell which ones are gone, but over the time I’ve spent with the unit, I recognise the ones that matter.
The ones on the steeds up the road, who follow the flames that eat through the city, as if checking that they don’t cross some invisible perimeter. Three are missing from the two dozen of them.
So that’s four confirmed dead fae so far.
And honestly, I’m impressed.
Like, really fucking awestruck.
It took a lot of humans to do that. A lot. But knowledge, too. Like, someone at least in that massive group, had militaryexperience, or was super observant of the fae for a while, at least long enough—and close enough—to realise their weakness.
Their necks.
But so many others were hit elsewhere.
The injured fae on the carts watch, moody, as the warriors bring destruction to the city, like they want nothing more than to join them.
The flames eat through the buildings, an unnatural swiftness to the fire spreading before moving on from the ash it leaves behind, and I’m getting a bit worried that those buildings are going to collapse, the debris that remains falling down on us—
And I’ll be crushed by concrete and steel.
That can’t be my end.
Not here, not like that. Not after everything.
Not likethem, the humans being flushed out in the blaze.
I wonder if they’re connected to the people who shot at us on the bridge or if they were just another group hiding out, or a bunch of individuals taking their chances in the city.
