At this point, I doubted they had ever been touched by a hair tie. Apparently, war or not, his hair needed tobreathe.
“Imagine someone stuffing their hand into your guts and squeezing and kneading and squishing everything that’s inside. Non-stop. For hours on end.” Jayla scowled at her crotch. “Give it fifteen minutes, and my thighs will be soaked. Thank the gods my pants are black.”
Ryder winced, the prospect of fighting in pain an unfamiliar concept to him. We had protected him as much as we could, identical to Sadira. Tech people were hard to come by, but today, we had to throw everything we had at Ilasall.
The splintered bark snagged on my shirt as I crossed my ankles. “You didn’t know your period would start today?”
Kali threw her arms in the air. “We’re not clocks, Gedeon.”
Her attempt to kill me with her glower curled my lips upward.
“I swear, our uteruses can detect the worst occasions possible,” Jayla seethed. “Like when you go to the seaside—your period will arrive earlier or later,specificallyto ruin your day at the beach.”
Sadira clapped Ryder’s shoulder. “Imagine if your balls would shrivel up any time you went near Greyn. That’s what periods are—a curse of nature.”
My fists clenched to avoid cupping my groin. Based on Ryder’s expression, I wasn’t the only one cringing at the notion of losing my balls.
“Greyn?” Ryder’s eyes bugged out, like a cornered animal. Blood abandoned his cheeks, as if the rising fog was consuming the planes of his face.
Sadira sighed. “Yes, we know about you two. Get over it,” she said, then twisted on her heel, marching back to her spot in the fifth row, where she and Ryder had set up camp to disable the city’s gates remotely.
“If we are done with…allthat.” I pushed off the maple tree. “Then get back in line. People are waiting.”
“I wish dicks bled as well,” Jayla groused as she stalked back to her place at the front, five yards before the treeline and the wide open, circular field leading to Ilasall.
A mist danced above the blanket of grass like a thick cloud, obscuring the shape of the city, the west gates ahead looming like a manifestation of oppression.
In less than an hour, the sun was going to emerge on the horizon, but for now, gloom had tucked us under its wing.
According to our intel, this early, an unusually low number of soldiers guarded the gates and trudged atop the wall, dutifully making their rounds. Kali’s idea of poisoning the military’s water supply had worked. Only a third of their armed forces had shown up, the majority too ill to arise from their beds.
Unfortunately, it also meant part of our contacts, our friends who had infiltrated Ilasall’s army, had succumbed to the destruction of the poison.
But war and collateral damage were inextricable. Winning without sacrifice was an impossibility.
It was living your life with the knowledge the undesired deaths had occurred by your order that slowly killed you in the end.
I checked the watch on my wrist. The scratched-up glass blurred the clock hands pushing forward, but it couldn’t hide the truth: we had thirty-eight seconds left until showtime.
Thirty-seven.
I nudged Kali with a hand on her lower back, her spine ramrod straight. “Ready?”
Thirty-four.
She gave a curt nod, her resolve not wavering from what lay before us—the future.
Twenty-nine.
We stepped out of the treeline and into the exposed field. Nature's wetness coating the grass slickened the rubber soles of our boots, threatening to snatch our balance.
Twenty-four.
I raised my arm high for all to see. A gust of wind twirled between my fingers, attacking, retreating, probing what it had come into contact with.
Twenty-one.
My chest deflated as I narrowed my focus to fall solely on the enemy.
