Menace leaned in. “How are you feeling, Parker?”
“She’s sick too,” Bronc said, with a flick of his hand. “We all are.”
“Parker, can you hear us?” Menace’s tone was gentler than I’d expected. “Anything you’ve found?”
I tried to focus, but my thoughts drifted like leaves in a gutter. “The traces are all dead ends. Whoever did this, if they're talking about it, used commercial VPNs, wiped the logs before we even noticed the breach. Best guess, the attack came in on a water shipment, but it seems like a stretch.”
Kazimir bared his teeth, bored already. “What is Maltraz’s end game?”
No one answered. We all knew what they wanted. The same thing everyone wanted.
“Power,” Rafe said. “If Iron Valor goes down, it leaves the southern territories weaker. Council will get involved.”
Bronc tried to steer it back. “We still have a job. We hold the territory. We protect the families. If we go down, we go down fighting. But we need help. We’re all about to wind up bedridden. We can’t fight like that. They’ll sweep in and kill us all.”
I looked at Wrecker, searching for any hint of the monster I’d loved.
Menace spoke, “We’re packing the jet right now. I’ll have a team there in two hours.”
Rafe chimed in. “We’ll be there in two and a half, fully armed and ready to make a stand against whoever did this. My guess is they’re waiting for everyone to simply die. Then they’ll come in and dispose of the bodies. No shots fired. They’re too chickenshit to fight.”
Doc said, “We have three days, maybe four, before this tears through the rest of us.”
Menace said, “Need to find an antidote.”
Kazimir nodded. “We’ll start looking.”
The room emptied fast. Nobody wanted to linger. Every second wasted was a chance for us to drop where we stood. Gunner left first, then Arsenal, then Doc, clutching his bag like a rosary. Bronc lingered, staring at the blacked-out screens, the old man in his eyes visible now.
I tried to stand, but my knees buckled. Wrecker caught me, or maybe I caught him. We staggered to the door, our bodies welded together by fever and muscle memory. In the hallway, I smelled vomit. Someone had lost the battle with their stomach and just left it for the janitor.
Outside, the air was cold and sharp, a knife after the stagnant war room. Wrecker led me to the truck, but he could barely work the keys. I took them from him, gentle, and started the engine.
“Are you okay to drive?” I asked. The question was pointless.
He grinned, a ghost of his old self. “You crash, I heal.”
I didn’t want to say that he might not.
The drive back to our house was silent. Didn’t bother with the radio. My skin prickled with every pothole, my head a riot of pain and memory. Wrecker leaned his head against the window, eyes closed, breathing shallow.
I reached over, squeezed his knee. “I’m not losing you,” I said, and the words tasted like a lie.
He didn’t open his eyes, but he smiled, just for me.
We made it home somehow. Rocket met us at the door, tail between his legs, whimpering in sympathy or terror. I tried to get Wrecker to bed, but he collapsed on the couch, shivering. I pulled a blanket over him, crawled in beside him, and listened to his heart stutter against my back.
When I finally drifted, I dreamed of the lemon tree, the branches heavy with fruit. My mother’s voice in the breeze: Just listen.
When I woke, Wrecker was burning up, breath coming in shallow little sips.
I’d never felt so small, or so alone.
The world resolved into fevered fragments: the sweat-stuck sheets, the red digits of the bedside clock, the rasp of Wrecker’s breath at my shoulder. Time lost all meaning. Sometimes it was morning; sometimes it was three AM, the only proof being the cold draft off the window and the blue light puddled on the floor. At some point, I stopped trying to track the hours and just counted his heartbeats instead.
His fever never broke. The skin of his forehead was so hot it felt like metal in the sun. I made a game of checking his temperature every hour, though the thermometer always glared backwith the same digital outrage: 105.1, then 105.4, then just HI. I wiped him down with towels, rotated Tylenol and ibuprofen like I was running a pharmacy for the dead. Every so often, he’d groan awake, eyes unfocused, and beg for water. His voice came out wrong, not even his. I brought him water, spooned it into his mouth when he couldn’t lift his own head. Sometimes he’d seize up, thrashing so hard I worried he’d break the bedframe.
Rocket whimpered at the foot of the bed, licking his own paws raw. Even the damn dog was sick.
