She didn’t so much as flinch while I secured the knot, too focused on scrutinizing our surroundings. “Shit, I don’t know where the Spire is,” she cursed.
Gedeon had cornered me this morning, growling his demand for the three of us to meet at the highest glass building in the city if we got separated.
Which had happened less than a minute after we’d stormed the west gates. The water droplets had formed a soup so thickwe’d waded through the fog unseeing, our enemies as invisible as our friends.
I could only pray that neither Gedeon nor Zion had experienced the type of luck Lucia had.
Willing the lump in my throat to dissolve, I surveyed the street. A large part of Ilasall’s military had been incapacitated, but enough of the brainwashed soldiers still stood.
Somebody had either cautioned them about the water—another traitor who’d slept in our beds—or they’d figured out the cause for the mysterious and untreatable sickness quicker than predicted.
Dressed-in-green-and-black marionettes mingled with our people, the clash of weapons and fists overfilling the street thirteen blocks from the Spire. Holes with jagged edges marred the public transportation and personal vehicles of the green-banded. Bullets had distorted the silver metal, soiling its shine and smoothness.
Citizens wearing both green and black wristbands either stood their ground against the government or cowered in their apartment buildings as gray as the fog, ten stories tall, built to spin your mind and confuse your sense of direction.
“I know where we need to go,” I yelled to Tarri, and we jumped back into the chaos.
Squeezing the trigger again and again, I swept the barrel through the helmet-clad mass of heads. Except I targeted their chests. As long as their lungs collapsed, I counted it as a win.
A shallow pop signaled the last bullet had already left the chamber, and I tossed the empty handgun aside. The toy forged from metal and plastic clattered on the asphalt as I plucked out my two knives and slit the carotid artery of a soldier Tarri was tackling.
“That way,” I shouted through the tumult, gesturing toward the adjoining street.
If we apprehended the seven Heads ruling the city and broadcasted our message across the city-wide network, we might be able to sway more of the hesitating citizens to take our side. Seeing the projection of their leaders on their knees, their mouths gagged and their hands cuffed behind their backs, could make anyone reconsider their choices.
“Go!” Tarri snapped a petite soldier’s neck, one of the few women allowed to join their military’s ranks. Ilasall was truly throwing everything it had at us. “I’ll cover your back.”
A nod, and I was sprinting toward the crossroad, using the silvery cars as covers whenever lead cylinders tried to adorn me with craters, hacking my way through anyone who dared to throw me a challenge.
Every dozen steps, enemy blades caressed my skin, and before I could realize it, my torso burned from the open wounds. Kicks rattled my bones and painted my flesh with hundreds of bruises. Sweat dripped into my eyes, lighting them on fire, the blaze as hot as the one fueling me. My chest heaved as oxygen played a dance of evasion, staying just out of reach instead of filling my lungs.
Yet I persisted.
Drenched in bodily liquids, mine and my opponents’, I invited the murkiness obstructing my vision to chill my blood.
Instead, it heated it. Brought it to a simmer.
And Tarri’s cry boiled it.
66
KALI
Ispun around?—
The sight before me tightened my grip on the two dripping knives.
The easily recognizable form of a lanky guard shoved Tarri into an abandoned bus, a part of Ilasall’s fleet of public transportation. I didn’t need to see the man’s face to know his nose was crooked.
“Arlo, no.” Tarri’s disbelief flowed through the bus’s open doors as he climbed the two steps, his body too slender to fully block the entrance.
Arlo. Ilasall’s citizen we’d considered to be a part of us, the man who’d earned our unconditional trust, the guard who’d helped us to sneak into Ilasall many times.
Ava’s friend of many years.
And all this time, he’d been posing. Scheming. Waiting for an opportunity to turn his back on us.
My bloodtorethrough my veins, shredding the thin membranes of my capillaries.
