“California?” Valkyrie asked.
“I’ll go,” I said.
I jogged back into the clubhouse.
The main room looked worse with the adrenaline rolling off. Glass everywhere. Bullet holes in the walls and ceiling. Blood tracked in boot prints. The man I’d killed lay in a glossy pool behind the bar, eyes staring at nothing.
I stepped over him and ducked behind the counter.
Cali was still tucked into the shadowed corner of the well, clutching the towel like a shield. Her breathing had evened some, but her eyes were rimmed red. Bruising was coming up mean and dark along her throat.
“Hey,” I said softer than I felt. “They’re gone.”
She swallowed. Winced. “All of them?”
“All that matters,” I said. “One exited himself. The rest ran.”
Her laugh was a brittle crack. “Good.”
“You need a medic?” I asked.
She shook her head, then stopped because that hurt. “India’ll look at me later,” she rasped. “I… I just need a second.”
“Take it,” I said. “You earned twenty.”
She lifted her eyes to mine. “You—”
“Don’t,” I cut in. “You’d have done the same.”
“Not that clean,” she whispered.
I snorted. “I’m a mess, Cali.”
But she knew what I meant. She nodded, fingers loosening around the towel.
“Under here’s the safest place in the room for now,” I said. “Stay until Valkyrie or Liberty tell you otherwise just in case there’s anyone else hiding.”
She nodded again. I climbed back out.
By the time I hit the yard again, the volume had dropped. Engines gone. Only sound now was the mutter of voices, the clink of shells being gathered, the low groans of the injured and the higher, brittle laughter of people who’d just realized they weren’t dead.
Liberty stood near the center of it all. Blood on her boots. Hair pulled back harder than before. The Steel Serpent cut from the junkyard still hung on a hook inside, but the war had just stopped being concept art.
She looked at me as I approached.
“California?” she asked.
“Bruised,” I said. “Shaken. Breathing. She’ll have a nice handprint for show-and-tell, but she’s upright.”
“Good.” Liberty nodded once. Shelooked around at her girls, at her yard, at the bent fence. Then back to me.
“They hit us once and ran,” she said. “Now they’ve hit us twice. Next time, it’ll be bigger. More bodies. More cars. They’ll rally, and when they do, they’ll decide whether to try us again or switch and hit you.”
I wiped a streak of blood—someone else’s—off my cheek with the back of my hand.
“They already gave us their allegiance cry,” I said. “‘For Bolivar.’ They’re not hiding who they’re working for anymore.”
“Good,” Liberty said. “I like my enemies labeled.”
