“You knew my brother!” I scream, “You were friends! They were the ones who killed him please don’t do this!”
“Sorry,” he says.
And then he shoots both men in the head before they can pull their triggers on me.
My heart’s pounding in my throat and it feels like it’s choking me. “Thank you. It’s not too late. You just proved it.”
He gives me the most heartbreaking version of his rakish grin. “I can’t…”
There’s a hole in his chest and a look of surprise as he stares down at it, then up at me. The man behind him steps out and grins. Baptiste Fournier.
“Motherfucking Fournier!” I hiss, “You fucking piece of shit!”
He’s casually holding his Glock, kicking poor Liam’s body over, rolling him away from the C4, the detonator still attached and counting down.
“I always hated you, Chandler,” he chuckles indifferently. “I drank a toast when they shot your brother. It was six bullets, did you know that?”
“You’re a fucking traitor, just like Camille!”
“You can sit down here and think about it, because you’ll be here when I blow this tunnel,” he says, still laughing like this is the most entertaining thing.
Fournier’s weakness has always been his overconfidence. As he bends over to pick up the brick of explosives lying next to Liam’s body, I pull my knife and throw myself on him, sendsing his gun flying. I’m graceless and awkward, but I knock him back and we both thrash, arms and legs kicking and punching but he’s on his back and I just need one opening.
“There’s a spot that causes instant death,”Cormac told me during practice once.“The quickest kill is a blade in the left eye. There’s a slight bulge in the brain behind the eye socket that makes it that much quicker to enter without your blade striking off bone. Always go for the left eye.”
My arm drives up as hard as I can. Cormac’s right. The blade goes in so easily.
I’ve never killed anyone before.
Chapter Twenty-Six
In which the world is on fire.
Cormac…
Grunting, I roll out from under a hailstorm of rocks just before a giant boulder hits the ground where I’d fallen after the explosion knocked me off my feet.
“Malaaaa!”I roar, but the piercing sound of gunfire and shouting pours down through the hole with the dirt and stones and I can’t hear anything from behind the barrier between us. I know the Academy is under attack. I know there are people who need me.
Mala comes first.
Charging back down the hallway, I shout into my headset. “Team three, to the Dean’s building, fire suppression and rescue. Team six, to the front gates for reinforcements. Team four, you’re with the security guards, spread across the perimeter, don’t let anything through, you hear me? You fucking hold it!”
The tunnel we’d been sweeping begins near the Academy security building, and my teams are pouring out the double doors, weapons in hand and moving to their assigned posts.
The campus is already a minefield; the team assigned to the last tunnel must have failed, it’s collapsed, a snaking, smoking trench and I see one student, legs braced, trying to pull his friend out. I stop long enough to help him.
The fire flares up the front of the Dean’s building, flames leaping three stories high and lighting the night around the rubble. The explosion demolished most of the building, but the back is still intact, and I let myself have one breath of hope. The tunnel exit is there.
Students are racing back and forth, but no one is panicking, I see Tatiana and Mariya climbing into the tower closest to the front, already coughing from the billowing smoke.
Ripping open the back door, I’m nearly shot in the face by Helen. “Woah! Friend,” I shout, “not foe!”
One of the sleeves of her jacket is torn off and there are a couple of burn marks in the cloth, but her hold on that AR-15 is completely steady.
“Very well,” she snaps, “on your way.” She disappears out into the night.
Huge cracks are splitting the stone walls of the basement, but this part of the building miraculously remained intact, even the two-story glass arboretum above the basement. Three doors, there are three doors between me and Mala and she will be there. She’ll be alive. I rip open the first door and charge down the next hallway, the cracks spiderwebbing the ceiling are ominous and still spreading as I run to the next door. This is the oldest substructure in the building, built nearly three hundredyears ago. I don’t know if it can hold against the explosion that just happened.
