Studying the faces of the fallen, Gedeon added, “Otherwise, this will keep going until there’s no one left.”
Plodding through the flood of death, jumping over gnarled bodies and slit necks, I clenched my teeth, focusing on the twinge in my molars instead of the squelching sounds our boots made as we disturbed the glossy surface of small scarlet pools.
“Is that…” I trailed off as hair as silver as the cars pierced by bullets came into view.
Gedeon and Zion crouched down beside the elderly woman. Stroking the wrinkles framing her once bright eyes, Gedeon murmured, “Zola.”
The contact who’d helped us deliver the packages to the Heads of Ilasall, Military, and Welfare last autumn. The woman who’d served as the leader of the opposition residing inside Ilasall. The one I’d met only two times, but more than enough to learn that wisdom had lived in her words and humor in her smile.
My legs gave out. “No.” I brushed down her cream sweater, the knitted fabric soaked in her blood. Four stains indicated the fatal wounds, one in her chest and three in her stomach.
Zion covered my hand with his own. “She’s gone.”
The contrast between the dryness of his palm and the wetness of Zola’s sweater forced me to wrench my limb away. “Fuck this,” I hissed as I stood. “I won’t accept more deaths. First Tarri, then Amari, and now Zola. How many of our friends are going to fall because we couldn’t get there in time?”
“That’s war, Kali.” Gedeon closed Zola’s eyes, her body still malleable for the folds of skin to be maneuvered. “Victory always demands a price.”
I rubbed my chest, trying to erase the void residing in the center of it. “What’s the point of winning if there’s no one to celebrate it with afterward?”
Rising back up, he bore into me. “You have us.”
“It’s not the same.” I threw my head back, willing the mist suffocating the city to dry my tears. “I can’t lose the only family I’ve ever had, Gedeon.”
Ilasall’s military had begun to scythe our friends one by one, and their images flashed in my mind, each with a big bold X over it—eliminated.
Those crisscrossing lines crucified me.
Zion pulled a handgun out of the closest soldier’s holster, nodding to himself when he found the weapon loaded. “Here, take this.” He offered the firearm to Gedeon. “We still have unfinished business with?—”
A thunder of bullets cut him off.
In the quiet that followed, a lonely, as delicate as a daisy, voice rang out, “Eli!”
No.
Eislyn was supposed to stay at the main hospital after she and Eli had dropped the package at the water plant, trusting our contacts to poison the military’s water supply.
Backing away from Zion and Gedeon, I watched how their faces twisted in horror as they realized what I was about to do.
74
KALI
“Kali,” Gedeon growled.
I bolted.
Toward the commotion, toward the adjoining street, toward the friend who’d welcomed me with open arms despite my reluctance and taught me what it meant to care for someone.
Asphalt provided much-needed friction as I ran down the street, aiming toward where I’d heard Eislyn call out her partner’s name.
Green-banded’s apartment buildings blurred in my peripherals, as quiet as the fallen filling the street in a stream. I leaped over one corpse after another, pushing past the pain hammering my ankles with each jump.
Ignoring Gedeon’s and Zion’s shouts behind me, I mentally nudged my legs to work faster. Wind howled in my ears, slithered under my clothes, and crawled through my veins.
But despite the pulsing twinges in my pinkie, the dull throbbing in my head, the warmth trickling from my temple and down the side of my face, my cramping muscles, and the thousand pangs wracking my body, I persevered.
The street corner was right there, just a few feet from me, but the clamor had died down, vanished, dissipated like the early morning fog.
