We’d found the lab. We’d actually found it! It wasn’t just rumors. It was real.
Then movement had caught my eye. Something dark in the window. A rifle.
Rav had slammed into me, and we hit the floor. Gunshots. Before or after Rav knocked me over? He landed on me, then rolled. The shelf beside us pitched. Glass slid and shattered. A sharp smash against the wall and my neck and my shoulder.
Heat that wasn’t heat.
Another voice—Percival now, close. “I’m good. It’s just the arm.” The words carried a tremor he probably thought he’d hidden. His sleeve was dark to the elbow. He kept the arm lifted away from his body like it didn’t belong to him.
“Get his sleeve cut. Flush. Then decon,” someone said, not asking. “You. Sit. Now.”
“I can stand.”
“Sit,” the voice repeated, flat enough to make even Percival drop onto the plastic chair.
I turned my head. Too fast. The room yanked sideways. I fought a swallow. “Rav?”
“Eyes here.” Hart tapped two fingers gently between my eyebrows, and my gaze obeyed. “He’s not your job. Your job is to stay with me.”
Not your job. Rav had said something like that in the truck, months ago, when I apologized for being in the middle of the convoy’s protection bubble.
‘You’re my job,’he’d said.
The heat in my face when he’d said that was rain compared to this wildfire. The memory flickered and went.
“Doc.” Hart again. Patient. Annoyed. The exact mix that got through when nothing else could. “Name.”
“Dr. Brooklyn McAllister,” I said. “Canadian liaison—biochem—” The sentence chose not to finish.
“Good. Date?”
“No thanks, I’m taken.” Iwastaken, wasn’t I?
We’d been stealing moments for weeks. Quick kisses here and there. Sneaking into my quarters more than once. Having quiet talks alone when I claimed to need help carrying things. He was my bodyguard, so he was my shadow. Our government had said we needed to stay together. It was a good cover.
I let my head roll to the side again, searching for Rav. But all I could see were the bodies crowded around someone out flat, and Rav wasn’t one of the crowd. Hewasthe one crashing.
What if he didn’t make it?
“Humor me.”
I fished for the detail Hart wanted, dragged it up through molasses. “June?”
“Close enough.” He chuckled as he spread something over my chest. He asked something else. About pain? About clothes?
Was his question even to me?
Was it even a question?
More voices filled the room, but I couldn’t latch on to any of them. I cast around for Percival, but my vision blurred, each shape swimming into the next. “Percy?”
Someone let go of my hand, and Percival grabbed it. “Helo’s here. Litters are coming in.”
Each breath took too much energy. Swallowing took too much energy. I needed sleep, but I needed something else first. “Promise me he’s okay?”
“Of course he will be.” Percival must have leaned closer, because his voice was quiet, but perfectly clear. “He’s got too much to live for not to be okay.”
He meant me, didn’t he?
