CASSIAN
We emerge from the servant tunnels into a slaughterhouse.
The door of the bunker access antechamber groans as I shove my right shoulder against it. We kept pushing down, straight toward the final fallback point, but the war beat us here. My left arm is entirely dead weight. Black spots swarm the edges of my vision, and if I let the agonizing, tearing pain in my shoulder fully register, I know I’ll drop right here on the concrete floor.
The basement junction is ruined. The concrete pillars are pockmarked, the overhead pipes venting hissing steam into a haze of drywall dust and gun smoke thick enough to taste.
A sudden, deafeningBOOMshatters the quiet as Varro fires a final shotgun blast into a twitching mercenary near the elevator bank.
The overpressure in the confined concrete space is brutal. Iris gasps behind me, clapping her hands over her ears, her face twisting in pain.
Only the close, ugly sounds remain now. The zip of flex-cuffs. The groan of a dying man. The racking of slides as weapons are cleared.
“Clear!” Varro shouts, lowering the shotgun.
I step out of the passage, keeping Iris behind me. My vision swims. The pure adrenaline that carried me through the tunnel is completely gone, replaced by the cold, crushing gravity of severe blood loss. My left sleeve is saturated, dripping a steady rhythm onto the dust-covered floor.
“Cassian!”
Varro spots us. He’s standing by the elevator call button, his face smeared with soot and blood. He rushes over, his eyes widening when he sees my shoulder.
“You’re hit,” he says.
“I’m mobile,” I lie, bracing my good arm against the cold concrete wall to keep the room from tilting. “Report.”
“We flushed them down,” he says, gesturing to the bodies scattered across the corridor. “They pushed hard on the study, so we retreated to the secondary stairs and pinched them against the bunker access doors.”
He looks grim, nodding toward the shattered lighting fixtures.
One of the last surviving guards is down. A medic is kneeling over him, pressing thick wads of gauze into a neck wound. The floor around them is slick with red.
“Bravo Three is gone,” Varro says quietly.
I nod, staring at the blood on the concrete. Another one gone. We traded half the inner guard for a full hit squad tonight. It’s the brutal math of war.
“And Kirill?” I ask.
Varro points to the far corner, near the shattered remains of a utility control panel.
“Alive,” he says. “Barely.”
Kirill is sitting on the floor, his back braced against the wall with his legs splayed out in front of him. He’s clutching his stomach, dark blood seeping through his fingers. He’s pale,his breath catching in a wet, hollow rattle every time his chest heaves.
I turn to Iris.
She’s standing in the opening of the secret passage, clutching the pistol I gave her. Her eyes are wide and glassy, darting around the room as she takes in the absolute carnage of the bodies and the blood. She’s trembling, a fine vibration she can’t control.
“Iris…”
She stares straight ahead, her gaze locked on the empty wall behind me, completely unresponsive.
I step closer and touch her arm.
“Iris.”
She flinches, her eyes snapping to mine. She stares at my lips as they move, shaking her head slightly and tapping the side of her ear.
“I can’t...” she yells, her voice entirely too loud in the quiet room. “It’s ringing. I can’t hear you.”
