My hand won't let go.
"Stay where I can see you."
It comes out harsh—the voice I use with soldiers, not with her.
She doesn't flinch. "I'm helping."
"You're distracting."
"Fine." She pulls her arm free. "I'll be over there."
She walks toward the medical tents without looking back, and I watch her go. The line of her shoulders. The way she moves.
My hands are shaking.
"Boss." Renan appears at my shoulder. "No sign of Coin forces. If they had watchers, they pulled out before we got here."
"Good."
"Civilian count is climbing. West building's worse than we thought."
"I know."
"You're bleeding."
I look down. There's a deep cut on my forearm, soaking through my sleeve. I don't remember getting it.
"Later."
The night grinds on. Thirty-one dead. Thirty-four. The numbers keep coming and I write each one into the list I'm building in my head—the list of reasons Daiven is going to die screaming.
Medical tent. Wrapping someone's arm. Her hands are steady.
Thirty-eight dead. Six of them children.
Dawn comes with the fires out and the rubble mostly cleared. Survivors have been transferred to proper facilities. The bodies are in the warehouse two blocks away, waiting to be identified and claimed.
Thirty-eight dead.
Iowyn is sitting on a piece of rubble near the medical tent with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She has that blank expression soldiers get after their first real battle—the one that says the brain hasn't caught up with what the eyes have seen.
She watched everything tonight. The bodies pulled from the wreckage, the survivors screaming for people who weren't coming, the way I held a dying man's hand because there was nothing else I could do. She knows what this is now.
I walk over and sit down next to her, close enough that our shoulders touch.
Her hands are in her lap. Cut up, bloody, concrete dust ground into the wounds. She dug through rubble all night with those hands.
"What happens next?" Her voice is hoarse, rough from smoke and exhaustion.
"I kill them. Every single one."
She nods slowly.
"And then?"
"Then we see what's left."
She closes her eyes, and her hands stay still in her lap with the blood drying in the creases of her palms.
