“Commander?” The girl opened her eyes.
“Don’t speak, just listen,” Aimilia said as she inspected girl’s arm. The girl let out a sharp hiss when Aimilia touched it. Broken, but not horrifically. “Sit up, I have to fasten your arm to your chest to keep you from damaging it further. This will hurt, but I can’t heal it right now. What this will do will make it easier for you to follow the vitae rope and get to the exit without your arm flying about and making it worse or causing you to scream in pain. So in that case, a little agony now to save you some later makes sense, yes?”
She didn’t actually give the girl time to respond. Instead, she took the arm, pinned it against her chest and started wrapping even as the girl screamed in her ear.
Once she’d tightly secured her arm, Aimilia pushed her in the opposite direction. “Take a few deep breaths if you need to, but don’t wait forever. The faster you get moving, the sooner you get help.”
And then Aimilia was off again as well.
She couldn’t stop to catch her breath. She couldn’t let herself focus on the scrapes she was accruing or the bruises she was accumulating. Honestly, why had she bothered to heal the bruises Clelia had left?
She crawled, climbed, walked, or fought.
She was coming through a narrow opening to the other side of the wall when an explosion of searing pain went through her arm that was already on the other side. She cried out, getting a mouthful of dirt as she did so, and the sound of snarling on the other side informed her what was the cause. But Aimilia dug her now burnt fingers into the dirt and pushed forward with her legs until she was through. She came tumbling through the other sideand was greeted with sharp teeth sinking into her shoulder since spitting fire at her hadn’t done the trick.
Aimilia twisted, launching a kick right into the goat-like middle of the chimera’s body. It yelped, let go and staggered back, but its teeth had left a mark. Aimilia moved her hands, unfortunately both of them since she’d been putting off letting Marcella teach her the clan mages’ style, and with a quick but definitive move, she severed the monster in two. Right before the snake’s tail managed to hit her.
Aimilia huffed, crouched on her knees as the chimera fell into the wall Aimilia had just crawled over. Aimilia could only dully stare at it in the dim light of her harness as the wall shifted and came down.
The only thought in her head was the darkest, most vulgar curse she knew as the heavy rocks hit her.
Then…
Nikias was going to be insufferable if she survived this.
Which she might not, given the way her shoulder was bleeding and her legs were now pinned under the rocks.
And the worst part was, she’d only found twenty-five of the novices. Half of them were still down here somewhere.
“Aimilia! Up! Wake up!”
She jolted back to full consciousness as the weight pinning her legs disappeared and hands were skimming over her.
“Marcella?” Aimilia muttered, blinking as her eyes burned with the sudden addition of vitae wrapped around the curly-haired girl illuminated the tunnel further.
“Good, awake and alive,” Marcella said right as her hand came into contact with Aimilia’s shoulder, ripping a hiss from her. Marcella jerked back and looked at the blood on her hand. “Mostly.”
“I’ll—I’ll be alright. What are you doing here?”
“Gavril also did not fit. I did.” Marcella’s eyes landed on the body of the chimera and shook her head. “I did not like you being alone down here.”
Aimilia reached up with the better of her two hands and unclasped her peplos. “If the handlers hadn’t turned out to be cowards, then I wouldn’t have had to. Now I need you to tie this to at least slow, if not stop the bleeding so I can keep going.”
Marcella took the fabric and began to do so, pulling it tightly against the punctures. “Cannot heal?”
“There’s no guarantee I’d be able to manage it. It’s so complex and I’d lose vitae either way. I’m already running lower than I’d like.” Aimilia gritted her teeth as Marcella tightened it again.
“Then you go back. I will go on.” Marcella’s accent thickened as her focus deepened while wrapping the fabric.
“Not happening.”
Marcella held the fabric in place while fumbling in the dim light for the clasp before pinning it in place. She glared at Aimilia. “You are bleeding. You are burned. Go back.”
“You wouldn’t be saying that if you’d ever seen me in action before. Believe me, this is nothing. I’m not leaving you down here alone just as much as you’re not leaving me. Now, let’s go.”
Marcella sighed but didn’t argue it any further. Instead, they pressed on together in silence. Aimilia could feel the dirt staining the skin her rearranged peplos exposed on one side and she tried to focus on that unpleasantness instead of the pain in her shoulder and arm. Her hand was already blistering and the skin was red even with their dim light. She fought the urge to scream every time she was forced to use it or even when it brushed up against anything.
Thankfully they came across a large cluster of novices, all five arguing about which way to go before they spotted them on the other side of the tunnel.
