“Torr…is going to…think it was…you,” Aric rasped, every word weaker than the last.
Harthon put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m going to return your body. You’ll be buried like you should. With honor.”
Aric shook his head, or tried to. His head lolled to one side, and I gently righted it. His next breath sounded wet. “No. He’ll…kill you. Leave…me…survive.”
The smoke wafting above us only made the grim reality bleaker. The flames would only hold our attackers off for so long. Harthon had an arrow in his side. He couldn’t carry Aric through the tunnel and still manage to outrun them. And even if he did, Aric was right.
Sixth would blame this on us.
The punishment would be death.
Aric’s gold eyes slid to me, mouth cracking open to gasp out a few more words. But then it stayed like that, open and silent, and his eyes stopped seeing.
“We have to go,” Joris said above the crackling of burning brush.
The entire circle was engulfed in flames, oppressive heat licking my exposed skin. Already, the perimeter was crumbling.
Harthon clenched his jaw, fighting some internal battle as he stared at Aric’s expressionless face. That battle erupted when he slammed his fist into the ground. “I’m sorry, brother,” he hissed, gently closing Aric’s eyes.
Then the moment was over. “Stefano first, then you,” he demanded, standing. He palmed the arrow still buried in his side. With a brutal jerk and an animalistic grunt, he snapped the arrow tip off and yanked it out from the back.
“Go,” he urged, nudging me toward the hole Stefano had already disappeared down.
I coughed on smoke and dropped to my knees, crawling to the edge. I grabbed the thickest-looking roots and swung my legs into the void.
A section of the brambles collapsed, black soot billowing up and glowing embers scattering. They rushed toward me in a violent swell, urging me to go back to where I belonged, and I dropped.
* * *
The opening in the ground didn’t seal back up behind us.
And so our escape turned into a massacre. One by one, our attackers dropped in, and one by one, Stefano and Harthon took them out with quick, close-range strikes.
Eventually, they learned and stopped coming, so we started running before they returned with backup and resumed their efforts. And they did. We knew this because as we ran through the tunnel’s pitch-black depths, we were chased by the echoes of our attackers—the whiz of an arrow that couldn’t quite reach us, muffled footsteps, garbled words and low grunts.
Our safety was entirely dependent on the gap we maintained with them, so we didn’t slow for hours, pushing a pace that was dangerous, running blind. Several times, I caught on someone’s feet and sprawled to the ground, only to be hauled up and sent into a sprint again.
The darkness was consuming, threatening to suffocate my lungs, already wheezing for air. But the chase was a blessing.
Because we couldn’t think about our failure, our disappointment. How Aric was dead and Sixth would now come for our heads. How there were no resources to save our world. How things had veered from hopeful to so damningly bad, it was laughable.
Everything we’d worked toward, everything we’d hoped for, had just come crashing down, and the burn in our legs was all that kept us from crumbling with it.
That was probably why I didn’t feel relief when we finally reached the exit into First Territory, or as we emerged with no new arrows in our bodies. The Horrads greeted us, a group of ten or so with pitchers of water and platters of food. They must have been awaiting our return from the moment we left, and they didn’t take kindly to the skeletal, vulture-eyed pursuers who climbed out of the path only minutes after we’d surfaced.
They swarmed and attacked every single body who followed us. Only one was still breathing by the time they were done, and that was only because of our interference.
We shouldered the Horrads aside to surround the man as his breath rattled his emaciated, exposed chest. His skin was covered in blotches, grime, and bruises spattered over protruding bones. Blood poured from a head wound and dribbled from his mouth. This was a man who’d just managed to stave away death, but couldn’t for much longer.
“What happened in Centralis?” Harthon demanded, crouching before him.
Bloodshot eyes regarded him, but he didn’t speak. That changed when Harthon pressed a fist against a wound in the man’s side.
Face contorting in pain, he scraped out, “The fucking walls.”
Harthon shook his head in denial. “The Domus was supposed to preserve your land while it took from ours.”
The man’s mouth contorted into a macabre grin. He wheezed out a weak laugh, and his eyes pulled up to the gray sky. Harthon jabbed the injury again, drawing a gargled choke from his throat.
